Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: How do you learn to trust your creative instincts when you've spent years second guessing the way you're wired?
After all, there's no shortage of experts eager to tell you or sell you the one right way to be creative.
But as highly sensitive persons, we notice details, connections, emotions and possibilities that many others may miss. And as we learn to trust our perceptions and they can powerfully guide our creative work.
Today, fiction author Laura Joy Lloyd joins me as guest co host. Laura Joy shares how her sensitivity shapes the stories she reads, the characters she writes, and the unconventional writing process she created to honor her gifts, personality and capacity.
Together we explore how to distinguish wise outside counsel from fear based pressure, why the right creative process may look different for each one of us, and what becomes possible when we stop fighting the way we're wired.
What if the creative process that fits you best begins with trusting who God created you to be as an hsp?
Welcome to Grit and Grace, the podcast for highly sensitive Christian women. I'm your host Sherri Gregory.
Are you tired of the overthinking, overwhelm and exhaustion that can come with being a highly sensitive person?
Are you ready to stop worrying that something is wrong with you and start understanding and nurturing yourself as an hsp?
Together we'll build resilience, practice self compassion, set healthy boundaries, unlock your creativity and learn to embrace, not fight, your God given sensitivity.
Let's dig in.
Hey friend, I'm so glad you're here with me today. You know, one of my favorite things about being a highly sensitive person is the way our HSP wiring influences our creativity.
When you combine our heightened perceptions through our five senses, our broader emotional palette, and our tendency to notice nuances, the results are often breathtaking regardless of the actual form they take.
Now, as a wordy girl, my primary creative outlet has always been writing. And I do mean always.
My mother was my very first publisher, carefully printing the story in her perfect penmanship as I dictated it to her when I was two or three years old.
My story was about one flower who was happy because her friends were near her, another flower who was sad because her friends were away, yet another flower who was happy because her friends were also near her, and a final flower who was crying because she was in an onion patch.
This little hand bound book tells you all you really need to know about me. I love being with my people and have a quirky, oddball sense of humor and the illustrations I drew tell you all you need to know about why I ended up being a writer, not an artist. Well, today's conversation is about learning to trust the creative instincts that are such a beautiful part of being a highly sensitive person.
My guest co host is Laura Joy Lloyd, author of Uplifting Contemporary Stories set on Pacific Northwest islands. Through an innovative approach she calls interactive self serialized fiction, Laura Joy invites readers to influence many of her stories in real time as she writes. Laura Joy is the author of two Wren island novels, Interesting Enough and her newest release, Far From Unremarkable.
In Interesting Enough, introverted aspiring songwriter Alison Theodore inherits millions, buys an island home, adopts two last chance dogs, and then finds her carefully constructed new life becoming far more interesting than she bargained for when her three eccentric aunts move in with her. It's a heartwarming story about second chances, spontaneous family, steadfast love, and what we may miss when we hold too tightly to self reliance.
Several characters in the book are highly sensitive persons and many of the discussion guide questions which are included in the book were written for deep thinkers like us.
So Laura Joy, welcome to Grit and Grace. I am so thrilled to have you with me today as my guest co host.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Ah, thank you for having me, Sheri. I've been looking forward to this.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Yes, me too. So let's dive straight in and talk a little bit about highly sensitive persons as readers of fiction, who are some of the authors who shaped your love of reading and I would guess, by extension, writing?
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Anything I've read also probably affects my writing. And you know, the short, boring answer to that question is probably everything I've ever read has influenced me.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: That's fair.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: When I was little, I loved reading Beverly Cleary books and I realized, I remember the moment I realized I was in this comfy chair in our family living room and I was reading a Beverly Cleary book. And for some reason I realized and understood. Probably actually my sister was next to me and told me this. She was always a little further ahead of things than me.
But Beverly Cleary grew up in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. And she was writing these stories about kids that were in Portland.
So it just connected with me that, oh, this book that I'm reading was written by somebody who lived in my town and wrote about kids like me. And so I wonder if that might have been my first point where I connected the idea of a writer being a real person behind these books and stories.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: I love that. That's cool.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And so ever since, I always just love finding connections, you know, with writers that I enjoy reading their books. Also, another moment, I remember my first novel by Maeve Binchy, she was an Irish novelist. I read it well after it had been published. It was early 2000s, and I can remember reading her novel and thinking, if I ever write a book, I want it to be like this.
And what she does is she has lots of characters, and they're all having these relationships with each other and figuring out, navigating their friendships and finding unexpected friendships and roadblocks.
And a lot of them are very quirky characters. And it's usually set somewhere where the setting is important and plays a role in the story. And I don't know that I will ever write like Maeve Minchi. That's a pretty high ambition. But I do incorporate some of those elements of style in my own stories.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: So in a very real way. She was a mentor text for you. That book was a mentor text.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I think you could say that.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: So, as a highly sensitive person, what do you feel like you look for or specifically try to avoid in stories?
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Yeah, we need to be careful, don't we? Careful and strategic.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Yes, we do.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: I used to think that being a highly sensitive person and reading meant that I needed to avoid things, and that is true. But I think that's only half of it, because I think I also look for certain things.
I can't read anything that's graphic violence.
I can't read anything where an animal gets hurt and I see it happening.
I can't be in the mind of a. Of a character who's plotting evil and trying to do terrible, horrible things.
I can have those characters in the book if I'm not deep in their. In their mind as I'm reading.
So those are all the things that I've always avoided. But as I've understood more what it means to be a highly sensitive person, I realize. I think that also makes me choose and look for certain things. I want stories where I'm seeing characters go through something really deep.
It can be difficult, but it needs to be deep, and I need to see them working it through. And that's why I'll get bored really quickly with a story that's super high action and a fantastic story, but I don't see the character changing. I don't see any relationships growing. I'm just bored. So I think I look for that in stories, the relationships.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: You're reminding me of Phil Vischer, who invented VeggieTales, he talked to, and I can't remember who the famous director was, and I think it was the movie Tron, but he saw him at some event and he said, do you think the reason this movie didn't succeed is you focused on the action, not the character?
And he was trying to be astute and he realized afterwards that he had just been insulting.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting because obviously there's a. There's a huge market of people who enjoy the movie.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: And so it is, you know, it's such an individual thing or what do we look for when we're reading? And to know a little bit about why we're looking for those things as we're reading is really, I think, a real, A gift. It helps us know why we want what we want.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Well, you're helping me understand. And I'll have to process this more further because of course, that's what HSPs do.
But like my favorite book as a teenager, and I probably read it 30 times before I became 20, was Jane Eyre. You know, we're not talking about a thin, light reading, but I loved the characters. I loved Jane Eyre and I loved watching Mr. Rochester wrestle. And then the man who wanted to marry her, I loved hating him and wrestling with, well, but society said she should have married him, but her heart, you know, and consequence. Anyways, I won't go down the deep, deep road of why I love Jane Eyre so much. But it Wasn't your typical 13 year old book to be reading, right?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: So what do you look for now? Do you think there's things that you look for, particularly now as an adult reader?
[00:10:53] Speaker A: Oh, that's an interesting question.
You know, one of the things that I agree with you, that there's certain things I cannot expose myself to. At the same time, I do feel like some fiction and nonfiction can be a simulation where I don't have to put myself through the situation in real life, but I can simulate it. And, you know, probably one of my best examples is when our family read the book, Marley and me, we read it out loud. And my husband and my daughter, they bailed on the last chapter. And I totally respect their choice. But Jonathan and I, we took turns reading until we were crying so uncontrollably that we would then pass the book over.
And that was really important for me to recognize that I could go through something really hard like losing a beloved pet through a book. And I think it did lay down the path for me because up until that point, and I, I'm. I would say I'm ashamed to admit this, I just had no other modeling. When we'd had a pet that was getting old, I dropped them off at the vet and Exited with an empty leash because that was just what had been modeled for me. And after Marlee and me, it became important for me to be the one to be there. And what it did was it served as a bridge. It helped me realize, okay, I could make it through with this character. I had enough distance, and we could close the book and pause if we needed to. You can't do that in real life, right? So, yeah, I think I look for things that are going to push me a little bit, not.
Not injure me. But I think it's Andy Kolber who says, we want to avoid doing things that are harmful, but we can do hard things. And I look for books that help me do hard things.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: That really makes sense. I think of reading a book as a safe place to explore some of those feelings and thoughts. I mean, where else can we do that, where we can come face to face with a character or a situation, and we have this entirely safe place to process.
What do I think about this? How do I feel about this? What might I do if I were this person or if I were next to this person?
And in a book, we can experience all that, and it might even just be subconscious. As we're reading, we don't realize we're processing that, and we don't have to share that with anyone or talk about it or show up and look like we're processing it. Well, we just get into that book and experience it, and it's. It's such an incredible.
It's just such an incredible gift to read a book and. And know that you're in this safe place.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Absolutely. And you're reminding me that especially with fiction, there's some great research that shows that reading fiction actually makes us more empathetic.
Well, let's shift to talking a little bit about what we keep in mind while we're writing. And you're a fiction writer. Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you, are you a pantser or a plotter?
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Oh, you're not gonna like the answer, because it's a little of this and a little of that. Okay. Not an easy answer at all.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Well, what I know is that for me as a nonfiction writer, each book I have written is one that a younger version of me desperately needed but couldn't find on the shelves. So I'm just curious if this is true about your wr.
Do you write stories that your former self would have loved to read?
[00:14:21] Speaker B: You know, that is so interesting. So you write the book.
The book you're writing now would be a book that you wished you had had to read earlier.
That's interesting. I don't think that's the same for me. I'm gonna say that actually, the book I'm writing now is the book that I need to help me process what's currently going on in my life.
And it's the book that I hope will represent more of me as my future self. Like, I hope that I will grow and change through the writing of the next book and that in the future, I'll look back on it almost like you would like a journal entry, and you'd look back and you'd see how you grew.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: So I would hope that my future self would look back and think, oh, you know, she pushed through that, or she. She was trying for that, and now she thinks differently. And, you know, I think that's what I'm writing for.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: So there's almost an aspirational quality to it.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like a. Like a hope for something, but yet recognizing what the current situation is.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. I had never thought of that before. So you're almost writing yourself that direction.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Yeah. You know how in some of the psalms in the Bible, the tense changes? You know, it'll. It'll be like one sentence will be, this is the here and now present. And then in the next sentence, or even in the next half of the sentence, it shifts to a forward. This is what it will be. And so there's a little bit of this ambiguity where there's part of this is happening right now and part of it is going to happen, and part of that overlaps.
It's just kind of this interesting.
It's an interesting conundrum. But, yeah, maybe that's how it is.
I'm confusing myself.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: No, no, no, not at all. This makes total sense. I love that element of hope and promise, like this future promise that you're reaching for, and. Yeah, I love that.
So what does it feel like for you to write a story that your HSP heart feels comfortable with and feels proud of?
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Comfortable with means I haven't put anything in it that doesn't feel quite right to me.
And even if I can't put my finger on why it doesn't feel quite right, I'm learning to pull back from those places so that I'm not leaving them in If I'm not 100% comfortable with them. And I don't think I necessarily need to know why I am or am not comfortable with those places.
But I do need to trust my gut when my gut is Saying that isn't quite right. Pull that out.
And then to be proud of it, I'm thinking, because the question is, as my hsp, as my highly sensitive self, to be proud of this book. I think that probably happens when I give a fair and perceptive presentation of my HSP parts. So, like, for instance, there's one character in, in my novel, interesting enough, Amelia, who's. Who's very much a highly sensitive person.
And it plays out in different ways. And so when I see her in a situation where one of those HSP traits is coming out, I try to lean into it and, and give her even just a little bit more of page time with that.
And I feel good about that because I'm representing people who also feel the same way. And I'm exploring that for myself as I write it.
And I'm giving a bit of a voice or a bit of phrasing to someone who's reading it and identifies with it instead of glossing over it.
There's so many times we hsbs are glossed over.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Well, I was about to say so often it's a. It's going to be. We're going to become a stereotype or a stock character with just a few telltale signs. And so it sounds like you're really giving more depth and more nuance and respecting the complexity of your characters. I love that.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: I do.
Can we go back to the plotting and pantsing question?
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Of course we can.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: I'm curious because you. I know your mind works differently than mine, so I want to turn the question around and ask you if you're glad or pants are both.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: I am both.
But I've come to realize that for me, and this seems to be true for many of the HSPs that I've worked with in writing, coaching and Kathy Lipp and I had a conversation about this a few years ago.
She writes to produce that's It.
And she doesn't have a lot of internal monologue, let alone dialogue going on. And when she told me that, my jaw fell on the floor because it is a cacophony inside my head almost all the time, right? Like between the reflective thoughts and all the versions of me that have ever lived. Like there's a big old conversation happening upstairs. And so I realized that for me, writing is prayer first and foremost. All writing is prayer. Like, it is me and Jesus, me and the Holy Spirit. It is. You know, sometimes I have just come from scripture, sometimes I'm just wrestling something through.
But it starts out as. As prayer and and it also is processing. And you've heard me use this, the phrase processing, like I'm trying to figure something out. I'm trying to put something in words. I'm trying to untie some kind of a knot within myself or in a relationship or whatever it might be. And often, again, it starts in scripture, and I'm. I've had a ton tiny aha. And it just starts, you know, the. The nuclear explosion of connections starts happening.
And then at some point, if I want to share it, what I've just described is pantsing. All of that is riding by the seat of my pants because there's no need for order or strategy or anything like that. Like, that's going with the flow of how God. I feel. God is leading in the moment.
But then in order for other people to understand, you've known me long enough to know I am not a woman of few words, am a verbal processor. And so in order for others to be able to make any sense, heads or tails of what I'm talking about, then I have to go through and plot it out. And for me, that really, that does include cutting up paper and spreading it, you know, printed versions of what I. You know, my processing and spreading it out on my living room table and putting it in columns and. And taking an actual journey.
And so, yeah, I.
I wish. I wish that it could just flow and be ready to go, you know, like, I wish I could just, like, dictate it and it would be done, but that has yet to happen.
[00:21:47] Speaker B: I think that might be a myth that it even can happen.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: I think so too. Let's talk a little bit about this world of being a writer, of being a creative, and how your HSP traits help you make strategic decisions in a business that relies on creativity. And it feels at first glance like strategic and creativity feel like they're opposed to each other.
So talk to us about this.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Yeah, Being strategic in a creative business. So for me, the creative business is writing fiction. And I absolutely love writing fiction.
If that was all I had to do, that would be fantastic.
But there is the business side of it too.
All the other things that need to happen to get a book out into the world and then to let people know about that book.
So for me, I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere for a long time with my fiction writing. I was writing the content, and I. I wasn't getting interest from agents and publishers, and I wasn't quite yet ready to swing into the idea of publishing the book myself.
So I sat down and I asked myself a bunch of self reflective questions which we HSPs love.
Just a bunch of things like what do I love about writing? What do I wish I didn't have to do that? Was writing.
When do I feel like I'm most productive? When am I. When am I really not able to be creative? What kinds of things need to be in place for me to be consistently creative? So it was just, I mean, I really should go back at some point and look at my journal notes and find out what those questions were.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: They sound great.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Because it just asking myself really just helped me figure out the way I wanted to write. And the way I wanted to write.
I didn't even know how to describe it and I didn't know anyone else doing it, but it was, it was going to be right for me. I could just tell it felt right after reflecting on all that. So I gave it a name. Eventually, after I got tired of trying to explain it to people in a million words, I gave it a name and started calling it interactive serialized fiction.
So what it allowed me to do was bring readers into the process, which is what I wanted to do as a writer. And not everybody wants to do that, but that's what I wanted. I didn't want to spend months alone in my head in a word doc and really not know how this stuff was going to land with anyone else and be limited to my own ideas and inspiration. I wanted to be having conversations about it. So this way of writing also worked for me because I knew I could keep to a certain word count. I had deadlines for myself. It was at a pace that I knew I could keep so I could promise readers another new installment at a certain point and know that I could make that deadline nice and push myself and yet not be overly pushing myself.
It just was a way of figuring out how to do this in a way that, and I don't want to say that it's comfortable for me, it is comfortable, but it's more than that.
It's like it's honoring my gifts, my preferences, my skills, my personality.
It's honoring all of that and writing in a way that suits me. And as a result, I love it. You know, I just love it.
So the question, strategic business decisions and creativity. I guess that's what it comes down to, figuring out what's going to work for me and then doing that even though nobody else is doing it. Right.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Okay, so that's where I want to go. You're sitting down and looking at what you were doing. You realized it wasn't sustainable. You realized it was draining you. You realized you were going to lose your enthusiasm.
And then you figured out how to do something nobody else was doing. How did you avoid the noise of all the Internet gurus saying, here's how you should do it, here's how you have to do it. If you do it any other way, you're going to die? Nobody. I mean, there's. There is so much, pretty much all the marketing out there for this, for, you know, anybody telling you how to do stuff. And I know what it's like in the nonfiction, but I'm sure it's the same in the fiction world.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: It is.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: It is all fear based. It is all scarcity based. It is all. There's only one way to do it, and I alone have the secret. And you for, you know, 999 or 9900, you know, for huge prices. So how did you put in earplugs and put on blinders to what everyone else was doing so that you could even discover this for yourself? And then how have you stayed the course?
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Well, first of all, I did listen to all of that stuff first.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: I'm so sorry.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: It's so discouraging, but I think I needed to. I needed to hear what was out there and try a few things.
And after so many times of figuring out this isn't going to work for me, I think I just got fed up and thought, well, this isn't going to work for me. I need to figure out what's going to work for me.
Nobody else can tell me that.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Okay, wait, can you say that again?
I need to figure out what works for me. Nobody else can tell me that that's okay. That's our. That's one of our big takeaways. Because that is the truth. For our lives as HSPs. And I'm not saying we can't receive wise counsel, but anyways, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Keep going.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: I think the sustainable part of it too, is when I. And because it's. It can still be an issue for me. You know, I'll see the newest, latest person offering the newest promise to, you know, zero to 60 in three months kind of a thing.
And there'll be a part of me that thinks, oh, maybe that would work for me.
But, you know, all of that thinking is coming from a place of fear. Like, oh, if I don't sign up for this, everyone else is going to take off with it and I'm going to be left in the dust or oh, I'm never really going to move forward and be successful if I don't do this. That is all fear based thinking and it's not fun. I mean it is not fun to be in that place.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: No.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: So I think that's the sustainer right there. Like my day to day life. I don't want to be constantly every day waking up and seeing the next new thing and being fearful I'm going to be left behind. No. I want to just do what I enjoy doing and, and trust. I mean as Christians we have this awesome gift that we can trust. We do what we can do and then we put it out there in the world and then we do what we can do to get it in front of people.
But it doesn't have to reach a million people. It might.
And if it does, it does.
And if it doesn't, it doesn't. And God is in control of that. He has a better plan than I do and just about everything, not just about my little book that I put out in the world.
So we have that. We have that to fall on and that's a huge, huge gift.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: And his plan is probably better than the fear based marketers plans as well. I just, I said that for myself. I'm preaching to myself here.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Not only that, it's probably less expensive too.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: Yes, friend if you've been enjoying this conversation with Laura Joy Lloyd, you can spend more time in the world she's created through her Wren island novels. Her first novel, Interesting Enough, introduces us to Alison Theodore, an introverted aspiring songwriter who, after inheriting millions, purchases an island home, adopts two dogs and sets out to pursue her most interesting dream. But when her three eccentric aunts move in, Alison's peaceful new beginning quickly becomes much more complicated and much more connected than she planned with an island community, a pod of endangered whales, unexpected relationships, and characters learning to loosen their grip on self Reliance. Interesting Enough is a heartwarming story about second chances, spontaneous family, and steadfast love. Laura Joy's newest Wren island novel, Far From Unremarkable, is available now as well. You'll find links to both books and also to Laura Joy's website in the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Grit and Grace, the podcast for highly sensitive Christian women. I hope this episode leaves you feeling encouraged, equipped to thrive, and excited to experience. Explore your own God given creativity. Be sure to follow in your favorite podcast app and share this episode with a friend.
Now, if you're brand new to the whole HSP concept, come take the am I a Highly Sensitive person Quiz. You'll find that link in the show notes.
God created you sensitive. In Christ you are always strong.
Do you have a message, a story or book idea that keeps circling in your heart, but you're struggling to move it forward on your own?
When I'm not recording Grit and Grace episodes or working on my own next manuscript, you'll find me working closely with other HSP Christian writers, speakers and creatives through my Right Beside you coaching services.
You know, the last thing any HSP needs is yet another formula to follow.
We thrive by having someone come alongside us to help you listen for what your project is becoming, discern your next doable step and keep moving forward in a way that honors both your calling and your capacity.
So whether you're shaping an early idea, working through a messy middle, or trying to bring a long awaited project across the finish line, Right Beside you offers thoughtful guidance, practical support, and compassionate accountability.
To learn more about the coaching services I offer, simply go to sherrygregory. Com write that's C H E R I G R E g o r y.com w r I T e And of course you can find the link in the show notes.
