Novel Deep Dive: Reverse Engineering Today's Bestsellers

Welcome to Novel Deep Dive: Reverse Engineering Today's Bestsellers, the video podcast where we look beyond what makes a current bestselling novel memorable to discover how it works.

Freelance fiction editor Miranda Darrow invites authors, editors, and writing professionals to reverse engineer today's bestselling fiction and uncover practical writing craft techniques writers can apply to their own stories.

Every episode focuses on one novel, one writing craft topic, ranging from story structure to POV to character arcs and more. These discussions include plenty of spoilers—because sometimes the best way to understand a great story is to take it apart and see how it was built.

This trailer explains the concept for this series and highlights the writing craft aspects we'll explore in some upcoming episodes from Season 1 including:

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Fourth Wing

Just for the Summer

Atmosphere

The Will of the Many

Missing White Woman

and more! The first six episodes will be available September 1, 2026 with new episodes every two weeks all season.