Counterintuitive Editing with Sarah Chauncey

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Sarah, welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so glad that you’re on today. Thank you so much for being here.

Sarah Chauncey [0:08]
Thank you so much, Lisa. I have really been wanting to be on this secretly, so thank you so much for inviting me. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:17]
Well, my desire to have you on has not been so secret, so I was so glad when you said yes, because we are going to have a deep conversation about 2025 and what we’re going to do as writers and how we can navigate the writing and editing process at a time that could be big, has a lot of unknowns, could contain some tumult. We don’t know where it’s going to go, but there is a lot of energy and expectation around it. When I was looking at my horoscope for the year, it said, “Buckle up. Change is coming.” So, I am buckling up and taking good care of myself, and writing is going to play a huge role in that. So, we’re going to get into the inner and outer work we need to do to edit our writing. But before we get to that, I want to give you an opportunity to tell us what you’d like us to know about you and your work as a writing coach.

Sarah Chauncey [1:19]
Thanks. I primarily work as a developmental editor with nonfiction writers, including memoirists. And I really like working with nonfiction writers because I’ve had a very eclectic career, and so I’ve built these storytelling tools from film and television and all these different mediums, and I like teaching them these techniques that generally, academics, journalists, physicians, aren’t taught. But I also really love troubleshooting story. So, I have a couple of clients who are general fiction writers, and I just love brainstorming. Kind of, okay, where are we going to go with this? What’s the most unexpected piece here? Then, as a coach, I work with all kinds of writers, and my main focus is in helping writers not only become better at their craft, but also—we were talking about the inside and the outside work—really learn about their own creative rhythms and process, which is something that I spent years doing and learning how to kind of make the most of writing time by attuning, you know, learning to notice their thoughts and what they’re daydreaming about and what ideas come up in the shower, or when they’re, you know, mowing the lawn, that kind of thing, and then how to incorporate that.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:46]
Yeah, I was reading one of your newsletter posts, and I know that you have two different newsletters. We’re going to talk today about the Counterintuitive Guide for Life, and that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. But you also have one for writers, on writing, and you talk a lot about the role of the unconscious. You also talked about this in a blog post that you wrote for Jane Friedman, which we’re going to share in the show notes so people can read it, because it was brilliant. I love that you talk about the role of the unconscious and how it impacts the writing that we do, because it is such a powerful part of the process, and it’s a dismissed part of the process.

Sarah Chauncey [3:28]
Yes, very much. I have to say, for people who are new writers and for writers who are just getting started, there is a benefit to “butt in the chair, hands on the keyboard, just stick it out,” because sometimes magic does happen that way. But after a certain point, you can spend a lot of time cranking out crap and staying at the keyboard. I often tell clients, you know, it’s not like carpentry. If you hammer harder, that’s not necessarily better. One of the big things that I encourage in both newsletters, actually, in all three, is allowing more than trying. This is one of the counterintuitive pieces: that if you’re stuck, getting up and going for a walk—in my experience, over and over, something will come up as you’re moving, and just when you stop thinking about it. It’s sort of the same concept as, you know, a watched pot never boils. Yes, like the harder we try, the more elusive it is, because we’re trying from the intellect, and creativity is not an intellectual process. Revision can be, but creativity as a trait isn’t.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [4:44]
And I tell the writers that I work with to go for walks all the time, and I find myself doing that. And, you know, as a writer, I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve had this thought, this “should” thought, which you and I were talking about—how much of writing and publishing is influenced by our capitalistic society and all the influences around it. This idea that we have to create products, and then I’ll have this thought like, “Oh, I haven’t published an essay in a while. I should publish an essay.” So, then I’m sitting down and I’m trying to brainstorm all these ideas. And, you know, sometimes I’ll pitch them, and they won’t work. But every time I go for a walk, and I get quiet, and I listen to the still, small voice inside myself that says, “Do this,” and if it says it in this really loud way, like, “Write this thing,” and I listen, it’ll get published.

Sarah Chauncey [5:38]
Ironically, I have a post that’s on the impact of mindfulness on creativity, and that was one of the first posts that just flew out of me—barely any revision. Like I had been walking for a couple of hours. I sat down, it just poured out. I made a couple of adjustments, and there it was. Which, for anyone who knows me, that’s not at all how I usually write. I can revise for years, literally even a blog post.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:08]
I want people to hear that you can revise for years. And it’s so important for people to hear that, because they think it’s got to be quick.

Sarah Chauncey [6:17]
Yes, because we live in this hustle culture that’s pushing against what is, rather than allowing what is to be. And sometimes that means not pushing. From 2002 to 2005, I spent five years writing a memoir about a trip I’d taken with my father. It got good feedback from the people I showed it to—really good. And I listened to my gut that said, “Don’t publish this.” And part of it at the time was insecurity, and part I now see was, I had written the wrong story. I always recommend Vivian Gornick’s book The Situation and the Story—yes, like every client. And, you know, that was the feedback I got from an editor: “This is a dark comedy; it kind of needs to be shifted that way.” My point is, I didn’t pursue publication, even though it probably might have gotten it, who knows? But, you know, it was last year or two years ago, I pulled a scene from that and put it in an essay. So, I still can use all that material elsewhere. The other thing I love telling clients is nothing ever goes to waste. And one of my favorite stories about this is there’s a TV show called The Good Place. It’s on Netflix now. And I don’t watch a lot of stuff, but I love that show. And Mike Schur—there was a podcast that went with it. And I started out wanting to be a comedy writer, and so I loved listening to the podcast, and the writing team, whenever they cut anything, they put it in something that Mike Schur called the candy jar. And I really like it. And then when they needed—so, for any joke, let’s say any laugh line, you create maybe 20 or 30, what they call—you brainstorm a bunch, and then cut them down so you have four or five alts that are, what are recorded, you know, along with the main line. And then in the edit suite, you can decide which one you want to use. And, you know, put all the alts back in the candy jar and just use them for something else. I just love that. And mine is far less creatively titled. I just call it my outtakes file, but it tricks my brain into believing that I’m not really cutting something. I’m just moving it. I’m rearranging the furniture for now, but it’s still here, you know? And that helps to trick my writerly ego that’s like, “But I need that paragraph,” you know? I love that sentence.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:53]
Oh, my goodness. I’m thinking of all the sentences that I have absolutely loved and had to cut, and that idea of the candy jar. I think I’m going to borrow that, because it really is a sweet way to talk about writing that is precious to us. Yeah, you know, that we don’t want to get rid of. Because one thing that I find I will fall into, and I know a lot of writers will fall into, is what’s called the sunk cost fallacy. So, the sunk cost fallacy is that if I put time into it, I have to finish it, or I have to get it to some completion point, otherwise it’s a failure. But the reality is, if you’ve put that work in and it’s not working, putting more into something that isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing isn’t helpful. So, allow it to be like, “Yes, that’s a sunk cost,” and I can move on. And giving yourself permission is so important.

Sarah Chauncey [9:47]
It is. I mean, it’s kind of like saying, if a relationship ends, it was worthless. And it’s not, because you came together for a period of time. You each brought something to it. You each took things away from it. And same with writing. If you spent that time honing your craft, it’s not wasted. And I have, along these lines, an essay that I wrote a few years ago that I’ve never been able to place. It’s far and away the best thing I’ve written. But, you know, that’s okay. When we were talking earlier, you were talking about authors taking their books to be their identity. Yes, when I was younger, I was a super ambitious creative. That was my whole identity, and I couldn’t imagine not doing it. And we are all so much more than we believe we are, than we’ve been conditioned to believe that we are, and even as writers, you know, we are so much more than our output, you know? I mean, I think that’s one of the capitalist framings. Productivity is not a moral imperative. It’s just not. It’s, you know, contributing to the well-being of the collective. But it is hard to see other people who are really taking it so much as, you know, this is who I am.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:07]
I was listening to—actually, a podcast episode this morning when I was lifting weights, because I get all brutely first in the morning. Actually, at 5:45. I bow to myself, because that normally does not happen. I do not get up that early, except perimenopause. Yes, you have those moments where you’re like, blink, I’m awake, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So, it was one of those days. But I was listening to this podcast episode from Off the Grid, which is a podcast about getting off social media. And I’m fascinated by this. And this episode was on being seen, and how important that is for us to understand what it means to be seen and to find the places where we are seen, and how social media can create this false sense of being seen, and that it skews our understanding of what’s important. We start thinking about metrics and all this other stuff. Yeah, but one of the things that happens on social media that’s actually decreasing our capacity for being seen and decreasing our happiness is the level of comparison—comparing ourselves to people’s hot takes and their highlight reels and all of these other things. Yeah, and I’m sharing this because you are taking a different path with your Substack, The Counterintuitive Guide to Life. And, you know, when we talked before, you told me that you’ve been doing this since 2012—an important year for me as well—and it was a passion project for a long time, and now you’re like, “I know what this has to be.”  So. can you tell us more about that?

Sarah Chauncey [12:43]
To give a little backstory, I was your typical high-achieving, type-A, anxious, creative. In between 2007 and late 2009 through early 2010, I had a complete breakdown. I had moved across the country for a job that didn’t fit me, but I couldn’t see that. I had already been deeply suicidal when I was in Toronto, and it just got way worse when I moved to Vancouver because I didn’t have any of my people around. I was working in a type of job—really, it wasn’t corporate, but it was marketing. Creative writers were at the top of the org chart, which was fantastic, but it was still an office, and there were politics and dynamics. The only thing that really kept me alive was my cat because I knew that if I ended my life, she wouldn’t understand.

Then I moved again, and in early 2010, out of all this pain, I had this sudden epiphany that sort of ties into what I said earlier: a lot of what we take to be reality isn’t—it’s conditioning. What really matters in this world is not achievement, accomplishment, or being important, which is how I had been conditioned to think. You’ve got to be important. But what really matters is growing on the inside and becoming more compassionate and kinder. It was a mind-blowing epiphany. At the same time, I had very little work—everything in my life had fallen away. I was in a new town that I really loved, and I just didn’t know who I was anymore. It’s like, who am I if I’m not a writer?

I became really determined to practice all the things I was learning. There’s this great phrase by Eckhart Tolle: “If you get the insight, the outside will fall into place.” That became my life—it became an experiment. I want to say I stopped writing creatively for three years because I had been a personal essay writer and a memoirist, and everything in my life had been about, “Oh, it’s hilarious or terrible, or how could he?” Everything had been a judgment on what had happened. Those judgments had wired my brain to make me really angry at myself—the same pathways that allowed me to judge other people.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t do that, because, you know, we’re humans, and that is what essays are about. They’re about saying, “This is what the situation is.” But I stopped writing creative essays for several years because I wanted to train my mind away from making stories that made me unhappy. So, in other words, I couldn’t separate the skill—interpreting a situation—from the way that skill had also led to me over-interpreting other situations. I’d think, “She hates me. I’m terrible. I’m a loser. I’m ugly.” I took all of that as fact because, as an essayist, I was taking my interpretation of a story as truth.

That’s another reason I love Vivian Gornick—because that’s true for all of us. We have millions of data points. What is the story? I just started having insights and taking notes and writing them down. A friend of mine once said, we were in a coffee shop, “Most people spend their lives being so busy, running away—doing shopping or eating or having sex, or anything—not to feel existential despair.” He said, “But you, you’re living the mess.” I loved that. So that became the first title, though it’s not anymore. So much of our pain comes from trying to make things not messy or trying to control the mess. The thing is, if we just allow it to unfold on its own…

So, Living the Mess—I wrote it, and I was literally writing my own resilience because I was writing blog posts. The early ones were really just about me and what I was experiencing. Even though I grew up in an affluent family, I spent several years below survival level, relying on a food bank, bartering for food. There were a few people reading it, and I kept going on and off, feeling like this was where I wanted to be focused.

Then a whole bunch of other stuff happened. My first gift book came out, and I started doing more work. Work came back, but I didn’t feel the same passion. A teacher I work with suggested I try meditating on it. I did, and I saw that it needed to be two things: One, the title Living the Mess wasn’t appealing enough, because the people who understand that title don’t need what’s in it. One of my early contenders had been The Counterintuitive Guide to Life. I loved the rhythm of it, and it was a little tongue-in-cheek. Who am I to say I have the Guide to Life, right? Of course I don’t. But for a while, I was saying, “It’s kind of like weird Barbie.”

The other part was that I realized it needed to be a handbook of skills for skillfully navigating life. Life is nothing but a series of paradoxes. We tend to make decisions, “This is right, and that’s wrong,” but it’s both—and. So, there are certain skills needed to navigate all of this, like learning to observe your thoughts. This comes back to what I do with writing clients and coaching clients—learning to separate facts from our interpretations of those facts. These are all ongoing practices. I knew it had a new name, though.

My big challenge was that life had painted me into a corner to do this work. When people are comfortable, there’s not much incentive to do a lot of deep personal work, right? You know, because everything’s groovy. And I just needed to get out of pain. I was in so much pain, I just needed to find a way out. People, including me, don’t make an effort to change when things are comfortable.

I don’t know how to reach, generally speaking, people who are uncomfortable. For a long time, the tagline was “Inner peace for overthinkers,” because that certainly captured it. But then this fall, like many people, I felt this gut punch—like, holy—what just happened? People started telling me things like, “You know, I finally stopped watching the news.” I, for years, have minimized how much I watch, and I suddenly went, “Oh, there are a whole lot of people in a whole lot of pain right now.”

It’s not that we need to wait another four years, or however long, to create a different kind of world. We can do it simultaneously. And these are the skill sets for that kind of world. I wish I could be one of those people who says, “Oh, just think happy thoughts,” because I see complexity everywhere. It takes dedication, and it takes commitment, but the reward is so great. I think now, I suddenly felt like, “Oh, now I can see that this has a purpose.” So again, for writers listening, you know, that’s 13 years of not knowing where I was going with this, and it may never become a book. We’ll see.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [21:03]
Even if it doesn’t, what I love about Substack and the work that you do is that it is helping people now, and it has the capacity to help people more as you process this and think about what it means to live in a counterintuitive way, or to think about those counterintuitive ways of living so that we can create the world we want now, regardless of what’s going on.

I think that’s so important to think about when it comes to writing, because so many people want to have the perfect conditions. “I want to have the perfect amount of time, I want to have the perfect amount of noise or quiet, the perfect pen, the perfect blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” The reality is, we write in the middle of imperfect circumstances all the time, and our understanding of our stories is always imperfect. It’s always growing. We could publish something, and it’s brilliant for now, but then we’re going to grow in some way, and we’ll look at it differently, right?

So, yeah, being able to live in the now as it is and create what you need is so important. I think, you know, one of the questions that some of the listeners have been coming to me with, or questions some of the listeners have been asking, is about editing. “How do I edit my work?” I think there are a lot of counterintuitive ways to edit work, because when we think about editing, we always think about what is happening on the page—”Do I have enough active verbs? Is the pacing right?” Those things are all important, yes, but there’s an inner work we need to do when we are editing, as well as this outer work.

When I talk about outer work, for anyone who’s listening and isn’t sure what I mean, I’m talking about the ways we change what’s on the page. That is valuable, but there’s more to it. As you think about the inner work that we have to do as writers and how it relates to counterintuitive living, what do you think about that? What’s the work?

Sarah Chauncey [23:12]
I have noticed with my clients, that whatever energy is going on inside them, I will feel it on the page. So, to me, the inner work, it’s taking time away in art, there’s white space, right? Yes, and we need to kind of cleanse the palette of our brains, you know, and just so that we can come back and look at it with fresh eyes. I am a huge fan of what I call coffee shop edits, because I tend to edit in a different location than I write, and that helps me see things differently. And people would be really shocked at how little of my revision time is actually spent hands on keyboard or pen to paper of my own. Like, when I’m editing, of course, I’m focused on the client’s work, but I’ll go for a walk for an hour, and I’ll sit down in a coffee shop, or if it’s nice, I’ll sit down outside. And right now, I’m mostly writing newsletters, so they’re under 2000 words, and I’ll take a quick pass, and I’ll notice five or 10 things, maybe not even that many. And then I’ll put it back in my bag and go for another walk. And then I’ll sit down, and when I know that I’m just sitting down for one pass on a short piece. So, for memoirs, it might be a chapter, or even part of a chapter, a big scene, you know, then that takes the pressure off. I just am looking to see if there’s anything I want to change.

The caveat is, when I get close to the end, I always thought it was just me, but I’m sensing that this is very common. I develop somatically, kind of an agitation or a little bit of irritability that, to me, is the clue that it’s time to really sit down and get this to the finish line. And I’m not talking hours, I’m talking maybe an hour. And then there’s little for me, there’s a little internal click. It’s like a key and a lock, and it goes, “Okay, that’s done. It’s done,” like I feel a sensation in my solar plexus. So that’s a little more intensive, but for the majority of my revising time, it’s going for walks, or, you know, playing with dogs. What it isn’t, in between, the inner work is not, is looking at social media, which, yes, I look forward to the day I can hire someone to do social media for me, because, as editors and writers, we right now have to be on it, but God, I hate it. I mean, I love connecting with friends, but I just, yeah, so that’s the inner. And then did you ask also about the outer? I forgot.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:53]
So we’re going to get into the outer in a moment, but I want to comment on a couple of things that you shared. You know, two strategies that I hear are: focus on one thing, get up, move around, look at things in a different location because that gives you a fresh perspective. And, notice what is my inner landscape? How am I feeling? And if I’m getting to that point where what I say is like, I’m sick of it, like, that’s my thing. It’s like, when you’re sick of it, it’s probably done, and then do that really hardcore final edit. And you said something that was really important, you knew it was done when you felt it in your solar plexus. And I have that same experience of, I feel it in my solar plexus, and it also feels like a sigh, like this sigh of relief.

Sarah Chauncey [26:41]
Yeah. It’s kind of like, “Oh my, oh, wow. I thought I had, like, hours more. Oh, it’s done.” It’s almost like surprise. It’s like, “Oh, okay, right.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:52]
And I always tell people to think about it in that way, whereas what we often are looking at is, oh, the deadline is here, or, you know, I want to get this done by such and such date, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And there are going to be times if you are writing professionally, where the deadline has arrived, and you have to send it off. That’s the way it is. But if it’s your most tender work, the work that matters to you most, it’s really important to wait for the sigh, wait for that feeling. And what I often tell people that’s a little counterintuitive is that your internal critic can be your friend at a certain point in the writing process, but here’s where it often goes awry in early drafts. And I actually teach people these skills in classes; it’s on building creative intuition because your intuition, it does so much for you. And on top of that, it’s a way that you can really see things differently and begin to see where the lies are. Because our inner critic will tell us so many lies. And the biggest lie that I’ve found that people have is that number one, it has to all be done in one shot, and it doesn’t, as you’re hearing. It’s draft, draft, draft, draft, draft. But also, that a lot of work has to happen in order for you to get to the truth. But what often happens is that in a first draft, it’s raw, it’s messy. Yes, things need to be changed, but there can be this grain of truth. And sometimes what happens is our inner critic says, “That sucks. That’s not right. You need to get rid of that. Nobody wants to hear about this thing.” And what I’ve had people do is assess their work. What feels like it’s great, what feels like it sucks completely and should be taken out? And what do you have questions about? Analyze a piece like that and then read it out loud to someone else and listen to what they have to say. And I have found so many cases where the writer was certain that this one part was terrible and it absolutely needed to be taken out, and it was the best part of their work. And the problem is that there’s a problem of calibration inside you in terms of truth. And what’s happened is they’ve hit their vulnerability, right? And so, I find that these things are so important that it’s often very different than what we think it is going to be. So, we need to think in new ways, and when we do that, it leads to what we put on the page.

Sarah Chauncey [29:23]
I mean, vulnerability. Thank God for Brené Brown. But you know, vulnerability is one of those things that is dismissed by the culture, and yet is the key, like the key to resonant writing? And so, for a lot of people, that’s a big shift to make. You know, it’s not about being clever, like cleverness is kind of a dime a dozen. Yeah, my 20-year-old self would scream to hear me say that. But vulnerability— we’re all going through this human experience right now. And we all have things we don’t share with other people. By letting us see that, you’re inviting us into that world. I wanted to mention a technique I use, which is just negotiating with my inner critic.

And I think it’s gotten easier for me over the years, just because I’ve been doing it a long time. But it’s basically saying to the inner critic, when I sit down to draft something, “Okay, you’re going to have your chance, you know, but right now I need you to go sit in a corner over there.” Yes, because as one of the things I was saying, I think, before we started recording, is when I was really young, I used to say my best writing doesn’t go through my head. Yes, it starts in my heart. It goes down my arm and out my pen. And so, the inner critic has a role, but it’s not in creating, it’s in revising, and it really, you know, it’s trying to protect us. You know, people don’t want to hear this, because we’ve been told, I mean, I grew up in a family that demonized any kind of inner work. You know, the intellect was everything, and that was the only thing that mattered. So, you know, learning these ways of opening up— what’s remarkable to me is that, as you said with your client, when we take those risks, there’s almost always, you know, a really positive response. Yes. Because as we change, the world around us changes. It both appears to change, and it really does change. I love that. I don’t know if you encounter over-revising…

Lisa Cooper Ellison [31:49]
Yes, and I have over-revised way too much.

Sarah Chauncey [31:54]
I have a friend who’s also a writer and editor, and so she’ll look over some of my stuff, and she has this great creation, “Don’t overcook the soufflé.” And I love that, yeah. And it’s so catchy that it’s like, yeah. You know, there is that solar plexus, yes. But if you keep pushing beyond that, it’s all going to fall.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [32:15]
And it will. I’m going to put that in my office. Don’t overcook the souffle. That is such a great line. You know, these are all of the internal things that we do in order to both prepare to revise and to revise itself. And you work with writers. So, what’s an exercise that you give writers to help them clarify or sharpen what’s on the page?

Sarah Chauncey [32:40]
There are a couple. One is, I do this in general with most clients. I ask them what location or activity brings them, you know, a sense of peace. Whether it’s people on the coast, will say, the beach. Other people will say, you know, playing with my dog. So doing that before they sit down. And that’s inner, outer for me. Like I mostly do that in the skills part, in our calls or in the markup I do. But I also will tell people to go into nature and do some sense exercises. Focus on the smell and what does that bring up? By sharpening their senses, they can bring that back onto the page within the context of whatever it is they’re writing about.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:34]
Yeah, I love that. You know, our senses are so powerful, and especially our sense of smell and our sense of taste. It can be so evocative. I mean, I always think about Proust and his Madeleine, that right? But it is true, it is one of the quickest ways to get to our unconscious and to all of these things below the surface of our, you know, our understanding. These are just some of the tools that you want to bring to the table so that people can take a look at their work. So, I love the senses. Another thing that I’ll use is, I’ll give people an assignment to go watch videos. Ah, yeah, especially when I see this happens a lot. So, everyone don’t get judgy. Okay, don’t get judgy on me, and don’t get judgy on yourself. We all read drafts filled with roiling and boiling tummies, clenched jaws, furrowed brows, name something else or cliché or elevated voice. Yes, that’s a normal part of the writing process, and that’s some of the stuff that we want to strip away. But, you know, if you are stuck and you’re like, but my stomach was messed up, which, of course, it was if you were really upset about something and you’re writing about personal things, or you’re thinking about a character and trying to use your own experience. But there are so many other, more subtle and unique ways to express emotion. And so, if you look at videos, that’s a great way to do that.

Sarah Chauncey [35:03]
I often tell people, you know, this is the difference between writing and speaking. Yes, even right now, you and I can see each other. We can see how the other person is responding—facial expressions, intonations, and none of that is on the page. So, the writer has to make up for that by really letting us experience through their body as a sensing organ. I mean, that sounds a little body-snatcher, but look through their eyes, listen through their ears, and just to the point of the sense memory exercises, I wrote an article about that, about how nature helps memoirists remember. It was for Writer’s Digest in the July issue this year, so I think it’s still available as an archive issue, but there are specific exercises in that issue that I lay out that you can do in nature to help bring up more.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:58]
I will definitely put that in the show notes so people can look at that, because you have so many wonderful exercises, and you’ve given us all of this great writing wisdom. So, I don’t know if you have one last “Oh, this is my best piece of writing advice,” or “the best piece of writing advice someone has told me.” If you don’t, you can say “pass,” because we’ve already covered so much. But then we’ll get into my last two lightning-round questions. Okay?

Sarah Chauncey [36:25]
The best piece of advice, I think I just said it, was the first time I sold an essay, an editor said to me, “You know, you’re telling this to me as though you’re standing at the door listening to what’s happening in the room and describing it. I need you to bring me inside the room with you.” So, I go a little bit further and say, “Let us look through your eyes.” But, I mean, that was one line of feedback that I’ve carried with me for 25 years.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:52]
I’m going to be keeping that with me as well. That’s a great piece of feedback. And so, we are preparing—well, this is being recorded before 2025 begins. We have no idea what life is going to be like, and we’re in a preparatory phase, right? So how are you nurturing your resilience as you work on your Counterintuitive Guide to Life and all the other writing projects you’re working on and your work with other writers?

Sarah Chauncey [37:27]
This is the other thing I wanted to say anyway, which is, for me, 2025 is a year of transformation. I’m preparing to move to a city about 90 minutes away, not super far, but it’s speaking of being in a different place and looking at material differently. Yeah, so there are physical things I’m doing. I’m creating some courses which I’ve never done before and probably going to have some group programs which I haven’t tried before. So, there’s that, but on the inside, going slowly so that I don’t burn out. Because, as we were talking about before, you know, it takes so much longer to recover from burnout. Yeah. I mean, it took me years and years to recover, but if we take care of ourselves along the way, and we stop before we bonk, which is a cycling phrase—like nothing left—then we have more sustenance to keep going. It’s more sustainable. That’s my resilience part. And then again, yeah, we’ll see what happens with the courses.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:36]
Speaking of your courses, I don’t know how much you will have ready by the time this airs, but what are the best ways for people to connect with you, to engage with you, and especially to learn more about what you’re up to, so that whether your courses are ready when this airs or later, because people will be listening to this along the way, where can they get updates?

Sarah Chauncey [39:01]
The central hub, like the easiest thing to remember, is that my name is my website: SarahChauncey.com. And from there, you can find each of my three newsletters. Resonant Storytelling is my newsletter for writers, The Counterintuitive Guide to Life, which is my project as a writer, and the More Than Tuna newsletter, which is very occasionally, but for people experiencing pet loss. I would say Instagram, which is @SarahKChauncey, is probably… I don’t know, I’m not on social that much, and I am trying to pare back. So, I think my website kind of gives you pointers to all the places where I am, but I look forward to hearing from anybody, and you know, please subscribe to the Substacks if it speaks to you.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [39:50]
And I definitely hope they do, because I subscribe, and I love getting your messages in my inbox, and I always learn something new from them. So, I’m currently meditating on the pain body, and I will share that as one of the links. And so, if you really want to engage with Sarah, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t get all those things,” fear not—all of it is in the show notes, so you will have lots of ways to get in touch with Sarah and to learn about her incredible work. Well, I want to thank you so much for being on the show today. It has been an absolute pleasure.

Sarah Chauncey [40:24]
I’ve had so much fun, Lisa, thank you for inviting me and thank you for such a great conversation.