Zan Romanoff is a writer of essays and fiction, mostly focused on food, feminism, television and books. She graduated from Yale in 2009 with a B.A. in Literature, and now lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the author of A Song to Take the World Apart, and her latest YA novel, Grace and the Fever.
Full shownotes: http://yourcreativepush.com/zan
-How writing has played a part in her life since she was very young.
-The unexpected result of one of her pieces ending up in The Paris Review.
-How she tricked herself into writing her first novel.
-The idea of wanting or needing permission from other people to call yourself a writer.
-Talking about your creative passion with other people and wanting to protect it from scrutiny, jokes, or small talk.
-The similarities and differences between writing and therapy.
-How she wants to be honest with her young audience so that they trust her.
-A long period of writer’s block after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend and thus losing her long-term reader/audience.
-The process of writing her third novel.
-How ideas often come to be in strange or long-winded ways that don’t make sense.
-The notion of “coming down with a book.”
-Giving yourself permission to spend time with yourself and be creative without thinking of those end goals.
-How selling her first book didn’t solve any problems for her or make her doubt herself any less.
-Trusting that your creative successes aren’t flukes and knowing that more successes will come again.
“What’s the thing that I wake up every day and do even though I don’t have to and even though nobody wants me to? And the answer was writing.”
“The only thing scarier than writing a novel is permanent unemployment, I would say.”
“External permission is important but it only gets you so far. Their permission opened a door and I had to sit with it for a long time.”
“I do feel strongly that one of the major differences between me and people that haven’t written books is that I sat down and wrote it.”
Zan's piece in The Paris Review
A Song to Take the World Apart by Zan Romanoff
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