Good evening mi loovs 🌹
Why is a sincere, smile-to-camera selfie so unsettling? There is something sinister in an earnest smile. The faux warm eyes? Childlike yet malevolent. It’s like I’m holding a gun to your head, demanding you buy my upcoming book. Only if you want to, of course 😌 unless… 😏 BUY IT 👹 !! Please 😚 ? OR ELSE 😡 *Marissa Cooper to enter stage left to save you in three, two, o …*
End scene. 🎬
Phew. I apologise for the dramatic introduction. I just needed to get all of my emoji urges out. Writing a book’s worth of words without a single artfully-placed emoticon was a serious challenge! I’m still recovering.
Tonight, I want to talk about the process of writing. The book has taken up most of my brain’s scarce real estate for close to eighteen months now. I ‘pinged’ the document to my publisher last week, for edits. Now I can breathe. And by breathe, I mean YAK.
haaaaaaaated this show. the wispy goatee ?
I asked for your questions via Instagram, and I enjoyed reading them. Even the inappropriate ones about my private life with la cucuracha.
Below are my answers – I hope you find them insightful. If not, don’t fret – you are not going home empty-handed tonight! Here is a new song I found that reminds me of a 90s anthem that would play at the end of Love Actually or Looking For Alibrandi.
What’s more self-indulgent – thinking you’re the Gandhi of writing or that your music taste is worthy of sharing? I’ll let you decide. And no, Marrisa is not avail to kill me. (Conflicting schedules with Neighbours.)
what was your motivation to write a book?
I wanted to be able to put ‘author’ in my LinkedIn bio! Also, creative writing is my passion.
how did you get a book deal?
I have a short answer (writing experience + online audience = book deal) and a longer answer. And so it goes:
I was first approached by a publisher in early 2021. It was over email – they said they thought I was a “so funny” writer (🥹) and wanted to know if I had any ideas. It was a dream scenario, given my LinkedIn aspirations.
To give you a lay of the land at the time: this newsletter was eight months old, and before that, I had worked at Pedestrian for four and a half years. So your girl was giving trenchfoot by way of writing. There was some hype in the Froomerverse too, given it was lockdown and I had just turned $500 into $14,000 via Cummies. My stocks were on the rise!
how did you choose something to write about?
I didn’t have a concept for a book when I was first approached. I obviously really wanted to take the opportunity, so the publisher and I workshopped a few ideas including a coffee table book with ‘CEO tips’ (which would have aged like soft cheese in a sauna). Nothing was grabbing me, so I put it aside and focused on other pursuits.
The other pursuits:
I try not to force creative work (hence this newsletter being a day late… sorry, Mami’s Bondi called). I would hate to take a big opportunity and do the wrong thing with it. So I waited. I trusted that by the time I had something worth writing about, the interest would still be there.
Meanwhile, in my mahogany office, I was in the beginning stages of eating disorder recovery. Rancid vibes. I didn’t think of it as material because I was really ashamed and worried about it and I just wanted it to go away. Then, in January 2022, a power not unlike Christ compelled me to write a newsletter about it. Something just clicked and I was ready to lay it down.
It remains my most-viewed piece of writing, ever. It propelled me into a new era where I could be more honest with myself and others. I was finally ready to accept that I’m not just an alien creature sent from Mars to terrorise the internet… I’m also a woman.
This was the little seedling from which this book sprouted.
how did you actually get started?
So, once I had the concept (write about eating disorders), I started thinking about how I could turn it into a book-length story. I already had three newsletters about the experience under my belt – one about the anorexia, another about binge eating + recovery, a third about ‘froomes weight gain’ – so these formed the spine.
Then, I had to explore all the other bones. I just brain-dumped into a Google Doc. I’d do this at all hours – at night, in the middle of the day, when I read other books. This inevitably led me to look at formative ideas about beauty and feminine desirability (so, my childhood) and the personal circumstances that perpetuated the eating disorder (my job, the media I consumed, my values).
It sounds kinda like a memoir, right? That was a problem for me. I was adamant that I wouldn’t write a memoir. I was deathly afraid of coming across as self-absorbed. Surprising, I know. Even the name of the genre, memoir, made me cringe because it reminded me of Memoirs of a Geisha, that book we learnt in school lol. Except I wasn’t a geisha and I’d never gone without – the only demon I was up against was myself 😈.
It’s funny, my bias against memoirs. It’s the genre I most enjoy reading. I like hearing about other people’s stories, especially ones I relate to. They don’t have to be filled with trauma and adverse experiences to be worth reading for me.
Ultimately, what I have written is likely to be categorised as a memoir. It still does have research and interviews with other people, but these orbit around my ideas. Flex helped me lean into that – she told me people aren’t interested in me theorising and attempting to represent broad swathes of people in my book. They just wanted to hear about a person’s experience!
So yerrrrrrrrr. I’m taking a risk with the book because when you’re honest you can sound pretty deranged but I’m trusting that at least some people will relate to it and that’s ultimately the purpose (apart from the LinkedIn boast).
what’s your writing process? can you just sit and write or do you have a ritual to get focused?
This was the most asked question!
I don’t have a strict routine. I’ve typed the book out over the course of a year, amongst other work that is similarly unstructured.
It’s relatively easy for me to focus because I’m really passionate about what I’m writing, and also because it’s about me 😂 so how good or bad it turns out is on my shoulders.
There have been periods where I’ve been paralysed by self-doubt. I would just avoid writing altogether. I felt like a bum but in hindsight, I needed to take that time to marinate. My brain was always thinking about the book and making new connections.
A typical day where I’m ‘locked in’ and writing looks like this:
Wake up at 8:30am and exit my enclosure
Walk straight to a cafe with a book in hand to get a coffee in my Shane Warne mug. Reading first thing in the morning kickstarts my brain… I learnt that through this process! If I’m stuck, picking up a book can start the engine.
Once the coffee has hit, I scurry home and boot up the laptop. I start with a brain dump/skeleton of what point I’m trying to make. Sometimes this comes to me on the walk home. Let’s use this newsletter for instance… I wrote the bones for this in my Notes app on the way home from the cafe:
I will open a Google Doc (there was a question about where I write – it’s there) and get started. I always start with the first sentence, and can’t move on until I’ve nailed that. I think that’s a consequence of working in digital media at Pedestrian and need it to be ‘hooky’. It also gives me confidence to keep going if I know the start is strong.
Once that happens, I inevitably get excited and open Spotify to listen to music which is so bad because it makes me want to dance and I also can’t concentrate when Kylie Minogue is singing “I’m, spiiinnninnng arounddd MOVE outta ma WA-EHHH”. So after a mini dance I’ll lock back in.
Once I write a paragraph I’m happy with, or feel like I’ve made a good point, I’ll usually send it to Madison. She is my bestie/creative life partner. She is a writer too, and I often trust her judgement more than I trust my own. I’m trying to get better at trusting myself but certainly, when I’m writing about broader sociological things (aka when the stakes are higher), she’s my sounding board.
When it’s bedtime, I read again. This is when my brain makes the most links. I’ll be dozing off and a really good sentence/point will come to me, so I turn over and plug it into this ‘master’ Google Doc I have called ‘BOOK / research materials’. This doc alone is now 24,650 words… I just DUMP random phrases and sentences and links into it every day. I guard this doc with my life because it’s full of half-formed thoughts. I don’t really read it, I just know it’s there so my brain doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything. But yeh it’s the most disjointed, fugly document. Brain melting!
I don’t dedicate a certain amount of hours to writing per day, I don’t give myself a word count. I spend a lot of time alone during the day (living alone) so it gets done incidentally, and seems to suit me. As for ‘writing retreats’, they don’t work for me – I went to an Airbnb with Madison at one point last year to ‘write’ and we just ended up ordering UberEats and chasing chickens in the yard.
Definitely, when it got to the pointy end of the deadline, I locked in. I woke up and started writing straight away, practically chaining myself to my desk. This was good because I had spent so much time marinating. I was ready to push.
describe your book in three words!
Honest, irreverent manifesto.
my final FROOMESWORLD tips and tricks
What I realised while writing the book is that no one has ever given me training on what to write. My whole career has felt like I’ve waited for someone to tell me how to do it, but I just forged ahead anyway because it needed to get done (writing 5 articles per day at Pedestrian got me like…) and in doing so, I learnt. This takes a lot of ‘trust’ in what you can do, knowing you can revise/jazz it up later.
I still have NFI what a noun, verb and adverb is. I never have.
When I was at Pedestrian, I had a ‘Stickie’ on my Desktop with ‘words I like’. It was just a list of weird/funny words and phrases I’d picked up from the internet/other writers. ‘Not here to fuck spiders’ was on there, along with ‘three-ring shit show’.
Asking for advice from writers isn’t always helpful either. For instance, when I started out at Pedestrian I Facebook messaged this old bloke who wrote a really successful indie book, asking him for advice. He answered, surprisingly, and I get the vibe that he only did because he was flirting but alas. He told me to ‘never go near those online websites that sell drivel’ (I had left out the fact I was at one such website). Looking back, it was bad advice. Drivel is in the eye of the beholder, and if I subscribed to such intellectual snobbery I would never have ever trusted myself to write.
Some other things: I use Grammarly (free version). When I got to the hard bit of writing the book I started using a program called Scrivener because I could order the chapters/upload research material and rejig chapters. I also constantly Google synonyms for words… my rule is that I’ll only include a word if I can confidently say it out loud in a sentence (thus, curmudgeon is out of the question).
Finally, whenever I finish something (including this newsletter) I will read it out loud. If anything is clunky I take it out or rework it.
Thanks for listening little freaks. If you have any good advice, please feel free to pop in the comments section below 👇😛👇
and my book, [TITLE TO BE REVEALED], is out in September. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available for pre-order.
Yours in good juju,
Froominda.
Froomes, you’ve gone and done it again. I’m super stoked about you writing this book. Firstly as a recovering binge-eater myself, I’m in desperate need to connect with truthful stories of (questionable) functioning women I admire online. I know it will be very healing to read your inner thoughts and generous words of the wrestle with self. Thanks for being brave enough to do it in a world where it’s okay to hide it away instead of teaching others “it’s ok, it’s part of life”.
Secondly, I don’t want to read about eating / body positivity from the usual ‘Karen-has-made-it-online’. I want you… well, the fresh faced, delicious and often inappropriate, smut infused writing style that makes me LOL at my screen (whilst reading your newsletter). Thats my wish, to not take all that’s so hidden, so seriously. Heal it with a LOL 😜 (book title sorted!?). From this blog, I sense I’ll get what I’ve been looking for.
Good luck! I’m in. Pre-order button?
Em - your smut enthralled fan 🪭
Hey Froomes, this helps me get a little bit more inspired towards a novel. Thanks.
I write for several tech journals and have a monthly column in one that I get free reign over. Every time I think about turning these skills into a novel, I get nothing. Nadda. Jack shit. I can smash out a pithy 1000-word article in no time but the 'big book' idea is eternally blank. Perhaps writing about myself (the bit I enjoy most about my column) could be the winner. Unfortunately, my online audience is a little too little, so don't yet see any publishers hounding me for a deal.
Word Hippo for synonyms / antonyms / etc beats Google for me. Also, I use M$Word's 'Read Aloud' function for final edits. Best done with eyes closed so there's no temptation to read along (and miss the mistakes that you can easily hear).
Good luck with the book.