The 7am Novelist

We hear from two writers today: The first received some not-so-helpful feedback from a single agent about the “strength of her writing.” So is the agent just wrong or is there something there? Most likely it’s the first, but if you’re worried about your writing style, we’ve got some pointers. The second finds her writing “boring.” What to do? We’ve got writers Jessica Bird, Kathleen Flynn, and Andrea Meyer to help us out.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Jessica Bird is a scholarship graduate of GrubStreet’s competitive Novel Incubator program, a past scholarship resident at Salty Quill Writers’ Retreat for Women, and was a finalist for the 2023 Edith Wharton Writers in Residence Program; she’s currently at work remapping her manuscript The Only Brother, the story of a man searching to discover why his older brother, presumed dead, survived his abduction when they were children but never returned to their family.

Kathleen Flynn is a classical singer, educator at Berklee College of Music and Tufts University, and an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. 

Andrea Meyer is the author of Room for Love, a romcom based on an article she wrote for the NY Post, for which she pretended to look for a roommate as a ploy to meet men, and she’s currently querying Manny, a literary romp about a Cambridge “manny” and the women who throw his life into chaos.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

Research! The fear of it. The overwhelming abundance of possibilities. And everything we don’t know! (Plus everything that we want to know because, oh, that’s really interesting. I’ll just click on…) We’ve got authors in both nonfiction and fiction, Lauren Aguirre and Anjali Mitter Duva, to help us out.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Lauren Aguirre is a Grubstreet Novel Incubee, a science writer and producer, and the author of the 2021 non-fiction book, The Memory Thief and the Secrets Behind How We Remember: A Medical Mystery.

Anjali Mitter Duva is the author of the historical novel Faint Promise of Rain and the co-founder of Galiot Press, a new publishing company ushering in a sea change for the written word.

Photo by Michaela Murphy on Unsplash

We hear from a short story writer today dipping her toes into her first novel and having trouble getting her characters to commit. How is character development different between a novel and short story? And how can you wrangle with a character who suffers from a short attention span? We’ve got authors Christine Murphy, Emily Ross, and Joanna Rakoff to help us out.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Christine Murphy is a graduate of Grubstreet's Novel Incubator program. Her novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. 

Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, and she’s currently shopping her second novel The Black Sea, an adult mystery/thriller set in her hometown of Quincy MA.

Joanna Rakoff is the author of the bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age.  

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

We talk to Aube Rey Lescure just days away from launching her debut, RIVER EAST, RIVER WEST. And guess what? It’s not all the dream she’d thought it would be. We talk about what a lot writers go through when publishing their first books (or even their tenth), how she got to this stage in the first place, and how she’s forging ahead on her second novel.

To watch a recording of our interview, click here. These recordings are only available for a few days. Missed it? Check out the podcast version of the 7am Novelist on your fave podcast platform.

To find Lescure’s debut and many books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. 

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. She grew up between Provence, northern China, and Shanghai, and graduated from Yale University in 2015. She worked in foreign policy before becoming an itinerant writer. Her debut novel, River East, River West, is forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins in January 2024. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions. WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Litro, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022. She currently works as the Deputy Editor at Off Assignment. 

We hear from one of our listeners today who is having trouble beginning her second book after she’s finished her first and finds herself in the querying stage. A tough place to be! But lots of writers have gone through it. We’ve got some suggestions for her (as well as for you) about how to dive into the messiness of a new project, drop expectations, and avoid focusing on the end point. Authors Christine Murphy (Notes on Surviving the Fire), Kasey LeBlanc (Flyboy), and Aaron Hamburger (Hotel Cuba) help us out.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Christine Murphy is a graduate of Grubstreet's Novel Incubator program. Her novel is under contract and forthcoming soon. 

Kasey LeBlanc is a graduate of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program, a contributor at WriterUnboxed, and the author of Flyboy, his debut YA novel, which will be published by Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins in May 2024. 

Aaron Hamburger is the author of four books, including his latest novel Hotel Cuba, released in May.

Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

We hear from a writer of historical fiction today who is worried about a lot of interrelated issues: her addiction to research, using her writing time “well,” and how to get excited again when she can’t make up her mind on too many aspects of the book. We’ve got writers Timothy Deer and Hesse Phillips to help us out.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Timothy Deer is an executive assistant by day and novelist by night, currently putting the finishing touches on the Folly of Harvest, the story of a dancer who gets caught up in a show that isn’t quite what it seems.

Hesse Phillips is a Novel Incubator graduate whose debut novel Lightborne, about the mysterious death of queer Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, comes out in the UK on May 2nd 2024.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

We hear from two writers today with very common writing issues. The first is trying to get over the “boredom” he hits at the midpoint. The second wants help with finishing (and overcoming the perfection that blocks her from being able to do so). We’ve got two authors helping us out. Nancy Crochiere is fresh off the launch of her award-winning debut novel, GRACELAND, and Sara Shukla will be launching her debut, PINK WHALES, in June.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Sara Shukla is an editor for Cognoscenti, WBUR’s ideas and opinions page, a graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator, and her novel PINK WHALES is publishing in June, 2024, from Little A. 

Nancy Crochiere is a former humor columnist whose comic debut novel, GRACELAND, published in May 2023, was named a best book of summer by Parade, Woman’s World, and Deep South Magazines.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

We hear from two writers today who suffer from some pretty common obstacles when it comes to what holds them back from their writing. The first talks about her submission anxiety, a fear of both failure and success. The second wonders how she can write character-driven prose instead of plot-driven prose that pushes her characters into unlikely scenarios. We’ve got writers and performers Liesl Swogger and Kathleen Flynn to help us out.

Watch a recording of our live webinar here. The audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.

Liesl Swogger is a graduate of Novel Incubator, with a new pretend deadline of March for her current revision of her novel, A Single Season. Her novel is based in part on her own experience in the world of ballet.

Kathleen Flynn is a classical singer, educator at Berklee College of Music and Tufts University, and an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. 

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

What is spitballing? A way to open up new ideas and possibilities in response to a writer’s story in a way that brightens their imagination and allows them to “steer into the curve,” making the story truly their own. Michael Lowenthal, who teaches a similar workshop method with the Story Lab at Lesley University, gives us some pointers about how to make the process work and what to avoid.

There’s still time to register for our live webinar, beginning tomorrow. Email me at 7amnovelist.substack.com if you want to take part. You can also watch the recordings here on our SubStack page or listen to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Subscribe to our Substack page for updates.

Want “spitballing” help for one of your own writing obstacles? Subscribers can email a one-minute-or-less recording (Wave, MP4, or M4A format) detailing “What’s Holding You Back?” to [email protected]. If making a recording seems impossible, submit your responses in writing (under 200 words).

Michael Lowenthal is the author of four novels: The Same Embrace (Dutton, 1998); Avoidance (Graywolf Press, 2002); Charity Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), which was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007″ pick; and The Paternity Test (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Guernica, True Story, and the Kenyon Review, and have been widely anthologized, in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and Best New American Voices 2005. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Out, and many other publications. His first story collection, Sex With Strangers, was published in March 2021. Lowenthal lives in Boston. Since 2003, he has been a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. 

Thank you for reading The 7am Novelist. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Yael Goldstein-Love discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The Possibilities, how she set the tone of her book with an unusual first chapter, how she managed emotion to avoid melodrama, her background as a mother and psychotherapist and how these inform her work, and the best way to use a therapist and therapy itself in your book.

Goldstein-Love’s first pages can be found here.

Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.

Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.

The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.

Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Passion of Tasha Darsky, described as “showing signs of brooding genius” by The New York Times, and The Possibilities, forthcoming in July. She also practices psychotherapy, with a particular interest in the transition to parenthood, and is working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. Her dissertation research focuses on how mothers experience their anxiety for the unknown futures of their children. She is a graduate of Harvard University and currently attends The Wright Institute. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy Blog, The Atlantic online, The Forward, Commentary, and other places. She lives with her six-year-old son and a very patient cat in Berkeley, CA. In another life, she was co-founder and Editorial Director of the literary studio Plympton, which aims to make the digital age a golden age for literature.