The 7am Novelist

Paul Rudnick discusses the first pages of his latest novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, how he discovered Farrell’s character during his writing process, the love story that gave his story its spine, the fever dream of productivity that produced his riveting, rifting style, and how he refuses to take the missteps and messiness of early drafts too seriously.

Rudnick’s first pages can be found here.

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Paul Rudnick is a novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter, whom the New York Times has called, “one of our pre-eminent humorists.” His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world. He has won an Obie Award, two Outer Critics Circle Awards and the John Gassner Playwrighting Award. His novels include SOCIAL DISEASE, I’LL TAKE IT, PLAYING THE PALACE and the YA novels GORGEOUS and IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT. His screenplays include IN & OUT, SISTER ACT, the screen adaptation of JEFFREY, and ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES.  His new novel, FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE, was published in June by Simon&Schuster.

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Julie Gerstenblatt discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Daughters of Nantucket, how her agent encouraged her omniscient-voiced prologue, her use of repetition to prepare the reader for the “great fire” which becomes the ticking clock of the book, the pleasures of dramatic irony, and how authors might best represent points of view that are unlike their own in terms of race, sexuality, class, and time period.

Gerstenblatt’s first pages can be found here.

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

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Julie Gerstenblatt holds a doctorate in education in Curriculum and Instruction from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her essays have appeared in The Huffington Post, Grown&Flown, and Cognoscenti, among others. When not writing, Julie is a college essay coach, as well as a producer and on-air host for A Mighty Blaze. A native New Yorker, Julie now lives in coastal Rhode Island with her family and one very smart poodle. Daughters of Nantucket is her first novel.

Sara Johnson Allen discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Down Here We Come Up, and her long road to publication. We talk about the power of the first pages in keeping you going, the importance of place description and how to make it move, how to find the balance between your front story and larger back story, and why it’s often necessary to put a book aside to understand it fully enough to revise.

Allen’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.

Sara Johnson Allen was raised (mostly) in North Carolina. Her first novel, Down Here We Come Up, is the winner of the 2022 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in August 2023. Her fiction has appeared in PANK Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Reckon Review. She was recently awarded runner-up in the 2022 Third Coast fiction contest. In 2018, she was awarded the Marianne Russo Award for Emerging Writers by the Key West Literary Seminar for her novel-in-progress. In 2019, she received the Stockholm Writers Festival First Pages Prize. She has also been awarded MacDowell fellowships and an artistic grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. When she is not grading papers or chasing after her three kids, she likes to write about ‘place’ and how it shapes us.

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Alyssa Songsiridej discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Little Rabbit, including her process of moving between longhand and typing her pages, a process which helps her quiet her anxieties and keep her early work private. We also talk about her choice to begin and end with the image that sparked her book, how she wrote to discover her character, and how that discovery offered surprises both for herself and for her reader.

Songsiridej’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.

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Alyssa Songsiridej is a fiction writer and editor. Her debut novel, Little Rabbit, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, long listed for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and named a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” Honoree. The novel was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, and more. Her short fiction can be found at StoryQuarterly, The Indiana Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She has been honored and supported by Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, Lighthouse Works, the VCCA, the Vermont Studio Center, KHN Center, MassMoca’s Assets for Artists, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is an editor at Electric Literature.

Elizabeth L. Silver discusses the first pages of her new novel, The Majority, her decision to combine multiple real-life personas (and her imagination) to create a fictional Supreme Justice, her choice of beginning with a prologue-like first chapter to introduce her reminiscent narrator and set up the stakes, and the power of a great first line.

Silver’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.

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Elizabeth L Silver is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Majority (Riverhead, 2023), as well as the memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017), and the novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown, 2013). Her work has been published in seven languages, and optioned for film. Also an attorney, Elizabeth has written for The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and McSweeney’s and currently teaches creative writing with the UCLA Writers Program. She is the founder and director of Onward Literary and lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Nancy Crochiere discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Graceland, the importance of goals for each of her three point-of-view characters, the power of a “goal by request,” and how to work in backstory when a story that is so reliant on the secrets about the past is flying forward from the first scene.

Crochiere’s first pages can be found here.

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For thirteen years, Nancy Crochiere chronicled the ups and downs of family life—including her obsession with George Clooney—in her humorous newspaper column, “The Mother Load,” which ran in The Daily News of Newburyport, and North Andover’s Eagle-Tribune. In 2014, she published a collection of those columns that was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year in humor and the Independent Publishers of New England 2014 Book Award. A graduate of Middlebury College, Nancy earned a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota and is an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. She worked for many years as a development editor for various educational publishers and wrote essays for The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. Once her daughters finished college, Nancy decided to pursue her lifelong dream of writing fiction. The result is Graceland, her first novel.

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Hank Phillippi Ryan discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The House Guest, the all important “save the cat” moment, ensuring that her readers are able to “imagine the film” of her scenes through sensory details and getting them to ask the right questions, including the pivotal “What happens next?”

Ryan’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.

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of fourteen award-winning novels of suspense. National reviews have called her a "master at crafting suspenseful mysteries" and "a superb and gifted storyteller." Her newest novel,THE HOUSE GUEST, received a starred review from LIbrary Journal, calling it "Binge-worhty." She blogs at Jungle Red Writers and Career Authors. She is a co-host at FIRST CHAPTER FUN and a founder and co-host of THE BACK ROOM, and the host of A Crime Time on A Mighty Blaze. She lives in Boston with her husband, a nationally renowned civil rights and criminal defense attorney. Her next book, ONE WRONG WORD, comes out in February.

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Jessica Keener discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Night Swim, recently re-released in a new 10th anniversary edition. We talk about how she straddled the genre line of an adult novel with a young protagonist, the way her frame story helped her understand what the book was all about, and her journey to find her own publisher instead of accepting unwanted changes—only to make the book a bestseller in the end.

Keener’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.

Jessica Keener’s debut novel, Night Swim, was a national bestseller, which was followed by an award-winning collection of stories, Women in Bed. Her second novel, Strangers in Budapest, was an Indie Next pick, an Entertainment Weekly best new book, and a Southern Independent Bookseller Association bestseller. A tenth-anniversary edition of Night Swim was published in March 2023 for which she embarked on a 50-state virtual book club tour. She's been the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council artist grant, a fellowship from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and scholarships for writing excellence from Wesleyan and Brown University. Her features have appeared in The Boston Globe, Agni, O magazine and others. Her essay “The Flow Room,” originally published by WBUR’s Cognoscenti, was included in the award-winning anthology: LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19, which won the 2021 Washington State Book prize. An excerpt from her forthcoming novel, Evening Begins the Day, will be published in June by Image magazine.

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Neema Avashia discusses the first pages of her essay collection and memoir, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, the structural power of list-making, the second person, and her twist on the usual advice: write the specific to convey the universal.

Avashia’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.

Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States from India. She has been a history and Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and now coaches ethnic studies teachers across the distinct. Her debut memoir, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was a Weatherford Award finalist in nonfiction, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in lesbian memoir/biography, a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022, and was named the best LGTBQ+ memoir of 2022 by Book Riot. 

Suzanne Berne discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The Blue Window, how her three points of views added interest and tension in the novel (for herself as much as for the reader), her decision to begin with the most unusual of these vantage points to invite mystery and empathy, and her belief in the relief and necessity of humor.

Berne’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.

Suzanne Berne is the author of five novels: The Dogs of Littlefield, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, and A Crime in the Neighborhood, which won Great Britain’s Orange Prize, now The Women’s Prize. Her latest, The Blue Window, was released in January 2023. She has written frequently for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and published essays and articles in numerous magazines. For many years she taught creative writing, first at Harvard University and then at Boston College and at the Ranier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA. She lives outside of Boston with her husband. They have two daughters.