We recently connected with Annalisa Summea and have shared our conversation below.

Annalisa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I’ve always been a writer. I published for the first time at nine years old. I got to read that poem on the State House lawn of my home state of New Hampshire. I had to stand on many boxes to get up over the podium , but it was a big day. Since then I’ve written more serious things, several books, teleplays, screenplays. I wrote for television, have been in the White House Press Pool-lots of writing and publishing experience, which led to many people that I knew saying, ‘Hey, you know, you’ve published. How do I get my book published? How do I get my short story published?’ And so I started helping people on the side. Then, one day I said, “You know, I love doing this thing.”

In regard to speeding up the learning process, over in the Writing Gym, we’re helping people to write their first draft in eight weeks, and this is a quality first draft–not what Stephen King calls a first draft. I mean there can be a place for first drafts, and I’m a pantser from way back, and, in case you don’t know, pantsers are famous for overwriting. We can write eighteen terrible drafts, none of which are workable. Maybe you need to do some of that work to cut your teeth and to really get to a point where you’ve got some skills, or you can fast track it by working with someone who really sees who you are, what tools you need, and helps you to find those tools rather than kind of the DIY meandering looking this up on YouTube and then over there on Google, and then reading this book.

Now, there’s merit in drafting repeatedly but if you wanna go faster, you get a mentor, and you get a good mentor. So certainly, in terms of learning the craft, can we accelerate it a hundred percent in terms of fast tracking publication? Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the huge reasons that people come to me is because I can start to make phone calls and say, ‘Hey, literary agent, you know, we’ve got this unicorn story, and the unicorn falls in love with the vampire. What do you think? Is this viable in the market right now?” And they’re going to give me feedback that can help make the story into a marketable novel. So, definitely, there are ways to fast track publication by working with a mentor.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve been a writer ever since I can remember. I write under my maiden name Annalisa Parent and am lucky to help others also live out their author lifestyles every single day.

The publishing industry is like any other industry in that as soon as you get to know one person, you get to know more people and more people and more people. And from the outside having been an outsider, I completely understand a writer’s feeling where it feels like there are all these publishing industry professionals and it’s really hard to break through. It’s hard to get a response. People get a lot of “No’s.” I understand all of that, but what it looks like on the inside–like when we’re hanging out with each other over a cup of coffee–it’s a bunch of really warm people who actually really care about other people, who care about story, who care about good stories, and it’s been amazing to meet these people.

After seeing the industry from both perspectives, I wanted to create this sense of community in an industry that can feel very intimidating. I get to help people to do something that they’ve always dreamed of doing. Not only is there that aspect of the amazing job that I get to do as a writing coach to help people to write and publish traditionally, but I also get to do something else that’s really important to me, which is a human connection. The reason that I love and believe in story is because it’s a time machine. You don’t have to be sitting next to that person. You don’t even have to be, alive anymore. Right? We still read Dickens, and we get great benefit from him. We’re still reading the Ancient Greeks. They’ve been gone for a good long time, but we get to talk about the human condition through what they left for us as their legacy. And I just think that that’s such a beautiful way for us to be able to connect with one another in a deeply meaningful way. And so I’m helping humanity to connect with humanity in my very small way, and I love that about what I get to do.

I’m most proud that I’ve had some pretty amazing writing experience. I got to walk on the red carpet. As a member of the White House press pool, I was escorted to the bathroom by Secret Service. I’ve written for television, met tons of famous people, authors, actors, producers, directors, written some really cool things, gotten them out into the world, helped other people to publish those have all been out of this world experiences, but the thing that I am hands down the most proud of is the Writing Gym community.

There’s a group of people on this planet who love each other, who look out for each other, who take care of each other, who encourage each other, who even after they graduate, come back and help each other. That’s huge. Truly.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I touched on part of it in terms of human connection is really important to me and what that means for my business. I don’t think of it necessarily as a business. It’s really a service that I get to do in the world. The people I’m writing with are all individuals to me. We don’t even talk about them as clients. We talk about them as people, as writers. They’re people who have names and lives that are each unique.

Just an example, we’ve got a writer in the Writing Gym who was hit kind of hard by life’s circumstances, and she’s had multiple deaths in the family, and she hasn’t had time for writing legitimately, so I just reached out to her just to say, “Are you okay?”

Because that’s important to what we do, that we work with people, and we care about them as people. I think that a huge part of our success is that they’re seen, they’re heard, they’re known, and they know that we really care about their success. They know we’re available for them, which sometimes means in the middle of the night if it’s a call from a writer in England. They know that we can have those conversations, and what we’ve seen as a result of that contact, of that connection, of that individualization massive growth.

Sometimes it takes a while for people to gain traction. That is the publishing industry. But what we do see is that when our authors get traction, it just happens one after another, publication after publication, and then a film deal and an audio deal. It’s just been amazing to watch these writers live their dreams, and I firmly believe a major part of that is the human connection that is really the foundation of what we do here at the Writing Gym.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

My whole life, I have been a teacher and a writer. It’s my calling. Sometimes that meant that I was a formal classroom teacher or a professor, and now I am a writing coach. I teach the craft of writing. The coaching part comes in where it’s individualized. I’m not only looking at who the person is, but how their brain works. That’s where my study of neuroscience comes in, when we ask the questions like, “What are some of the skills and the tools that are going to work for who you are? And where you are right this second in this manuscript?”

In one of the sessions with a writer, we took a moment to step back and say, “Okay, based on this experience, what tool do you now have in your toolbox that you didn’t have before? How are you gonna apply that in a different time when you get to a spot and your next novel where you’re facing a similar challenge.” Teaching is one of my passions. When you combine teaching as a passion, with writing, you get this amazing experience that I get to live with now as a writing coach.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://datewiththemuse.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annalisa.parent
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/annalisa-parent
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Annalisaparentauthor