Join us at the Story Works Round Table as we welcome back the talented author Paulette Stout to discuss her latest novel, What We Give Away. This captivating story tackles the often-taboo subject of body image and societal expectations surrounding weight. Paulette shares her insights on writing about sensitive topics while allowing readers to engage with the characters’ journeys authentically. Join us as we explore the intersection of food, love, and self-acceptance, and discover how Paulette’s personal experiences shaped her writing. Don’t miss this enlightening conversation!

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TRANSCRIPT

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Alida Winternheimer: There is still time to get into my right great Openings workshop. If you are ready to master the art of Act 1 and make sure your readers can’t help but read your book through all the way to the end, then sign up Today, go to wordessential.com workshops, get all the details and enroll. Oh and by the way, if you enroll with a friend, you will both receive 20% off a storyboard consultation or your next writing workshop with me at wordessssential. This week we are so excited to have Paulette Stout back with us at the StoryWorks roundtable talking about what we give away. Her new novel, which is fiction inspired by an issue. The sort of issue that is overlooked or rather taboo to talk about. So we have fun getting into the why’and wherefores behind writing this kind of novel and Paulette writing this novel in particular. I know you’re going to love this episode and you’re going to want to come back in two weeks for the next episode because Paula will be doing a part two with us talking about the craft of spicy scenes, one of her specialties. All right, here’s this week’s episode of the Story Works Roundtable. Enjoy. 

Hello and welcome to this Week StoryWorks Roundtable. Today, Catherine and I are delighted to have our friend Paulette Stout back with us at the round table. Paulette is read in 43 countries and the 17 time award winning author of fast paced contemporary women’s fiction that tackle social issues often ignored. Fans call her work brave, spicy and a mesmerizing tapestry of realism. Good stuff. That’s awesome.

Paulette Stout: I know, right?

Alida Winternheimer: Her stories feature brave characters finding their voices and transforming into their best selves while finding love along the way. Paulette is also the co host of the Best of Book Marketing podcast and works by day as the director of brand marketing at a global software company. Her fourth novel, what We Give Away, released in February and that is what we’re going to talk about today. So welcome Paulette. So glad you’re here.

Paulette Stout: Am so glad to be back. Thanks so much for having me.

Alida Winternheimer: Of course. And I want to go back to your bio quickly because we’re talking about this novel, your fourth in the series, what We Give Away. So just a reminder for everybody. Fast paced contemporary women’s fiction, tackling social issues often ignored, brave, spicy, transforming into your best selves and finding love along the way. I think all of those descriptors set us up really well for the conversation we’re about to have. So I just wanted to kind of highlight those as we get started here.

Paulette Stout: Yeah. Love it, Love it.

Alida Winternheimer: So why don’t you give us the premise of the book? So for listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with that novel or the series, what’s it about?

Paulette Stout: Yeah. So my Bold Journey series are interconnected standalone novel. So each one can be read individually. And this one follows the third friend in a friend group that each person has their own book. and this one takes on weight and body size and each of my books takes on different social issues. And this one is, kind of tackles our cultural obsession with thinness and is that the right way and what are potentially other and better ways to live our lives and have fulfilling and rewarding relationships. So I tackle the issue from kind of all different angles from people with larger bodies, people with smaller bodies. Adulthood. Ah. Children, workplace, home. Complicated inter family relationships that surround expectations around what we should look, at what we look like and what we weigh.

Alida Winternheimer: Yeah. So I’m reading this book right now and I’ve got to say one of the things I really appreciate about it is that we’ve got this issue at the core of the story. But I never feel like you’re making it an issue. I don’t feel like you’re up on a pulpit saying, here’s my flag, I’m waving it in your face. This is about this issue. We are on a journey with your protagonist

Alida Winternheimer: who is going through a process of self discovery and exploring this issue. So it feels natural and it feels like we’re a part of the journey with her. So can you talk into why issues at the heart of your stories and your approach to writing them?

Paulette Stout: Yeah, it’s so interesting because I grew up in a very politically active household and everybody’ve worked in campaigns, they’ve been in strikes and they’ve gone to jail and all kinds of things. And like, that was’t my vibe. But I do, you know, observe and I observe social, our society and our cultural, norms and our cultural. And I just make observation. So I feel like each of these book is like bringing to the fore an observation I had. So in this book it’s. I have struggled with my weight my whole life. As I aged, I came to discover a different way of kind of approaching weight called intuitive eating. And it’s really an approach that is like we can be healthy and unhealthy at any size and it’s really about how we eat, how we move, the choices we make. Are we sleeping and just letting your body fall where it wet nor it may. there’s lots and lots of data around why dieting doesn’t work physiologically, scientifically, why dieting doesn’t work. Our body has a genetic wayight it wants to be that’s obviously impacted by our choices around food and things. But for the most part, our body’s gonna like kind of land at a size. And if we learn to kind of listen to our own body signals, we’ll kind of like level at a place where we’re supposed to be. So when we try to like stray too far away from that with dieting, it kind of gets us into this cycle. And when I was going through that, it was just something like, I know everyone can relate to this and my approach and I’m so appreciative of what you said, Alita, because people don’t get a soapbox in my books. They get kind of exposed to ideas and they can come away with whatever opinion they want. You know, they might be persuaded, they might be not persuaded. My goal isn’t. It’s basically to let you walk in the character’s shoes, experience that life and then, you know, maybe exposeure to a different way of thinking that you might not have considered. But I never want people to feel like I’m being prescriptive about how I want them to think. And they have to think a certain way because everyone there’s individuals, they agency, they can think whatever they want. And I personally don’t enjoy books and I’m not persuaded by books that I can just tell the, the authors broken the wall, the fourth wall, and they are on an olo box and they were screaming at me and I’m like, wait a minute, Bobby Joe would never be saying that. This is you author person on the page indulging your little fancies about whatever topic it is. And I hate that when I’m reading, so I don’t do that. I try not to.

Alida Winternheimer: Yes. Oh, and I’m so glad that you don’t do that. Ktherine and I have had episodes before talking about like agitation propaganda in fiction, that old theater term and how the soapbox just’ so self evident and rarely effective for that reason. I mean, maybe if you’re preaching to the choir, the choir gets into it, but everybody else is going to be turned off by it. So something else that interests me, not to shift the topic too quickly here, but so you’ve got male and female point of view, characters, love interests. She’s on this journey of self discovery around eating and he’s a chef and you writing around food is so rich. It’s just. It’s like. It’s the feast, a feast of words. So, maybe marry that Mary. This relationship between the two characters and eating issues and food and that choice to put them in writing and the craft of how you handled it just kind of go anywhere you’re inspired to go.

Paulette Stout: Yeah, I mean, I think that it just. It’s like a natural conflict to have someone who has you issues with food in a relationship with a chef, because that’just creates natural tension just right off the bat, just situationally. But I think that I, wanted. There are lots of people who have issues around food, but I also wanted to show and experience food in a different way. I wanted to celebrate the splendor and joy that is food. Like, my family, like, we’re all into eating where we love. You know, we’re from, like, a Jewish background, a Puerto Rican background, like, where’you know, food is part of life and is part of our celebration. And that I wanted to people to really experience that richness. And I wanted. And I. That’s why I ended up making the recipes for the book, because people are like, I’m reading this book and I’m getting super hungry. So I have recipes on my website, y’all, so you can go to bloodstop.com, go to the book page. You get the recip. So, these are dishes that are very familiar to me. They bring me joy, and I like to express that. So I want people to have the colors and the textures and the sensations and the scents and just bringing all the things alive. We had another episode when I was on last talking about writing the Sennses. So it’s something that I take very seriously, and I’m glad that you appreciate it. to the second question about. In terms of the journeys of the two characters, I had the first, you, the main character. The big thing for me that I experienced on my own personal weight journey was freeing myself to gain weight. After spending decades being obsessed with losing and staying at a certain size, it was terrifying for me to intentionally let myself gain weight if that’s where my body wanted to be. So that’s the journey I wanted Leslie to take in the book. I wanted the journey not to be about her eating disorder, but about her kind of experiencing her body as it gets larger and what does that feel like and the terror we all have around that. And I very intentionally do not talk about specific weights, specific sizes, weight gain, loss, because we all have these perspectives about how we feel in our skin, whether it’s right, whether it’s wrong, and it doesn’t matter what size we are. We all have the same neuroses, societal, pressures to look and feel a certain way. And then if we were outside of that norm, then you were wrong. So that was an intentional choice I made to not talk about the specific sizes. Because what Risa goes on if, you know, all of a sudden he was feeling really good in his body and I think I’m fine. And all of a sudden someone’s telling him he’s not fine. So that was kind of new for him. So him going through the journey in one direction while she’s going in the journey in the other direction, I think it kind of, it shows the, you know, it creates a conflict between the two characters that kind of propels the story. but it also is very true to the experiences of readers, you know, that they. It’s very relatable because people can relate to both ends of that journey. To feeling like I’m in this weird space and my family’saying this and my job is saying this and people online are saying that. And, I think it’s very real and relatable on both ends.

Alida Winternheimer: Definitely. Yeah. And I really appreciate as a reader what you did in this story. I think a writer who sets out to write a character with an eating disorder could easily focus on that character and that issue, that eating disorder. But by having the love interest be a chef and then bringing in all of the food and also Leslie’s aunt’s role in the story, there’s so much celebration around food. So it isn’t just, just a, hurdle she has to overcome. M On her journey of acceptance. It’s so much more than that. It’s accepting food and nourishment, but family and love and heritage. And what you do is you write the food into the scenes. That element of celebration, it makes it so much richer then I think the story would be if you didn’t have that element to it. And then having Risow face his own body issue, the way you handled it, I really liked because I knew he was a bigger guy. We get enough description.

Paulette Stout: He a bbm, a big beautiful man.

Alida Winternheimer: Right. We have enough of an understanding of his physicality without you putting a number on a scale in front of us to know he’s a big guy.

Paulette Stout: Right.

Alida Winternheimer: And then you get to that scene where an outsider makes that statement that you’re too big, you’ve got to lose weight or you aren’t Going to make it in your industry, your career won’t go where you want it to. And I was like, oh, that’s good. Look at that. Seeing what you’re doing with these dual storylines. Kudos on that.

Paulette Stout: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think it’s, people have really appreciated the Resto storyline because, I mean, that’s the more typical one. Someone telling you you’re wrong and you’ve got toa be smaller. But it’s also like, I think we’ve all had moments in our life where we felt good, like, okay, feel I’m feeling okay, I’m feeling okay. And then someone tells you you’re not, and then you doubt yourself. You’like well, am I okay? Am I not okay? Did I? You know, and then it’s basically having to rediscover your own inner center of like, who am I? What am I about? And do I care what other people say about me? You know, what is more important, what I think about myself and my health or what other people are saying about me fitting into certain societal expectations? So, I think that, that, you know, that’s like a beautiful journey for him because I think that’s very, true to the experiences of lots of people where, you know, you go, you show up someplace and you’re feeling really good and then a family member or somebody says something kind of negative. Oh, you know, you look fat in that dress or that’s the best you could wear, or didn’t you brush your hair or you know, whatever it is, you know, like someone just says something a little bit nasty to kind of take you down a peg. And really it says more about them than it does about us. And I kind of wanted the readers to kind of have that experience. It was like, was Riso really, did he really need to change or is this like a really inappropriate expectation that’s being forced on him externally?

Alida Winternheimer: Yeah. So you don’t have to answer this question, but I’m curious if you as the author, have your mind made up on that question? Is it an unreasonable expectation or is he maybe pushing the unhealthy end of being bigger? Or is it just one of those realities that we all have to face because we don’t live in a bubble and the world does exist and we do have career pressure and we do have all of those other things, you.

Paulette Stout: Know, u, do you a writer flabbergasted that you’re. You don’t know. And I think that’s fantastic that you’ve gotten as far I Know you have book, but I’m. I love that you can’t tell. Like, I just am getting chills on my back right now because you can’t tell. I very much have an extremely strong point of view on this issue and it lands squarely on the you. Do you be healthy in the body you have? It’it’s really more about the behaviors. Like, are you kind of having a mix of foods? Like, are you eating when you’re hungry and stopping? Like, are you eating past when you’re comfortable? Are you eating when you’re hungry? Are you trying to like pretend you’re not hungry and like drink stuff? It’s like, that’s not good. Are you forcing yourself to eat foods that don’t bring you joy? Like, are you creating rules around your, your food habits that aren’t serving you? You know, are you, are you getting out and moving your body in a way that’s meaningful for you? Are you, do you view exercise as punishment or you’ve exercised as a way to really make your body stronger and make you, you know, have the capacity to live the life you want? Like, if you like to go you on trips and you need to walk a lot or you want to go on a hike, like, are you doing what you need to do to stay in that kind ofysical condition? So it’s really about eating and nourishing your body and moving yourself in a way that will give you the body and the life you want, you know, and it’s really less about what your body looks like and more about what it can do.

Alida Winternheimer: Right, Right. Yeah. You know, that really comes through with Leslie’s storyline, you know, as far as I’ve read so far. And with Ros, he got the message from his agent that he should drop some weight. And then he looked at himself, right? He looked at the photos the agent showed him and saw the roles the agent was pointing out. And he has that moment of reflection where he’s saying, but these are the arms that can lift 100 pound case of me, and these are the legs that can. I can be on my feet all day in a kitchen and I can do all this. So very much what you were just describing. But then right where I’m adding the story, he thought, well, I’ll just do the diet, make the agent happy, drop some weight, and then I’ll go back to living my life. So I’m like, okay, okay.

Paulette Stout: I think that that’s what people do. People succumb. And I think that’s why I have so many references and reading materials at the back of the book, which we haven’t gotten to, but I have. I think there’s like four or five pages, of additional reading and references and sources. This is a very deeply research book. This is, I had people from meta, which is like, eating disorder association, read it. I had a nutritionalist read it. I’ve had people who experience anorexia and neur rosa res it. I had people who work in commercial kitchens read it. I have lots of external expertise that’s put on here so we can kind of accurately reflect the journey. and then people can kind of come away with the opinions they want t. But if you don’t come away from this book, may be questioning whether all the pressure you put yourself through is necessary. I’d be surprised, right?

Alida Winternheimer: Yes. All right. I want to talk about all the research that went into this book because it is apparent, but not, not in a on the nose way. It’s apparent because I was like, oh, wow. The authenticity feels present and seamless. And I did go to the book page on your website and I saw your PDF with all of the sources for further information. So, how important is it to you personally and how important do you think it should be to authors in general to do this kind of research to get this work right, to make it true?

Paulette Stout: I think it’s critically important and I take it extremely seriously. It’s kind of like when someone’s writing historical fiction and they get the facts wrong, you kind of lose some trust with the reader. and it can impact the reading experience. And I think that for people who have read my books, this might be the first book people are reading of me. They want to go back and read more. I feel it’s really important for people, for me to get the facts right. If I’m saying that X number of. Like, you know, for my second book, for instance, you know, X number of men are sexually harassed at work and, you know, the x1 in 6 men are, you know, sexually have unwanted sexual contact in their lifetimes. I feel like it’s really important for that to be true. you know, if I’m talking about racial discrimination, if I’m talking about workplace discrimination and contracting, I think it’s important for it to be true. So I don’t ever want people to read one of my books, come, away believing things that aren’t accurate. Because, because my books are so deeply researched, people do use them as a launching pant to have conversations with people. And I Want them to be empowered with real facts and not things that I’ve made up to make the story work, but might leave them feeling betrayed afterwards.

Alida Winternheimer: I love that. Yeah. Amen. So, what kind of feedback have you gotten from readers about the impact these facts that are embedded into your fictional narratives are having on their lives, on the way they think, on their conversations and such?

Paulette Stout: I’ve been frankly, a little overwhelmed by the response that I’m getting on this book. I have people who weren’t eating telling me if they began eating. I have people who were smoking to suppress their appetites that stopped smoking. I’ve had people who feel, like, incredibly seen, who was experienced anorexia nervosa. I’ve had people, on the larger end of the body size spectrum who, feel validated for living the lives. They do that. Yes, I can be a large body yoga instructor. And, you know, that’s awesome. You know, and I think that. I think people are feeling really seen and they feel like they’re people feeling a little bit relieved and they’re feeling a little empowered to make changes in their life, to kind of live the life that’s closer to the one they want versus the one they think people want them to have.

Alida Winternheimer: Wow. And this just came out in February. That’s got to just feel amazing.

Paulette Stout: Yeah, it really does. It really does. And, I’ve had, had one reader who was, you know, in a much larger body who didn’t feel quite as connected to the characters. But, you know, no book is going to be for everybody. I did my best to kind of portray the emotional experience of having, you know, concerns and challenges with how we feel about our bodies. And I feel like that’s kind of a universal sentiment. We talk about those universal fantasy things, you know, where, you know, these are very relatable experiences. And I think that, know, not feeling right in your skin is one of those things. And it’s just, how do I not feel right in my skin? But I did also want to touch on some of those experiences of people in larger bodies. So when the character does have her body, there is a discrimination element that comes into play that I’ve experienced. Like, I’ve loved doctor’s offices in tears. I’ve, you know, been mistreated in a. Of doctor office. I’ve been, you know, not feeling right or having difficulty finding clothes, you know, in a store, you know, different. So there’s lots of those experiences I didn’t want to put in. because, you know, I Couldn’t put them all in because that wasn’t Leslie’s journey. And you know, Leslie was a character I’d been in my other books and it was only so far I could take her from how I wrote her in the other books. I kind of pushed the ethnicity a little bit. Like. Well, I really didn’t really say what thisenie she was. So she can be Puerto Rican. but yes, I was trying to keep the continuity while making the individual journey in each book kind of true and self contained within itself.

Alida Winternheimer: Yeah. So did you know when you, at the very beginning of the series of these interconnected novels that Leslie has an eating disorder? Was that from the get go.

Paulette Stout: I knew that know book one is going to be off the sexy stuff. I knew book two kind of came to me when I was writing, a short story, reader magnet. For book one. I was like, oh, what happens if he had sexual harassment? You know. So I basically wrote book two because I’d written this reader magnet. So they kind of organically. Book three, having a black, lead character, you know, it made the topic of raised, you know, in the workplace kind of a normal, you know, like something that fit for that character. I also, Another observation. I grew up in New York City. I grew up in a very diverse environment. I was around lots of people of color who were, you know, extremely successful professionals. And those were like a group of characters that I wasn’t seeing a lot, especially in women’s fiction. Maybe other genres have more. But in women’s fiction I was not seeing a lot of black professional women characters who were affluent. You know, like they were. The black characters I was seeing are kind of on the brink of destitution and impoverishment. They were not the people that I grew up, my parents knew, you know, that kind of thing. So I felt like, I wanted to make sure that there was that representation and the women that I worked with for that book felt really seen. But when I got to book four, I knew it wanted to be on weight and body size. I didn’t really know exactly how that would manifest because Leslie was not portrayed as a larger body character in the other books. So I was trying to figure out what is her journey. And I had lots of conversations with my editor about her journey because I didn’t want it just to be about the eating, her eating disorder. I wanted it to be about the really powerful battle of letting yourself gain. Like for me that was the revelation in my journey and that was what I wanted her story to be about. So then it made sense to have resto kind of be kind of a corollary story to that.

Alida Winternheimer: Yeaheah. So I’d love to hear a little about getting, expert readers to go through your manuscript and give you feedback and insights and whatever you can share about that. like how do you find these people? What did you learn working with them? Any tips for writers who might be thinking, oh, I’ve got to find an expert for those are that issue with my manuscript.

Paulette Stout: Yeah, I just find it essential because we always are. You hear the right what you know. But I will very often write what I don’t know. And when you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So I like to find people. So, I actually worked with my old nutritionist who was a healthy and every size nutritionist and had this kind of approach to eating. So I had that person to go to. I just, I just email people, I emailed, I looked up what are eating disorder associations? You know, and I looked and I emailed, I said look, I have a book, I have this, I really want to get this right. Do you have anybody on staff would be willing to look at the book? And sometimes, you know, if it’s a paid situation or someone is very busy, I focus them on specific chapters. Like when I worked with, my contact in the restaurant industry, I said, here are the scenes where there are scenes in a commercial kitchen and you know, what’s going on in these spaces and does this anything pop out to you? And then I usually have like an email exchange or a phone conversation really quickly to kind of talk it through because sometimes it’s easy for them to verbalize the feedback. But they did give me line edits.

Alida Winternheimer: oh great.

Paulette Stout: Both gave me line edits on the thing. I did end up paying my old nutritionist for her time. the other person did it for free. And so you’ll have a combination. So in my book two, I needed to work with a lawyer and so without, no, I’m sorry. She was a therapist, you know, and that was a paid situation. And I’ve had both paid and free. You know, it kind of is a mix, based on who you can find. And I always, you know, I don’t, I offered to compensate them, but they sometimes don’t always take me up on that. So, but I like to put that out there because they are professional people and their time is valuable. So I want toa be respectful of that. And I feel like Sometimes when you offer to compensate someone just the offer is like a gesture of goodwill and they don’t always accept it but I think it’s appreciated. and I think for those who do want toa ask then it gives them the opportunity to do that and not to feel awkward. right. So I think that those, those are good approaches and let’s see. Anybody else? Yeah. So I just, if there’s just something I don’t know, I don’t feel like it’s right. I just reach out and I try to find somebody and I think associations have you know, good list. If there’s an association, if you’re writing a crime something and you need to speak to someone who’s got combat experience or you know there’s, you know I think that there associations are a great resource to reach out to. and then you, if you’re in like a writing association

Paulette Stout: sometimes their members will kind of help each other and they have little lists of expert lists of people that can do. And I’ve gotten people through those two things. So I think either writer associations or professional organizations in the fields you’re interested in researching, I think both can be good resources.

Alida Winternheimer: Yeaheah, that’s great. That’s very valuable to people listening. I think for someone who maybe hasn’t done this before there’or who hasn’t published yet, there’s a lot of fear around. I don’t have a track record. Why would they want to help me Or I hate cold calling. I can’t just email this person. They’ll you know, think I’m a spammer or crazy. And then so I am curious, what would you recommend somebody budget for an expert like you say? I would be happy to compensate you if somebody at hundred dollar they could designate for that. Is that enough or are. Yeah, I think thinking okay, it’s hours and hours of someone’s time. If they’re you know what’s kind of.

Paulette Stout: Right, they are hopefully getting an enjoyable read out of it. So it shouldn’t hopefully not be all painful. I think that’s something you can negotiate with the person, you know. I think if you offered to compensate then you know they can come back with a rate. And then you say well that’s a little, it’s more than I can use my budget would you be comfortable with you know, this amount instead? You know, 75, you know I’ve paid probably 100, 200 depending on the expertise. And also if someone is you know, in profession that’s like, they had to get a license. They had a lot of school, they had a lot of training. That type of a person is probably going toa be a little more expensive than, you know, someone else that’s, you know, maybe sharing their life experience. If you are writing outside your lived experience and you re people can kind of say what they’re comfortable with and then you can figure out. I do think that experts, it’s different. They Writing outside yourd experience for a main character is hard because there’s so many aspects of that person’s life that you haven’t experienced. so for my last book, I had like a little cohort of people who, they just felt passionate about the project. And I worked with them for over a year and they read sections of drafts over time and they were very emotionally invested in the project and they gave candid feedback. And I think that the end result speaks for itself because I had Black readers are like, I couldn’t even tell you weren’t black reading that because it was really, you know, there were just some nuances and things that they were able to get. And I just felt like I got so much out of the experience. and yeah, highly, highly recommended. Working with, very intensely if you have a main character and then, you know, checks for other types of things as well.

Kathryn Arnold:  Man, now you’re making me want to. Read your book, Paulette.

Paulette Stout: It’s in print, ebook and audio. You can read it tonight’I. Think it’s really good. I m most peoplen read it in a few days. I’m so proud of this book. It’s delicious. It’s delicious from the food, it’s delicious from the relationship. And it’s just, I think that in my craft. This is my fifth book I’ve written, my fourth book I published. I think that I’m just like, I’m on point. It’s a good book. It’s a good book.

Alida Winternheimer: It’s a good feeling is definitely. Well, thank you so much, Paulette. Tell our readers where they can find you and your delicious book.

Paulette Stout: You can find me in my delicious book. wherever you enjoy books. It’s, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. you can get the audio on Apple and Google Play. you can go to your, request at a local bookseller. You can request it at the library. the audiobook should be on hoopla soon. I’m not sure when this is airing, but, ye. So go enjoy wherever you enjoy books. Excellent. And you can find me, sorry, @paulettestout.com is my website. I have lots of free reads on there if you want to sample my work to see if I’m your jam or not. You can also find me on social on most places at Paulette Stout Author.