WHY DOES MCKINLEY VALENTINE WRITE?

Publications: List of articles & fiction publications

Noè

Welcome to Why Write, a super short podcast that asks writers just that, why they write. Hi, I’m Noè Harsel, a writer and Chair of Writers Victoria, and I’m excited to chat to a diverse group of writers and simply ask, why write? I’m glad you’re here with me.

Today we have McKinley Valentine. McKinley Valentine is a neurodivergent writer who reads more Wikipedia articles than can possibly be healthy. She makes The Whippet, a cult hit newsletter of esoterica, unsolicited advice and zero contemporary politics. She is a writer researcher for the ABC’s Hard Quiz and her short fiction has been published in Fantasy Magazine, Seizure, and Andromeda’s Spaceways’ Inflight Magazine.

So welcome to Why Write, McKinley and your writing life is really diverse–from the Sci Fi writing to your business writing, to your newsletter writing, which we all know about, I just feel that there’d be so many reasons why you write. So I’m really excited for this chat. So let’s get right to it. The big question. Tell us McKinley, why do you write?

McKinley

So weirdly, when I agreed to do this podcast, the second I hung up the phone, I was just like, hang on a second, I have no idea. I just do it. Which is weird for me, because I’m usually pretty self aware and try to understand my own motivations for things. And so I think it just didn’t occur to me not to. Seems like the kind of thing that you would opt-out of, rather than opt-in kind of thing. I need to be doing or making something that is outside of, not capitalism, because writing is very much part of capitalism, but outside of what someone else’s project, or someone else is paying me to do, which I suppose is talking about autonomy. But it has to be producing something. I also, you know, I see friends, I play board games, I read books, but that doesn’t fill that need. I think that humans just have an innate need to make stuff. Like when you make a bookshelf, and you put it together yourself.

Noè

I mean, I love that. And it’s so true about that making of things and you know, your newsletter, The Whippet is so unique. It’s incredibly well loved. It’s pretty much everyone’s favourite newsletter. So can you perhaps tell us a little bit about that? And about what it’s like to write that?

McKinley

Yeah, so I actually have a why I write specifically for The Whippet. Because I have an enormous urge, when I see anything interesting, I immediately want to share it with someone else. And if I can’t, I get frustrated. And I feel like what was the point of even seeing that cool thing if I couldn’t tell someone about it.

And the thing about making recommendations is if you just link to it, nobody will click that link, or if you say read this book, it’s good, no one will read that book. You have to pretty much give a persuasive spiel about what the value of that thing is. Which sounds a bit like you shouldn’t have to persuade something if you just want to recommend them something, but the fact is, people won’t do it if you don’t. And because I desperately want to share things with people, I write the persuasive, little spiel about why they should, or the you know, teaser text of what I thought was fascinating about it. And I think even I would go further and say that I want people to understand what it is that I was excited about in that… I’m not… I’ve heard some people say that they write to express themselves. And I don’t think that’s the case for me. But I write to point out things that I love in the world. And that is sort of an expression of self.

Noè

That’s beautiful. I mean, that ability that you have, and that desire that you have, to share the love and to, you know, in a way, to be able to sort of say I want to show this to you. But I want to show this as to why you should be loving it, not just that you’ll love it. But these are the reasons why. I mean, I’ve heard you say, and you’re quite an advocate of the newsletter form itself. Can you tell me why that you love newsletters, or what makes a good newsletter in your mind?

McKinley

A big part of why I love them is that they are outside of SEO, like algorithms and stuff like that. So you don’t need to tailor them to what Google or Facebook is going to decide that it feels like showing people that week. Whatever you write shows up in people’s inbox. There’s this idea of transactional versus relational writing. So transactional is when I say, you know, I want to know how to make this recipe and I Google it, I get the recipe and I don’t know who wrote it, never go back there again. Relational writing is when you like that writer’s voice and really you’re there for whatever it is they want to say to you. And newsletters and podcasts are really, really built for relational writing.

Noè

So you feel that you’ve got this one-on-one connection with the people that you’re actually writing for this relationship building.

McKinley

Yeah. And I feel like I’m very free to talk about a huge variety of things, because I’ve built enough trust that people will give it a go, even if it’s outside of what they might have been expecting.

Noè

And do you feel, do you feel a sense of pressure? I mean, I know that for you, it sounds to me from what you’re saying, that because you have this sense of relationship, and you feel very free in it, but do you still feel a pressure to deliver?

McKinley

Yeah, absolutely. My god, yeah. Especially because, I mean, it’s every two weeks. And yeah, sometimes I’m really, really busy. But that was kind of why I started it, because I hadn’t been writing for years when I started it. And I was really sad about that. And so I wanted to give myself a deadline that I treated as seriously as I would treat a client’s deadline. And that means that in the beginning, sometimes I was staying up until 5am to finish because I hadn’t started until midnight that day.

Noè

And so how do you find that this newsletter… the newsletter writing for you, is different to all the other writing you do? Because you do all this business writing and this SEO writing that you’re sort of talking about? Is it freer? Or for you? Does it release something, a need in you?

McKinley

It’s freer, in the sense that it can always follow what I’m interested in that week, and if I lose interest in something, I don’t have to keep writing about it.

Noè

How did you know that this, this way of writing was you? That The Whippet, the way that it’s sort of freeform flows of thought and the almost stream of consciousness and in your desires and interests that that was where you are gonna follow? Were there many sort of fallen by the wayside newsletters in its wake?

McKinley

So if you look at the early Whippets, it’s a lot drier, and it’s a lot more: here’s just the article and not much of my voice. And that was because I had terrible, terrible, terrible anxiety about sharing writing with people. And so I sort of was like, well, if I’m pointing to these other articles, then people can just skip the bit that I wrote. And they can read that. And that way, I felt that was kind of carrying the weight, and I didn’t have as much pressure on me. But as I got more comfortable with it, I started, sort of, writing more rather than just sharing the articles. And when I, every single time, I would write something that felt like it was a little too vulnerable, or too weird, or too far, everyone responded really positively. So it just encouraged me to keep going in that direction.

I really liked that it is a way to keep in touch with people. I’ve heard newsletters called ‘networking for introverts’, and I think that is really true. It’s even like, increasingly now if I’m going to be hired by someone, they’ve already read a bit of The Whippet even just from Googling me, and you know, as employers do, and it means that I feel like I have to do a lot less, I don’t know, presenting a certain self in the workplace, because they already know what the what they’re getting into, I guess at that point, and that makes life easier.

Noè

So I suppose that’s really interesting for me, because t’s different type of writing, right? So your newsletter writing is quite different to your business writing in terms of style, but you find that they quite complement each other, regardless?

McKinley

I think that what they have in common is that you’re always trying to think about what is the value for the reader? And what rather than just what do I want to say, which happens with businesses a lot. They’re like, ‘we want to tell them about this new feature we’ve excitingly developed’ and you’re like, ‘okay, they don’t care,’ you need to figure out why they would care about it, and how that is valuable to them. It’s the same with really any kind of writing.

Noè

I think it’s true isn’t it’s all about the storytelling.

McKinley

Except a little less brutal sounding, but yeah.

Noè

All about the storytelling in the end. Now, I really want to ask about the ABC’s Hard Quiz. Tell me a little bit about that. So I just find that fascinating working for them.

McKinley

Right. So I got asked to audition for that just because someone who works there reads The Whippet. And obviously was like, ‘we need someone who can research topics and find what’s interesting and what the story is in that topic. And it looks like you already do that. So do you want to try out?’ I had to write some sample questions. Yeah, and I just finished up a 10 week contract for season seven. And that was enormously fun.

Noè

Amazing. So what you do there, is you research the questions, write, the questions, how does that work?

McKinley

So it’s usually a couple of days straight, just pure research. And then you’re kind of pulling out things that you think might make interesting facts that can be turned into questions. And then you spend a huge amount of time workshopping the question, like way more than you would think is possible for like a 20 word question, or something like that. Because it has to be that there’s no possible other answer that anyone could give. People will say anything. So you have to be really, really precise with it. Which is sort of like, I don’t know, if you’re putting a haiku together or something, where you have to be like that–making sure the word has the exact correct meaning that you want and things like that. Which is very satisfying because normally with most other kinds of work, you have deadlines and you don’t get that much time to spend getting the phrasing right on 20 words are so.

Noè

Amazing. I love it. That is so cool. Thank you so much for giving us such an insight into all the types of writing practice that you do and I just love the focus on the newsletter because it’s something I don’t think a lot of us take the time to appreciate, or spend as much time reading as we used to. So it’s really great to see that happening. Thank you so much McKinley for being our guest.

McKinley

Thank you so much.

Noè

Thanks for listening. We would love to hear why you write, tell me at whywrite.com.au

Why write is a Writers Victoria podcast. All programs and information about becoming a member with us at writers Victoria is available at writersvictoria.org.au

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Why Write was recorded at Brand Music and engineered by Michael Burrows.

Original Music by Brand Music.

WHY DOES MCKINLEY VALENTINE WRITE?

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