In this episode, Belinda Pollard, Donita Bundy and Alison Joy interview Kelly Needham – podcaster, mother of five, women’s minister and author of PURPOSEFOOLED and FRIEND-ISH. Kelly has a personal, powerful and honest message about how to resist the pressures popular culture puts on our writing goals, and where and how to find contentment.
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In conversation in this episode:
- Kelly Needham, non-fiction author, podcaster and women’s ministry leader
- Belinda Pollard, author of mainstream crime novels, writing coach, accredited editor with qualifications in theology, writing and publishing blogger at smallbluedog.com, and Gracewriters founder
- Donita Bundy, writing teacher, preacher and author of the Armour of Light supernatural fiction series
- Alison Joy, romance author, former early childhood teacher and mother of 4 adult children
Topics covered in this episode:
- How Kelly’s first non-fiction book about friendship emerged organically from a ten-year journey of blogging about a topic important to her, and for which she couldn’t find the right book.
- The process of converting blog posts to a book – it ended up forming an outline rather than the actual content.
- The relief of getting the book out of her, and the process of choosing a publishing path: traditional vs self-publishing.
- Finding a literary agent, and choosing one who connected with her project.
- Finding a publisher who cared about the content and was invested in it.
- How Kelly’s existing marketing platform on her blog and social media was appealing to a publisher, but also not necessarily a huge platform.
- Finding the balance between making sales – which does matter a little bit, partly because it shows us what people need – vs having an enduring impact on the lives of individual people.
- Why chasing our dreams is unsatisfying, and yet we will still do it.
- Giving ourselves the freedom to “fail” as writers.
- False narratives from popular culture about what successful writing looks like, and how we can counter those by intentionally being good stewards of our minds.
- How to cope when our achievements don’t match our goals, and when we get post-partum depression after publishing a book.
- How much Kelly struggled with writing her first book, and how much we should be encouraged that we persevered through that.
- The value of making great Art as Christians.
Find Kelly Needham online
Jim and Kelly’s website: https://www.jimmyandkelly.com/
Kelly’s website: https://kellyneedham.com/aboutme
Clearly podcast: https://www.jimmyandkelly.com/podcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellyneedham
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mrskellyneedham
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqEztUPvuH5Agy7ehBBEnRQ
Check out Kelly Needham’s books
Click one of Kelly’s covers below, or titles in the transcript, to find out more on Amazon (associate links that help earn a few cents for Gracewriters):
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Audio
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Transcript
Belinda Pollard: Welcome to the Gracewriters Podcast – Christian Writers Changing Popular Culture. Hit subscribe on your favourite podcast player so you never miss an episode and find show notes, useful links and a full transcript at gracewriters.com.
Today on the podcast, mother of five, involved in women’s student care and counselling ministries, author of multiple books and podcaster, Kelly Needham.
I’m Belinda Pollard. I’m an author, editor and book coach with a theology degree and 20 years in the publishing industry. I blog for writers at smallbluedog.com and you can find links to all my books, blogs and online courses at belindapollard.com.
Alison Joy: Hi, I’m Alison Young. I’m a former early-childhood educator with four adult children. Aside from writing, my other passion is photography and as part of the media team at my local church, it’s a privilege to be able to capture God moments, both big and small. I write contemporary romance under the penname, Alison Joy and you can find out more about my books at alisonjoywriter.com.
Donita Bundy: Hi, I’m Donita Bundy. For the past 20 years, I’ve been using my theology degree to underpin my preaching and, more recently, to inspire my urban-fantasy series, Armour of Light. You can find out more about me and my books and my other endeavours, like book cover design and my blog, at donitabundy.com.
Kelly Needham is the author of two books: PURPOSEFOOLED and FRIENDISH. She’s also been the contributing author to many other books including FAITHFUL and BEAUTIFULLY DISTINCT.
She’s served on staff at multiple churches serving in youth, college and women’s ministry. Kelly currently co-leads a women’s teaching program and co-hosts a podcast, CLEARLY, WITH JIMMY AND KELLY NEEDHAM.
Welcome to the podcast, Kelly.
Kelly Needham: Thank you so much for having me.
Alison Joy: It’s great that you could join us. So, Kelly, just to help our audience to get to know you a bit better, we’d like you to answer the rapid-fire five questions. Are you up for that?
Kelly Needham: Yes, bring it on! Let’s do it!
Alison Joy: Okay. Who is your target audience?
Kelly Needham: I would say Christian audience mainly and adults usually.
Alison Joy: That’s great. What is your main genre?
Kelly Needham: Mostly, right now, non-fiction. Writing a lot of that, although I’ve dabbled a little bit in this last book in fiction, just a tad.
Alison Joy: When is your optimum time for writing?
Kelly Needham: For me, that would have to be midday. The most inconvenient time as a parent but absolutely, if I can hit 10am to 2pm, get writing in there, that’s ideal.
Alison Joy: Where is your favourite place to write?
Kelly Needham: My favourite place to write is actually in a crowded coffee shop with headphones blaring instrumental music loudly to tune everybody out but if I can find a window seat in a busy coffee shop with people moving all around me, I actually love writing there.
Alison Joy: Briefly, can you tell us how you go into writing?
Kelly Needham: I got into writing accidently, actually. I have a degree in finance so I love math. So, writing was not on the agenda but I started blogging alongside my husband’s ministry when we were first married and that’s how I came into it.
Belinda Pollard: So how did your first book come about?
Kelly Needham: Oh, man! Again accidentally. I did not actually set out to write a book but I have some interest in writing about friendship because I had looked for a resource on friendship and couldn’t find one that met the needs I was looking for. So, I began doing the research myself and interviewing people and I just started blogging about that. So, I wrote a series of blogs on friendship and it was actually people reading those blogs, resonating with them and then asking me, “Can you make this into something printed? Something that I could print and make notes on and pass out to people.”
So, I started looking into the idea of doing something bigger, publishing something, maybe self-publishing. It was probably a ten-year journey from those initial research and writing to published book.
Belinda Pollard: That’s interesting because some people actually choose to blog a book. They actually make a plan: I’m going to write my book as a series of blog posts over this period of time. But you kind of did it the other way.
Did it introduce complications that you were using blog material to create your book or how did you actually take the raw material of the blogs and convert that into a cohesive book?
Kelly Needham: Yes. It was actually a difficult process. It was a very difficult book to write because the topic of friendship and the way I was writing about it was already nuanced in some ways that were difficult anyway because I was talking about the idolatry of friendship but we need friendship.
And so, as it began to expand into a bigger thing, I actually didn’t use quite as much of those initial blogs as I had thought because, now that I had more words, I realised that was actually an asset to deal with something so sensitive and nuanced. And so, I actually rewrote a lot of that content.
The blogs, if anything, became like an outline in some ways, that I referenced a lot but I really didn’t keep a ton of it in the final printed format.
Belinda Pollard: That’s interesting. I actually wrote a book, a few years ago, that was based on a bunch of blog posts and I found that the blog material was enslaving me, in a way, and I felt that it didn’t have the clarity and the flow that it needed. So, I actually ended up, later on, coming back at it again and almost starting from a blank page with just the same ideas.
Did you move to a blank page or did you still keep the blog materials in the document you were writing?
Kelly Needham: No, I actually ended up referencing them for my own research but I just kind of got rid of it because of the same reason. I started with my printed blogs and then I moved them into a Word document. Okay, well, I’ll write from here. And it did feel really enslaving and it felt like it hindered me. And if anything, it felt like this is the time to write something fresh and new.
The content’s the same, the truth in it is the same but I felt like I needed to come at it from different angles and address things a little bit differently. So, when I kind of moved away from those blog posts was actually when I was able to do a lot better writing. But that took some time because you feel like, “I did all this work already. I wrote all these blogs but I really don’t want to waste them!”
So, you feel a little bit tied to them and why write something new? I already gave my best effort back then, but getting rid of them actually freed me up to do a better job.
Belinda Pollard: And what was the path from there to publication?
Kelly Needham: Well, I started on the journey to really just self-publish. I didn’t have a lot of connections with publishers and I didn’t really know how to get them.
I had some people who had coached me who had published books themselves and said, “Hey, I can maybe make a connection for you.” There’s a writer who said, “Some of you have a book burning in your bones,” and I’m like, I have to get this out of me just so that I will be relieved.
That’s how I felt about that book. I don’t care if it’s self-published or published by somebody, I just need to get done with it. So, I’d actually been intending to self-publish and it was in the process of writing the book, outlining it, that I had a connection happen that was unanticipated with a literary agent.
Again, there was a testing. These are all really interesting partnerships we make, especially with our own work, and so when I had a conversation, I actually talked to two different agents, now that I’m remembering it, and one of them, I really didn’t resonate with him and when I shared the material of the book, he clearly didn’t get it.
Again, I was like I’d rather just self-publish the book than try and fight for a publishing deal. That wasn’t as important to me. But then the second agent I talked to, I really connected with and felt like they understood and really saw a need for the book like I did. And they were willing to work with me and I was willing to do that with them and it’s through that partnership that some opportunities opened for a few publishing houses here in the States.
But even then, it was like, this is my book baby. Again, I’d rather self-publish unless I’m partnered with somebody who really understands this content and believes in it with me but I did find a publisher who understood the material and actually was interested in it for personal reasons, their editor was, in particular.
It was that conversation that made me realise, “Okay. I think I could actually partner with this editor and with this publisher for this content.” So, that whole process was probably a year and a half.
Belinda Pollard: You made it a team sport!
With your blog, did you already have quite an audience so that you would have had that readership already there to give to a publisher?
Kelly Needham: I had a decent audience but, again, who are you comparing to? There’s so many different ways to think about that but I probably, at the time – how many people on my email subscription list – it was probably over a thousand. So, I would say a decent audience but not like what some other people stateside were pulling. Even my social media, when you make a proposal for a publisher, they want to know all those numbers. How many people follow you and honestly, it was more than total obscurity. I had more than like 80 people following but it wasn’t anything to write home about.
I think it really was that this editor, at this publisher, believed in the content and there really wasn’t anything else out there at the time addressing the topic in the way that I was. And so, I think it was those two combinations of things that she really fought for, for the book, with the team at the rest of the publishing house that was maybe on the fence.
That connection of her really believing in the content, I think, is what made it possible. So, I had a little bit of an audience but it wasn’t, at that point, anything huge.
Donita Bundy: Kelly, as writers, we may say it’s all about impact, that true success is depth of effect not numbers of sales, but in truth, we all want to sell books and have an impact.
How can we tackle feelings of failure when we don’t see the results?
Kelly Needham: That is the tension, isn’t it?
I think it’s not wrong to want to sell books and I think, how a book sells or how many people read a book and share it, is telling us something about how content is resonating with people. So, it is information that, I think, is helpful.
I pay attention to it, a little bit, and I want to know that what I’m writing is connecting with people who read it and if it’s not, I would like to know what’s not resonating so that I can shift gears or see what I can’t see; see my blind spots.
But at the same time, this is something I tell myself, there are books out there that sell like crazy and I read some of them and I think to myself, I could write that. There are books that are easy to write that aren’t saying much but sell well for one reason or another or maybe it’s just the person has the right connections or personality or all those things and people read it and put it down and move on.
I would rather my books succeed in this way, that every person who does pick it up that my writing creates a fork in the road for them, that there is a choice they have to make after encountering what I’m writing about. Either to stay the same but they have to do that intentionally or to go a different direction because of what has been shared. And if less people read the book but more of those readers have an encounter like that that is shifting for them, it is changing the trajectory of their lives even just a little bit, that actually, I think, has a longer impact. It might be less in number but I think, over time, the impact and the success of it, I would say is actually greater than like a flash in the pan of, “Whoa, sold a lot of books! But we all moved on from it and went to the next one.”
That is a type of success, maybe, and you could go after that, but I’d rather go after the intentional impact of individual readers. So, I do think numbers and sales matter a little bit but that’s at least what I’m fighting for. And sometimes I’ll ask the Lord for it. God, would you help me?
How many people write to their authors when they read their book? I don’t do that very often. I don’t read a book and then find out how to contact the author and write them but I will ask God, “Will You just help me hear stories, just a few, of how this book is resonating with people?” And that enough is helpful to me to know. Okay. It’s doing what I had hoped it was doing and I can rest easy knowing I don’t know half the stories. I’ve just got to, in faith, put it out there and trust that God’s going to put it in the hands that need it.
Donita Bundy: That’s the encouragement, isn’t it? We cannot see the impact that our work will have on others and we will never know to the full extent, but perhaps that’s encouragement for all of us to reach out to the author of books that we’ve read and had an impact.
I have to admit, I received something recently that was similar to that and it just was mind blowing and I thought, “Yes!” Perhaps we can all do that in reverse and actually connect with that. Thanks for that, Kelly.
Alison Joy: Kelly, the subtitle of Purposefooled says “chasing your dreams, finding your calling and reaching for greatness will never be enough”. Is it wrong to chase our dreams, to strive for greatness in our writing and how do we know when we’ve found it?
Kelly Needham: Yes, my subtitle’s a little punchy there, isn’t it? That was intentional to get people intrigued in it.
I do believe what it says. But I don’t think it’s wrong to chase dreams. I just don’t think it will satisfy us in the way that sometimes we think it will. And that’s really what the theme of that book is that I do think we’re made for transcendent meaning and purpose and I think every heart hungers for that but I don’t think any amount of achievement can accomplish it.
That’s what I think the book of Ecclesiastes is about in the Bible. You have a man who accomplished everything, did it all. He climbed the mountain we’re all trying to climb and did everything better than us and says, essentially, there’s nothing here. Nothing more than was at the bottom of the mountain, as well.
Meaning is really found in a person. Meaning is found in the person of God and so, when it comes to writing, if I could write on a piece of paper my wildest dreams for writing, the books I’d want to write, the time I’d want to write them, the success I would want them to have, whether that’s impact or numbers or both, all of those things, the right team of people around me, if I’ve got it all, it still wouldn’t be enough. And so, I don’t think it’s wrong to chase it, but just why am I going after it and is it something I’m holding with closed hands – I have to have this to be okay. If I do, that’s a lose-lose battle. You get it, it’s not going to be enough. It’s what every person who has an immense amount of fame or seeing them deal with, they got everything they’ve wanted? They’re not okay.
Or even if I don’t get it, that’s okay. I’m free to fail and I’m free to chase things so I don’t think it’s wrong to chase those things but it really isn’t going to satisfy the deepest needs in me. Which I think, actually, makes us better writers because we’re not so attached to, “I have to succeed to be okay.”
I’m okay before I did anything. So, now I’m free to give my best at this and even if that means taking a risk and I fall on my face; it’s okay. I can pick up and start again.
Belinda Pollard: You feel like this will be the thing and then when you get to that thing, it crumbles and you’re trying to move onto the next thing and the next thing. Working with authors, I know so many who are just so starry eyed. “It’s going to be so exciting when my first book is published,” and then they’re like, “Was it meant to feel like this because it doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel?”
How do you think we’ve picked up these false narratives about what writing will be like and how do you think we can deal with those in particular?
Kelly Needham: Well, I think that comes from what we’re seeing culturally, what we see celebrated culturally. What we celebrate is what we think will satisfy, generally.
It’s true for my kids, too. What I make much of and celebrate, they tend to gravitate toward. When we look at the culture around us which is, by and large, not Christian people, and many of them don’t have a sense of meaning coming from a higher power. You have a world driven by humans and human accomplishment being the end-all and be-all of what this world has to offer.
If there’s no life beyond this or there’s no greater being beyond us, then all we have is us. And we are left to be the protagonist and the hero that is on a mission to accomplish something and so, human achievement and accomplishment becomes the end-all, be-all of life and why people are famous. People are famous because they’ve accomplished something, generally, most of the time. Whether it’s in music or acting or writing.
And we’re seeing it put before us all the time. And so, I think, that’s just teaching us as we watch it happen, “Oh, okay. That’s where meaning is found. I need to achieve something even if it can’t be on that level, I’m going to do this.”
So, I think that’s why that’s happening. For me personally, I have to really steward my mind and my imagination on a daily basis as I’m seeing things. Sometimes when I’m on the internet, on my phone, social media, whatever, and I’m seeing the cool things that the algorithm puts in front of me of people doing awesome stuff.
And I will tell myself, “Jesus, you said, ‘Apart from you, we can do nothing.’ And many of these people, I’m seeing their great achievements, and they don’t trust You. That means that in the final analysis, these great human achievements are really a type of nothing and it looks really fancy but it’s still empty.
So, would You help me have eyes to see what is something and what You value and I’ll just daydream sometimes and think about that.”
If God were peering over and looking at all the people on the earth, what would He be impressed with? What would He look at and go, “I love that. I see that.” That is impressive to me.
And even just doing that exercise regularly helps me to go, “Okay. I want to be in that bucket of impressive, not the worldly bucket of impressive.” But it just takes a type of intentionality and effort to move myself from one to the other because every day it’s screaming at me: This is where meaning is found. Chase achievement in your own way.
Donita Bundy: So, Kelly, what advice would you give someone whose achievements have not matched up with the goals that they’ve set?
Kelly Needham: I would say, 1) welcome to the club, maybe! I don’t know many people that that disparity is not there. There are very few people. And also, 2) if you did achieve everything you had ever set out to do, you’d probably feel pretty discouraged because, on the other side of it, you realise, “Oh, I’m still left wanting.”
I think about what you said, Belinda, earlier. People think they’re going to release and publish their first book and be like, “That’s amazing!” If anything, I think there’s a type of post-partum depression, post-book depression, that happens. You release your book into the world and there’s all this energy.
And then, I just want to forget, after my first book, feeling that way, just discouraged and like, “Why do I feel sad and despondent?” because I put all this work into this thing and it did turn out how I wanted and, man, if all my hope was in that achievement, then that’s really just disappointing.
If your achievements haven’t met the goals you’ve set, 1) I think that’s just normal, and, 2) what if they’re even bigger goals you didn’t set for yourself that you’ve met. I think, even just to keep writing despite perceived failure, whatever that is, I’m not even saying it is failure, just perceived failure, is quite a feat in and of itself, that I think is impressive. It’s something that everybody does.
There are many people who try and pick up their pen, so to speak, their keyboard, and start doing it and at the first sign of failure, they quit. And so, to even just continue doing something you feel called to do when it seems to not be panning out how you really want, is actually quite a great achievement.
So, even though your achievements might not have met the goals you set, you might have achieved plenty of other unbelievable things that are impressive in their own right if you just had eyes to see it.
Donita Bundy: Yes, maybe its about a change or a shift in perspective and maybe a resetting of goals.
Belinda Pollard: Any maybe things that we won’t know until heaven.
Kelly Needham: Yes. I think so. I think there are so many things in the New Heaven, New Earth. God said, “The things whispered in secret are going to be shouted from roof tops,” which is very terrifying in one moment but also really encouraging in the other. There are so many days, we’re talking to writers right now, I mean, who doesn’t resonate with this. There are so many days where you’re like, “I can’t do this.”
My first book, my whole journal in that season is filled with page after page of, “I can’t write this book. I can’t write this book. It’s not going to come together. This is an impossible task.” And I’m spending hours just typing a little bit and then I’m on my knees like, “God, I don’t know what to do next. I’m scared and nervous.”
All those moments of trying to trust Him. What an encouragement that those moments will be rewarded, they will be seen later, and maybe, what I think are my greatest achievements in this life, maybe are books I’ve written or things like that, that God will, instead, pull back the curtain and go, “You thought it was that but actually this was more impressive!”
And that we’ll get to see that about other lives. People who just have accomplished great feats of achievement of faith in other ways that no one saw because it was done in secret, that it will be made public and put on display and they will be entrusted with things because of that. It’s so fun to think about that. That perspective shift has really helped empower me to continue doing the work of writing, which is a very hidden work, by and large.
Belinda Pollard: Beautiful thoughts.
Alison Joy: So, the Gracewriters slogan is Christian Writers Changing Popular Culture; what are your thoughts on that?
Kelly Needham: I love it! I want to be part of the team. Just talking to you guys and as I was even perusing some other episodes that you’ve done, I think what a great thing for Christians to do. To get into the Arts and not necessarily to write Christian books but to, as Christians, do their craft with excellence and some of the things I’ve heard you guys say, to even write characters into your books that aren’t just portraying people of faith as just terrible human beings which is, by and large, what exists out there. But even that is, I think, a great way to help shape people’s imaginations and thoughts about things.
I think the effort of Christians in the Arts is really important and needed and has not always been something people have seen as important if it doesn’t have a very upfront-facing Jesus banner on it. Sometimes, we tend to dismiss it but I actually think it’s really important that Christians make excellent Art that actually is above and beyond what the culture’s writing.
We serve the all-creative God, so our Art should be even more excellent and the World should look around and go, “If you want a great book, go read a Christian author.” Not because it’s a Christian book, or if you want to watch a great movie, go find a person who produced it or directed it is a Christian, they make the best Art even if I don’t agree with their ideology. Now, that’s obviously not how people think but I think they should and I think that is an important effort to make and I think that takes more than just one or two people to do it.
So, I love y’all slogan and I think it’s really important to encourage people to step up to the plate in that way.
Belinda Pollard: Thank you! Love that. Love those insights. Wow!
Kelly, where can people find you online?
Kelly Needham: The easiest place would be to go to the website I actually share with my husband, jimmyandkelly.com and there you can find an assortment of things that we do individually and together; find places to follow us online, on social media.
We’re both on Instagram and Facebook but if you go to jimmyandkelly.com you will be able to find all sorts of places there to see all of what we’re doing.
Belinda Pollard: Sounds great. How about I pray for you before we finish up?
Kelly Needham: That would be delightful; thank you.
Belinda Pollard: Heavenly Father, we thank you for Kelly. We thank you for all of the ideas and insights that she’s brought into this episode today.
And what an encouragement for so many Gracewriters out there who are wrestling with similar issues, practical issues, issues of mindset and purpose and goals. And we pray that You will continue to bless her abundantly, with her family, with her writing, with her podcasting.
And that You will also encourage all the other Gracewriters out there who are trying to figure out what their purpose is and how to be content with what You are calling them to do as writers.
And we ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Kelly Needham: Amen.
Belinda Pollard: Kelly Needham, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
Kelly Needham: Thank you, guys, for having me.
Belinda Pollard: Thank you, Donita Bundy and Alison Joy. I’m Belinda Pollard and we will see you next time on the Gracewriters podcast.
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