Beth Lisick is a poet, essayist, short fiction writer and narrative nonfiction writer. She’s also a humorist and spoken word artist, and she co-organizes the Porchlight Storytelling Series, a monthly show for amateur storytellers in San Francisco. She is the author of Everybody Into the Pool, which tells the story of her transformation from a homecoming queen to a young woman living illegally in a sewage-infested warehouse and includes such adventures as going on tour as the sole straight girl with a lesbian punk band. Everybody Into the Pool was a New York Times bestseller and made Entertainment Weekly's list of Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2005. Her latest book about her adventures in the self-help business is called Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, 10 Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone.

You majored in American Studies at UC Santa Cruz and once aspired to be a pastry chef — how did you learn how to tell stories and write?

My last couple years in college, while I was working as a baker, I started writing things down in notebooks. Mostly overheard conversations or childhood memories, nothing even remotely resembling a poem or story. That part seemed too daunting, the act of writing something “real.” It wasn’t until after I was out of college and stumbled upon an open mic that I really got serious about trying to write things. I liked the immediacy of that scene, the fact that you could write something and test out whether it was working or not. Still, what I was writing was only intended for people to hear, not to read on a page. When the publisher from Manic D Press asked to see my manuscript of spoken word poems and stories, I didn’t want to give her what I’d written. I was embarrassed. What was I doing? Once she talked me down, helped me out, and put out that collection (Monkey Girl), I began writing with a reader, not just a listener, in mind.

As far as telling stories goes, I have always been a superfan of listening to other people’s stories. The ham gene is definitely in me, the one that makes me like to get up on stage and tell stories, but I also have a good dose of the observer. I had two best friends growing up and we would always try to tell each other good stories, even if it was just about going to Costco with our parents or trying to reenact something that happened at a school dance. I love thinking about how you sequence events to maximize hilarity or drama. You know, do you reveal what your dad said about the enormous can of frank and beans before or after you’ve described the stockboy’s hairdo? That kind of stuff.
 
Besides being a writer, you are also a spoken word artist and a humorist. Being funny on paper isn’t easy — the humor often doesn’t translate. How have you developed this skill and how do you know when it’s working?

I like to write conversationally and I’m always thinking about whether what I’m writing is going to translate to a spoken performance or not. So I’ll read stuff out loud to myself to see how it sounds. A lot of it is trial and error. Sometimes I write something for a book and I just know that I will never read that section out loud at an event. Conversely, I write things to read out loud that I would never publish. You can do a lot in performance, using your voice and body language, to make up for mediocre writing. Hurray for that! The trick is learning how to distinguish between what you publish and what you read to a crowded bar. Sometimes a piece of writing can be both, but I am still learning.

For your latest book, Helping Me Help Myself, you dedicated yourself (in 2006) to a year-long experiment in self-improvement, devoting each month of that year to an area you wanted to work on (e.g. fitness, organization, spirituality, personal finances, etc.) What were the easiest and most difficult months of the experiment to write about?

The absolute easiest was the home organization chapter. I wanted so much to improve that area of my life that I was pretty dedicated to following the advice of the expert. Just about every other chapter felt difficult. Even the Richard Simmons cruise where all I had to do to be entertaining was describe what was happening and throw in some of Richard’s direct quotes. He’s so intriguing. I really struggled with that book because there is so much to make fun of in the self-help world, but I didn’t want to go with the easy laughs all the time. It was a constant battle, juggling the sarcasm and irony and honesty. Also, the chapters on sex and fashion completely evaporated because I could not bring myself to do them. I’m pretty complacent with both of those areas of my life — not that I’m a sex machine with a killer wardrobe — but it just seem disingenuous to dedicate entire chapters to things that I ultimately wasn’t that unhappy with.

Of all the self-help advice you consumed two years ago, what has stuck with you most?

Probably the idea from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that you need to determine what your life purpose is. I always thought that kind of thing was unbearably cheesy, that it messed with my laidback m.o., but it started to make a lot of sense. Once I defined my main creative purpose as storytelling — and I did this just by thinking about what makes me really happy and excited — I felt more focused and inspired. I could better see that my life isn’t the random and chaotic mess I sometimes perceive it to be. Not that I have become a streamlined machine. I’m just a little more confident about what I do. And it’s still hard to write this stuff without cringing.

In the chapter on personal finance, we learn that making a living as a writer isn’t easy — even for a New York Times bestselling author. What advice do you have for other writers when it comes to money?

Don’t expect too much and then you’ll be happy when it comes! I love talking about money because it’s such an uncomfortable subject. People often email me about that chapter, surprised that I could be so strapped for cash when my books are seen as being pretty successful. I think I make about as much money a year as a public school teacher, which I’m proud of, though I do a lot of other things besides write to earn it (and while I’m at it, if anyone in charge of anything is reading this, schoolteachers should be paid more.) I emcee events, run a storytelling series, teach writing to high schoolers, dress up in a banana costume, judge writing contests. I got a hundred and fifty bucks last week to have dinner with some marketing people for Levi’s and talk about What Women Want. Plus I got some free jeans. And then there’s the fact that I live in the Bay Area, which is an expensive place to be, and my husband is a self-employed musician and recording engineer, so neither of us have a job with health benefits. We pay a ton for private insurance. When I say that I will pretty much do anything for a hundred bucks, I mean it. I don’t think my money issues are very different from regular middle class people, but if you get your picture in a magazine, people sometimes think you also must have a hot tub and a cleaning person and no credit card debt. Very few writers get rich doing it, so you have to make sure you love to write. But you can make a living. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you can’t. 

Your life is often the fodder of your stories. How do you recognize when something is worthy of writing about? Conversely, how do you know when something is too personal to include?

If something makes me laugh, I’ll include it. If something makes me cry, I’ll include it. If something makes me cringe, I’ll include it. If I start to write about something and keep going back to it and can never finish it, it’s usually because it’s too personal and my brain is not letting me process it as fit for public consumption.

Tell me about your life as a writer. How does writing fit into your day-to-day schedule? What’s your process? When do you do your best writing?

Now that I have a kid, I write during the day when he’s at school. I have an office outside of my house, in downtown Oakland, with a couple of other writers. That is a huge help, having somewhere else to go so that writing really feels like a job. I’m not sure that I have a process, but I think my best writing happens when I’m having fun.

You write poems, essays, short stories and nonfiction. How do you decide what genre to write in and how does the process of writing fiction differ from nonfiction?

I go in long stretches doing one thing or the other. For the past few years, I have written mostly nonfiction. This came about because I was reading a lot of nonfiction and I was interested in how a writer presents herself as a character. How can you be real and entertaining without being overly confessional? Back when I was doing performance poetry, I was blending fact and fiction and it amazed me how people always thought I was talking about my actual life. Always. I was younger and inexperienced and I didn’t like it at all. I had a problem with people thinking they knew me when what they knew was my writing. So I became a lot more interested in writing short stories, most of which I wrote in the first person voice of whatever weird narrator I’d dreamed up. As I got older, I realized that I could write as myself more comfortably. Of course, after two books of nonfiction in a row, I am totally over it and ready to go back to fiction. Ultimately, I find it much more liberating to make things up. I can take all my horrible and embarrassing thoughts and attributes and put them on some made-up character. What a jerk.

Let’s talk a bit about the role of writer as promoter. These days it seems like authors have to have a platform. Do you feel like you have you developed a platform? If so, how did you do it? And how well would you say it has worked?

The self-promotion angle is a huge part of selling books these days and everybody pretty much hates it. I’m a fairly sociable person and yet there are aspects of PR that make me never want to write a book again. For example, my publisher wanted to film me talking about different chapters in my book to put up on Youtube and Amazon. I felt horrible asking my friend to volunteer to shoot it for me and it was so awkward. And I say that as someone who has made and acted in films. And still! There is something about pimping your book that way that feels real dirty. And not the good kind of dirty. I don’t want to complain about it too much because it starts to sound kind of like, Oh, the horrible music kids listen to these days! Back in my day we had songs! Not just this thump-thump-thump! It’s simply a fact of being a writer in these wacky modern times that you have to put work into promoting your book. Your book is not going to sell itself just because it’s awesome.

I didn’t consciously work on developing a “platform,” but there’s something to the fact that I spent a good ten years performing around the country in little venues before Everybody Into the Pool came out. I learned a lot in that time about finding my audience, and I secretly believe that it became a bestseller because there were so many people going, “Hey, I think I remember her. She crashed on my floor in the 90s.”

Can you tell us what you are working on now?

I’ve got another book idea, but I’m going to sit on it awhile until I’m fully prepared to launch into that intense work process again. Generally, I’m happiest when I’m working on a bunch of different things, but if you’re writing a book, there isn’t a lot of room for other projects. I am going to Hawaii next week to write a travel story for Sunset magazine and I’m writing a screenplay. Also, my friend Tara and I are shooting a comedy pilot called Groomed for Success that we’re hoping to sell to a network that allows nudity of middle-aged women.

I’m always curious, what are you reading now?

I just finished Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach, which I loved. I love all of her books because she is so funny and curious and smart. She is also one of my officemates, so I find her particularly inspiring to read. I really love reading books by people I know or have met. Same goes for listening to music or looking at art. You may have lunch with this person or get a few drinks with them occasionally, but they have this whole inner creative life that is pretty mysterious. I love that. It’s like there’s this magic happening when no one’s around.