Episode 154: Interview with Sarah Zimmerman

These notes include affiliate links.

Today, Fable and the Verbivore are delighted to share our conversation with YA fantasy romance author Sarah Zimmerman.

Sarah is an YA Fantasy Romance author who’s currently querying her debut novel Wicked Glimpses (book one) - an urban fantasy romance with elements of sci-fi. Wicked Glimpses “is about a teenage girl chased by dark hallucinations into a magical world of crime fighters to investigate her wild power, family secrets, and a mysterious bond with a broody time traveler that’s either the start or end of everything”. She’s also in the process of developing and writing book two in this series. Her instagram @authorsarahzimm is filled with useful pieces of wisdom on writing and editing as well as beautiful posts that explore the world of her stories.

In this episode, Sarah talks about lessons she’s learned through the developmental editing, beta reading, and line editing process. Such as:

  • Learn to listen to your instincts. Pay attention to that inkling when something doesn’t feel right and start to develop the confidence to act on that gut feeling as early in the process as you can.

  • Don’t take advantage of people but take full advantage of opportunities you have to work with people. It’s useful to get different perspectives and lenses from others on your work. “Be vulnerable and be open. Find people that you trust, people who can shine some light on what can really help your book sing.”

  • When receiving feedback, try not to take things personally and set expectations that you will need to make changes and cut things. Remember that critical feedback doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. Sit with those suggestions and notice patterns in the feedback, but not every piece of feedback means a change is needed.

  • Aethetics and character art can help the readers know what they can expect from the work. But working on it during the initial phases can help the author develop the mood, so that it’s clear when they go to write it.

Sarah also talks a little about her current process for capturing ideas for the book series and specifically for book two that she’s currently developing. She uses colored sticky notes on an element level (rather than a scene level) to allow her to move around and pile up things that feel like they should go together. Keeping everything open and note locked in allows her to ask questions and removes the pressure to have all the answers right away.

She ends this conversation with two great pieces of advice. The first is to be curious about everything from your work to the writing craft, and not to let your worries or fears stop you. Asking questions and not needing to know everything can open you up to possibilities. And the second is to remind yourself that a books gets written in layers, it happens throughout the process and most of the magic we love so much in our favorite books came togther at the end. It takes times, so allow youself the patience for it to come together.

We hope you enjoy this episode. It was a conversation filled with many useful pieces of writing advice and we were thrilled to have been a part of it!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Sarah is an YA Fantasy Romance author who’s currently querying her debut novel Wicked Glimpses (book one) - an urban fantasy romance with elements of sci-fi. Wicked Glimpses “is about a teenage girl chased by dark hallucinations into a magical world of crime fighters to investigate her wild power, family secrets, and a mysterious bond with a broody time traveler that’s either the start or end of everything”. She’s also in the process of developing and writing book two in this series.

Sarah’s personal website is https://sarahlyn81.wixsite.com/sarahzimmerman . We’d also highly recommend checking out her Instagram @authorsarahzimm.

Books and Movies Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

interviewBethany Stedman