Writing about Mind, Body, Spirit with Maggie Hamilton

Maggie Hamilton: And I also do encourage them to get into case studies and into interviewing people, because another thing I find is that often they don’t connect what they’re talking about to real life experiences. So, for the everyday person, you are not really getting that bridge to where you are.

Rachel: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives.

Lynne: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Hey Rachel, I want to ask a question. I know you’re a big reader; we were just talking about that off air, but do you read a lot of mind, body and spirit books?

Rachel: I do read a really wide variety of books, and I am a massive self-help fan. I’m just looking at my bookshelf and thinking, oh my goodness, there’s a lot of self-help up there. I do like thoughtful books that teach you something or make you think in a different way. What about you?

Lynne: Well, it’s probably not really my thing. I’ve read a lot of business books, but I do know it’s a huge area in publishing. Anyone who’s been into a bookshop would know there’s aisles and aisles and I think there’s a lot of magazine articles as well as books, and I thought it was an area and niche worth exploring with, and we’ve got a fabulous guest today.

Rachel: I know, I think a lot of people also come to this niche without much training or background in writing, so we are really stoked to have Maggie Hamilton with us to chat with us today. She is one of the country’s experts in this field, and I think you might know her or be friends with her, is that right?

Lynne: We are. I do. Maggie is amazing. She’s a great friend of mine. We’re in a book club together, ironically. Oh, so that’s good. And Maggie, it’s the best book club ever, and she’s so inspiring. She’s a writer, a social researcher, and a former publisher. Some of her books, particularly on parenting, are so amazing.

She writes books and for magazines and she gives frequent talks and lectures. She also teaches for Writing New South Wales. She’s a media commentator and she’s, I think, a keen observer of social trends. She’s held senior roles in publishing and at the ABC, and pertinent to the point today or discussion today, she set up and ran Allen & Unwin’s mind, body, spirit imprint, Inspired Living.

Rachel: Wow. Incredible. Well, mind, body, spirit includes a whole range of spiritual traditions. So, there’s inspirational memoirs and mindfulness – something that we all need to learn and something that is being taught at my kids’ school, funnily enough, they do mindfulness every day.

Lynne: Oh interesting.

Rachel: It’s a big part of the curriculum. I don’t know if it is across the board but definitely is at his school. There are also significant life moments in this kind of niche and popular psychology and the whole wellness space, tarot and astrology, nature-based traditions, survival beyond death and more. There’s lots of opportunity there.

So, welcome Maggie. You’re going to tell us all about it.

Maggie It’s lovely to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Lynne: Well, Maggie, we know each other well and I know you’ve written in the mind, body, spirit space for a while. What sparked your interest in that field?

Maggie: Look, I’m really passionate about it, Lynne, because you just meet the most incredible people, and I love that it’s an area where a lot of the questions in life that we will struggle with, that there are people out there who actually want to look for answers and for the difficult stuff as well, whether it’s the dark nights of the soul, death and dying to happy and joyous.

It kind of covers the whole well, it does, it spices the life experience, and that’s what I love about it. I just find it so uplifting and I think we all struggle at times with difficult things, and it’s wonderful to have somebody who’s been there before you who can say, look, this is what I did, and it really helps.

Lynne: Interesting.

Rachel: Absolutely. What are some of the more famous titles in the mind, body, spirit niche, would you say? 

Maggie: Well, I would tend to talk about recent classics, and those will be everything from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying to the Power of Now to Women Who Run with the Wolves, Medical Medium, Marion Williamson’s gorgeous work. There’s a whole body of people out there who I think have done really solid work in this area that provide quite original thinking because one of the challenges I think we have at the moment is with this space is that a lot of thinking isn’t particularly original and with a little tweak, which we might talk about later, that can be really much more engaging and much more original than it is.

Lynne: Oh, that’s so interesting. And you also mentioned to me before that many of the authors in this space don’t have that traditional writing background. So that must bring different challenges, do you think?

Maggie: Well, it is, and particularly when you are actually wanting to do a book with them because they have all the knowledge, but they don’t necessarily know how to put it down.

So, that’s been a real or was a real learning curve for me to take somebody who wasn’t necessarily an engaging writer and help them unpack what it was they wanted to write about and break it down in a way that was manageable for them in their writing. And of course, that’s what we all have to do, whether we’re writing an article or a book.

We often have ideas swirling, but at the beginning, sometimes it can be a bit terrifying because you can’t kind of see a logical way through what it is you’ve got in that swirl. So that’s a big thing. And the other thing I found, for instance, I published in the Chinese medicine area.

Now Chinese medicine is so complex and of course it’s thousands of years old and everything has a Chinese name. So, I had this wonderful author who’s both a lecturer in Chinese medicine and practitioner so, we talked and we’ve honed in on – the organs have a couple of hours, the major organs have a couple of hours in the day that are kind of for them, and so we did a book purely on that.

We just took a slice, and we made it very simple and very easy to understand to the point that I went to my acupuncturist when the book came out and to my great joy and delight, any publisher’s dream, she had a pile sitting on her desk and offered to sell me one.

Lynne: How nice. That’s good. Doesn’t happen often.

Maggie: Full circle.

Rachel: It sounds like you’d probably be needing ghostwriter a lot for these types of books or people that can create that structure and help pull those ideas out and structure them in a way that’s accessible to readers.

Maggie: Well, there’s definitely, I think, a role for people who want to ghost, and these authors are one that are very committed to getting their work out. And so, they’re very grateful. And there aren’t many people in this space who show an interest in this. Probably because they haven’t thought about it otherwise, what tends to happen is the author, the publisher ends up having to rewrite whole slabs, which isn’t ideal.

So, definitely I think if you’re a good writer and it’s an area you’re interested in, even though you mightn’t have a lot of knowledge in that area, that can often be a real benefit because you’re going to ask the kind of questions that an everyday reader coming to that subject is going to ask, whereas somebody who’s knowledgeable in the area, they can end up, as we know, making a lot of assumptions about the level of knowledge that the average reader would have.

Lynne: How interesting.

Rachel: Well, that brings me to my next question. What sort of mistakes do you see people making when it comes to writing in the mind, body, spirit genre?

Maggie:  Well, I think one of the things I’m noticing very much with younger writers, because I still work on a lot of manuscripts, is that, and I don’t know whether it’s because of social media, but it’s like they feel that they can only bring their own experience to the subject.

Now, obviously if it’s a memoir, that’s what’s expected, but because of that, I find the work is often very thin. What I encourage them to do is to reference what different spiritual traditions would say about this, or famous thinkers of the past, like the beautiful Sufi poet, Rumi, or whoever to flesh out their work a bit.

And I also do encourage them to get into case studies and into interviewing people. Because another thing I find is that often they don’t connect what they’re talking about to real life experiences. So, for the everyday person, you are not really getting that bridge to where you are. The writers who do that, whether it’s an article or a book, that just sets their work alight because people aren’t trying to see how this might relate to their own experience.

You were talking about mindfulness before Rachel in your children’s school and what we’re now finding with research is that schools that adopt mindfulness, retention of knowledge and also a huge decline in bullying and also self-soothing is happening for kids.

So, you could end up writing a story about mindfulness for kids, which is a bit wafty, but throw in that research and suddenly you’ve got a whole range of people interested in that article or book that mightn’t have been otherwise, because it just seemed to be a little bit out there.

Lynne:  It sort of grounds it in the real world, really.

Maggie: Absolutely, Lynne.

Lynne:  It’s so interesting. One of the things I found interesting is because all these sorts of topics are quite universal, the human experience, as you say, they have a really big audience, an international audience, really. Is that what happens?

Maggie: That’s absolutely right. And so, what I’ve always encouraged my authors to do is to take out local references. And what do I mean by that? If you are living up the coast in Mullumbimby and you talk about Mullumbimby that has absolutely no relevance to people who are not living in Australia. But if you say that it’s a kind of laid-back beach area that has a little kind of hippie flare, then suddenly it becomes universal.

And I think one of the great tricks of this writing is to take something, and this, I think particularly also for memoir to really give it that punch, is to take that personal experience and broaden it out by what I call cascading phrases, which link you to the wider life experience. I also find those cascading references are very good for slowing down the narrative so that a person who’s reading your book doesn’t miss that point.

You know what it’s like we’re reading at night; we’re reading in snippets when we can, and we tend to skim. That also helps slow you down to say, hey, just hang on a sec, this is relevant to a whole range of things. And for you, it also gives you a story to hang it off too. 

Lynne: Interesting.

Maggie: Hang off the insight.

Lynne: So interesting.

Rachel: Wow. I haven’t heard that before. Well, something I noticed from your bio is you talk at a lot of conferences and workshops. Is that opportunity for that niche as well? If you were to write a book that you would have those opportunities or perhaps be able to promote yourself in that way because you’ve got the book.

Maggie: Look, I think the book is definitely a bridge to being able to get your work out there and it gives people a tangible sense of what you’re going to be able to bring to a conference or talk. The other thing that I really encourage people to do is to get out there and do community talks. Talk at the local library or whatever, and that’s where so many of my, might call bigger speaking experiences have come from. It’s brilliant because it gives you practice and confidence and refining your skills. The questions people ask often takes you work in a new direction, aspects you hadn’t thought about, or you hadn’t thought would be important to people. And because they like what they see, they have a conference coming up at work, or they need an after-dinner speaker and that’s easy for them to recommend to you. So, definitely.

Lynne: That’s so interesting because I would’ve thought that there are lots of opportunities in that mind, body, spirit. People talk about that a lot. Even if they may be engineers, they might talk about bridges, but they’ll often have something a bit more holistic as part of the presentation or part of the day.

Maggie: And I think Lynne, that comes back to making sure that you’re offering has unique aspects to it.

What I find with a lot of stuff that I read is that I can read a chapter, and I can say what three thinkers, those you know of, not reference, where they’ve come from. But the trick is to be, yes, we can build on other people’s experience. That’s how knowledge and information grows. But we have to work with it to make it our own and be curious enough to find new applications or new levels to that information. And that’s where I think a lot of people fall short because people are pretty smart out there. They look at it and they think this is the same old, same old.

But there’s always room for fresh thinking and doesn’t our planet need it at the moment?

Lynne: Yes.

Rachel: Yes, in so many ways.

Lynne: I was wondering because self-help books and the spiritual topics and everything is traditional publishing the way to go. I think there’s some like specialist publishers in this niche or genre. Or is there a lot of people doing self-publishing. Is that a valid route for this sort of style.

Maggie: Absolutely. I mean, the brutal fact is with traditional publishing is that 95% of the manuscripts that come in house, and this is actually for every genre, don’t get published. That doesn’t mean to say you don’t try and give it a go, but I think increasingly people are taking the self-publishing route because it enables them to get onto Amazon and to other platforms, and it gives them a universal audience right from the get-go. And it also means that you get to write your message in the way you want to and deliver it in the way you want to. I mean, the fact is that if you’re in a traditional publishing house, you have to dance to a number of tunes, and that can be good because you actually have a whole range of experts who are inputting into your book.

But it can also mean that if you’re not careful, your work can get funnelled into a way that perhaps is not how you wanted it. The flip side of that is that if you’re going down the self-published route, then you do need to make sure that your book is really edited well, because that’s so often lets people down and the time also to really look at your content is to have somebody look at it when you’ve got the outline, when you’ve got your chapter heads and kind of some nice fleshed out detail underneath, and to sit down with somebody who knows who can go, actually, there’s a lot on that area – I’d put chapter four in just a paragraph in at the end of chapter five. Meld those two chapters, this is a really important chapter. This is fresh thinking. Make it two or three chapters and so on. If you get that help at the beginning, it’s a whole lot easier than tackling seventy or eighty or more thousand words that all have to be re-calibrated.

Lynne: Redone. Recalibrated is a nice way of saying rewritten.

Maggie: It is. I use tweak with my authors to make it sound like it’s effortless.

Rachel: Who would that be sitting down with an author and helping restructure the book? Would it be a structural book editor or is there another person to do that with you.

Maggie: That’s a great question, Rachel and all the Writing NSW and equivalent bodies around Australia have people who can do a reader’s report, so I’m sure you could ask for that. And so does the Australian Society of Authors. It’s a really, really valuable thing to do. I have to say that the sad thing is that most of the time I see unwieldy manuscripts that needn’t have been so, because people set off with such vim and that’s great. We want that reflected in the writing.

But, it’s also people who know what’s out there at the moment because it’s interesting how often, and I don’t know, and I know Lynne has worked in the magazine space amongst many others for a long time, and whether or not you’ve both seen how often, it’s almost like that idea’s fallen out of the universe into three different people’s laps and within a month you get three. These people they don’t know each other, but it’s like the ideas dropped out and you do need, I mean, if it’s that instant, you’re not going to be able to pick it up, but generally they will know the trends and they will know what’s happening at the moment for you.

Lynne: Yes. And you don’t want to be competing against the same, really well known or established author in this genre at the same time as you are as a new author.

Maggie: Absolutely.

Rachel: That’s really valuable. So, get a reader’s report or hire a structural book editor at that first stage when you’re just doing the roadmap of the book itself.

Lynne: Mapping it out really. 

Rachel: Okay. That’s really good. Well, we understand you’re about to run an online course for mind, body, spirit writers through Writing NSW, which is amazing. Tell us a bit about that and what people might expect if they were to sign up.

Maggie: Yes. So, I’ve been doing this course for a number of years as a day workshop, and people keep saying at the end of it, oh, can we do an extended one? And, I mean, all of us, I think, are doing many projects in one go, and it’s just like, oh, I’m not sure about that. But anyway, Writing NSW has put together this program on the Wet Ink platform and it’s actually a written tutorial, which I wasn’t sure about when I was writing it, but I actually can see the value of it because it means you can actually do the lesson in little bites during the week.

And so, what are we looking at? I’m taking people right from the idea to the publisher’s submission. Of course, we are looking in depth about writing, but we’re also looking at the common mistakes people make. One of the things that I’m very big on is actually getting each of these writers to hone in on who their specific readership is.

Now, that might seem so obvious to the pair of you, but in this area, you’ve often got people who’ve got a body of work of a lifetime, and all they want to do is kind of get it out and they’re not thinking about what’s relevant. And also, to look at the zeitgeist, because often that can pull in threads of wisdom or information that you’ve got in your head that is second nature to you, but not to the person in the street.

We also look at; I’m a great believer in getting writers in this area. I mentioned it briefly early to do case studies, to interview people, which of course is very new for them and how to use the interviews. We also look at things like practical stuff like permissions and things as well, that you can’t just go – which tends to be one of the habits in this area. People just take massive chunks from other people’s work.

Lynne: Yes. Especially if they’re not trained writers. They don’t know.

Maggie: They’ve got no idea. So how they deal with that, and then we also look at the languaging for their subject, but also the languaging for this genre. So, this is a genre that expects empathetic writing.

That is no surprise to you, but it often is to the writers who often end up writing in say, practitioner speak, or it’s so beautiful, it’s not kind of tied to reality. So, I personally love luminous writing, but I think it’s very important that the person in the street who’s struggling to pay the mortgage, stay sane with the kids commute to work, whatever they’re doing, the elderly parents. It needs to be instantly understandable to them. So that’s something we are looking at as well as, the musicality of words, common mistakes, how to start a punchy chapter. Using introductions. One of the things I encourage my authors to do is to use their introduction as a press release kind of mindset.

So, don’t waffle about how this has been a project twenty years in the making and three paragraphs, but make it so pithy so that you guys who don’t have the chance to read every single book can sustain a really good interview. So, lots of tips like that and encouragement to get people on their way.

Lynne: Oh, sounds wonderful.

Rachel: Are there any sort of key questions that you teach writers to ask themselves before they start work?

Maggie: One of the things I do, and this is a rather new age thing, is to actually get them to write down why in a kind of almost like affirmation phrase, they’re writing the book, and why would I do that? Because when you are writing a book, it’s a marathon and there are usually at least one, if not two or more dark nights of the soul in your life during that. And that is actually, so that on those dark days when they’re tearing their hair out, as we all do and think, why did I embark on this Everest of a project to remind themselves why they’re doing it?

So, I’ve tried to lace it with understanding my own struggles as a writer, not just words on the page, but those things of balancing out friendship and loved ones, and commitment to your work. And that’s a dance I think we don’t ever end up getting totally sorted because life happens and how we work with our creativity too.

Rachel: Oh, nice.

Lynne: I’d love to know your favourite authors in this space. What appeals to you?

Maggie: Well, I love people like Clarissa Estés, Women who Run with the Wolves, all that mythology. It’s so rich. John O’Donohue, who’s an Irish mystic and poet, and he was a Catholic priest, and he deconstructs for us the Celtic world, and it’s so rich and powerful.

I love books like the Marion Williamson books. I tend to go for the classics in this field because as I mentioned earlier, I just tend to find their thinking that much more deep and universal in the sense that they’re timeless. I find John O’Donohue, for instance, who wrote a number of books including Anam Cara Care of the Soul, that sometimes I can open that book and I only need to read a sentence, and it’s so profound, that’s all I need for the day a week.

Now, those sorts of people don’t come along that often. When they do, I think you just grab them with both hands. I have this thing where I talk about books to enjoy and books for life.

Lynne: Yes.

Maggie: And my books for life that I cling to that I will go back to again and again. Rumi, I am a huge fan of Rumi and I’m sure both of you are aware of, the beautiful London Turkish writer, Elif Shefak. And she has written the most divine book on Rumi, whose title I’ve just forgotten.

Lynne: You can send it later and I’ll add it to the show notes.

Maggie: I’ll, yes. It’s those sorts of opportunities too, those left of field opportunities. I think through fiction that are also very powerful as well. That’s an idea for all your writers out there. I worked at, Transworld Publishers when we did The Celestine Prophecy, which is a while ago now, but it was a massive global sensation. That was a self-published book by somebody who was a counsellor and working with disturbed kids and various things and they wrote this book, which is basically about synchronicity, but it’s kind of got an adventure, kind of feel to it. And so, he’s self-published it and was giving talks and people were loving it so much he couldn’t keep up with the books in the back of the car to do the talk down the road. And so, we ended up getting this global deal and we were part of it. But, there’s hardly anybody who has done a fiction book with mind, body, spirit themes and I was such an appetite out there for it.

Lynne: So interesting. Great opportunity.

Rachel: Going to get the wheels turning with our audience. A lot of want to be authors out there.

Well, Maggie, tell us about your usual week. because you do the courses, but you also do your own writing. What does it look like?

Maggie: I tend to make the weekday mornings my writing time. Unless I have a big project on for someone else. So, I also work on other people’s writing manuscripts here and overseas. That’s probably about 70% of my working week. But then I run a number of courses. I do a number of ancestral healing courses, which I’m really passionate about, and then I find myself giving talks and book clubs as well, which feeds the soul. So, it’s a delicious mix and when I’m writing other people’s, working on other people’s manuscripts, I’m just as passionate about their work as I am about my own, because I really care about this area. I mean, there are some way out, there is some way-out stuff there that, I think only a handful of people probably grasp, but generally I think the people you meet, the topics, they just take you to new places and I just feel our world, so needs it at the moment.

We need new ways of looking at things, new ways of building bridges and

Rachel: New leaders.

Maggie: New leaders. Most definitely. And I feel that this is one of the gifts of this genre are when it’s done well.

Rachel: So nice.

Lynne: It sounds like such a good balance. So lovely.

Rachel: I love it. 

Lynne: Because you always seem very well balanced.

Maggie: Oh, I have mine. I don’t want to give the impression I’ve got it all sorted. There’s plenty of days I want to pull my hair out, which is probably why it’s looking the way it is. But I just think I feel very blessed to be able to follow my passions and I was so lucky at Transworld in the eighties when I first got into publishing, or in the nineties, I should say after I’d been in publishing just a little while. I was lucky enough to work with a lot of the key people of that time, and I didn’t realise how much knowledge I was getting through it and you just want to pass that on for the future, I think.

Lynne: I think that is so nice. Now we are ending off our podcast these days with our new fast, three questions. Are you ready?

Maggie: Oh, yes. Hang onto my hat.

Rachel: First question. Favorite tool of the trade that you can’t live without?

Maggie: Well, my tool – mine’s more a habit and it’s pinched from Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way, which is to take yourself off for an artist’s date. Somewhere in your city that you love that you haven’t been to for ages or you’ve never been, and you don’t take the partner or anybody else, this is just your time to kind of be a mini flinner and it just recharges and you never fail to find some magic there. And so, it’s great for the creative juices. It’s just great for kind of filling the tank up again. Highly recommend it, ladies.

Lynne: That sounds nice. I can do with one of those at the moment. So, question two is one habit that genuinely saves you time.

Maggie:  Now I find if I’m asked to write an article or do something written, I have to say I don’t suffer from writer’s block, I tend to suffer from an avalanche of ideas. I think it either goes one way or the other for you, and what I’ve learned is to just put the ideas down and to start to work on them in short chunks of time. What I used to do is, I’d let this blizzard come onto the page and then I’d be wrestling. I’d be like wrestling through the snowstorm to see the forest for the trees, excuse those completely different mixed metaphors there, but what I’ve found is get it down on a piece of paper. I mean, obviously you’ve got, if deadlines today, you can’t necessarily do that. Leave a bit of space, be there even if it’s only later in the day. Write a paragraph that you’re happy with. It might be your opening paragraph, or it might be one of the ideas you love, bit more space. And I find that when I say it almost writes itself, it writes itself so much easier than if I’m sitting there biting my nails and trying to get it down in however long.

Lynne: That’s true. That makes sense to me too.

Rachel: Absolutely. Well, final question, one thing you wish you’d done sooner in your career.

Maggie: I wish I’d had the confidence to be more curious and follow the parts of my passion earlier.

I mean, I’m lucky I have been able to do this for a long time, but I think when you are young, fresh out of uni, and of course you do need some life experience, but I think we tend to get very influenced by everybody else’s work around us, and I think it is the road less travelled.

It is that following, trusting your passions that really start to inject your work with a unique perspective because we all have that unique perspective. And again, I feel the world needs that now. That’s not to say that we take ourselves off and we all have that vision of being in the cottage with the floaty linen curtains and it all just coming to us.

I’ve worked, mainstream and busy jobs and done this on the side for years. Now I don’t, and that too is valuable I think, to be able to follow your passions and also have the mainstream job that gives you the security and I think that’s what a lot of artists forget about, and I think they make a very, they see it as selling out, but I actually think they often choose a very painful path, which they don’t need to.

 So, it’s having quiet faith in your perspective and your passions. 

Lynne: Wow, Maggie, thank you so much. It’s so good. I feel like I know you, but now I’ve learned even more. It’s wonderful.

Maggie: Oh, well I’m only sorry I can’t interview you two right now. I’m sure it’ll be equal if not more captivating.

Lynne: So inspiring

Rachel: Well, start a podcast and then get us on.

Lynne: Yes, but we’ll put some of the details in the show notes. We may put the Writing NSW site; we’ll put their website and if they’ve got the course up in time. But when it comes out, we’ll add the details of the course as well as the link to your website with all the books you’ve done because there’s been a lot.

Maggie: It’s been a few, keeping me out of mischief most of the time. Thank you so much. Really appreciated it.

Lynne:  So good.

Rachel: Thank you, Maggie. All right, we will see you all next week.

Credits:

The Elif Shafak book on Rumi is The Forty Rules of Love. 

Maggie’s course for Writing NSW is here: https://writingnsw.org.au/whats-on/courses/online-mind-body-spirit/

Her website is: https://www.maggiehamilton.org/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co