London Writers' Salon

#195: Holly Ringland — The Pain of Not Writing, Breaking Through Decades of Self-Doubt, Meeting the Inner Critic with the Inner Fan, and Building a Toolkit for the Creative Life

Episode Summary

Bestselling novelist Holly Ringland on writing from joy instead of fear, the toolkit she built to meet the inner critic with self-compassion, and finding the first true sentence of her debut after decades of silence.

Episode Notes

Bestselling novelist Holly Ringland on writing from joy instead of fear, the toolkit she built to meet the inner critic with self-compassion, and finding the first true sentence of her debut after decades of silence.
 

We discuss

• Why the pain of not writing eventually outweighs the pain of writing.
• What grief and loss can crack open in a writer that nothing else can.
• How the first true line of a novel can arrive once you stop listening to the reasons you can't write it.
• A bullet-point approach to plotting that protects the nervous system from the blank page.
• What to ask for from early readers, and what to refuse.
• The distinction between self-doubt and the inner critic, and why it matters.
• Meeting the inner critic with an equal and opposite internalised force.
• Breaking procrastination by making the next step impossibly small.
• Fiction as the lie that tells the truth truest.
   

Resources & Links

• 📄Interview Transcript
• The House That Joy Built
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Zeitgeist Agency
• Dangerous Writing
• Holly’s Substack

About Holly Ringland

Holly Ringland is a writer, storyteller and TV presenter. She is the author of the international bestseller The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which has been translated into thirty languages and adapted into a seven-part TV series starring Sigourney Weaver, produced by Amazon Prime and Made Up Stories. In 2019, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart won the Australian Book Industry Award General Fiction Book of the Year. In 2021, Holly co-hosted an eight-episode ABC TV series, Back to Nature, with Aaron Pedersen. After living between Australia and the UK for ten years, Holly has been based in the Yugambeh region of southeast Queensland since 2020, where she wrote her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, in her 'office', a vintage caravan named Frenchie. Upon publication, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding became an instant national bestseller, and it was named Booktopia's 2022 Book of the Year. Holly writes a bestselling Substack on the intersection of creativity and connection, The Joy Rise. Her latest book is The House That Joy Built.