Inspired By (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
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What inspired Nancy Crampton Brophy's writing career?
Today's story is about a fiction writer who used her own life as inspiration for her books. However, as she would find out, some stories are better left untold. So, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right show, because that's all we do. So if that's of interest to you, please replace the Follow Button's coffee creamer with white paint. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the night of June 1st, 2018, 68-year-old Nancy Crampton Brophy sat in bed with her computer on her lap in the home she shared with her husband in the suburb of Beaverton, Oregon. Nancy was trying to work on her newest book, but for some reason, she just couldn't focus on the chapter she was writing. So Nancy was a romance writer who had actually finished 11 novels, and she also ran a blog with some other romance writers who lived in the area. Now, writing really was Nancy's passion, and she'd been doing it her whole life.
What challenges did Nancy face in her writing journey?
But despite that, she really had not made any real money from writing. She'd never gotten a legitimate publisher to buy one of her books. So those 11 novels she did, well, they had to be self-published and basically had to be free online for anybody to read them. And so in order to keep on writing, she had to have a day job to pay the bills. In the past, she'd run a catering company, but now she worked for Medicare. However, despite not having made it big, at least not financially, as a writer yet, it didn't deter Nancy. I mean, she was totally motivated to keep on writing because she believed that the next thing she wrote was gonna be the thing that finally made her a bestseller and made her famous and financially stable on her writing.
However, tonight, Nancy just felt completely stuck.
How did Nancy and Dan's relationship influence her writing?
She could not think of what to write next. So she leaned back into her pillow and just thought about what her character was going through and tried to think if she'd ever gone through anything similar that might inspire what would need to happen next in the story. So these romance epics that Nancy wrote were very over the top, but she did draw a lot of inspiration from her actual personal life. Most of her work featured very powerful women and had similar themes like freedom and strength and love because Nancy really valued all those things in her own life. The other things all her books had in common was they always had happy endings. And Nancy knew all about happy endings because in some ways, you know, she was living one.
Nancy and her husband, Dan Brophy, had been married for almost 25 years. They had both been married before, and Dan actually had a son and granddaughter from his first marriage. And so the fact that Nancy and Dan had found each other after essentially both of them had been living what, you know, felt like very complete lives to that point, felt like another theme that she wrote about all the time, which was this idea of fate. You know, as if fate is the thing that brought Nancy and Dan together. Dan and Nancy even called themselves soulmates, sort of playing on this idea that really fate had led them together. I mean, they had fights and disagreements like any other couple, but they also knew each other so well that sometimes Nancy felt like they could almost read each other's minds and that sort of got them through any rough patches.
And also another part of the reason that they seemed to work so well together as a couple... was because they gave each other plenty of space to pursue their own interests. They were given freedom, something, again, that Nancy really valued. And so for Nancy, her sense of freedom, her sense of being able to pursue what she wanted to, meant shutting herself away every evening in their little attic bedroom for hours and hours to write. And for Dan, you know, his sense of freedom and his ability to pursue his own interests meant working long hours at a career he loved as a chef and a teacher at the Oregon Culinary Institute.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What inspired Nancy Crampton Brophy's writing career?
0:00–1:17
2
What challenges did Nancy face in her writing journey?
1:17–2:04
3
How did Nancy and Dan's relationship influence her writing?
2:04–7:46
4
What financial struggles did Nancy and Dan encounter?
7:46–10:45
5
What led to the tragic event on June 2nd?
10:45–25:05