Looking for inspiration, guidance, and a fresh perspective on your craft? You are in the right place.
In this week’s episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I sit down with Beth Barany, a creativity coach, NLP expert, and accomplished author.
Beth shares her fascinating journey from aspiring doctor to published writer, and offers invaluable insights on nurturing creativity, finding joy in the writing process, and approaching marketing with a heart-centered approach.
Beth’s unique blend of playfulness, emotional intelligence, and practical advice will leave you energized and ready to tackle your next writing project. Join us as we explore the world of science fiction, indie publishing, and the power of embracing your creative side.
Listen now:
The Writing Coach Episode #206 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #206 Transcript
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Today on the podcast, I have Beth Barany. Beth, welcome to the show,
Thank you so much, Kevin, for having me.
Right before we started, we were talking about the weather in your beautiful part of the world, and I do see both Rey and Princess Leia behind you, so I feel like, as a crazy Star Wars fan myself, the first thing I have to ask you is: Have you been down to Marin County? Have you stalked George Lucas at all?
No. But you know, every time I go up north, because I’m from Sonoma, which is the wine country, and I’m living in Oakland, so every time I go up north, you see the turn-off to the ranch right off the freeway. I know where… everyone knows where it is, but I have not gone there yet.
Speaking of science fiction, you are the host of How to Write the Future, a podcast about futurism. Has sci-fi always been a part of your life? Were you interested in science fiction literature when you were younger?
Absolutely. I was an avid reader of Isaac Asimov short stories, and I read his Foundation series. I’m sure I read iRobot in that big collection that I read as a teenager. I read Arthur C Clarke as well. And yeah, that was one of my passions as a child, reading science fiction and fantasy also, of course,
Were books and writing something you had went on to study?
No, not exactly. I did an interdisciplinary degree at UC Berkeley with an emphasis on education. I actually knew I wanted to be a writer from a young age. Have writing a writer in the family, my great grandmother and about eight years old, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I knew also I didn’t want to study English in college, because I already knew that I would be tearing apart literature, and that just broke my heart. I’m like, I don’t want to tear apart literature. I want to write stories.
So I took rhetoric, which was perfect, because that’s more about persuasion and deconstructing arguments. That was a really good use of my, you know, the units I had to fulfill for English, I think I just had to take a semester. And then I went on to do social sciences, essentially, and understand how societies are put together and all that stuff. And got to wander around, you know, and take anthropology and religion, comparative religion, which I loved.
I did actually start pre-med, so I took a year of chemistry in a semester of bio, and I was on track. I thought I would be a doctor. You know, that’s the professional thing to say. Whenever someone said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I was like, I want to be a doctor. And everyone’s like, looking at me all impressed. And I did well in school. I did well in the sciences, but University sciences are not made for my kind of brain. You know?
I realized pretty soon, by my sophomore year, I’m like, yeah, no, I dropped out. I announced to the family I’m not pre-med, and that’s what my dad told me, “Oh yeah, my family wanted me to be a doctor too.” I’m like, oh my god, I’m acting out, you know, the unspoken parental, you know, up the family line, my child’s going to be a doctor, you know. So it came from a serious, educated, education oriented family and up the lineage on the Jewish side, you know, just all about education, all about getting a professional degree.
Yeah, no, that wasn’t me. I did not. I did not do that.
Was it that moment when you decided you weren’t going to be a doctor that you started pursuing publishing? When did that come around?
Publishing came around when I dropped out of university and I went and lived in Paris. Maybe some of you have heard about The Shakespearean Company, this beautiful bookstore in the left bank in Paris. I started hanging out over there, met some American friends, made it my very first zine with them. And this is like 1991, something like that, pre-internet, really. And I actually started trying to get published.
I finally did get published in this beautiful, little free called the Paris Free Voice. it was written in English, and it was for the expat community. And I had to, I pitched the editor like three, four times through the mail. Nothing happened. Then finally, my life circumstances changed, and I was able to go into the office and verbally pitch the editor and watch how he would respond to my ideas, and then found an idea that he liked, and went off and wrote my very first little tiny article, which was hard, so hard, you know, I think I wrote a second one for them in the time I lived there, but that was the start. So I just, you know, boots to the ground. Just, let’s get started making things.
That sounds like you were living the dream for most writers. We all hear about Ezra Pound and Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds and all of them hanging out in Paris, and here you were doing something similar.
Yeah. I mean, it was a copy, and it was a cut-and-paste job with our zine, that first zine that I made with two other American women and then I actually became the keeper of it when I came home to the US. I think we did two editions, and I have whatever remains. And, yeah, that was a really fabulous little experience. I just fell into it. We raised money to print it at a little printer. The whole thing.
Was it fiction-focused?
It was all kinds of things, poetry, short stories, you know, black and white, illustrations, just a random bunch of things just like us. You know, ran a bunch of young, young 20 somethings in Paris in the early 90s, right after the Berlin Wall fell. And, yeah, it was very exciting time.
When did your first novel come along?
I published my first novel in 2011 That’s right, when indie publishing was taking off. I think at the end of 2010 it started to take off. And one of my friends turned to me in the writing group, and they’re like, Oh, look at this. There was an indie YA fantasy novel taking off about trolls under a bridge or something. And she turned to me and like, “Hey, you’re Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, that’s fantasy. Why don’t you give it a try?” And I was just also in the process of trying, yet again, to find a traditional publisher, trying to I was going after agents in the fall of 2010, and by January, the end of January 2011, I self-published my baby. I self-published it, and right after that, I got an agent who’s like, oh, I may be interested in I am very excited about your Henrietta, the dragon slayer. And I’m like, Well, I just published it. Are you still interested? And they’re like, “No, we just took on another indie author, and we don’t really know how that will shape out.” You know, this was at the very beginning. And I’m like, that’s fine. I was not sad. I was not sad at all. I was very happy to be indie-published.
Yeah, that’s my world as well. With my clients, I try to present them with a balanced view of all the options out there. There are so many options, and I always say to them, “You’ve got to look at what your goals are, look at what your project is, look at what you want to achieve, and choose what’s right for you … but self-publishing is best. (Laughs)
Yeah, I’m just like, like, here’s the pros and cons. People do your reading, and this is why this is awesome. But I get it. Not everybody wants to do what is required. You know, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of autonomy. I really love it. put out a trilogy. I have my four-book science fiction mystery series. I have five books for writers because, like you, I’m a writing coach, and I love it. I just love it to bits.
Let’s dig into that. When did you start coaching? How did coaching even get on your radar?
Like a lot of things, a creativity coach by the name of Eric Meisel came and spoke to our writers’ group. I think he was doing his presentation on, like, how to handle nerves when you pitch to an agent. Because he has his background is psychology, psychologist, and then he’s like, at the very end, he’s like, Oh, and by the way, I’m training the next cohort of creativity coaches you all in the room could come in and be our, be our guinea pigs and check out our program, and I swear, as soon as I heard about the program, I knew I’m like, this is for me because I have never followed the traditional path. I taught English to foreigners in in France the second time I lived there, and I liked teaching in these different environments, and I knew that coaching, creativity coaching, to me, sounded like a niche. It wasn’t life coaching; it was a lovely niche, and I knew immediately that I would focus on writing. So I was a guinea pig, and then I signed up for the training, and I was certified, I think, in 2007 maybe. But I started my business in the end of 2006 and that made me hustle and like, “Oh, I better get the certification done.” So I have this certification as a creativity coach. I always super niched it as a creativity coach for writers. And yeah, I felt like I could do anything with this. I can call myself a creativity coach for writers, and then I can show up in all these other ways. Teacher, speaker, writer, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Consultant, coach, book midwife, you know, it can be whatever I wanted it to be, because it’s creativity and it can be whatever it needs to be.
Given the broad spectrum that creativity covers, do you have a particular take on creativity?
I do. I even have a philosophy written on my website, which I did not review in preparation for this interview, because and it’s evolved, but I believe that creativity is our birthright. I believe we all are creative. Every single person on this planet is creative. Exercising our creativity brings us joy and so much satisfaction. And lately, I’ve been talking a lot about how creativity is actually going to save humanity if we don’t get creative–and this is my whole futurist thing, right?–if we don’t get creative about how we work together, how we address all the issues, and coming back to how we work together. That’s one of the biggest problems, is humans don’t necessarily know how to work out problems with other humans. We’re a lot of us have not been taught ways of thinking outside the box, right? That to use the common term for creativity.
Creativity is actually an essential life skill for resilience. And you know, I just love exercising it, and I really love working with people who want to be exercising it. And I notice, even with writers, I have to encourage them and remind them to do creative things, to nurture their muse, and to really step outside the norm for themselves so they can write vibrant novels.
Because it’s not just sitting down and writing like you have to feel; you have to do things and come up with ideas that are different than the norm. And you know, especially now with the rise of AI, it’s like AI is not creative. AI can generate a lot of things, but it’s just pulling from everything else that came before it. Our job is to do that innovative, lateral thinking so that we come up with new ideas that no one’s ever seen before and fit them into these beautiful, you know, genre expectations that we all desire. So it is not easy, but it is a muscle we can exercise. guess that’s also part of the philosophies is like creativity is a muscle that we can get, that we can exercise and get better at.
How do you work all of those concepts into your coaching when you’re working with a writer to help them achieve a project? How do you go about it?
Of course, it’s going to be different from one person to the next. Being a coach, as you know, is highly tailored work, and that’s what I actually love about it. It’s not one size fits all, and that’s part of my philosophy, too. It is not part of one size fits all.
I mean, when I was talking with a client today, I can tell his well is dry, so to speak, his creative well is dry. So we can be talking about a story we you know, I know a lot about the craft and structure of story. We’re talking about story structure for him, and I can tell that he needs to be nurtured. So this is me being in the moment with him. I’m like, “All right, we need to nurture your creativity.” So what about that? And, you know, he and I have been working together a long time. I can, I already, we already have some things in place, and I’m like, “Oh, what about this? What about that?” Like, I can just kind of encourage him, and then he can, he can come up with the game plan. You know, it doesn’t need me for that, but at one point, we did work really hard on coming up with the game plan, how he could, in little bite-sized pieces, nurture his creativity. So I just had to, kind of like activate that.
And so sometimes, with my writers, at the very beginning of working together, I’m like, “What inspires you? What do you where do you get your ideas?” I just start to get a lay of the land for them, and then I can sprinkle that in. And when I notice they seem low on creative energy. I’m like, “All right, maybe it’s time for an artist date,” you know, and we can bring that back into the conversation.
It’s like an ongoing conversation. I’m paying attention to all the parts that we use to create, the logical mind, the creative mind, the emotional self. And I’m noticing, like, kind of like a doctor coming back to a doctor, like I have in my mind, like it takes the whole person to write a novel. So I’m noticing where they’re really coming out strong, where they might be weak, what needs nurturing, what needs support, and that’s kind of part of the overall day-to-day, with meeting with a client. And then I would kind of nudge them. I’m like, “Oh, you’re really leaning heavily on the creative generation, huh? Maybe here we need to add in some structure and some a little bit, because you said to me you wanted this goal, and so therefore, how are we going to get there? You know, what does that look like for you today or this week or in the next few weeks?”
So everyone’s different, but I am looking at the whole system. I’m looking at them in their entirety. And, you know, and it works to varying degrees. Some people don’t have certain parts of themselves activated, and so I have to poke at it very gently. I don’t really poke. I just point like, oh, what’s going on over here, you know? And they’re not going to show up like a marathon runner if they’re still learning how to get used to jogging. You know,
When I first started working with writers, I was very focused on productivity. I thought my job was to make writing smoother and easier for authors so they could get more done. More and more, I’ve started to lean into making writing fun. I think, you know, ultimately, productivity remains one of the goals, but I’m at a point in my life where I’m thinking, what’s the point of doing this if you’re not having fun doing it? And I noticed that you have something called The Writer’s Fun Zone, which is why I bring this up. Can you tell me a little bit about how you work the idea of fun into coaching writers?
Absolutely. The Writer’s Fun Zone is our blog, and a lot of writers write for my blog, and in fact, Kevin, you’re invited to write for our blog. Any writers, and anybody who works with fiction writers is invited to write for our blog. So from the very beginning of my business, we had the little tagline, “find the fun to get it done” like it was all about fun, that fun actually leads to productivity.
You were way ahead of me. It took me like six years to figure that out.
Yeah, yeah. And because, and maybe it came from the fact that I did childcare and when, when you’re trying to teach a child how to pick up their blocks, you make it a game, right? If you’re trying to help them brush their teeth, you make it a game. You sing a song. If you’re trying to help them learn how to tie their shoes and dress themself to you make it light. You make it silly. So I have that background and that playfulness is really a big part of my life.
It has a lot to do with my husband, Ezra, who really, when I first started dating with him, I became, like, reconnected to my silly, joking self. He’s making jokes all the time, saying non sequiturs and just little plug Ezra Barany, The Torah Code series. You know, he has his own four book thriller series out there, and humor is all over it. So whenever I’m stuck, and whenever my clients are stuck, I’m like, where’s the play? Where’s the joy? Where do you find joy? You know, and so really connecting to the joy, because I’m like, You, life’s too short. Let’s have fun. Only do this if you want to. And I, you know, I also had experiences one of my early novels that still unpublished, one of my critique partners said, Beth, why are you hitting your head against the wall trying to get this project done? This is meant to be fun. No one’s going to read your work for a long time. So do something that’s fun. And that’s actually when I switched gears and started working on Henrietta, the dragon slayer, which was a story I was I resurrected from when I was younger. So yeah, fun is so when I work with clients, I’m really paying attention to how they what lights them up, where do they get excited? And for a lot of them, they’re already deeply tapped into that. Because I come out of the gate with that playfulness, I’m attracting people who want that as well and who already have some of that built in. And when we work together, you know, I I’m navigating through, getting them connected to their project, through, like, what is it that you love about it? You know, where’s your joy? Where’s your interest? Not everyone is going to create a story from A to Z. They might do it in a complete out of order, so to speak. So my job is to like, well, what is next? What is that joyful next step for you? And just keep it there, you know. And if they start telling me how hard it is, I’m like, okay, whoa, deli. Let’s find out what’s going on here. It doesn’t have to be like that. It could be whatever you want it to be. There’s no rules here, you know. So really finding that juice, the The Live Wire, the the energy that is like bubbly with excitement. So
I understand you’re an NLP expert. Could you tell the listeners, maybe, if they’re not familiar with that term, what it means and how you work it into the coaching that you do?
Sure. NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming in this context, not to be confused with other uses of the acronym, and so, NLP, it is essentially an offshoot or a part of psychology, depending on who you talk to and it really came out of the 70s. UC Santa Cruz, these, these guys were like, “Hmm, I think we can, you know, decode the brain.” Not the biology of the brain, but how the brain, how humans, how their brains operate. And they came, they brought in linguistics, they brought in coding, and then they went and watched experts and tried to and gave things names and noticed things and tried to connect how we behaved with how we’re thinking and how we’re thinking with what is driving that thinking. It’s gone through a lot of iterations.
I studied at NLP Marin in Marin County, here in Northern California. And my teacher one of my teachers has written a book called Transformational NLP, where he explains the whole history and, along the way, the core principles.
And essentially, when I work with writers, I am I’ve been trained with the NLP toolkit to look at how they process reality. What is their map of reality? You know, just like we have a north, south, east, west, but all of us actually apply meaning North is North is at the top. So if I say North, everyone is going to think upward, right? So every word that we use comes with a package of ideas and sometimes emotional meaning. So, we make meaning out of words, and then from there, we build and create stories. But it works because we’re all in a shared hallucination of what all these words mean.
So when I’m working with writers, I work on two levels. I work with their own personal roadmap to help them build their writing process. But then I also help them, uh, write better stories by one getting to know their characters really deeply, by doing some deep meaning work for their characters. And also, I haven’t really applied it to like a macrostructure, but I do apply it to craft. Like when we write fiction, we need to see it, we need to hear it, we need to feel it. Your character needs to be thinking and doing and feeling. And those come right out of my NLP toolkit. Like when I’m analyzing someone and watching how they behave, I’m listening to how they speak, I’m listening to their body behavior, and I’m watching their body behavior, and I’m noticing what emotions are showing. We can do that same thing with our characters and actually our readers, walking, talking, human beings just like us, are decoding reality by what they see, what they hear, and the feelings that are coming through the point of view character. So that’s one of the analysis tools that I use when I’m editing and when I’m helping other people with their work, and it helps me speak in also a very clear language, like, “I don’t see your setting. You’re missing the visual aspect. So you got just talking heads here,” or “You’re telling me what’s happening, but you’re not showing the feelings. All the feelings are missing.” Then I learn also a writer can only write what they know. If the feelings are missing, then I need to help them unlock the emotional vocabulary. I need to show them the emotional thesaurus. I need to send them go and observe people. I need to help them have another level of refinement around the emotional life.
This was my problem, too, when I was starting out, I knew happy and sad. That was it like, ah, oh, there’s more words, and I wasn’t paying attention to the nuance between choosing the word walk versus the word scramble, you know, so I was just using very simple vocabulary. I even had someone shake her finger at me through the through the note she gave me, she’s like, “Beth, there are more words for running than just run.”
I could tell you are a writing coach just from the examples that you chose of environmental description and emotion. I do weekly hot seats, plus all my one-on-one clients, and I swear I don’t think I’ve ever gotten on a call with a client and said, “Too much environment. Too much emotion.” It’s never enough! I’m always pushing for more of those things, so I totally resonated with you using those as your examples.
Something else we probably both know from working with writers is that marketing is often a place of high anxiety and concern for them. Can you tell us about your approach and, specifically, this idea of heart-centered marketing?
Yes, I recently taught my first workshop on heart-centered marketing, and it’s, it’s something that I’ve been working on for years, and something that I came to because, oh my gosh, when I first started my business in 2006, I jumped into business training. And so all of a sudden, I’m getting business training from the world of business out there, the zeitgeist. The group think, was very, you know, by going, by the numbers, and it was very left-brained. And it was very if you’re not doing it this way, you’re not doing it right, you know all of that.
So over the years, I was as I embraced more and more my creative identity, because I realized I’m a creative having a creative business. And that was an evolution. And I’m like, I want every single thing I do to be filtered through the part of me that knows how to sit down and write from my point of view character, and get into the emotions. Art is very emotional, entirely emotional. So I’m like, Well, how do I apply that to marketing? Yeah, there’s the nuts and bolts and everything.
I was never truly afraid of marketing. I think because I come from my father was a salesman, and I would watch him do his spiel, and he was a person. He was a heart-centered person, and he was always like, you’re just human to human. Like he, that’s one of the pieces of wisdom. He told me, even when I was like, dealing with UC Berkeley bureaucracy as a freshman, he’s like, “Beth, just remember, the bureaucrats are people too.” You know, some version of that. And it really helped me deal with that, because that’s like, the big education you get at universities, like, how to deal with bureaucracy, right? Like, that’s what you got your BA in, actually, right?
So it came back down to, okay, I understand nuts and bolts of marketing, but how do I do it in a way that’s true to me? Just like I would write my fiction in a way that’s true to me. How do I do marketing in a way that’s true to me?
And so I realized, well, I’m an emotional person, and I like. It came down to what I like. I realized, Oh, I write. I write what I write, fiction-wise, because I like it and I love it and etc. How do I do that with marketing? And so it was an exploration. It was trial and error. And it all comes down to so when I work with people, I’m like, “Well, what do you like? There’s no shoulds here. You don’t have to be online. You don’t have to do Tiktok, you know, you don’t have to do Instagram, you don’t have to do any of it. What do you like?” And then now we’re in the territory of emotion and passion, and we can explore what people like.
People will say all kinds of things, and then they’ll light up. And I’m like, Yeah, great. Do that? You like book signings, awesome. You love making silly sketches with the cat. Making videos. My husband loves making videos. I’m like, “Dude, do it.” You know he likes to do book trailers. He’s so good at it. He spent hours and hours and hours on his very first book trailer years ago, long before that book ever came out; that was a labour of love. Let me tell you, before the technology was is what it is today. I mean, wow.
And so what is it that you spend a lot of time in that you would that you love to do? That’s where you want to put your marketing energy in. And I mean, I do recommend an author website. I do recommend a mailing list. Everything else is off the table unless you want to put it on the table. Seriously, I mean, and I’ve seen people do amazing things, because when you love it, you’ll do it again and again and again. You’ll stick with it, you’ll stay
Being a novelist is a marathon. We’re in this for the long haul. I work with novelists, and, yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’m assuming, right, we’re doing the big thing. It requires constant nurturing, and so you have to do it in a way that you love. And you know, I always love Twitter, so for me, that’s a play space, you know. But, you know, I don’t really like Instagram that much.
I have some I have help. So that’s the other thing. If you want to expand to areas that you don’t like, then you need help, and you got to get creative on how to do that. If you don’t have a budget, then maybe there’s someone you can do a trade with.
This is also, like, my core belief, like, if you want to do it, you can find a way. You just need to be creative, and you have to ask for help. You have to ask for help from the universe, from a family member, all of it, you know?
guess deep beneath all of this is this belief that we can do the impossible. In fact, writing fiction, to me is like an impossible thing. It was an impossible thing for many, many years, I didn’t know how to do it, and maybe that’s what drives me, you know, but I finally did it. It’s incredible. I seriously didn’t know how to be a fiction writer, and now I do. That’s if I can do that, but I can make a movie that I can, you know, be on the red carpet one day. These are real dreams. These are real dreams.
What do you have on the horizon, and where can folks go to learn more about you and your work with authors?
Yes, well, always, lots of things on the horizon. I show up at different writers’ summits. I teach in different people’s online communities and schools. So, depending on when this airs, I would say get on my mailing list at Bethbarany.com, and you’ll see my mailing list sign up there at the bottom of every page. Or there’s a little newsletter tab in there too. I give away a wonderful free writing course called the Writer’s Motivation mini-course, which will allow you to reflect on what it is that you’re doing and why. And then, at all the different summits, I’m giving away other freebies as well. So yeah, that’s the best place.
And then another entry point is my blog. If you sign up for my blog, you’re also signing up for my list, and you’ll get all the goodies, and you’ll be notified when a blog post goes up. We have about two to four blog posts per week because we have a lot of great writers coming in and doing writing for us, as well as notifications about my weekly podcast. That’s the best way.
Or you can just find me at Beth Barany on the socials, where I’m out there, YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok. (Someone else puts up my Tiktok.) You know, Facebook, Twitter, yeah, that’s where I’m at.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
Kevin, thank you so much for having me. I love all the work that you’re doing. Writing coaches unite!
