The 7am Novelist

When to do research in your writing process, how to organize it, the pitfalls of too much research, and the gems your research obstacles might offer you. We have two historical novelists, Lara Prescott and Crystal King, on board to help us with research how-tos.

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Crystal King is the bestselling author of The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow, the latter of which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was a Must Read for the MassBook Awards. She is an author, culinary enthusiast, and marketing expert. Her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy. She has taught classes in writing, creativity, and social media at several universities including Harvard Extension School, Boston University and UMass Boston, as well as at GrubStreet. You can find her at crystalking.com.

Lara Prescott’s debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, was an instant NYT bestseller, a Hello Sunshine x Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, an Edgar Award nominee for Best First Fiction, a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, and winner of 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in Fiction. It has been translated into thirty languages and is being adapted for television by The Ink Factory and Marc Platt Productions. Lara lives in coastal New Hampshire with her family.

What is Autofiction? What barriers between genres does it allow us to break? How does it allow us to simply follow what is happening on the page as our book grows and becomes what the writer wants or even needs it to be? Writers Shuchi Saraswat and Stacy Mattingly help us explore the form.

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

Shuchi Saraswat is a writer and editor based in Boston. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Boston Globe, The Boston Art Review, Ecotone, Coffee House Writers’ Project, Tin House online, Arrowsmith and elsewhere. Her essay "The Journey Home" received a special mention in Pushcart XLII 2018 and is anthologized in Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism. For ten years she worked as an independent bookseller in Massachusetts. During that time she founded The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, a reading series focused on stories of migration, the intersection of politics & literature, and works in translation, and in 2019 she served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. She’s now the associate editor and a co-nonfiction editor at the literary journal AGNI, and she teaches classes in creative nonfiction at GrubStreet.

Stacy Mattingly is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, an Atlanta hostage story now a feature film, Captive, starring David Oyelowo (Selma) and Kate Mara (House of Cards). Stacy’s work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, Off Assignment, EuropeNow, and elsewhere. In 2012, she launched the Sarajevo Writers' Workshop in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later helped lead the first Narrative Witness exchange (Caracas-Sarajevo) for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. An Atlanta native, Stacy teaches at Boston University, where she received an MFA in fiction, and she is an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. Her recently completed first novel is set in the present-day Balkans. 

Patricia Park talks to us about how she blocks out her scenes from the very beginning, keeping in mind the scene’s necessary Pulse and Point (POS), and how she combines and revises her first ideas into deeper, more complicated moments of emotion and purpose.

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

Patricia Park is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at American University, Fulbright scholar in Creative Arts, Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and author of the acclaimed debut novel, RE JANE (Penguin), a Korean-American reimagining of Brontë's JANE EYRE. RE JANE was named Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review; Best Books of 2015 by American Library Association; O, The Oprah Magazine pick; NPR "Fresh Air" pick; and others. She was born and raised in Queens and lives in Brooklyn. Her second book, a YA novel titled IMPOSTER SYNDROME & OTHER CONFESSIONS OF ALEJANDRA KIM, just came out to glowing reviews in February.   

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Lost your sense of wonder and excitement about your writing? Margo Rabb has the cure.

And read more about Margo finding inspiration in gardens:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/abandoned-industrial-ruin-garden-wilmington-dupont-crowninshield-180981544/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/opinion/garden-of-solace.html

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

Margo Rabb s the author of the award-winning novels Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize, Kissing in America, and Cures for Heartbreak, all published by HarperCollins. Margo’s essays, journalism, book reviews, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Slate, Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story, and Marie Claire, and have been broadcast on NPR. She received the grand prize in the Zoetrope short story contest, first prize in The Atlantic fiction contest, first prize in the American Fiction contest, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. Margo grew up in Queens, New York, and now lives in the Philadelphia area with her family. Visit her online at www.margorabb.com.

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Sympathy for the devil (and understanding a bit of that devil in yourself). Author Randy Susan Meyers helps us understand our antagonist’s deeper worlds, making them more believable, interesting, and worth spending time with.

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

The drama of Randy Susan Meyers' internationally bestselling novels, including Accidents of Marriage, The Widow of Wallstreet, and The Comfort of Lies, is informed by over twenty years of working with families impacted by emotional and physical violence. The Massachusetts Center of the Book chose three of her novels as "Must Read Books" and as finalists for the Massachusetts Book Award. The Murderer's Daughters, Meyers' debut novel, was chosen as One Book, One Community Read by the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. Meyers lives in Boston with her husband. She teaches at Boston's GrubStreet and Writer in Progress in Northampton, MA.

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Do you know what a French scene is? I didn’t! This and other helpful tips and tricks from the very source of our storytelling structures: playwriting. And Sari Boren, essayist, storyteller, and playwright is here to help us out.

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

Sari Boren is playwright, essayist, and museum exhibit developer. She premiered her solo play Exhibiting in 2019 and her short play To Rest at the Somerville Theater Festival. She was a member of Company One Theater’s PlayLab Unit and one of seven playwrights in Flat Earth Theatre’s collaborative virtual play Seven Rooms: The Masque of The Red Death. Her essays “He’s a Rope” and “The Slurry Wall,” were recognized as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2019 and 2021.  Her writing has been supported with grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, St. Botolph Club Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. 

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How do you know when it’s time to put a book away? How do you find your voice again in moments of doubt? And when is that doubt useful, even necessary, to the writing process as a whole? We talk to authors Dawn Tripp and Jane Roper about their experience with the highs and lows of the writing life.

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

Dawn Tripp’s fourth novel Georgia was a national bestseller, finalist for the New England Book Award, and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR, among others. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons. Her fifth novel will be published by Random House in 2025.

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. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Jane currently lives just north of Boston with her husband, rad teenage twins, and two cats, one of whom sucks. 

Interview best practices, how to get yourself geared up for an interview in the first place, how to pace them with your writing, and how to blend what you learn with your own stories and experience. Our experts Shalene Gupta and E.B. Bartels give us their best tips.

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

E.B.’s quick tips!

This piece was just published in Narratively which is super helpful! https://narratively.com/how-journalists-get-their-profile-subjects-to-open-up/

Also:

• Don’t ask yes/no questions or questions with short/specific answers

• Don’t ask questions with Google-able answers

• Do ask more open-ended feelings/memories/experiences questions

• Do ask questions that you can only get that information from them

• One of my favorite questions to ask: what is the most challenging / most rewarding part of what you do?

• Most important question to ask: who should I talk to next? (Like what Shalene just said about finding the Reddit excerpt!)

E.B. Bartels is a nonfiction writer, a former Newtonville Books bookseller, and a GrubStreet instructor, with an MFA from Columbia University. She is the author of Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, a narrative nonfiction book about loving and losing animals, and her essays and interviews have appeared in Salon, Slate, WBUR, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Believer, and The Rumpus, among others. E.B. lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Richie, and their many, many pets.

Shalene Gupta has a Master’s from Columbia Journalism School. In the past she was a reporter for Fortune where she wrote about the intersection of diversity and tech. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, ESPN-W, and Kirkus Reviews, among others. Before working as a reporter, she taught English in Malaysia on a Fulbright scholarship and wrote a book documenting the history of the Malaysian Fulbright program. She’s co-authored the Power of Trust (Public Affairs) with HBS professor Sandra Sucher and is currently working on a book on PMDD/severe PMS (Flatiron ’24), and her YA novel from the Novel Incubator program. 

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Jobs, kids, life! How to deal with the challenges of self-doubt, belief in your work, juggling your relationships and your writing time, and possibly even using those obstacles to spur you on. Authors David Abrams and Ilan Mochari share their experience to help us out.

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

David Abrams is the author of two novels about the Iraq War: Brave Deeds and Fobbit, a comedy Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” It was also a New York Times Notable Book, an Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a finalist for the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Abrams’ short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in the anthologies Montana Noir, Watchlist, and Fire and Forget. He lives in Helena, Montana with his wife and their many cats.

Ilan Mochari's debut novel ZINSKY THE OBSCURE earned acclaim from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. His stories and poems have been widely published, appearing in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Salamander, Solstice, Hobart, Juked, J Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Valparaiso Fiction Review and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes as well as the Derringer Award, and he is the recipient of a Literature Artist Fellowship grant from the Somerville Arts Council.  

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How does a writer find balance between their private lives and their own writing with the more public facing writer persona, marketer, and literary citizen? And what does writer moxie have to do with it? To help us out, we talk to one writer who somehow does all three spectacularly: Jenna Blum.

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

JENNA BLUM is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, and The Lost Family; the novella “The Lucky One” in the collection Grand Central; and memoir Woodrow on the Bench, about her senior black Lab and what his last seven months taught her, now in paperback from Harper Collins. Jenna is one of Oprah’s Top Thirty Women Writers, with her work published in over 20 countries, and cofounder/CEO of literary social media marketing company A Mighty Blaze. Jenna’s New York Times and internationally bestselling first novel, Those Who Save Us, won the Ribalow Prize, awarded by Hadassah Magazine and adjudged by Elie Wiesel; Jenna interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation for five years. Jenna is based in Boston, where she has taught at Grub Street Writers for over 20 years; she earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University and was the fiction editor for AGNI Literary Magazine.

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