Sarah Montana on writing about her story while still "keeping my life"
"I am finding a lot more solace in writing about things that have happened to me as fiction so that I can rewrite the story into how I wish it had happened."
This week I'm talking with Sarah Montana, a screenwriter, speaker, writer, and–fun fact!--trained opera singer. Sarah has written multiple movies for the Hallmark Channel, including Rescuing Christmas, Love to the Rescue, and A New Year's Resolution. Her TEDx talk, “The Real Risk of Forgiveness and Why It's Worth It” is one of my favorite TED talks of all time, and her talk “What Shapes You Doesn’t Break You” has been viewed multiple millions of times.
Sensitive content warning: If you’ve listened to Sarah’s talks, you’ll know that her mother and brother were killed during a home break-in when she was 22 and that she’s experienced sexual assault. We don’t discuss these events directly, but knowing that fact will help you know what Sarah means when she refers to ‘trauma.’ We also briefly mention suicide, so please take care while listening to this episode. Sarah also goes deep into some major truths about life and you probably don’t want to be listening while you’re doing chores or around other people so you can let it all in. (I’m still processing it all! In the very very best way.)
“Singing felt like standing under a waterfall and just having everything cleansed out of your body. But writing feels like a fire, an alchemizing fire for the things that you've gone through. It's this way of making meaning out of what you've experienced and taking the threads of these things and weaving them into something new. It feels more important than anything else that I could personally do with my life. It's something that I feel compelled to do—that I have to do.”
The things we covered:
How The Artist’s Way got Sarah into writing as a profession.
Why being in a non-creative period is the perfect time to expose yourself to things that are nothing like your work, like “fairies falling in love and fighting in wars.”
And why, when the ideas ARE coming, it’s a great time to consume things that are in the same realm as your work to help you not be so “creative and in the sky”
How she learned not to force the work
Figuring out what you need in a given moment by noticing the themes in the things you’re doing to distract yourself
The things that help Sarah stay in a good place
OK, this alternative to meal planning is FIRE (and you’ll never have to eat lasagne for five days in a row)
Her daily approach to sitting down and doing work
How to tell when your brain needs a break
“Something that I'm thinking about more and more is, how can I
create things that have maximum healing impact, but the least amount of personal attachment to me? Because then I get to keep my life.”
How there is incredible fulfillment that comes from helping others by sharing your traumatic stories and truths, AND that there’s a sh!t sandwich that comes along with it
Fictionalizing your traumatic experiences to express the feelings while also creating boundaries (it also lets you say and do the things you wish you’d said and done in real life)
How Brittany Spears’s memoir got Sarah thinking deeply about success and freedom
Thoughts on how having power can trigger you to express it in very-no-good ways, just because you can, or what Sarah calls “the intoxication of power”
How having money does not equal safety
The writer’s strike as an opportunity to be a citizen, not just a worker
Why Sarah no longer has role models, per se, and what she looks to for inspiration instead
Having a varied social diet—seeing friends, being present with your favorite people, but also chatting with people you don’t know
How Sarah is learning to ask for what she wants
How growing up in a conflict averse household makes negotiating hard
Staying involved in the writer’s union now that the strike has passed
The book series she’s been reading out loud with her husband, which she calls “the most fun I’ve had in a really long time”
The playlist that always turns Sarah’s energy around (in a good way)
The special energy of transitional times of day, like twilight
“I've made this mistake a lot of times where I've tried to force the work, and every draft was terrible. Once I let go and was like, you know what? I'm just in the space where the stuff that I'm making is not good and I'm too stressed and there's too much going on and I just have to wait, it all clicked into place. I was like, Oh, this is what this has always wanted to be.”
Lightbulb moments:
All work, and all lives, have cycles of compression and expansion. Raising your awareness of the cycle you’re in helps you discern which tools you need, when.
The absolute genius of having a good day plan and a bad day plan.
There are important messages even in the things you do to distract yourself.
I need to teach my kids that achievement is for the sake of gaining enough influence that you can then help people (something Sarah’s parents taught her).
Specific things we discussed:
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Britney Spears, The Woman In Me
Sarah J. Maas’s Crescent City novels (about “fairies falling in love and fighting wars”)
The Brass Tracks cover of “Always Be My Baby”
Sarah’s work:
What Shapes You Can’t Break You (her Goal Cast talk)
Why Forgiveness Is Worth It (her TedX talk)
Two Turtle Doves (Sarah’s Hallmark Christmas movie about grief)
Connect with Sarah:
Listen to Sarah’s episodes:
Listen to parts 2 and 3 when they launch 2/81 and 3/1
Listen to previous episodes:
Jodie Noel Vinson, part 1: Saving time to stare at the sky + writing about the “shadow side of life”
Jodie Noel Vinson, part 2: Saying your big dreams out loud + so many awesome reading recommendations
Jodie Noel Vinson, part 3: Claiming the title "writer" + acknowledging your privilege
Terri Trespicio, part 2: Getting better at “trembling in the face of resistance”