In this episode, I sit down with Emily Krempholtz, a writer, creator, and an all-around amazing human that I have the pleasure of calling my book coach as I write my memoir. In her interview, she takes us through her life going from doing what she thought she should, to now doing what she loves. “I knew that writing books was what I wanted to do for a living. I knew that working with stories was what I wanted to be when I grew up. And even knowing that, it took me a really long time. I let a lot of people talk me into going to college for a major that was a lot more practical than what I wanted to be doing, which was creative writing.”

Emily believes in the magic of the world, infusing it into her books and passion projects while also acknowledging the need to pay the bills with her non-fiction work. While her work that pays the bills is compartmentalized in one half of her brain, her creative work is where her heart lies. “And it’s hard, you know. You put your book out there to say, “here is a little piece of my soul, I’m giving it to you,” and then to have someone come back and say, “no thanks, this isn’t for me.”

Inevitably, pieces of Emily’s life became woven into her novels and she shares how important it is for writers to give themselves the grace of being a human being. “So suddenly I was writing a book about grief when I was kind of actively grieving and that was really difficult. And so I poured a lot of that emotion into this book and then I also had to put it down for a little while. And that's something I think not enough writers talk about is sometimes, you know, it's okay to set something aside.”

Highlights from Emily:

“I think we have these points where, in a perfect world, we'd be able to go back and edit our lives and edit the way we did things in the past, but we don't have that. We are slaves to time in the real world in a way that we aren't when we're writing. And being able to take the hindsight, to take the lessons that we learned from that first draft of our lives, and take that breaking point and say, okay.”

“There is no one right way to write a book. There's no one right way to do something. There's a lot of different schools of thought about how to create a book, because it is, it's this huge thing. It is multi-dimensional, it is complex, and when done right, you should never be able to just sit down and spit out a book without, and say, okay, this is perfect. This is exactly what I intended it to be.”

“Let Perfect Burn means abandoning those shoulds—abandoning that sense of this is what I'm supposed to be doing to get to where I am, focusing on the things that you can control and saying fuck it to the rest.”

Don't Miss a Beat.
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Emily’s Website:
https://emilykrempholtz.com/