Unveiling Creativity: A Conversation with Author Julia Golding - Part 2 of 2

00:04 - Speaker 1 Today we do part two with author and creative Julia Golding. She's coming to us live from Oxford, uk, and whereas in episode one we spent time talking about some of the serious aspects of creative and writing, today we're talking about some of the joys of being a creative. So this is a great episode and let's go right in with Julia Golding here on Conversations with Giants. Welcome back to Conversations with Giants, the podcast, and this is part two of our conversation with Julia Golding direct from her office in the UK. Good day again, julia, hi, direct from her office in the UK. 00:47 - Speaker 2 Good day again, Julia, Hi Brian. 00:49 - Speaker 1 We had so much to talk about last time we couldn't get through it all, so today is part two of that, and be sure and follow and subscribe on any podcast platform and for more about Julia, you can always go to her website, goldinggatewaycom. That's goldinggatewaycom. That's goldinggatewaycom, and she has a lot going on. Last time, julia, we talked a lot about the arts and some of the struggles, or the always not the great part of being in the arts industry, and today it'd probably be a good idea to talk about the joys of the arts and working in that industry. What do you think? 01:26 - Speaker 2 That's right. I said at the end to you that I felt we went quite dark, yeah, as somebody working in the arts these days, and perhaps it would be helpful to say well, why hang on in there? What is it about being a creative being in the arts which actually makes it worthwhile putting up with the strange world we've got ourselves into, where people don't get paid very well for what they do? 02:01 - Speaker 1 To set this conversation up. Remind the audience why you are the best person to talk about the arts. Tell me a little bit about. Remind our audience who Julia is. 02:13 - Speaker 2 I'm certainly not the best person, but I'm one of the people to talk about being in the arts. 02:17 - Speaker 1 You certainly are, that's right. 02:18 - Speaker 2 I am an author. I started my career back in 2006. And the initial part of my role as a writer was writing for children for the first part Well, the noughties, really and then, when we got to the 2010s, I moved to writing YA, and halfway through the 2010s I switched to writing for adults. I still do dip back into YA and children's fiction, but at the moment I'm writing a murder mystery series set in the Regency period with HarperCollins. That starts with a book called the Persephone Code. So it's channeling my love for the time of Jane Austen, but imagining what a detective duo might be getting up to then. 03:07 - Speaker 1 So for those of our audience who aren't familiar with how writing books works and something many authors have different pen names Can you explain that whole concept of that? 03:17 - Speaker 2 Yes, I'm someone who's leaned into this very hard. So my main pen name, my sort of home name it's also my maiden name, julia Golding is one of my identities, but I also use two others. Another one is Joss Sterling. I span that off. It is, coincidentally, my husband's first and second name, so I sort of feel I kind of own it. I married him, so you know, what is his is mine. 03:45 - Speaker 1 He's not going to get own it. I married him so you know what is his is mine. 03:46 - Speaker 2 He's not going to get too mad, but what I liked about that name for writing for teens that's where it went was that Joss is a not a particularly gendered name. 03:56 So it was helpful to have a different identity, a different brand. And then I also have a pen name, eve Edwards, which is because, as I was writing Joss Sterling books, I was asked by Penguin Random House Penguin to write a Tudor series for teens, and so we wanted a more traditional historical name. So we span off Eve Edwards and I found, as a sort of looking at myself as a business, it's very useful to have three strands, three brands that I can go to. So if I feel something suits more a Julia Golding output, I guess then I'll go there, and if I feel that that particular series or that particular name isn't really got a lot of excitement about it, I can reinvent myself and switch back to one of the other names. Another way of thinking about it is plate spinning. So if you've got, have you seen the old, the old act where someone had to keep wobbling the poles to keep the plates spinning? 04:56 - Speaker 1 Of course, yeah, sure yeah. 04:58 - Speaker 2 So I can sort of wobble one and say, right, let's keep this Julia Golding series going and I'll start off another one to do a Joss Sterling one, and it's a way of surviving. If you are a, I regard myself a bit like a character actor or somebody who's got sort of mid-level success, rather than the JK Rowlings or Stephen King you know I'm not up there but the people who are making their living at it. You've got to find these strategies so that you keep getting the contracts, you keep getting books published and also don't get pigeonholed as being one kind of thing, because the problem about that as a writer is if your kind of thing, so say, if you're writing a dragon-based romantasy thing, so say, if you're writing a dragon-based romantasy at the moment, which is flavor of the month, I can assure you it won't be flavor of the month in about three years' time. So you don't want to be just dragon-based romantasy, you want to be in the game for a long time. 06:02 - Speaker 1 And I suppose it's helpful too. As you walk around London or Oxford, people don't swarm you and say, hey, Eve Edwards, and you have to fend off all the autograph seekers and things like that. 06:14 - Speaker 2 Well, writers across the board. Even extremely famous writers do not really get noticed unless you put yourself out there as a public speaker. I do imagine that the occasional writer, like I mentioned, jk Rowling she would. She would get noticed, I imagine. Yeah, I'm not sure how many others like Jack Thorne, who writes a lot of screenplays. I don't think you'll have watched what he writes, but you won't know what he looks like. 06:40 - Speaker 1 Yeah. 06:41 - Speaker 2 So it's a nice kind of fame. It reminds me of the conversation I heard on another podcast about what's the best level of fame in the music industry, and the answer was to be one of the other band members in Coldplay. You don't want to be Chris Martin. You want to be one of the others, because you can go to the gig on the underground or just walk in with everybody else and no one will notice you. 07:05 Yeah, there is actually a huge amount to be said for not being famous in that way, because it's you know, as we record this in the news. 07:15 - Speaker 1 This week harrison ford was seen walking in new york city and he was just trying to get from point a to point b by himself and somebody had taped, you know videoed the whole thing and it was really kind of annoying. People were just trying to get in his way and it was really kind of upsetting, in a way, actually, that he couldn't even walk down the street. So, but again, that's the life that Harrison Ford has based, on who. He is right. 07:40 Yeah, I mean it's not the most awful of, because he can arrange his life so that he gets some privacy. I'm sure he could have. 07:49 - Speaker 2 that's right On the other hand, there is a story which I can counter that with, which is my brother-in-law lives in the part of London where Paul McCartney lives and everybody in that area has agreed that Paul McCartney is a local resident and they don't go up and mob him. I'm not even going to tell you where that is. So if you've got the right arrangement with your neighbors, even as a famous person, you can have a pretty nice life. 08:16 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I think New York's typically like that. I'm sitting in New York right now and typically you see someone of some notoriety or something and you leave them alone. You know you give people their respect, but not everyone's like that. You talked about the dragon-based fantasy Is Game of Thrones. Was that whole series in that genre? Would you call it that genre too? 08:36 - Speaker 2 I'm talking. So Romanticy is a blend of romantic fiction and fantasy, and the one that is particularly well known at the moment is a book by a writer called Rebecca Garros, called Fourth Wing, and it seems to carry on from the higher sexualized content that you have in things not quite 50 shades, but the boundaries have moved into being more explicitly sexualized. 09:06 - Speaker 1 Interesting. 09:07 - Speaker 2 So it's not Game of Thrones, because that had sex and violence, but not in a romantic sense. 09:14 - Speaker 1 Got it. 09:15 - Speaker 2 There are differences. Anyway, that's the genre at the moment which is being the sort of most popular in terms of lucrative in some ways, that and cozy crime. But these things are trends and once the market is saturated people will say, actually, you know, I want to read a who knows alien world fantasy or whatever it might be so. 09:44 - Speaker 1 When I was in high school in the 1980s, my part-time job was working at a pizza parlor and I made pizzas for, oh, two or three years, and for a while I never wanted to see a pizza again. I was pizzad out. Trust me, we're going somewhere with this, Julie. 10:03 - Speaker 2 Okay, I'll stick with you for the journey. 10:07 - Speaker 1 As an author who is creative like yourself and you have ideas and maybe they come while you're walking your dog or you're shampooing your hair or wherever the ideas come from. Do you even want to read other authors' work? Are you so tired of the no, no, no, let me phrase that, since you're in the industry, do you even make time and want to make time, to go to the bookstore, buy the 10 latest books and go through them all? Do you even? Is it too much for you? 10:38 - Speaker 2 That's an interesting one. Going back to your pizza analogy, I do remember in the early days when I was writing, I would read the chapter I had written to my kids in the evening, so it was very much an instant response. Would be occasional times when I wasn't writing and my children would say tell me a story. And that was my, I've had too much pizza moment. 11:09 I'd say I can't make something up, unless I'm writing it down, sure. So I'm rubbish at spontaneous stories for kids, whereas I can actually give me an hour. I could probably write them a decent one. So, yeah, there is a moment where you do get your too much pizza. I read a lot, but I won't methodically go into a bookshop and hoover up all the current bestsellers. Normally I'm reading around a subject. I read a lot of nonfiction. I do eventually crumble and read bestsellers, usually if they've got up there to a certain point where I can no longer ignore them. So I read recently and very much enjoyed the Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club and his other novels. 11:56 - Speaker 1 Yeah, that's on Netflix right now the Thursday Murder Club. 11:58 - Speaker 2 Yeah the book is much better than the film. Okay, don't get me started on what's better than the film okay don't get me started on what's wrong about the film, um, but the, the books are great and they he's. He's found a particularly rich vein for the murder mystery world, which fits our times, because it's set in a retirement community, not an old people's home, but one of these. 12:23 You have them in the States, don't you Like gated communities it's that kind of thing, but a sort of posh English stately home version of it. So eventually I'll crumble and read something like that. I'm particularly interested when there is an adaptation, so the Slow Horses is another of those. I was fascinated to see how close the novel was to the program. 12:47 - Speaker 1 Last question about reading. When you read, are you reading electronically these days or are you picking up the paper version? 12:56 - Speaker 2 I have. It goes in phases and recently I've been reading more paper books. I also get books to review, which is nice. So someone sends me a nice paperback, but just for example, I'm going away next week on holiday, so what's on my reading list? My reading list is going to be a history book about the place I'm going. 13:19 And then I'll get some literary novels set in Italy. That will be the kind of thing I do, so I've got a little reason for reading them. And earlier in the year I went to Istanbul so I had a little let's read about Turkey phase and I enjoy that. I think it's. The directed reading for me is how I like to do it. I like to choose my books and read them for a purpose. 13:43 - Speaker 1 That's a good piece of advice. I appreciate that. So let's talk about being creative, especially in today's era where we see creativity on social media. We see creativity on YouTube, video type work. Authors, playwrights Tell us about the joys of being creative. Last episode we talked about some of the serious pieces of it. But is there joy in being a creative? Can you be happy and make an income, or even not make an income, but improve your quality of life by being in the creative arts? 14:22 - Speaker 2 I could be very cruel and just say yes to that question. 14:26 - Speaker 1 You, could I set you up that way, yeah. 14:28 - Speaker 2 That's not really why you asked me to talk about it. The answer is creativity is absolutely essential to all of us as humans, and depending which direction you're coming at this from. But for me, looking at it from a Christian point of view, we're made in the image of God and the first thing we know about God is he creates the world, so it's about being creative. He creates the garden of Eden, so we got to each of us to be in the image of God, to be fully human, fully fulfill our potential. We've got to create our own gardens. That might be literal. It might be that your creativity is you're a great gardener. That's perfectly fine. It might be that you do quilting. It might be that you do it in the way you teach your classes, that you're creative in your jobs. But for some of us, being creative falls into the category of some of the arts. So you might want to be a writer, a painter, a musician, a composer fill in the blank, a ballet dancer. There's all these different outlets, depending on your skills and how your brain works, where you can put that. And I think creativity is a particular miracle because, if you think about other forms of industry, in order to make a bag of chips, you have to take potatoes, cut them up. They can't be potatoes anymore, they've become chips, and then the consumer buys them. So you've turned one form of thing into something else Ideas which is what creativity runs on. Don't start with the potato. They come out of nothing, ex nihilo. You know they're from, so you are doing a miraculous thing. You're breaking Newton's laws, aren't you Cause you're creating more matter. 16:28 There's a really interesting book by Dorothy Alsayers, who's well known as crime writer from the golden era contemporary with Agatha Christie she's. She wrote a book called Mind of the Maker. She wrote a book called Mind of the Maker, and she is the one who puts this as to make a Hamlet. Shakespeare didn't have to destroy a full staff. You didn't have to go back and get rid of other things. He just could keep on adding to the sum of the world's beauty and inspiration. So when you're making up things or creating a dance, or composing a tune, whatever it is, you are part of this wonderful new energy that you're putting into the world. 17:17 - Speaker 1 We were traveling this summer and we spent a little time in a part of the world where we were doing some wine tastings and we show up at this winery and there were mosaics everywhere, little mosaics on the walls on the sides of buildings. 17:37 Turns out, the gentleman who owned the winery was a doctor in the medical field and when he retired he started doing a mosaic on a wall and it just grew and it covered the whole property and now it's one of the top tourist activities in this area of the world and everyone comes to see these mosaics. But I doubt he planned that as a child. One day I'm going to make mosaics on the wall and people are going to travel thousands of miles to come look at them. But I was amazed at the creativity that this person had done in actually creating People are taking. There's been millions of pictures taken of these mosaics right, so to me that was a really interesting example of creativity in action. 18:21 - Speaker 2 Yeah, and unexpected because presumably he's also creating wine. Yeah that's true. That may have been what he thought he was doing, but by mistake, as a side project. His side project has, in a way, taken over and become the main thing. He's ended up being known for. 18:38 - Speaker 1 Do you think there's any hierarchy in creativity? I mean, there are 17, 18-year-olds today who are posting on TikTok and getting millions of views with a dance or a song, and then there's people who write movies that are seen by millions, or people who write books. What do you think about the role of creativity in the Gen Alpha stage today? 19:05 - Speaker 2 Remind me who are Gen Alpha. 19:07 - Speaker 1 Gen Alpha is. I'm gonna actually just pull it up real quick. It's the newest. 19:12 - Speaker 2 I need to know. The reason I'm asking you is that my kids Gen Alpha includes individuals born between 2010 and 2024. Okay, and before that Right now it's. Gen Z is it. 19:23 - Speaker 1 I think Gen Z and before. Yeah, I get slightly confused and Millennials and then Gen X, yeah, exactly. 19:29 - Speaker 2 Yeah, because I think one of the exciting things about technology is it does allow us all to have the equivalent of desktop publishing, desktop composing. So the tools are there for us to use, particularly in image manipulating images, whereas before you'd had to have access to some sort of dark room and all the rest of it. That's right, there is the other side of this, which is it shouldn't be too easy, because you then just get a lot of slop. That's right. 20:12 So I guess the way we're going to be going on this is, as more of us use the apps that allow you to generate images and all that kind of thing, the more that's out there, the more it will lose its value of being interesting or us want to look at it. I remember when we first had those generative images, I was amazed by them. Now, when I look at them, I think generative image. You know that that moment has passed for me, right, and I'd be very interested in seeing somebody's own expression of their creativity, rather than something which they've just put three or four words into a image generator. 20:57 - Speaker 1 Yeah, ai has really had a role. It's changing by the day, so it really is having an effect in this industry. 21:07 - Speaker 2 So there are lots of wonderful things that AI can do. I think that it's a tool. So say you don't like AI it's like saying I don't like knives. Knives are incredibly useful. A scalpel can save someone's life. So you can imagine AI and it already is helping development of better treatments, finding new antibiotics, checking scans. So, yes, definitely it can be a scalpel. It can also be a craft knife, so you can use a knife to sculpt something, cut something up, you know. So it can be the tool that a killing. 21:55 The thing we love, which is if we say that we no longer need the human in the equation and that the AI can just go and scrape off everything that we've all done beforehand and produce another book written by Jane Austen or another book written by Dickens or another book written by a living author, which is much more worrying then the AI has not in any way interacted or experienced that material because it's not conscious, so it is reliant only on a reader response. 22:33 And the thing about art is it should be both the creator and the receiver in a relationship. It shouldn't be just a receptive pap that we all sat down, and I think we're going to have to find a way of hallmarking or showing that actually, yes, this was created by a person who has been thoughtful about it, has actually created it to use a little bit of AI to help them in that process. I'm not worried about that. It's if they're taken out of the equation and just let some algorithm run, Because it doesn't mean anything, because it's you as the viewer, watcher, consumer is doing all the work. 23:15 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I think transparency and I'm sure this will all flesh out over time, but transparency in the use of those technologies. One of the things that you do, Julia, there in Oxford with Oxford Centre for Fantasy and others, is you bring people in and you teach creativity, you teach writing. Tell us more about what you're doing in that area. 23:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, we've gone through phases. So initially, when we came out of COVID, we were doing online courses with people turning up on seminars. We found recently that there were less interest in people doing that, and so the last course we did was an in-person course where people came to Oxford, stayed with us at the centre we have there and we went round places that inspired Tolkien and CS Lewis and used those as prompts for writing. So there was two tutors and a few handful of students Great fun. And I suppose it raises the question when you teach writing, as to whether or not you can teach writing. 24:20 I didn't ever sit through any creative writing teaching, except for a poetry workshop once before I became a novelist, so when I started teaching it, I had to work out well, what is it that I can actually pass on, actually pass on, and I'm coming around to the view that you can. What you can teach is how how to be creative. It's very hard to teach how. You can't teach them to be their own writer, because their own voice is something someone has to put in the hard graph to discover for themselves. But you can be the person. I suppose it's a bit like being a sportsman, so you're the coach for the team. You can't make that person the best quarterback ever they have to come with their skills. But you can improve their game by watching what they do and giving them some pointers and putting them through I don't know bootcamp or whatever it is. That's what you do. So I've enjoyed learning how to teach writing because it also, I also teach myself. 25:28 So if I reach a bit in writing a book where I'm the nadir, where it all feels terrible and why am I doing this? And all that moment of like hitting the wall in a marathon, you feel you can't go on, I actually very often stop and start teaching myself and say okay, what would I say to a student who came to me saying all these things? 25:50 - Speaker 1 And we know about marathons a little bit, don't we? Julia? 25:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right, Brian and I have been. We weren't in the marathon, but I think we did even more work. 26:00 - Speaker 1 We did To court your dear wife in Dublin Little side side anecdote Uh, my wife ran the Paris marathon and Julia was was gracious enough to fly over and we oh, it was the Dublin one. Dublin. I'm sorry, dublin, you do so many marathons in your family, it's. Dublin. 26:18 - Speaker 2 I can't remember which country you are? Don't you remember there was more Guinness than there was wine? 26:24 - Speaker 1 One of the highlights was we were waiting for my wife to come to a certain mile marker or kilometer marker in this case and we had a moment, so we hopped into a pub and warmed up a little bit with a nice refreshing beverage. It was very nice a nice refreshing beverage. 26:37 - Speaker 2 It was very nice. Yeah, that's right, it was Guinness. It was Guinness, brian. 26:39 - Speaker 1 It was Guinness, it was a lack of croissant and wine. It was yeah, it's true. 26:45 - Speaker 2 Guinness and crisps. 26:47 - Speaker 1 Any success stories that have come out of your creative classes. Anything come to mind? If not, that's okay. I didn't ask you at the time. 26:54 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so there's a wonderful writer called Marissa Linton who's had two books published now in the fantasy field, so do check out her work. She's got one YA title and one adult title. The Binding Spell is the YA title and the adult title is the Circle of Shadows. And we've had other people who've had their work considered by agents and publishers. I haven't heard yet what's happened at the other end of it. We also ran a fantasy prize where we took in submissions of people for a child or YA fantasy title. The winner of that is working with a publisher in the UK, so hopefully that will get published at some time. Publishing moves very slowly, by the way. It's a bit like trying to make a film. It goes very slowly. So people you teach it will be several years before you see anything on the other end of it. But, to be honest, a lot of the real successes I would say is the relationships and the friendships that come out of it. 28:03 That's the really long-term stuff. So quite a few of our students have stuck together and do writing support groups and I often hear from all of them, so that's lovely. 28:13 - Speaker 1 If you'd like to learn more about the writing courses and what Julie has been talking about, learn more about the writing courses and what Julia has been talking about, all you have to do is Google Oxford Center for Fantasy and the first result will be her website so, oxford Center for Fantasy. Just throw that into your search engine and you will immediately get that information so you can sign up for courses, learn about that, et cetera. Before we wrap up and you've been very gracious with your time, Julia tell us what is new with you. I know you're very diversified. You work in several areas of the arts. Tell us what's happening over the next year. What's new with you? 28:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah. So if you were looking at me you'd say how does she do all these different things? So there is the next book in my Regency series which is called the Austin Intrigue, and this is the fourth in my detective series. But it's actually based on a real murder story within the world of Jane Austin which I'm absolutely astonished that no one's written about before. So read that book when it comes out. It's coming out in November, the Austen Intrigue. 29:26 But also in November I've got a very different kind of book coming out which is called Wardrobes and Rings, which I've written with the wonderful poet and with the wonderful poet and literary critic Malcolm Gite, who some of you might know if you follow him on YouTube because he's like a cross between Father Christmas and Gandalf. He's a wonderful man and Simon Horobin, professor Simon Horobin, who is the academic who holds CS Lewis's post at Magdalen College, oxford, and we have put together a Lent reader. So for your next Lent you can spend 40 days with Tolkien, cs Lewis and other members of the Inklings with a thought drawn from their work, but connected to the Lent and Easter story, but connected to the Lent and Easter story. That was huge fun to do because it was like eating Turkish delight every day. 30:26 I know that's bad news if you're the White Witch, but actually it felt so lovely writing that. And then I also dabbling in screenwriting, and I've got various irons in fires, some of which are hotting up and which don't seem to go anywhere, which is the world of screenwriting. 30:43 - Speaker 1 Well, I think if I know your sub stack is popular, so can can users. Can people get to your sub stack via goldengatewaycom? 30:52 - Speaker 2 I yes, I use it as my newsletter. 30:55 - Speaker 1 There you go, okay. 30:56 - Speaker 2 Sign up to my newsletter and it takes you to Substack and you can follow my musings I did. My last one was about the list of writers that President Trump mentioned. At Windsor Castle during state dinner. He had a very I called it unexpected item in bagging area. Do you have automatic tills in the state? 31:19 - Speaker 1 You're making me laugh so hard. That literally happens all the time and we have to call over the person to help because it doesn't know what to do. 31:26 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so the speechwriter for President Trump had put in a list of six writers and there's a couple of unexpected items in the bagging area, so let me tell you what they are and then you can go and read in my sub stack more about this. So it was a Shakespeare, dickens, tolkien, lewis. 31:46 - Speaker 1 I think he means CS Lewis. Yeah. 31:48 - Speaker 2 Orwell as in. 31:50 - Speaker 1 George George. 31:51 - Speaker 2 And then Kipling. So for me the unexpected item in the bagging area was Tolkien and Lewis. Though I love them, I've never seen them in a lineup of like the greats of English literature before Interesting Kipling, who was the poet of empire, also known for writing the Jungle Book. But the Jungle Book is nothing like Bare Necessities, it's a very different book. But the Jungle Book is nothing like Bare Necessities, it's a very different book. And George Orwell, of course, is 1984 and Animal Farm. So an interesting choice for a state dinner in front of the King. 32:30 So I've had fun with that and also making an argument for what the substitutions might've been in the grocery bag if I'd got in charge of that list. 32:41 - Speaker 1 And what would that be? 32:43 - Speaker 2 Oh well, definitely Jane Austen. I mean, come on, she's on our money and it's the 250th anniversary of her birth this year. So, speaker writer, that really was a missed opportunity. I'd probably put in another couple of women. I'm debating between Charlotte Bronte, probably George Eliot and possibly Virginia Woolf. I think if I was a speechwriter and he was only using surnames, I'd have put in Eliot, because then you get George Eliot, but someone might have thought you meant TS Eliot. 33:18 So, you've got two for the price of one to continue our rotary metaphor there, Anyway. So that's the kind of thing I do over on Substack. 33:28 - Speaker 1 That's great. Well, visit goldinggatewaycom. Goldinggatewaycom and you can sign up for that. I think I'm going to name this podcast Unexpected Item in Banking Area. That's just too great of a one-liner to pass up. I think that there's a store here in the States that actually just deleted all of their self-check-ins because people were yelling and complaining, so that's a whole other story. Julia, what an honor to have you on today. The first episode, we talked about some of the serious aspects of writing and creativity. Today we talked about some of the joys. I think everybody came away with some new information and hopefully people will visit you and sign up for your writing courses. 34:13 - Speaker 2 That'd be lovely, and thank you very much for having me. 34:16 - Speaker 1 You're welcome. This is Conversations with Giants and we've had Julia Golding on today. Be sure and follow and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.