Stoughton Writers Group on TV – Interview with Laura Lee Bahr

Mike Hartman

[ 00:00:08,250 ]Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Stoughton Writers Group on TV. I'm Mike Hartman, your host, the CEO and founder of the Stoughton Writers Group, and also the author of Hartman and Memoir. Today we're going to find out why four little girls know who's living in the cold storage place underneath their house. Laura Lee Barr is joining me, the author of Who is the Liar? I loved your book.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:00:31,020 ] Yay, thank you.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:00:31,660 ] But you know what I do? I never read the end of your book novels because I have this thing that I'm going to tell you the end of the story to an author. And I have a really great writing skill. I'm going to say, oh, yeah, this happened. And then nobody's going to want to read the book because they don't know the ending. So what I don't do is I don't read the ending.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:00:46,910 ] Oh, that's awesome.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:00:47,910 ] But I broke the rules. So I know the ending. So I'm going to try not to tell you the ending because I couldn't wait. I lasted until this morning. I got up at like 8 and I go... I really need to know.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:01:02,350 ] Oh, if you'd held out, I would have been very impressed. I wrote down.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:01:08,490 ] Tell a little bit about the book and how you got the idea for the book.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:01:11,950 ] So I wrote a short story back in 2011 called The Liar, and basically the premise of it was...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:01:23,090 ] There is a killer on the loose, a child killer, and a young girl and her sisters are worried. Their parents are worried. The town is worried.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:01:35,910 ] The older sister who, she's 16, she's had some trouble in school, she has trouble, tells her littlest sister who she shares a room with not to worry.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:01:48,370 ] because she has the killer tied up downstairs in the root cellar. And then she says, do you want to see? And then she takes her little sister down there, and her little sister has to figure out what to do, because she knows her sister lies.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:02:07,150 ] and she knows sort of the guy who's in the uh in the root cellar and she's you know not sure he says you know your sister's a liar and she's trapped me here and she's going to kill me and so a young child has to figure out what to do the idea came from from me um just sort of the terror as a kid that you have and the lack of control and understanding, but also the innocence in terms of How do you know if someone's telling you the truth or not? Even people that you love. How do you know that your sister or your mother or anybody is telling you the truth about things, especially when you don't have all the information or you're young? So it was based on sort of a nightmare idea that...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:02:52,670 ] came to me and that was the question, like, what do you do and how do you ever know who's telling you the truth about things that are matters of life and death and then later I realized I had.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:03:08,020 ] It was a very brief sort of just that snippet of an idea was the short story. And then my partner has been for years, you should write this as a novel. You should write this as a novel. And I was like, it's too dark. It's too scary. And then in 2020, everything felt too dark and scary. And I realized I knew.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:03:29,460 ] All of a sudden, the voice of Topaz, the protagonist, came to me and just started telling me the rest of the story, and I had to be faithful to that.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:03:39,030 ] That's a very funny story. When you were selling your book at Paperback Junction, I was talking to this woman in line. She goes, 'Why don't people move away when there's a serial killer in their town?' I'm stuck with you. Why didn't the people move away?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:03:49,750 ] I mean, why doesn't the whole town just pick up and leave, right? It takes a little bit— like, you know, there's the sort of thing, like, if you have a haunted house, your house is haunted, what do you do? You try to move away, but then the logistics of life, right, are...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:04:04,250 ] You have a house. You have, how are you going to sell it? You have a job. You have all these things. And if there's a serial killer in the town, what, does the whole town just pick up and go?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:04:14,010 ] That's why she made me laugh when she started, but it stuck in my mind. That makes a lot of sense.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:04:18,089 ] We're all going to move.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:04:19,610 ] I would have wanted to move too. How did you come up with the idea for a root cellar? And as somebody who grew up with a root cellar, it was like, I remember I grew up with that. My grandmothers would do that. They would put stuff in the ground. Everything was buried in the ground. I thought that was interesting that you came up with that being the central location for everything that happens, really.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:04:36,900 ] Yeah, because, I mean, the root cellar is a wonderful place to store root vegetables. It's cold, right? Very cold. But it's also a good place to hide a body.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:04:47,000 ] Did you learn anything about root cellars when you wrote the book? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:04:51,360 ] We had one.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:04:52,200 ] I thought you were kind of expert on it. Yeah. Because, you know, she had the jars the right way. Yeah. She had all the vegetables. How do you come up with Topaz being the little girl being the character? What was it like to write her voice?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:05:03,680 ] Topaz, to me, was the one telling me the story. So it was all from her point of view because, to me, that was the story. The story is her point of view.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:05:15,570 ] Lots of times there's like thrillers, whodunnits, and it's all kind of like— who is the actual person who did this and like, why, and it's trying to solve the mystery of the thing. But to me, the really interesting... What was interesting about the story to me, the reason why I wanted to write it, is because I felt this little girl in my head and heart being like, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And so telling me the story, so...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:05:44,510 ] So Topaz is the reason for the story. It wouldn't be, I didn't want to write the book for any other reason than her voice.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:05:55,590 ] When I ask you about, go back to Topaz being the character, what was it like to write in her voice?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:06:01,250 ] It was very scary in a lot of ways because she is so young and so vulnerable, and it was very also liberating to be able to look at the world again from that point of view.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:06:21,160 ] So I just loved, I loved and also felt very vulnerable and raw writing from that point of view.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:06:30,450 ] Was it hard to go back after writing it as a short story and then go back to write it as a longer story?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:06:34,550 ] No, because the short story, actually, the short story is really just the very, very beginning premise. Like, the short story was basically what you see on the back cover.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:06:45,160 ] So it was really just the idea, and it ended without any sort of resolution of knowing anything else. Like, it was just basically like, here's this person, what do you do? And...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:06:56,100 ] and Topaz grappling with that question. So basically writing the novel from there was taking this kind of idea and then running with the idea and knowing what happened next and what happened next and what happened next so everything the novel is.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:07:18,880 ] Basically all the things that happen in the novel are brand new. Except the premise was the short story, the very opening premise.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:07:27,800 ] What I thought of it, too, was there were certain points in the book, okay, that's it, but then I did more.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:07:31,580 ] Yeah.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:07:31,900 ] And you did a really good job, like the cliffhanger part of it. Yeah. I thought it was solved, and then it wasn't.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:07:36,840 ] Yeah.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:07:37,140 ] How was that? How did you decide to do that?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:07:40,420 ] Was it conscious, or was it...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:07:41,740 ] Yeah, well, as an author...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:07:45,170 ] I'm always also thinking, as a reader, I love to read. I love books so much. And so I'm always kind of thinking, too, like, what is it to experience this book as a reader? And one of the things you know, when I read page turners and cliffhangers, there's a little bit of a like— sometimes if it's not satisfying, I don't—I don't really like it. You know, I'll read the next page and I'll be like, 'Whatever.' But for me, what I really wanted to do was I wanted to keep driving the mystery. I wanted to keep driving that sense of like, but now what's going to happen? But now what's going to happen? Like you have when you're a kid, right? Like when you're a kid, you're in a constant, like as an adult, we get bored with, like, whatever. But as a kid, it's always like. But now what? And so, um, when those stakes are really high and you, as a reader, understand more than because you, as a reader, as an adult looking back, and this takes place in the 80s, so looking back on your own childhood and thinking about yourself.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:08:49,750 ] In danger, and that propels you because you know things as a reader that Topaz doesn't know, even though she's just telling you what you know.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:08:58,850 ] Why did you set it in the 1980s? I thought it was interesting. It was MTV with the twins, the twin sisters, can't watch MTV. Yeah. They live in a religious home and all that. Yeah. Was the 80s on purpose to set in?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:09:08,470 ] Yeah. I um I grew up in the 80s and um there felt like to me like that time period was a really um Another metaphor for what this story is about, this idea of authority, this idea of who will help you, this idea of what do you have to do for yourself. All of that was happening at that time period.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:09:36,030 ] And for me, it is also an analogy for looking back, like those of us who grew up in that time period, being able to reflect upon that. So it was, for me, a lot about excavating my own, what was around when I grew up.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:09:54,950 ] Did you get a better understanding about growing up, when you grew up, by writing this book? Do you think?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:09:58,710 ] Did I what?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:09:59,310 ] Did you get a better understanding of when you grew up in the 80s by writing it?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:10:05,070 ] Understanding of what?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:10:06,930 ] Like what was going on around you when you were a kid. Did you understand it better?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:10:11,050 ] I felt like...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:10:15,330 ] I felt like more it was a looking back from where I am now. Maybe it helped me understand now better than I did before, because there's something very scary to me now looking around and looking at the world, and I still feel like that sense of 'Who's in control here? What's happening? What are these forces that are shaping our world? What are these?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:10:45,040 ] Who is protecting us? Do we have to protect ourselves? And if so, how? And who are we protecting ourselves against? So there's that sense for me now. And by looking back...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:10:58,110 ] and putting myself in that position as a child, and putting myself in the like sort of like what was the culture at the time, what was the media at the time, what was happening, it gives me a reflection between them and now, then and now.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:11:17,070 ] I feel like so much of when I look at, like, the culture around me, the sense of unease and fear and being able to look back gives me a mirror with which to see it.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:11:36,190 ] Because when I read it, reading it from the 19s, looking back, you could see the precursor of what was happening in your writing. Like some of the things they were teaching in the school, for example. Yeah. You could get the idea, okay, this is... This is how this started. This is how we got from point A to point B. Yeah. Is that conscious? Did you do that? Yeah, yeah. Because it comes out clearly in the book. Yeah. Obviously, that's not what the book's about, but that's like a subtitle to the book. Yeah. Subculture of the book is that.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:12:01,320 ] Yes, absolutely. And even though that's not what the story of the book is about, so much of it to me is about...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:12:11,050 ] the culture and who's the monster, right? Who are the monsters of our culture? You know, who are the villains? Who are the, what are the things that we celebrate and why? So those all were very conscious.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:12:26,090 ] Hard was it to write about the monster because you're kind of descriptive about him too.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:12:32,020 ] But this mystery to him.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:12:33,680 ] Yeah, yeah. Well, so he, you know, he is maybe a monster or maybe not. Who is this person, you know? Is he the villain or is he someone that... Ruby says is the villain, right? So the central question of it is, or is he even that person at all? There's a male character who is a very charismatic person.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:13:06,640 ] topaz doesn't even really know who he is but then she starts to discover who is this person in her root cellar and you know his humanity versus what is said about him so writing about that person this character um i wanted to be really clear that he's a you know a uh i wanted him to have a lot of personality and somebody that is a real person not just a Well, the description, fingers, dirty fingernails, and things you described, too.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:13:44,990 ] But you also capture a fear. Like, I had one as a little kid, because where I grew up, there was a prison nearby, and a prisoner escaped. And people were afraid to go down to the cellars and things. We were afraid to do that. In your book, I felt that again. It was so strange to go back. And that's something that happened in the 1960s. But I felt like when she would go downstairs, I felt the same feeling. And you really capture that really well in the book.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:14:06,400 ] I will say about the character who plays Brother Johnson or Mr. Johnson, it was really helpful in writing him. I pictured him as this actor who I really, really admire, who I think is really, he's just such a good actor. And so I pictured him playing this character, and it really helped me to find those nuances of...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:14:34,470 ] His charisma and like of where he you know he's funny and like the riddles that he tells and things like that. So, that was one of the things I find very helpful when I am writing: to think about, like, who would play this? What actor would I want to play this role?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:14:55,890 ] Cast it in my mind, throw him in there, let him duke it out in the scenes.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:15:03,190 ] Is that because of your film background?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:15:04,430 ] Yeah, I have a film background and an acting background. And so I love to, like, cast it.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:15:13,250 ] I put pictures of people that I think they look like them. If I read a book from, like, a novel from the 1940s, I'll take actual video of 1940s. Oh, that's awesome. Or take photos of the people who look like that. Because in my mind, I think film-wise, too, in my mind, I can't think about it unless I see the first person. I can't write about them. I have to know what the person looks like. And it's interesting that you do the same thing. Your mind works the same way, too.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:15:36,330 ] Yeah, and sometimes it's really, like, it doesn't, I really don't have who Ruby looks like in my mind. I really don't have who Topaz looks like in my mind, except for maybe, like, me, right? I don't have, like, so I don't do it for every character. But some of them, it just comes like, it just like, for some characters, it really, really helps me. But the same thing, like when you're reading, do you, do you put faces to people when you're reading?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:16:05,990 ] Oh, definitely.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:16:07,390 ] I sometimes don't. Like they're sometimes just like kind of half faces or like faces in a dream, you know?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:16:15,650 ] No, I definitely do that. I think of people, what they look like, what they visually look like. I do a trick where I write it down, like on a side piece of paper. Like what they wear, what they're like, and stuff like that. So I refer to it because I'm afraid what you didn't do in the book, you did really well in the book, you didn't lose the character. I'm afraid when you write a novel that you lose the character. And all of a sudden they appear totally different, like in Chapter 12. Oh, no, that's not the person they are. How did you keep that all the way through the book?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:16:39,350 ] So I have this...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:16:41,540 ] so characters for me are like they're very like obvious. Like characters for me are not hard, but I think that's because I'm an actor and come from that background. So for me, characters are very much like—oh, this person is this, and I see them and I feel them and I they show me who they are. And so I don't, so characters to me are one of the starting points. So I don't have, I don't usually feel like I'm going to lose them. It is interesting to me that you said, 'It is interesting to me thinking about that I don't actually necessarily see their faces clearly.' Because in my life, I have a thing with faces where I remember them very well. I remember faces much better than names.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:17:26,960 ] I remember the characters in your book, I had the characters in my mind, what they look like. Yeah. You know, who they look like, who would play them.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:17:32,780 ] Isn't that funny? Because I'm sure it's very different than what I would have.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:17:36,020 ] Yeah, I would have thought, I would have. That dollar is to a donut that you would have thought you would have the characters all picked out. Yeah, because I look at Ruby, I look at some of the actors from that period of time too, that would have fit her perfectly. Yeah, like Christy McNichol, I think is what I thought of. Oh yeah, I thought of her as Ruby, as Ruby. Yeah, yeah. Authors like that, not now. Now, you think we would play it now? When you write a book and your film, are you thinking of the book as a film when you're writing it?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:18:00,410 ] No.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:18:02,290 ] I do think of it more as like a dream, though. I mean, in the way that films are a dream, it comes to me like more of a...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:18:11,409 ] a dream, I guess, than a film. So I wouldn't say, but I do see it like, I feel like I'm there.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:18:19,550 ] Did you dream this?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:18:21,090 ] It felt like a fever dream, honestly. Like, when the story started telling itself to me, like, I felt like...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:18:29,900 ] I had to just keep writing it. I, like, huddled in, like, the little lavender room and just, like, you know, like a little troll. No, no, no.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:18:42,000 ] It felt like that. It felt like you were in the room with you. That's when you know, like, the example of if it's 100 degrees out and you read a book about Siberia and you feel cold. That's the kind of thing. Here is that: in writing, I felt like I was there. I felt like I envisioned it as a village. Because all the people went to church and things like that, and they all knew everybody. And I felt that I was part of the community when reading the book. And you feel like that in this book. You feel like, 'Oh, I'm moving there.' Where do we go next? Where do we go next? Who are the people? But I also thought you did a really good job with the sub-characters, like the mother and the father. They add to it. How do you do that as a writer? Use those characters to prop up the sisters, maybe Ruby and Topaz. But the twins are more of a side character, right?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:19:24,763 ] Well, yeah, I mean, the twins become, I think, more and more of a character. And I come from a big family. I was raised in a big family, and so, to me, sisters, brothers, all of these people are, you know, I like to say, in my family, everybody has a very different. We all had different childhoods, because we all have completely different perspectives of what of the same thing that happened. Right, we all see it completely differently, because it's all from this example, draw the kitchen table.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:19:54,640 ] Everybody draws a kitchen table.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:19:55,700 ] Right, right, right. So for me, the dad and the mom, you know, lots of times people have kind of stock dads and moms. But for me, dads and moms are all vastly different and very, very real. And so their dad, I can picture him. I still can't see his face, but I picture his body. I can see how he slumps. I see how he moves. I see how he talks. I feel how he jokes. The dad and the mom just feel like real people to me.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:20:33,850 ] Doing the things that you do, the mom has some kind of relationship to my mom, who was very always worried, worried all the time, anything like like she was just always you know always on edge about what's going to happen to her kids. And so this, that mom definitely shares.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:20:56,780 ] You feel that when you get that impression that she's, oh my God, Brooke, you know, I'm going to, something's going to break or something's going to happen. Something's going to lose our money. You know, she had a lot of worries at that time too. But I really want to also talk to you about writing yourself, too. How did you get into writing? What was the...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:21:11,769 ] So I've always loved reading. Like that's my, like my, I can remember, I don't know how, I think I was like three or four, but I can remember wanting to read so badly. And then when I learned to read, I learned to read pretty young because my mom worked with us and she got us reading young. I can remember those moments when I could, like, read the credits on the cartoons, like, how happy I was to be able to, like, decipher that. So I've always, always loved reading. And then pretty quickly, I wanted to be a writer. That's the first thing I ever wanted to be. And my dad taught me how to type. And I set up a little office in the closet.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:21:55,620 ] I wrote in a lot of closets. Closet spaces have been my offices, like, throughout life until, like, now where I have, like, an actual room.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:22:06,040 ] So I always wanted to do it, and I've been working at it in various ways. I sort of stopped writing stories.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:22:16,640 ] And focused more on acting and theater from high school on. And then, early, like in my 20s, I started writing screenplays, which was a completely different way of writing.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:22:32,870 ] And then I returned to short stories and novels. And the first novel I wrote was an experimental.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:22:43,140 ] It was an experimental novel, like a choose-your-own-adventure where the choices were taken out, a haunted ghost story, but, like, very weird and bizarro. And my partner, it was just a bunch of pages in a box, and I was like, what do I do with this? And my partner, Ezra, was like... this is really good. You need to you know do something with this. Like, do something. And I showed it to my friend who is a writer named John Skipp, and he he was very enthusiastic. He helped me.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:23:16,730 ] He became the editor for this book and started a new imprint with Eraserhead Press. And so I started with these kind of niche indie books that were different, weird, things that excited me to write. And then, in 2018, I got a writer's residency at the Kerouac House in... Florida, and there, with the goal of writing more mainstream books, I developed a really really good process for myself for producing work. Which before had been very like: I'll do it because I was a teacher at the time, I'll do it on my spring break, or I'll do it on the summer, or I'll do it like whenever I have time.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:24:00,860 ] But the process that I developed, I realized, was something that, like, if I gave myself this gift of my own time and I invested into my process, I could produce novels.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:24:18,210 ] If I did it in this way. So everybody, I think, has a different way that works for them of being productive. I worked a lot as a teacher with neurodiverse kids who had trouble in mainstream classrooms. And part of the thing that was my challenge as a teacher was to find how do I help these kids learn how to work with their own minds? How do we puzzle through producing work?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:24:48,790 ] So through working with kids in this way, I could start looking at my own process in the same way. Like, how do I work with myself to do this thing that's incredibly challenging? Writing books is, it's a very challenging task. So how do I...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:25:08,300 ] do both the reward and the work to make it a livable process.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:25:16,080 ] You have like a personality and then you have your writing personality. I mean, knowing you a little bit now. You're nothing like your writing personality. I read your book and go, 'How does that come out of her mind?'

Mike Hartman

[ 00:25:28,440 ] I know, people say that. She's such a nice person, she's a nice person. I know, I know.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:25:34,250 ] But I feel like my writing is the reason why I get to be a kind person out there because I'm grappling on the page with all of these aspects of the world that I see around me and how to contend with those forces.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:25:54,650 ] But if you were the other way, it would be a nightmare.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:25:57,990 ] That's a good thing.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:25:58,930 ] I'm a writer. That's interesting.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:26:03,490 ] And when you looked at, when you started writing, what advice would you give to somebody now that was watching the show and said, 'I want to be a writer? What would you tell them to do?'

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:26:12,500 ] The first thing I would say, 100%, it's the easiest thing and it's the dumbest thing: start writing. And don't write and be precious about it. Write and be prolific about it. Write and be OK with it being garbage. Be OK with, I'm just going to throw this away. Be OK with, like, just get into the habit of trying to write things, first just as trying to write things, and then trying to see what pleases you that you've written. What have you written that works for you?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:26:50,629 ] I give myself a time, like I need to write for this amount of time, and a lot of it is just stream of consciousness. I am a big believer in stream of consciousness writing, that you sit down and you just get it out there. I know writers who are completely the opposite. They sit there and they will write one beautiful sentence. And so, whatever it is that works for you, people have to figure it out for themselves. But I would say, whatever it is that your process is, give yourself the time, the space, and the gift of actually writing.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:27:28,050 ] You have to get in there and start digging through what's in your mind and getting it onto the page. That's the number one thing.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:27:39,150 ] Are you a rewrite person?

Mike Hartman

[ 00:27:42,650 ] I've had people on the word or rewrite person go, how do you do that?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:27:45,910 ] Yeah. I mean, did you ever see, you saw the movie Amadeus, right? And one of the things, like, Salieri is looking at, like, there's like, he... these are he never makes mistakes, he just knows he just knows. But um, so Kerouac, like, one of the things about his writing is he would have these big scrolls, and he would just write, write, write, write. He didn't rewrite.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:28:08,400 ] But there's a myth in that. And there's this brilliant book about Jack Kerouac called The Voice Is All. And one of his girlfriends, like, she kind of demythologized, like, she looked back at his process. And the thing was, before he got into that writing style, he wrote.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:28:29,780 ] Just diligently, committedly, all of the other ways. And because he had put in, like, those 10,000 hours or whatever it is to get to be an expert, he'd already done that. So that, by the time he started doing that sort of like stream of consciousness, free flow writing, this is it, this is perfect.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:28:47,630 ] He'd already, like a jazz musician, really knew how to do all of his, you know, he already knew how to do everything on the trumpet before he just started improvising.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:28:57,510 ] Okay, we'll wrap this up a little bit. This is awesome. Great job. Really interesting talk. We took hours on writing. I'll be back just to talk about writing, but can you tell me where your book is available and how people can get it?

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:29:07,050 ] Yeah, it's get it on Amazon or on Kindle. I think it's also on Barnes & Noble and in some bookstores.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:29:17,030 ] Thank you so much, Laura, for coming on. You're going to have to come back, though, because we were going to talk about writing, and we never got to that.

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:29:21,550 ] Oh, yeah, and I love to talk about the process because I really do think, like anything, the key to... I love talking to writers, and I love talking about writing. It's a fascinating thing to talk about, and I love...

Laura Lee Bahr

[ 00:29:38,010 ] books, and I love writers. That's all.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:29:41,030 ] Love to hear that.

Mike Hartman

[ 00:29:42,970 ] Thanks, everyone, for watching Stoughton Writers Group on TV, and thank you to the great people here at SMAC that put this show on and let us have this forum to talk about books. We'll see you next time. Thank you.