S2E23: Samantha WL Lee on Building a 5am Writing Practice, Curiosity and Writing Bound

Sam, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners?

Yes, thank you Meg.

My name is Samantha W. L. Lee.

I am a writer.

I've just had my debut novel Bound come out.

That came out at the start of March.

So yeah, that's been my main art form and I also write poetry and essays.

Excellent.

How long have you been a writer for?

Probably about 10 years, a bit over 10 years, maybe.

And it's something that, you know, as a child, I always wanted to do it.

But it's just something that you never thought, like, that's not a job you can actually do.

That sounds

familiar.

Yeah.

And also it was like, we need to not think about it as a job either is the other thing, because it's realistically you know it's very hard to make money from your writing anyway um and but I think even that confidence just to have it as a hobby to say oh I'm a writer is you know that's a huge step um and when I actually first started writing Bound it was actually because um well I'm an English teacher by trade and it was my very first year teaching extension to English and they actually have to write about a 5,000 word major work, um, a short story.

And I was thinking, how can I expect my students to write a 5,000 word story when I actually have not done that myself and I can't do that.

So that's kind of what got me going, okay, I need to actually write as opposed to think about it.

Oh, I love that way into it as well.

Um, Because, you know, it is easy.

Like I've run a lot of workshops.

It's easy to set though.

But can you do it yourself? Well,

that's something that I'd be sending all these tasks.

I'm like, actually, like, is this actually a good task? I don't know.