The 7am Novelist

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, VV Ganeshananthan discusses the first pages of her most recent novel, Brotherless Night. We talk about how she challenged her audience, her eighteen years of research and revision, the power of dramatic questions, and the mysterious character only known as K.

Ganeshananthan's first pages can be found here. (For the prologue, seek out the Kindle sample on Amazon)

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.

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She has served as visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news. 

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First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right.

In this episode, Juliette Fay discusses the first pages of her newest novel, The Half of It. We talk about how her early instincts helped her shape the rest of the book, including her theme, her character’s wound, the book’s inciting incident, using “Captain Happen” characters, and how she worked in the necessary backstory as her first scene progressed.

Fay's full first chapter can be found here (scroll down on right side).

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

Click here for the 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.

Juliette Fay is the bestselling author of seven novels, including THE HALF OF IT, CATCH US WHEN WE FALL, CITY OF FLICKERING LIGHT and THE TUMBLING TURNER SISTERS, a USA Today bestseller and Costco Pennie’s Book Club Pick. Previous novels include THE SHORTEST WAY HOME, one of Library Journal’s Top 5 Best Books of 2012: Women’s Fiction; DEEP DOWN TRUE, short-listed for the 2011 Women’s Fiction award by the American Library Association; and SHELTER ME, a 2009 Massachusetts Book Award “Must-Read Book” and an Indie Next pick. Juliette is a graduate of Boston College and Harvard University, and lives in Massachusetts with her family. 

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

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right.

In this episode, Nathaniel Ian Miller discusses the first pages of his debut novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, and how his discoveries about the character’s inner life allowed him to go back to his book’s beginning again and offer readers a fuller, more nuanced sense of Sven. We also discuss the power of distance in a reminiscent narrator, what writers might borrow from memoir in terms of voice and complexity, and how world building can be a very physical experience more than anything else.

Miller's first pages can be found here (click the link beneath the book description).

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.

Nathaniel Ian Miller’s debut novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, a #1 Indie Next Pick published in 2021 by Little, Brown & Co., was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and has been translated into multiple languages. He has written for newspapers in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Montana, and Colorado, for which he received multiple Associated Press Awards. He is also a former resident in the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Program. He lives with his family on a farm in Vermont.

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

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. 

In this episode, Jane Roper discusses the first pages of her second novel, The Society of Shame, and how she forced herself into a different writing process to get the book done. We also talk about the necessity of being hard on your characters, finding your story by giving your protagonist the worst possible version of what they think they want, and digging into the details your subconscious has offered you as you write your way forward.

Roper’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.

Jane Roper is the author of two novels, The Society of Shame, and Eden Lake, and a memoir, Double Time: How I Survived–and Mostly Thrived–Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins. Her writing has appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Writers’ Digest and elsewhere, and has been included in the anthology Labor Day: True Birth Stories by today’s Best Women Writers. She has taught writing at GrubStreet, Follow Your Art Community Studios, The University of Iowa, the Sanibel Writers’ Conference, and The Muse & The Marketplace. Jane is also a freelance copywriter and brand strategist. Originally from Fairfield, Connecticut, Jane is a graduate of Williams College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently lives just north of Boston in a drafty Victorian house on a hill with her husband, singer-songwriter Alastair Moock, and teenage twins.

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

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got they right.

In this episode, Marisa Crane discusses the first pages of their debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself. We talk about how the novel grew out of a great first line, how Marisa accomplished world building while also avoiding unnecessary explanations, and how they followed their obsessions to keep the story going.

Crane's 1st pages can be found here (click “read sample” tab beneath cover photo).

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

Click here for the 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.

Marisa Crane’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Joyland, The Offing, No Tokens, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, Lit Hub, Catapult, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. An attendee of the Tin House Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and an American Short Fiction Merit Fellow, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and child. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is their first novel. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

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

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right.

In this episode, Vanessa Hua discusses the first pages of her latest novel, Forbidden City. We talk about how she stuck to her instincts about the power of her prologue, the reminiscent narrator, and how to handle direct address.

Hua'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.

Finally, here's a link to the photo that launched Vanessa's book.

Vanessa Hua, is author of DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES, a NYT Editors pick, and the national bestsellers A RIVER OF STARS and FORBIDDEN CITY. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Award for fiction. She has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, Aspen Summer Words, Voices of Our Nation, Community of Writers at Squaw, and Napa Valley writing conferences. Her work has appeared in New York Times, FRONTLINE/World, PRI's The World, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and twins. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and elsewhere.

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

First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right.

In this episode, Elizabeth Graver discusses the first pages of her most recent novel, Kantika, and how she learned to trust the reader in order to take chances with her use of language, narrative voice, and her own special blend of fiction and family history.

Graver's first pages can be found here.

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

Click here for the 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.

Clips of Graver's grandmother's voice (or other ways writers can use material otherwise cut from a book)

Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika (Metropolitan Books/Holt, 2023), was inspired by the tumultuous life journey of her grandmother who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul. Her fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two daughters, she teaches at Boston College.

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

Today we hear from writer and wellness nonprofit founder Lara Wilson about her idea of the Shadowscape: exploring the shadow side of yourself to deepen your characters in your fiction and your own understanding of how they move in the world (and how you do so as well).

For a list of my fave craft books and most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page.

Lara Wilson devotes her life to exploring the intersection of storytelling, wellbeing and befriending. Her short stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, American Fiction, Confrontation, Indiana Review, the Chicago Tribune Book Section and the anthology, Printers Row, among others. An essay about her breast cancer journey was published on WBUR's Cognoscenti. Lara was awarded a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Fiction as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. She served on the board and taught fiction workshops at GrubStreet and for the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, where she curates the Concord Festival of Authors. A lifelong meditator, Lara established 501c3 non-profit Be Well Be Here, whose mission is to inspire greater wellBEing through creative mindful wellness practices and the transformative power of storytelling to build compassionate communities.

Publishing after sixty? Not only is it possible, it has its own benefits and triumphs. We hear from Donna Gordon who debuted at age 65 and E.B. Moore who published her first book with a two-book deal at age 72.

Find Liz and Donna’s most recent books and more of my favorites on the 7am Novelist Bookshop page.

Donna Gordon graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and won a PEN discovery award, and a Ploughshares discovery award. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, was published in 2022 by Regal House when she was 65 years old. It received a starred Kirkus review and was described as, “A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.”  She received the Whirling Prose Prize for the novel, and it was named by the Independent Book Review as one of the top 45 books that they were excited about for 2022. Nina McLaughlin wrote in a Boston Globe review: “Gordon’s prose is lively; it rushes along with verve, humor, and heart…[She has] achieved the rare thing, a stirring, poignant story of death and love and a page-turning adventure.” Gordon is also a visual artist, with a focus on painting and printmaking. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

E. B. Moore is a metal sculptor turned poet, turned novelist. She has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Vermont Studio Center. After graduating from the Novel Incubator, she has published three novels: Loose in the Bright Fantastic (forthcoming May 16, 2023 from Frayed Edge Press), Stones in the Road (NAL/Penguin/Random House 2015); and An Unseemly Wife (NAL/Penguin 2014). Kirkus named Stones in the Road One of the Best Books of 2015. She has also published a poetry chapbook, New Eden, A Legacy, (Finishing Line Press, ‘09). She is the mother of three, grandmother of five and lives with her partner in Scarborough, Maine.

How do you create the negative space necessary to keep the reader turning the pages? It has a lot to do with the magic combination of curiosity and concern. Erica Ferencik tells us more.

Find Erica’s most recent book and more of my favorites on the 7am Novelist Bookshop page.

Oprah chose Erica Ferencik’s The River at Night as a #1 Pick, calling the book “the page-turning novel you’ve been waiting for, a heart-pounding debut.” The New York Times Book Review called Into the Jungle, one woman's terrifying journey of survival in the Bolivian Amazon, one of the “Summer of 2019’s Best Thrillers.” Girl in Ice, published in March 2022 and set in Greenland, is a New York Times, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal’s editors’ pick. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio.