Dec. 8, 2024

From Psychology to Fiction Susan Beth Miller's Journey

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Join us on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast as we delve into the world of psychology and fiction with clinical psychologist and author, Susan Beth Miller. Discover how Susan's experiences and insights shape her writing, including her latest young adult novel, "By the Way, I Love You." Learn about the intersection of psychology and storytelling, and get inspired by Susan’s journey from a young writer to a seasoned psychologist and novelist. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that explores the complexities of human nature and the art of crafting compelling narratives.

www.susanbethmiller.com
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600

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00:00:00.719 --> 00:00:09.205
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, um, to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve, cheat.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today, we are joined by a clinical psychologist and author, Susan Miller.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Susan has a lot of experience in the psychology world, and she has a lot of things that she loves. So we're going to be talking to her about her story and everything that she's up to.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So, Susan, thank you so much for joining me.

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> Speaker B>Thank you, Curtis. It's a pleasure to be with you this morning.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Speaker B>Uh, okay. I am a clinical psychologist, as you shared with the audience. I've been doing that work for quite a few decades, I'd say, now. Uh, but I also have a longstanding interest in writing that I'd say goes back even further, probably to a time in my life when I had no idea what a psychologist was. But I did know something about stories, since most kids do. Right. We all, uh, engage with the world through stories, and many young people are drawn to them, and I was one of those folks. Um, so I started writing as a young person and then maintain that through my training as a psychologist. And then when I could get back to it more seriously, I. I, uh, started writing both in the field of psychology and then back to my first love, which was fiction.

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> Speaker B>So that's kind of where I've landed. More recently, uh, have been focusing on fiction writing.

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> Speaker B>And the most recent book published, uh, just last month or at the end of October, was the first young adult novel that I've written called, by the way, I love you. So, a bit of a new terrain for me to, um, move into young adult fiction.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, explain to the listeners what a clinical psychologist is and what they do.

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> Speaker B>Okay. Uh, well, it's a person such as myself who is trained in a variety of things. You know, some psychologists do evaluations of things that might be troubling a person psychologically or even neurologically with respect to brain functioning through testing. But many psychologists, and that's what I'm doing now, are primarily working with people, uh, through psychotherapy. And there's a lot of different approaches to that.

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> Speaker B>Um, but the primary approach for me is very interpersonal.

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> Speaker B>It's sitting down with a person in a small office, or sometimes these days, on a screen, um, and just listening to that person talk about their life, helping them talk about their life, so that that person and me, um, are able to get at some of the roots of what could be causing person difficulty. And of course there's a lot of different types of difficulty that people encounter in life. It, uh, could be mood like depression or anxious reactions, could be, ah, habitual problems in their interpersonal relationships or struggles around their values, all kinds of things. But you know, fundamentally we're all human and we all struggle in ways that are more alike than they are different. So psychology is kind of a guide, helping the person to really get to know themselves better and also to treat themselves more compassionately. Since people tend to be very judgmental in relation to themselves, sometimes in relation to others as well.

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> Speaker B>Um, and the judging, although it can come naturally, it usually isn't very constructive and it doesn't lead you out of difficulty and often just deepens difficulty.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, we'll talk about how your work as a psychologist helps you with your fiction writing or relates to your, you and your fiction writing.

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> Speaker B>Yeah, I do think about that from time to time because there certainly is an intersection between those two areas of interest. Uh, one way that I've thought about it is that it just has to do with character. Um, in that psychologists just by nature are people who are quite interested in, um, the complexity of human beings and all the ways that people share themselves with others. Or sometimes the opposite, they refrain from sharing with others in the world.

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> Speaker B>So people do that in your office as a psychologist, through the stories they tell you, through the stories they don't tell you, you know, through their faces and the way they use language and the way they move gesturally. And all those elements come into play as a writer, uh, especially a fiction writer, you know, as opposed to say a poet or a non fiction writer.

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> Speaker B>Fiction writer is really communicating, uh, through the creation of characters who are, you know, moving about in an invented world. So, uh, lots of learning that a psychologist can do in office and just gathering up of impressions of people, uh, that will feed your fiction and also learning about the complicated situations people find themselves in and how they negotiate those. Those two, you know, come into play very much in fiction writing.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, how do you come up with your subject matters for your novels?

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> Speaker B>Uh, it's been a variety of ways. I think sometimes things have started for me in my psychologist's office. So actually that was the case with this most recent young adult novel. It really started years ago with some, a young person I was working with who had just started college and was making that big transition away from their original family. But in that case, the person had lost a parent at a very young age and really didn't have much m. Of understanding or, uh, even a feeling for how that loss had impacted them and how it was impacting their effort to form a new adult life for themselves and new relationships.

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> Speaker B>So that was really the beginning of this current story, I think, because the young person was. It was a moving experience to work with them and to see the shadow of this lost mother in their current life experience, in many ways that they weren't able to see it. So that was the beginning of this story.

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> Speaker B>Um, and I realized that it also, even though I'd not written young adult novels before, I realized that I had focused a lot on young adults. So the two novels that I had written for an adult audience, an older audience, both had young adults at the center.

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> Speaker B>Um, and then I had also written a psychology book called When Parents have Problems that was speaking directly to young people, teenagers or young adults who have a troubled parent.

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> Speaker B>So maybe an alcoholic parent or an abusive parent, or just someone with very challenging personality, say, a parent who's chronically dishonest. So those young people have been at the center for me. But actually, kind of coming back to your question. So some stories have started for me in my clinical work, but others in events in the larger world. So, for example, I can remember one novel that I wrote that started driving in the car listening to a news story about something that was, um, very moving to me, that was happening very far from my home. But sometimes when I'll hear something, it might be something troubling, say, on a theme of violence, where I'm trying to wrap my head around it more. I noticed that I've often been drawn to trying to understand better and relate more to perpetrators of violence. Sometimes, um, you know, m people who are victims of violence, but also those who originated. So as I'm trying to come to terms with something in my own head, I sometimes will start to think about story.

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> Speaker B>And how might this new story give rise to a fictional story? Uh, maybe one where I'm trying to understand something about the roots of, um, difficult human interactions.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about some of your biggest influences when it comes to writing.

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> Speaker B>Oh, boy. Well, I guess when you asked that question, my mind went in two directions. One was just people who had in some way encouraged me with writing. And then the other direction I went was writers, you know, who, uh, influenced me just by. Through their work. So there certainly have been lots of those starting, you know, from a very young age, stories that would fascinate me.

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> Speaker B>I remember being in the grade school library and um, oh, I guess the way a lot of kids might, you know, just knowing that there was a lot in there that a lot of worlds that you could have access to that might be exciting or interesting. So I used to scan the books for these books that had, uh, a red spine, because those were the biographies that I like to read. So there's something about reading about people's life stories, maybe sort of what you're doing, Curtis, dipping into people's life stories and seeing where they've had struggles and successes. That, um, was exciting. And it's funny the things that you remember from early on. But I remember a particular book that was called Luther Burbank, Boy Scientist. And it was about, you know, this man who later, I believe, hybridized peanut plants. But he, as a young person, figured out how to hybridize plants and come up with plants that had new characteristics. And so, as a very young kid, I was pretty fascinated by that. And Chris didn't understand, uh, the technology at all. So I would walk around in my yard and take pieces off of one plant and another and tape them together and think that I could somehow produce a new one. But I didn't understand much about root systems or anything like that. But, um, there was some inspiration in that. And then, you know, in addition to a great many writers that were influential to me, there were teachers, which I think is true for a lot of people. So, for example, I remember a teacher I had when I was about nine years old.

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> Speaker B>It was a bit of a, you know, serious individual, not the most popular of teachers with the kids.

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> Speaker B>But she had a very positive effect on me. I think she encouraged me to speak up. Um, and she also had an assignment that she'd given us that I remember because it sparked something in me. And it was an assignment that involved, I think the kids were asked to start with, uh, just a noun table, and then add a modifying word. So it would be huge table, and then add another modifying word. So a huge old table. And on and on and on until you had basically a story written about this table. And I was, uh, excited by that experience. There was something about what you could do with these words. It was like creating something out of words. And I had, before that time, enjoyed, um, making things out of clay or making things using paints or sticks and stones in the. You know, out in the woods. But I don't know if I had had that experience that you could actually create something using language that you could feel maybe, um, proud of and just feel that special pleasure of making something new in the world. So that was very important. And certainly other teachers along the way.

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> Speaker B>In some ways, my home life was difficult, and there wasn't a lot of focused attention there.

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> Speaker B>But as a student, you know, if you were willing to do the work, uh, I found that I could get very encouraging attention from teachers, and especially in this area that was starting to be more interesting to me, which was writing.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that people need to be aware of.

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> Speaker B>Well, the most recent was just the completion and publication of the young adult book. By the way, I love you. And then I am working on another novel. But I'd say it's got quite a long ways to go, so you won't be hearing about that one for a while.

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> Speaker B>Um, it's. Yeah, in the earlier stages.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Throw out your contact info so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

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> Speaker B>Uh, sure. I have a website, susanbethmiller.com.

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> Speaker B>uh, of course, books are available where they are these days on Amazon, um, or on bookshop.com, which is a network of independent bookstores. And people can always get a book through their local bookstore by asking that it be ordered. Or you're going to ask your library to order a book, too, and that's another way to get it.

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> Speaker B>And if you do happen to read the book, um, I like to hear from people.

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> Speaker B>I appreciate reviews because my publisher appreciates reviews, so I'll encourage those. Um, oh, and I should also. Curtis, I don't know when your podcast goes live. Um, right now there's a free download of the book on Amazon, Kindle, but I don't know if that syncs up with your timing, so I'm not sure if that will be available.

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> Speaker B>But it's available generally for just a few dollars. As a ebook.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Yeah, it'll be live in the next 10 days.

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> Speaker B>Oh, okay. Well, it might still. It might still be free on Amazon, Kindle. The, uh, ebook, the paperback course, is also for sale.

00:18:59.454 --> 00:19:07.154
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, we'll close this out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about, that you would like to touch on any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Speaker B>Uh, well, let's see. It's Thanksgiving season, so I just encourage people to maybe, uh, think about the things that they do value in their life and possibly something new that you'd like for yourself or a new direction to follow. As we move to the end of this year and into a new year, people think about giving themselves the gift of following some interests that they have that maybe they haven't been able to find the time or focus to pursue.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, ladies and gentlemen, Susan bethmello.com please be sure to check out our, uh, work. Check out our website. Keep up with everything that she's up to. Jump on your favorite podcast app. Follow us, Leave us a review.

00:20:04.396 --> 00:20:20.702
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Share the show thank you for listening and supporting the show. If you have any guests or suggestion topics, Curtis Jackson 1978@att.net is the place to send them. Susan, thank you for, uh, all that you do. And thank you for joining us.

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> Speaker B>Thank you very much, Curtis. My pleasure.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>until next time, stay focused on Living the Dream. Dream.