How To Write Your First Novel In Your 40s

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

WBEZ

Tv & Film, Books, Self, Improvement, Pop, Tv, Wbez, Culture, Technology, Society & Culture, Nerds, Nerd, Nerdette

4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2019

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you know NPR’s Linda Holmes, it’s probably not as a novelist. She’s a pop culture correspondent, she co-hosts NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, and her recalcitrant dog Brian is mildly famous on Twitter.

But she always wanted to write a novel. And at 48, she did. It's called Evvie Drake Starts Over and it is excellent.

“This is what I think my story does actually prove,” Holmes tells Greta on this episode of Nerdette. “The fact that you haven’t gotten something done by a certain point in your life does not mean you’re not going to.”

Listen up ... and then go write that book!

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago, join me as I share how the genre
0:22.3	began, their social impact, and why these stories endure. Listen, wherever you get your podcast.
0:30.2	Hey, just want to warn you, this episode is like the tiniest, smidgiest bit, Curseys, so consider
0:34.7	this your warning.
0:40.8	From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette.
0:45.1	I'm Greta Johnson, and Nerdette is a show where we talk to your favorite or soon-to-be favorite people, and this week's guest is legit, one of my favorite people.
0:49.2	Her name is Linda Holmes.
0:50.7	She is NPR's Pop Culture Correspondent.
0:53.2	She hosts a little podcast you may have heard of called Pop Culture Happy Hour. And lucky for everyone on this green earth, Linda has just written her first book. It is called Evie Drake starts over and it is great. It's about a woman who, just as she decides, she's about to finally leave her husband, finds out that he's dead, and a major league baseball pitcher who suddenly loses the ability to throw.
1:19.2	We're going to talk to her about the book and about what it's like to write your first book when you're like pushing 50.
1:25.7	So if you listening right now are one of those people who's
1:27.9	always thought about writing a book, this episode is totally for you.
1:34.7	Linda, welcome back to Nuredette. Thank you so much. So this is one of those books. Like I finished
1:40.9	it in the afternoon and then I took a really long nap and then like I pulled it back off of my shelf and put it on my bed before I was about to go to sleep like not realizing that I had already finished it and then I had to have this moment where I was like oh no this book is over I'm so sad there's no more of it for me to enjoy oh that's wonderful it's also probably probably because I laced it with drugs. No, I didn't do that. You just have to take a minute to mourn the fact that it's actually over and now you have to find a new thing.
2:18.4	Oh, yeah, definitely.
2:19.2	I mean, in my own personal life, I have so much that I'm always trying to consume that there's also always that feeling of like, that was great.
2:27.4	Now I have time to start something else.
2:29.3	Moving on.
2:30.0	Exactly.
	...

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