This is part of the Interviews with Creatives series, a curated library of conversations from the Creative Momentum with Meg podcast.
What if the way you think you’re supposed to write isn’t actually the way you write best?
For author Ingrid J. Adams, discovering that she is an afternoon writer rather than a morning writer has been part of understanding how her creative mind works. After exercising, getting the household organised and meditating, she can finally settle into writing. It isn’t the conventional picture of a writer sitting down at dawn with a clear desk and a clear mind, but it works for her.
Ingrid has always wanted to write. As a child, before she could physically write herself, she dictated stories to her aunt, who patiently wrote them down. Later she became a therapist, studied journalism, business, health sciences and kinesiology, and eventually returned to writing when her children were at school.
Eight years later, she has completed a four-book series.
That journey has also changed the way she works. Ingrid describes herself as having once been a complete ‘pantser’, someone who simply sat down and followed an idea wherever it went. Writing a four-book series changed that. She needed to know where the story was ultimately going, so she began plotting, while still leaving room for the characters to take over. The same evolution has happened in her relationship with success.
Her first series was very much a ‘heart project’. But when she began thinking about the realities of marketing and selling books, she realised that writing what she wanted wasn’t quite the whole story. Genre, tropes and categories mattered too. And then came the numbers: rankings, reviews, followers and sales.
When Ingrid reached number one in an Amazon category, her mother and husband wanted to celebrate. Ingrid initially dismissed it because it was ‘only’ one category. They reminded her that reaching number one had been her goal for the year. Why wasn’t she celebrating? That question led to one of my favourite parts of our conversation: the importance of recognising the milestone you’ve actually reached before immediately moving the goalposts.
Listen or watch the podcast interview
Prefer to listen? This conversation first appeared on Creative Momentum with Meg. Listen below or continue reading the full transcript.
‘We need to celebrate the little wins as we come along,’ Ingrid says. It is a simple idea, but one that is easy to forget when the creative life becomes a series of things we haven’t achieved yet.
We also talk about inspiration, creative community, the writers and books Ingrid loves, and what happens when you finish a series after eight years and suddenly have to leave behind characters who have become almost like family.
For Ingrid, those characters feel like home.
And perhaps that’s another way of thinking about creative work: finding the place, process and people that allow you to feel at home in what you’re making.
In this interview we explore
- finding the time of day when you write best
- creating around family life
- moving from being a ‘pantser’ to a mixture of plotting and pantsing
- the tension between writing from the heart and writing commercially
- what success means and why we keep moving the goalposts
- finding inspiration in our own life experiences and questions
- the importance of creative community and honest feedback
- what it means to finish a long-running creative project
- why Ingrid’s characters feel like home
Read the full conversation below, or listen to the episode above.
Conversation with Ingrid J. Adams
IJA: I am the author of the Descended series. It’s a series that’s set in Australia and America, but it starts off mainly on the beaches of Sydney in the 1990s, so it’s 90s nostalgia. It’s ultimately a love story about a boy named Indigo and a girl named Cordelia, and a love that spans lifetimes. It explores things like reincarnation, fate versus free will, soulmates, soul family, and all that kind of juicy stuff.
MD: Have you always been a writer?
IJA: Yes and no. I always wanted to be a writer, put it that way. I was a therapist. I’ve had many different careers. I ‘ve got a degree in psychotherapy, a master’s in journalism, a degree in business, and a degree in health sciences and kinesiology. And now I’m writing. So I’m bringing all those backgrounds and degrees into my work now.
MD: It sounds like you would have a pretty good idea of how people behave and think, from all of that.
IJA: Yes, it’s good. I used to run my own clinic and obviously see patients. Everything’s anonymous, but I have used a lot of my experience with the human condition in my work, if you want to put it that way.
MD: Do you do anything else creatively, or just keep it to the writing?
IJA: Just keep it to the writing. I’ve got four kids. I’ve got four boys, I’m a mum, so that takes up most of my time. When I had my kids, I put my career aside and became a stay-at-home mum, because with four kids, it’s actually a lot more economical to stay at home than put them into daycare. So, I decided I’d stay at home with the kids. But then when my baby went to daycare, suddenly the house was so big and so empty, and I just cried and cried, and my husband said, ‘You always wanted to write a book, why don’t you write that book now?’
So that became my creative outlet. My baby was at kindy three days a week then, and the others were at school, and I decided to write, and that was eight years ago. And yeah, now I have a finished series, so it worked out quite well.
MD: And he said that you always wanted to write, so was this a childhood thing, or just as an adult you thought, hmm, I’d love to write a book?
IJA: No. I remember even before I could physically write, I used to get my lovely auntie, she used to scribe my books for me. I would dictate to her when I was little. I must have been about four or five, because I couldn’t write them myself, so she would sit there for hours. She didn’t have children of her own, so I was her passion project. I was her goddaughter and her niece, and I was her passion project, so she would sit there and scribe all these crazy ideas and books for me, even when I was that age.
And then I think I started to write again in my early 20s, and thank god none of that got published, because I look at it now and think, oh my gosh. I think I didn’t have the life skills and experience. So yeah, then I put that aside and went back to therapy and had a clinic and did therapy, and then I went back to writing again when my kids went to school.
MD: So, are you writing full-time, or are you writing around work?
IJA: I’m writing full-time, so I’m full-time around kids. I write when my kids are at school, which everyone goes, ‘Wow’, but you know what? It’s actually a very short day. They leave at 7.30, and I have an office at home. So it’s literally, they leave and I’m like, right, okay, clean everything up, put a load of washing on, clean up the house, work out what’s for dinner, what’s for afternoon tea, go upstairs and write for a bit, ? Go take the dog for a run, come back, write for a bit, put another load of washing on. So it’s very much around house chores, but I am a full-time writer around being also a full-time mum.
Creative Routine
MD: I was actually going to ask you about whether you have a routine, and what that routine is. Is it Monday to Friday?
IJA: It is. Actually, weekends, I’m trying to get more work in, because my husband’s at home and he can take the kids, although I’ve got four boys, so it’s a lot of sport on the weekends now, and that’s actually really eating into my writing time.
But for me, because I’m a bit hectic and ADHD, I need to exercise every day, so I’ve got to do my workout in the morning, I’ve got to get the house set up, I’ve got to get everything organised, and then I sit and do my meditation. I have to be able to meditate first to calm the nervous system, and then I just sit down and I can write. I actually find I write better in the afternoons, which is actually a pain in the butt. I’d rather be one of those morning people that can get up and just create in the morning, but I find I’ve got to get everything out of the way and get my brain settled down, and then I start to write in the afternoons, and then the kids come home.
MD: So how many hours would you get, focused on your writing in a day?
IJA: It depends. On a good day, maybe six hours?
MD: Yeah, okay.
IJA: Probably a weekend when I can literally just knuckle down in the afternoon and write till all hours. For me, I’d rather start at three o’clock and write till 2am. If I was on my own and I was single, my routine would be 3pm to probably 2am, and then sleep till 11am, and then go up and do it all over again. But unfortunately, life gets in the way of that schedule.
MD: Yeah. I love that you have recognised when is the right time for you to write, because so many people say, ‘Oh, you must write in the morning’, or you must do your creative work first thing, but it’s so important to actually recognise when we’re more creative and the things that we need to get out of our way.
IJA: It really is. I’ve got so many author friends, and some of them will literally get up in the morning and write from 6am. And I was like, wow, oh yeah, I can do that. And I spoke to other people, they’re like, ‘I can’t do that. Can you do that?’ I’ve found there are people who are afternoon people and people who are morning people. It’s literally one or the other. It’s quite interesting when you start talking to writers, how they work. It’s one or the other.
MD: Yeah, there was a writer I spoke to, I don’t know however many episodes ago, Anna Wood, and she talked about how she writes after everyone’s gone to bed. Like, she just likes to write with a little lamp on, and just be in this beautiful liminal space.
IJA: I would love that too, except mine get up at, like, I’ve got to be up at six o’clock the next morning, and then I’m not very good. I’ve only had, like, four hours’ sleep, that’s my problem. But I would love to be able to. Yes, I get her. I’m on her team, definitely, on that.
MD: Yeah, and I get the boy thing, I’ve got three sons.
IJA: So you get it.
MD: But they’re adults now, so it does get better. It gets easier.
IJA: Right now, mine just eat. They just eat you out of house and home, and totally leave all the dirty laundry around, and yeah, sport, dirty washing, food.
MD: Can you have enough carbs and protein to keep them fed?
IJA: That’s exactly it. My oldest one’s a bit of a jock, and he just weighs all his carbs and protein. Everything’s got to be balanced. He’s got to have his creatine in the morning, and we have the full-on schedule of what he’s allowed to eat and what he isn’t.
MD: Oh, God, yeah, it does get better because they move out eventually.
IJA: I think it’ll be a long time for mine, but yes, that’s good to know.
MD: It comes faster than you expect.
IJA: I know.
Creative Process
MD: Can you please tell me, Ingrid, a little bit about what your process is when you go from, say, idea to the finished manuscript?
IJA: Well, I used to be a pantser, so I would literally just sit down and do no planning. If an idea came in, I would just sit down and write. And then I had someone say to me, ‘You’re writing a series. You need to plan.’ So now I have bullet points. So I’ve got documents of a bullet point of what is going to generally happen, because I’m sure most writers would say, once you start writing, the characters take a life of their own, and they go places you didn’t even know they were going to go, and so you’ve got to be flexible.
But I think particularly with my series I’ve just finished now, it’s a four-book series, and so I had to know what was going to happen at the end from the first book, so I couldn’t just pants it. I would love to have just written where the wind takes me, but obviously, with a series, you’ve got to know where everyone’s going to end up to a degree. So now I plan. I’m a mixture of a pantser and a plotter, as they say. I do plan, and I do plot notes, and my Notes app in my phone is chaos, because if I’m out and about, I’ll just be making little notes in there, making notes on the laptop.
I’ve got some different documents for ideas. I’m writing two different books at once, so I’ve got notes for this one, notes for that one, document for this one, document for that one, so it’s probably a bit more chaotic than what I would like. I never said I’d write two books at once. I always said I’d write one book at a time, but this time it hasn’t worked out that way.
MD: And so, they’re part of the series, are they, or…
IJA: No, so I finished that series. I’m actually writing a prequel. There was a character in the series I’ve just finished, a side character that everybody fell in love with, and everyone kept sending me DMs or putting in reviews, ‘We want more Nash, we want more Nash.’ So I’m actually writing a prequel for him. So one of the books I’m writing is his prequel, which was meant to be a little novella, but it’s ended up being a novel, because things drop in and things happen, and I realise I can’t write short. And then I’m also writing a new series as well.
MD: And has your process changed? I love the idea that you’re a bit of a pantser, a bit of a plotter, because I actually think it’s a spectrum. And we’re all somewhere on that spectrum, some further up the end of pantsing, some further down plotting. But I also think it changes over time, and maybe changes also according to what book we’re writing. So, has it changed for you, this process, over time, or not?
IJA: Absolutely. Because when I first started, my process would be, as I said, just sit down and just write wherever the wind took me. I would like to still do that, because I think that’s a very creative way of doing it, but I think now I’ve become a lot more methodical, because I think as you go on, to be blunt, you become much more aware of also what’s commercial. My first series I wrote what was in my heart. It was my heart series, you know what I mean? And then I wrote this series, and everyone was saying, because it’s genre-busting, and it jumps genres, and it’s this and it’s that, it doesn’t fit anywhere. It’s really hard to market because it’s not this, and it’s not this, and it’s not this, and it’s not that.
So I think, as you go on as an author, you realise you can still write within your heart, but I think I’ve had to be a bit more like, okay, so what tropes are going to be in this? What category is it going to fit into? Where would it sit on the bookshelf at a bookshop? Where would it sit on Amazon? What categories would it fall into?
And you have to be, I think, a little bit more commercially minded, because you write what you want to write, but you unfortunately have also got to sell what you want to write. That’s a hard truth, and it doesn’t sound like creative and lovely, but it’s true, because when I first wrote my first series, I was like, I don’t care, as long as one person reads my book and it touches their soul, that’s all I want. And then that happens, and then you want something more. Then the other person reads it, and another, and then another. And then you get the Amazon number one, you hit number one on Amazon, you think, oh, that felt really good, I want to do that again.
And so, I think your process definitely does change, because you have to start seeing things a bit more commercially and sharply, and seeing what success is. It’s writing the story from your heart, but it’s also making sure it fits into the world that you’re putting it out into, if that makes sense.
Creative Success
MD: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this idea of success changes as well. As you said, that first time, you’re just happy if someone reads it, and then it changes the more you have out there, and I know that this gets in the way for many authors.
IJA: Because it gets addictive, it does, because suddenly you’re getting all these rankings, and you’re getting all these reviews on social media, and you’re getting all these followers, and you’re seeing your sales go up, you’re seeing your page reads on KDP go up. And it becomes almost addictive… not addictive, but it fuels you, because you think, wow, it’s actually getting out there. And then you want more of that.
MD: I do think that someone should write a paper someday about this idea of success, because I think it can really get in the way for a lot of creatives, because you never quite get there.
IJA: Absolutely.
MD: You never quite get there.
IJA: What do they say? ‘When there becomes here, you get a new there.’ You know, the grass is always greener. You think, all I want is this, and you get that, and you think, that was great, but now I want this. And you don’t actually take the time to sit in that and go, wow. I achieved that. I mean, when I did get to number one on Amazon, I remember my mum and my husband saying, ‘We need to celebrate.’ And I’m like, oh, it’s not a big deal, it’s only in one category. And they’re like, ‘No, your aim this year was to hit number one on Amazon, you got there. Celebrate it.’ And I’m like, oh, no, no, no, because you think it doesn’t matter. And it’s true, I think we need to celebrate the little wins as we come along, as we go, and appreciate the success that we get, because it’s so easy to get caught up on what’s next, what’s next? I’ve hit that, next it’s this, next it’s this, next it’s that.
And instead of just sitting in the moment and saying, wow, I did that, and that was my aim for the year. Give yourself enough credit.
MD: Yeah, I agree. I think we do need to pause at each of those milestones, and just really sit in that celebration, because otherwise we are rushing to the next, raising the bar, raising the bar.
IJA: And then you’re never going to be happy, right? Because you always want what’s next. And I think the worst thing is, what is it, ‘comparison is the thief of joy’, they say, and that’s the thing. I don’t think you should compare yourself to other people because everyone’s writing journey’s different. Every author out there has a different journey, has a different measure of success, has a different aim. Some are self-published, some are traditionally published, some think a trad deal is what success is. Some think that selling this many books is success. You know what I mean? Everyone has a different idea of success, and I think you just gotta go with what’s right for you.
MD: Yeah, and maybe it’s about we need to go, well, what does success look like for me right now? And when I get that, I need to stop and celebrate. And then I’m allowed to then change the bar of what success is, but only after I’ve actually celebrated that moment.
IJA: Absolutely, no, I agree 100%
Creative Inspiration
MD: Tell me, where do you get your ideas from, or your inspiration from? Is it from other authors out there? Is it from the world around you?
IJA: Well, my first series, it was very much from the world around me, and what I wanted to say. As I said to you, I’d been a therapist, I’d worked in energy healing, I’d worked in journalism. I think it goes back to me being a very anxious child. I was a very anxious child that used to lie awake at night thinking, wondering things like, what happens when I die? This is the little kid I was. What happens? What’s going to happen when I die? Why am I here? What is my purpose?
These are things I would think about when I was five and six, and I would lie awake worrying about these things. I think my life, everything from the degrees I’ve done to working with people, has been about exploring that. What happens when we die? Do we get reincarnated? Do we have soul family? Do we have soulmates? Do we have guides? Do we have this? Do we have that?
And for me, going through that process and figuring out the universe in a way, for what worked for me, and helped me sleep at night. That’s something I wanted to give to my children, because I’ve got a couple of anxious kids too. But if I sit my kids down and say, ‘Now listen, this is what I’ve learned, this is what I think. Not necessarily true, but this is what I think happens when you die, this is what I think happens here, this is what I think…’ they wouldn’t want to hear it. But if I sit down and write all that stuff about fate and past lives and soulmates and soul family into a book and put it in a contemporary fantasy, paranormal romance-type situation, set all over the world in these beautiful locations, set in the 90s, so people can see what the 90s was like that didn’t live it, or have the nostalgia of the people that did live through it, to me, that’s something I really want to share and to put it in a book in that form was to make my life experiences palatable, if that makes sense. So that was where that inspiration came from, from that, was to share that sort of stuff with my kids.
Yeah, so that was my heart project. That’s why it was all over the place, and not really fitting into any categories.
MD: Yeah, and now?
IJA: I was told my next book had to be commercial. I can’t. I tried that. I can’t write commercial, commercial. I wanted to do a little fluffy, cosy. Because my first series was so in-depth and took everything out of me, I wanted to have a palate cleanser. But I figured out I can’t do that. I was writing a little fluffy, cosy paranormal romance, and I was just, like, plonking at the keys, going, ‘This is stupid, this is dumb, this is nothing’, and I wasn’t loving it. And I called one of my girlfriends who’s an author, and she’s like, ‘You can’t write that. That’s not in your wheelhouse. Unfortunately, you need to get into the nitty-gritty, and the deep stuff, and the intense, and explore all these deep themes. You can’t do light and fluffy. You can do light and fluffy scenes within that book, but you can’t do a whole light and fluffy rom-com beach read.’
So now I’m taking the stuff I want to say, but probably being a bit lighter, but also not being too light, if that makes sense. I would like to do light and fluffy, but it’s just not yet. It’s just not. I don’t have the capability of doing it, so I’ll still be doing nitty-gritty, but my next one’s going to be about three sisters who are witches. So that’s going to be three interconnecting standalones. It’ll be interesting.
MD: Nice. Do you have an author or a book, or authors or books who you would go, ‘I would love to be…’, or they’re my inspiration.
IJA: Yeah, I think, for me, it’s quite funny. I was speaking to a few other friends recently, and my influences growing up were my mum and my grandma. None of my friends really read, so it was my mum and my grandma who were giving me books. I’ve always read non age-appropriate stuff. I was reading Ken Follett when I was 11 years old and books that were like this.
MD: Damn.
IJA: Historical fiction or historical romance is my absolute comfort read, go-to. I love The Bronze Horseman. Did you read that?
MD: Yeah!
IJA: Paullina Simons, and all those. I loved her books.
MD: Yeah!
IJA: I loved the way she writes, and I love The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah and certain books that have just changed my life. And I’ve always loved things like A Little Life. Did you ever read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara?
MD: It’s one of those ones that’s sitting in my to-be-read pile, and so many people keep saying to me, you’ve just got to read it and I put it off, because when it came out, people were like, oh gosh, this is a lot.
IJA: It’s a lot. And the thing is, I’ve figured out that I like books that really get into my soul and squeeze my heart and rip it out, and I need to walk away and never forget that book. Like, as I said, you read Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth, and a book that in-depth sets you up to not want fluffier books. I love a fluffy movie, but for some reason, I don’t really love a fluffy book. I love a really deep and meaningful book that’s going to make me sob and never forget about it, and burrow into my soul and stay there. I think they’re probably the authors that I’ve held up to.
I’ve got readers that DM me saying, ‘F you, I’m sitting on a train, and I’m bawling my eyes out, and everyone’s staring at me, and I can’t stop crying.’
With my last finale, we had a cry count tally and the winner was 11 cries in the book. She cried 11 times, and I’m like, yes. And she’s like, ‘You just want to bottle my tears and use them?’ I’m like, yes, I’m going to bottle your tears and use them up. I love that when people are abusing me because they’re crying, or because they love these characters, and they’re saying, ‘You finished this series, and I need more. How can you finish it after four books?’ And I’m like, because I like to quit when I’m ahead.
People are like, ‘I love these characters, I can’t let them go.’ I’m like, well, go do a reread. I don’t know, I can’t give you any more. I think that’s because I like to emotionally destroy people, in a nice way, with love.
MD: Yeah. I feel like it’s the greatest compliment to a writer, is to hear that what you’ve written has moved someone.
IJA: 100%. That’s what I think. That’s why I think art’s all about moving people. It is. It’s about making people think, and it’s about something that’s going to stay with them for a long time after they turn that final page and close the book.
I remember finishing a book once, I think it was a Ken Follett. I was sitting on the beach by myself, and I remember closing it and this sense of absolute loss. I had just lost my best friend, because it was a book that was thousands of pages. It was a chunky hardback and I just lived and breathed this book and just couldn’t put it down, and then it was over.
And that sense of loss. That’s what I think I want my readers to feel. That absolute sense of, oh my God, my life has just been changed, and what am I going to do now? I think they call it a book hangover, right?
MD: Also to have that feeling of, how can I go on in the world in the same way? Something has moved me so much.
IJA: Yes. That’s it. And that’s why I love it, because my favourite thing is when readers DM me. I have people who say to me after reading my books, because I told you what they were about, people say to me, ‘I’ve had death anxiety my whole life, and then I read your books, and now I don’t feel scared of death anymore.’ And I’m like, are you serious? And they’re like, yeah, it’s really just changed my whole way I look.
I had a woman in her 80s or 90s message me, and she’s like, ‘I’m a very Christian woman, I’ve always looked to God’, and this is nothing against Christianity, I’m not going to go there, but she said to me, ‘But I read your books, and it gave me so much more comfort about… that I will see my mum again when I pass over, and that I will be held when I pass, and I won’t be alone, and it gave me such great comfort about the universe, and life, and death, and the people that I’ve lost, more than my religion’s ever given me.’ And I was like, wow, that’s a pretty bold statement.
So, yeah, it’s interesting. I think I just want to make people think and feel, and open that little question in their mind.
People message me and go, ‘Is what you’re writing real?’ I’m like, what do you mean? They’re like, ‘Is what you’re writing, is it real?’ And I’m like, what do you mean by real? And they said, ‘Is this what happens when you die?’ I’m like, well, we don’t know what happens when we die, but this is my interpretation of what helps me sleep at night, because it’s a book about reincarnation and soulmates and stuff.
But if it resonates with you, it resonates with you, and that’s all I’ll say. That’s all I’m going to say. And they’re like, oh, okay. I’m like, it is what it is. It is what you want it to be, type thing.
MD: Absolutely. You don’t have the answers, but it’s an idea.
IJA: Exactly. It’s fiction.
Filling the Creative Cup
MD: How do you refill your cup for your creative work?
IJA: I have to walk and run for miles every day because I have that excess energy. I’ve always got to get out before I can sit down, so it’s that. But for me, it’s more things like meditation. I used to resist meditating because I thought it was a waste of time. But now I find it really does calm that nervous system and bring those cortisol levels down. And the other thing is, what’s interesting is it kind of clears the channels. You sit down and then just sit quietly, and it feels like it opens everything up, so then when you start to write, it kind of pours. Everything can pour in how it’s meant to pour in. It depends on your belief system, once again.
That’s how I fill my cup, really.
For me, self-care, like, I just put a sauna in here. I sauna every night with my Kindle. I have a hot bath, so my reading time is in the sauna, and then I go and have a hot bath. So that’s my time when nobody comes and disturbs Mum. It’s my me-time.
So, I think that self-care is good, and obviously eating well. I mean, I’ve got a degree in nutrition, so I’m very big on eating well, and feeling the physical body in that sense.
Creative Wisdom
MD: If you were to be talking to someone who is either at a kind of stuck, stagnant point, or wanting to get into doing writing or some other creative pursuit, what wisdom would you want to share with them?
IJA: I think that I would just say, I mean, it’s cliché, but just write. There’s really interesting stats about how many people who start writing a book, and I think it’s like 3% of people who start writing a book finish it. And then, I think, maybe 0.5 per cent publish, or something. If you want to write, you’ve got to actually just do it. And don’t worry about the future, don’t worry about how it’s going to get published. It’s so easy these days with self-publishing, with Amazon and everything, and IngramSpark and all that. It’s so easy to self-publish. You don’t have to worry about submitting and all that stuff and querying. I think just get the words on the page, but also you need to have a really good team around you, is what I found. You’ve got to get it down, but you can’t just have your eyes on a manuscript.
I’ve got the most amazing beta readers, editors, formatters. You need people around you who are going to tell you the truth. Because there’s two types of editors? There’s some who just blow smoke, and there’s some who are too hard. There’s a really nice balance of people who tell you the truth, but who are also supportive of you. It’s amazing when you write a book and you’ve got it all down, because it’s the world in your head. Everything makes sense to you on the page. But fresh eyes will come in and go, ‘Hang on, this makes no sense, that makes no sense, this makes no sense.’
So get the story down, but then while you’re doing that, just start looking around for really good people.
I’ve got a group of fellow Aussie authors, and we swap manuscripts and we beta read for each other. So people who are in the industry who know what they’re doing, but make some connections and find really good people around you, who will support you, who you can swap manuscripts with, who will beta for you, who you can connect with.
Because writing is a really, really lonely, solitary career. It really is.
Social media is the other thing, I guess. I was told you have to have social media, and I resisted it for so long. And it’s true, you do need to have, unfortunately… if it was the 90s, we could just write our books anonymously and move on with our lives, but now, in this day and age, social media is a gift and also a bane. It’s work. It takes up many, many hours, but it connects you with readers who you never would have met otherwise. I’ve met the most amazing readers, the most amazing authors on social media.
And so before you publish, it’s good to have a presence, so I would start a social media account, and I would start reviewing books. Try not to be too harsh. If you want to be an author, the problem is with the reviewing is you can’t be too harsh on your colleagues, because they’re going to be your colleagues one day. But review the books you want to do. Do a pretty Instagram post. If you’re younger, go on TikTok and do some BookTok stuff. Me, I can’t do all the lip-syncing and the dancing, so that’s not for me, but if you’re younger, yes.
And yeah, I just think even though you’re sitting at home writing, you need to have a capsule of people still around you, in your corner.
MD: Yeah, you need the community.
IJA: I really do. And in Australia, it’s such a small community, everybody knows everybody.
MD: And if you really don’t like a book, just don’t say anything.
IJA: Don’t say anything. You can’t. I think I read a book, and I think I said one little negative thing about it. I can’t remember what it was. I won’t say what it was, but it was about a guy, an underage girl hooking up with her uncle, who was much older, and I was like, this is not really my cup of tea. And then I had my social media audited by a marketing person. She’s like, ‘You’ve got to delete that review’, because even though it’s what you’re saying is an opinion, it still doesn’t look good because you’re criticising another book by another author. And I was like, okay.
Home for Creativity
MD: Tell me, what feels like home for you and your creative work, Ingrid?
IJA: What feels like home? I think, well, right now, to be honest, the series I’ve just finished, those characters feel like home to me. And so it’s been really, really hard, because, as I said, this series has been eight years in the making, and these characters I’ve loved them, battled with them, wrangled them, and they’ve been in my life. They’re almost like children from another plane of existence or something. I call them my book babies.
When I finish writing this series, it’s actually been really hard to let go and start a new series, because I’m like, ‘I miss my babies!’ I do, I miss them, because maybe it’s my first series as an author, and I was starting out, and I really love these characters I’ve created. I love them so much, and I know them so well.
When I go to write a new series, and I’ve got to write a new character, I’m like, who is this person? I don’t know them.
Whereas when you write four books with these characters, you know them so well. You’re in their head, you know what their voice sounds like, you know what they’re going to say next, you know how they’re going to react to every situation.
So that, to me, is home. Because then to start a new series, I’m like, it feels very foreign and very uncomfortable, because I’m not sure who that character is, how he’s going to react to this situation, or what he would say here.
Whereas the other ones just come so naturally to me. It’s just a real comfort zone to me.
Connect with Ingrid J. Adams
Ingrid J. Adams is an award-nominated paranormal romance author living in creative chaos by the beach in Manly, Australia, with her husband, four sons, a cavoodle pup, an ever-growing reading list, and a deep conviction that some loves don’t end when a lifetime does.
- Website: https://ingridjadams.com/
- Instagram: @ingrid.j.adams
- Substack: Ingrid J. Adams
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