175. Tricking Yourself into Writing Habits with LA Bourgeois

“I am a horrible little goblin like that, and it's just what happens. So I have to trick myself and the ways that I trick myself are to really let myself see what I want to create.” - LA Bourgeois

About this episode

In this How To Write the Future podcast episode, host Beth Barany, talks to Kaizen Muse Certified Creativity Coach, end of life doula, and author LA Bourgeois where they define the meaning behind a creativity coach, and LA discusses strategies for establishing writing habits, emphasizing the importance of starting with tiny, manageable steps to overcome resistance.

About LA Bourgeois

LA Bourgeois is a Kaizen-Muse certified creativity coach, end-of-life doula, and author. Her readers delight in her Diary of a Lesbian Housewyfe and find inspiration & book reviews at The Thriving Creative.

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/housewyfe/

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/la.bourgeois/

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/lahousewyfe/

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/la-bourgeois-16b7542b/

YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@LAHousewyfe

Subscribe to the Thriving Creative and get my quick tips on Tricking Yourself into a Creative Habit!

https://labourgeois.substack.com/

ABOUT BETH BARANY

Beth Barany, an award-winning fantasy and science fiction novelist, teaches novelists how to write, edit, and publish their books as a coach, teacher, consultant, and developmental editor.

RESOURCES

FOR CREATIVE WRITING PROFESSIONALS - BUILD YOUR BUSINESS SERVING WRITERS

Sign up to be notified when our training opens and get a short Creative Business Style Quiz to help you create success.

https://bethbarany.com/apprenticeship/

Support our work for creatives!

Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

GET HELP WITH YOUR WORLD BUILDING - START HERE

Free World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

GET SOME FREE WRITING COACHING LIVE ON THE PODCAST

Sign up for the 30-minute Story Success Clinic with Beth Barany: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/story-success-clinic/

• SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
• SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
• EDITORIAL SUPPORT by Iman Llompart

c. 2025 BETH BARANY

https://bethbarany.com/

--
CONNECT
Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580
Email: beth@bethbarany.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbarany/

CREDITS
EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://get.descript.com/0clwwvlf6e3j
MUSIC: Uppbeat.io
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465

Transcript

Transcript for episode 175 - Tricking Yourself into Writing Habits with LA Bourgeois

Introduction & Host Welcome 

BETH BARANY: Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Write the Future Podcast. I'm your host, Beth Barany. I'm an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who helps other writers finish their books and get them published. I also help creative entrepreneurs build their businesses. And I'm passionate about thinking about the future, putting it into my stories, and encouraging other people to think about how they want to evolve and use their fiction for what's the next step in humanity.

And of course, it's not just one thing. So I love talking to lots of different people. 

[00:35] Guest Introduction: LA Bourgeois 

So today I have as my guest, LA Bourgeois. Hi LA. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Hi. 

BETH BARANY: I am gonna read your bio so everyone can get to know you, a little bit and then we're gonna dive into our questions. All right. Everyone get to know LA a little bit.

LA Bourgeois is a Kaizen Muse Certified Creativity Coach, end of life doula, and author. Her readers delight in her Diary of a Lesbian Housewyfe and find inspiration and book reviews at the Thriving Creative. So welcome again, LA. So glad to have you here.

LA BOURGEOIS: So glad to be here.

BETH BARANY: We get to talk creativity and book recommendations and also about your book. Before we turned on record, I was noodling around the idea of talking to you about creative flow because you are a Kaizen Muse Certified Creativity Coach. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what that means and any advice you have for a writer like myself who's had a break from writing only a few weeks 'cause I was so busy with, with some other projects. But here I am restarting a place I've been in many, many, many, many, many times, but I'm always having to reconnect, and kind of come into present time and reorient myself.

And I have a whole lot of practices around that. So I was wondering if you too had some advice for writers like myself who wanna reconnect to their work and also maybe in a fresh way, because my project is changing. And that's often what happens after a break. So that's a lot. 

[02:12] What is a Creativity Coach? 

LA BOURGEOIS: Alright, let's start off with just what is a creativity coach? And really the Kaizen Muse style of creativity coaching, has to do with unlocking your creativity in a way that affects, you can apply this sort of coaching to almost any situation, because what it does is it helps you to think differently and engage your imagination as well as empowering you to overcome the obstacle. 

So we spend a lot of time going into what things have worked for you in the past, what you might imagine could work for you, and then if we run out of all of those things, then I start chiming in. People have worked with me to do things like from re reigniting their creative spark, finding their way back to that creative passion that they had loved so much and had just kind of fallen out of love with to I had one woman who contacted me because she wanted some help with interior design.

She was doing some interior design and um, the energy flowed where it flowed and she ended up, actually we did relationship coaching and she found a boyfriend. There's just all of these different spaces that creativity coaching can help with.

A lot of my knowledge comes from being a, an entrepreneur for most of my life, as well as being an author and writer and having done that research to know what it takes to do that.

But most of the information actually comes from the client, so I, I don't have to know a lot about that field. 

That said, reconnecting and reflowing into connection with your work. The way that I have always done this, I call it tricking yourself into a creative habit, because I will look at something that I know is like the best thing for me to do, and I will immediately rebel and not do it.

[04:19] Reconnecting with Creative Work 

I am a horrible little goblin like that, and it's just what happens, so I have to trick myself and the ways that I trick myself are to really let myself see what I want to create. 

So first I select a goal, the goal, and I know what I wanna reconnect with.

[04:41] Building Creative Habits: Tiny Steps 

Then I select a teeny tiny, itty bitty step, like the smallest step that you could possibly think of to get me that little tiny step toward the goal. And this is actually something that, especially for me and people like me who need to be tricked into doing something, needs to be easier to do it than not to do it.

The big trick is to pick something that's gonna be teeny tiny that you get and you experience success with. So you're happy to reengage with it. And just taking that one tiny step starts to build momentum into the project and allows you to go ahead and reengage in an easy way and in a way that builds those, builds that space where you can actually start creating the work and really being in meaningful connection to it.

So for example, if I was reconnecting with the work like you were talking about, right? One of the steps that I might take is to say, I'm going to spend a minute a day thinking about the work. Or sitting at my desk and staring at the computer or going to a coffee shop or just some sort of something, but like just a minute.

Because if you take a minute of the day, just one minute, and think about the project that you're working on, no matter where you are, and then when that one minute is done, you're done. That's another trick. You're done. You do not, you're, you don't have to think about it again. Your work is done. You can walk away.

Once you've done that, then the next day it's easier to return and do that one minute again, but it starts to release all of those things. It starts to move you out of this space where you're going, where you're putting pressure on yourself to get it done. Or let's say you were like, oh, I'm gonna spend an hour on my project and you spent forty five minutes on your project.

Well, suddenly you've done forty five minutes more than I'm asking you to do. Or forty four minutes, I'll figure out math. and then, where you would have this amazing victory because you were only spending one minute. Now you feel failure 'cause you were like, I'm gonna do an hour. So it's very important to select that, that step and make it something that you do, and then repeat it over and over again.

And as you repeat it, you slowly build the habit. 

BETH BARANY: That's wonderful. Yeah. I love that. I like that first step too, for getting really, really clear about what it is that you wanna create and I do that through journaling. I have a little section in my writing software called Scrivener, where I have "journal to write" when I'm in the writing phase and now I'm in the editing phase, so it's "journal to edit", and I just allow myself total permission to kevetch or whatever's going on. Write a to-do list, it doesn't matter. And also that gets me to, oh yeah, my main character this, my main character that, and I start reconnecting to the work, acknowledging where it is and where I wanna take it, and then my brain just starts lining up the next steps. 

I love your advice starting small, at the very smallest goal that you can conceive of that sounds fun. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Absolutely. It's actually really, really, I hate to say normal, because normal is just not for creative people, let's call it universal. 

BETH BARANY: Yes. Yes. It's universal. And I've noticed that with lots of authors and I do notice lots of writers beat themselves up because they don't meet some imagined expectation.

I'm a working writer. You're a working writer. We have to deal with who we are today, not some idealized version, while we reach for the stars in terms of trying to create something, right. We'll never really get there, but we'll get pretty close, and then I also love what you were saying, make it small, repeatable, and you said something else that I really vibed with as well. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Celebrate?

BETH BARANY: Celebrate

LA BOURGEOIS: Celebrate your success and then let it go. Know that you've done it for the day and you get to walk away.

[08:47] Celebrating Success & Overcoming Expectations 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's so important and I think we're, we're practicing the muscle of getting to our work, but we're also practicing the muscle of celebrating each step, which I have learned that is way more useful than being harsh on myself for not meeting some imaginary, really high bar, which, we never do, and you know, comes from often expectations based on what we see other people do, but we never really know what other people are doing. Plus we don't really even know how long it took for them to get there.

LA BOURGEOIS: Right.

BETH BARANY: We're working for thirty years on that habit, and we just see the fruit of it. We don't see them working all the way into the habit.

LA BOURGEOIS: Exactly. We don't see them, um, having that one day where like the dog decides that he's going to chase a deer outta the yard and you spend all of your writing time for that day, wandering around the neighborhood trying to find the dog. Like you don't see that. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. And you don't, you don't see how many years they might've worked in obscurity, none of that.

LA BOURGEOIS: Yeah. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah, great. I wanna let people know that you and I, I'm pretty sure you and I met through the creativity coaching community, 'cause we both, 

LA BOURGEOIS: We did. 

BETH BARANY: Have training of being a creativity coach, which is a sub niche of coaching. And, yeah, just wanna let people know that that exists, if you're curious about that kind of training. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Yeah. 

[10:13] Book Recommendations for Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Cool, so let's talk books. You are an avid, avid reader. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Yes. 

BETH BARANY: I wanna let everyone know that you write a column for us at Writer's Fun Zone. And, you have all these wonderful book reviews there that I love so much. I can't read all the books, so I love reading book reviews, so I wanna give a shout out to that.

Yeah. And because we focus here on science fiction and fantasy authors, I asked for some book recommendations, from you for writing books that you have for science fiction and fantasy authors. Can you tell us about those? 

LA BOURGEOIS: Sure. I think the very first one, and it's like the classic is the Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler, and that really details the hero's journey.

And it's one that, I mean, you see it in every Marvel movie. You see it in all over the place, right? 

BETH BARANY: Mm-hmm. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Um, the more intriguing storyline to me these days besides the hero's journey, because in the hero's journey, your hero ends up kind of alone. 

[11:16] The Hero's Journey vs. The Heroine's Journey 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Tortured, sad alone, and I'm like not into that anymore.

So I really like Heroine's Journey. And Gail Carriger, who's the woman who wrote like the Parasol Protectorate and all those books, she wrote a book called The Heroine's Journey, which is great because it really focuses on things like found family. You go from being alone to being a group, you grow as a human being or all of those, I mean, not that you don't grow as a human being in the hero's journey, but it just feels like a more rewarding storyline to me, and it's what I like a lot. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. 

LA BOURGEOIS: But knowing those two journeys actually really helps you in terms of creating a plot that works 

BETH BARANY: Yeah. 

LA BOURGEOIS: For your storyline and, the Hero's Journey is just a classic of the science fiction fantasy genre.

[12:15] Wonderbook & Imagination in Writing 

BETH BARANY: Absolutely. Yeah. 

LA BOURGEOIS: And then in terms of actually writing science fiction and fantasy, I discovered a book a few years ago called Wonderbook by a guy named Jeff Vandermeer. And this book is gorgeous. I mean, it's just so beautifully illustrated. He grabs information from all different areas and brings them together and really uses this book as a way to engage your imagination and start breaking you out of the normal cycle of this world to a space where you can actually imagine a world that is fantastic, speculative and all of those things. So that's the book, especially for science fiction and fantasy. I think any author could use it to great effect, but especially for science fiction and fantasy, and he does do the nuts and bolts of creating a story through to actually creating this beautiful science fiction and fantasy novel. In the next three months, I'm going to do a review of that book. 

BETH BARANY: Dear listeners, by the time this interview airs, that review might be up, so be sure to check out LA Bourgeois's column on Writer's Fun Zone and also on your Substack. You post all your book reviews on your substacks.

LA BOURGEOIS: So the Thriving Creative is where I post my book reviews, and that's at LA bourgeois.substack.com. And then I have my art that I do, which is humorous and heartfelt essays about my life and history and house wife-ing basically.

And that is at Lesbian Housewyfe and Housewyfe is spelled with a Y H-O-U-S-E-W-Y-F-E.substack.com. So lesbian Housewyfe.substack.com is the best place to go. 

[14:09] LA Bourgeois' Book: The Lesbian Housewyfe 

BETH BARANY: Oh that’s so fun. And now I really wanna celebrate you 'cause your, you have a book coming out or your book is out, your next book? 

LA BOURGEOIS: My book is out, yep. I just launched it, mid August. 

BETH BARANY: Yep. 

LA BOURGEOIS: The Lesbian Housewyfe: Bigger, Broader, Delightfuller. 

BETH BARANY: I love it. Love it. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Yeah. And it's, it's super fun. It's a bunch of essays that I wrote, as I was getting back into this talking of, speaking of connecting back to the work. Back in 2021, I was starting to connect back into my Lesbian Housewyfe work, and this book is actually the first forty essays, something like that. I mean, it's a lot of essays, but built around that Lesbian Housewyfe character who I had written about for years in the nineties and two thousands, and then I'd taken a break from. And in 2021 I was like, I'm just here, might as well start writing this again and started up the newsletter. 

BETH BARANY: And, I just wanna shout out, shout it out for you, because I really love this work. 

I just find your work so hilarious and in a, in a big belly laugh kind of way, and also very relatable and very heartwarming. So that's my plug, and I really encourage folks to read it if you want a good laugh. And also maybe a little tiny cry of joy sometimes, maybe sometimes sadness.

But I, I find it really touching all of your stories. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Oh, thank you. 

BETH BARANY: Yeah, 

LA BOURGEOIS: That's very kind. 

BETH BARANY: So you have two volumes out, right? Tell us the awesome title again. 

LA BOURGEOIS: Lesbian housewyfe: Bigger, Broader. Delightfuller. 

BETH BARANY: Great. And where can people find your book? 

LA BOURGEOIS: So right now it's available on all of the online platforms and in ebook form and, um, later this year, maybe even by the time this podcast airs, it will be available in paperback as well. 

BETH BARANY: Oh, wonderful. Yay. 

[16:17] Advice for writers on how to write the future 

So I have one more question for you, which I like to spring on folks, but I won't be completely outta left field, which is: What advice do you have for writers who want to write the future, write their own future, write their character's future, but write also maybe a little tiny snippet of humanity's future?

Because I have this saying that I, I use sometimes in the podcast, which is:

When we vision what is possible, we help make it so.

So the power of visualization, but also the power of putting what we really want into stories like we're talking about the contrast between the hero's journey, typically the hero's alone at the end versus the heroine's journey where your main character gets to find their new community, which is something I've always been writing myself. And yeah, so when we vision what is possible, we help make it so.

So I'm just curious if you have any advice for writers about that process? 

LA BOURGEOIS: Well, the first thing that pops into my mind is an exercise that I like to do with people who are just kind of trying to figure out where they are in life and what they want. And I call it your perfect day, writing your perfect day. So what happens is you just make a little time for yourself, sit down and just write out your perfect day. You don't have to include everything in your perfect day, but you wanna include the most important touch points for that.

But it could be like, get up at ten am and have a magnificent cup of coffee and enjoy time on the porch. What that does throughout as you work your way through that day, is it helps you to really define what are your basic values that you want to see.

Do you love being content?'

That's a big thing for me. I'm a big proponent of contentment as opposed to ecstatic joy. I'm like, no, no, just let me have a nice day. I do love that moment on the porch with my cup of tea in the morning.

Does your art show up in that space?

Do you want to have that? What else shows up in that day for you? Is it spending time with family and building those, taking those touch points for yourself and making sure that they are included in your story, whatever story you're writing, those are the points of uh concreteness with things that you have in common with your reader because if you can write about any world in the universe, as long as you have some sort of universal theme that's running through it, and that can help people to find those touch points in your story so they can jump into the space with you.

BETH BARANY: Oh, yes. That's so beautiful. And so powerful, so powerful. I'm just thinking maybe your main character is an alien or an elf or a dragon, but you can give it those moments that you cherish, that you hold dear, and now the reader is gravitates towards that. Your description of contentment or maybe for some it is excited joy, or maybe for some it's adventure, which is something that I really enjoy or I also enjoy meandering.

That to me is a great joy to go out and meander without a direction which is full of discovery and I get to be curious. I get to be in awe, which is probably the core there, this awe about the everyday. Um, I love taking pictures of my neighborhood and the graffiti and the posters and the little, the little gems that people are putting out on the street.

Someone is painting hearts on little pieces of wood and tacking them onto light poles. Yes, and it's on the main, main commercial street here in my neighborhood and I've been taking pictures of them. Very fanatically. 

I wanna say thank you so much LA for coming in today and talking with us about creativity, about tips, story, tips for writers, science fiction, fantasy writers, and also your book. 

[20:35] Closing Thoughts & Where to Find LA's Work 

Yes, please do check out LA Bourgeois work also at writersfunzone.com. And I'm just gonna sign off here and also say thank you very much LA for being our guest today.

LA BOURGEOIS: Thanks for having me. It was so fun.

BETH BARANY: All right everyone. Write long and prosper. And that's a wrap.