Meet Sabrina Fedel

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sabrina Fedel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sabrina below.

Hi Sabrina , we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?

Writing is a difficult profession because it can take a lot of rejection and critique to get to a place where you have agents, editors, and readers who support your work. It’s very important for anyone in a challenging profession to surround themselves with supportive friends and colleagues, especially within the profession. Writing can be very solitary, but it is possible to find community through professional writing organizations, writing groups, bookstores, libraries, and writing programs, whether full scale courses that lead to degrees or classes put on by magazines, writing organizations, or schools.
For me, it’s been really important to grow my writing community and to have their support. Knowing that people want me to succeed and having them cheer me on when I do has helped me to believe in myself.
I’ve also had to learn to accept, rather than deflect, compliments. I’ve always struggled with being able to believe that people really mean it when they compliment me. So this is an ongoing effort, but I’ve definitely learned over time to notice and stop myself when I start to dismiss a compliment. I don’t have a place where I collect these kinds of compliments, but I often wish I had the time to make a little scrapbook for those times when I feel doubtful about myself. Not everyone will believe you or love your work, but for those people who do, that’s a hug we should carry with us.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m a writer, and the most special part about that is being able to share something you’ve created with other people and find connections. My latest young adult novel, All Paths Lead to Paris, is an escapist romcom, but it features a female lead who lives with a math disability (known as dyscalculia). Although the book came out this past summer, I’ve had several readers reach out to me to tell me how much that representation has meant for them. It’s a little overwhelming to hear someone say “Your book changed my life,” when you’ve written what is mostly a lighthearted romance, but it also really touching. As someone who is math disabled, and has a math disabled child, this representation really mattered to me. So to have others who share this disability let me know that it mattered to them, too, has been really rewarding.
One of my favorite aspects of being a writer is doing school visits because it’s really humbling to meet students and have them be impacted by your work. My first novel, Leaving Kent State, is based on the Kent State shootings of 1970, and the relevance of those times to today’s turbulent world is a reminder of why it’s so important to understand our past. So, for me, being a fiction writer is a very special way to connect with others as we try to understand the world.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

In addition to being a writer, I’m also an attorney. Three qualities that I think are relevant to both of these professions are persistence, patience, and resilience.
Persistence is important in writing because it can take a long time to hone your craft enough to have agents and editors take a chance on you. In law, persistence is important because finding the right fit for your skill set can be challenging. When people think of lawyers, they often think of trial lawyers, prosecutors, or corporate lawyers. In reality, there are many more types of law and finding the right fit can be a learning process.
Patience is a great skill for both writing and law because projects can take a long time to come to fruition. Some projects move more quickly than others, but having the patience to keep working at the difficult parts of a project can mean the difference between success and failure.
Resilience is important in both writing and law because we aren’t always going to be successful. There will be times where we aren’t able to sell a writing project or to get the legal outcome we were hoping for. Resilience is the ability to take the lessons learned from your failures and use them to shape better future outcomes.
For me, each of these skills has been critical to shaping my careers.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?

The most impactful things that my parents did for me was to bring me up as a full member of their world. What I mean by that is that my brother and I were always a part of what was happening in our house, which was always full of guests and conversation. We were never told to “go and play,” or to “leave the grown ups alone.” We were surrounded by adults as they discussed literature and world politics and the price of meat at the grocery store and we were always allowed to ask questions or interject observations. Our natural curiosity of the world was always encouraged. We were never talked down to or told that we wouldn’t understand something because it was too grown up. This fostered our curiosity and allowed us to hear various perspectives on social issues, although my parents also always let us know what they considered to be right and wrong when it came to important issues such as how to treat others. We were encouraged to think for ourselves, but we were given guardrails to help guide us along the way. This structured freedom was instrumental for me to become a writer.

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