The 7am Novelist

When writer’s block begins to overwhelm, it’s often best to go back to basics, to finding your “why” again, and examine just what might be holding you back. That block might be more helpful to you than you think.

Meta Wagner is passionate about helping people reach their creative potential. She is the author of What’s Your Creative Type?: Harnessing the Power of Your Artistic Personality (Seal/Hachette) and of the Substack newsletter, Page Fright. She is a writing and creativity professor at Emerson College and instructor at Grub Street and has also taught at Boston University and Wheelock College. Meta is the creator of an original model for creativity, the Five Creative Types, and has given talks about it at TEDx, creativity conferences, and corporate events and webinars. She is a contributor to The Boston Globe opinion pages, was a columnist for the online magazine PopMatters, and has had articles published in The Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe Magazine, Wall Street Journal custom content, Salon, Huffington Post, and others. She is a writing coach and writing workshop leader. Meta was previously an award-winning marketing communications executive. 

Self doubts? Self-sabotage? Blank pages? Bad writing days? Bad self talk? How to deal with the time alone necessary for writing but difficult for your psyche to keep going. Helping us out are writers Liesl Swogger and Alex Ferraro.

When should you get feedback? How should you go about it? How can you shape the best feedback group ahead of time? How do you advocate for your book’s intentions? And what do you do with all that feedback afterwards? To help us answer these questions, we’ve got writers Bob Fernandes and Marc Foster.

One common piece of advice that writers receive is the following: You can’t know your beginning until you know your ending. This idea requires a writer to finish the first draft and then go back to the beginning again to re-see and re-imagine the whole thing. We discuss this process as well as the ideas of Poetic Justice, Aristotle’s Reversals, and other ways that the discovery of your ending reshapes your book from the beginning—or should. And we’ve got writer Christine Murphy on with us again to help us out. Thanks Christine!

Understanding the Denouement as well as John Barth’s idea of the “complexified equilibrium” and Jessica Brody’s “Five-Point Finale” with authors Rebecca Rolland and Rishi Reddi.

Rebecca Rolland is the author of the Art of Talking with Children (HarperOne, 2022), a combination memoir and parenting/education guide that will be translated into over 10 languages. She's also a poet, essayist, and novelist, winner of the Dana Award for Short Fiction, with three poetry collections published and a fourth one coming out next year. She lives in Boston with her family.

Rishi Reddi is the author of the novel Passage West, a Los Angeles Times “Best California Book of 2020” which tells of the early South Asian immigrants to California, and Karma and Other Stories, which received the 2008 L.L. Winship /PEN New England Award for Fiction. A National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow for 2021-2022, her reviews, essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Alta Journal, and Partisan Review, among others. Rishi has received fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the U.S. Department of State. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and is the Director of Environmental Justice in her day job with the government of Massachusetts. 

Find John Barth’s essay Incremental Perturbations in Julie Checkoway’s (editor) Creativing Fiction. And Jessica Brody’s 5-Point Final can be found in her craft book: Save the Cat Writes a Novel.

Find these and more of fave craft books as well as our panelists’ most recent publications on our Bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

Getting pacing right and keeping the reader’s emotional and intellectual attention isn’t about the stuff you make happen, but the incremental revelation of information about your characters’ emotional makeup, their relationships, and the way they see (or don’t see) their world as well as thematic resonances. Such revelations are often more implicit than explicit, sitting in the subtext of a scene, and giving the writer-in-process a good measuring tool to understand what they’ve put on the page and how to use it. To help us understand this important concept, we talk to esteemed author and teacher Jim Shepard.

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently Phase Six, and The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner.   Seven of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and two for Pushcart Prizes. He’s also won a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Library of Congress/ Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association.  He teaches at Williams College. 

Looking at some traditional Western plot points today. Why might they be useful (or not)? How might we try to understand or subvert them? And why might this point in your book feel like your own dark night of the soul? Helping us answer these questions are authors Julie Carrick Dalton and Tara Lynn Masih.

Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of a Julia Ward Howe Award, a Florida Book Award, a Benjamin Franklin Award, and multiple Foreword Book of the Year Awards. She is the author of the acclaimed novel My Real Name Is Hanna and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. Tara also founded The Best Small Fictions series. How We Disappear is her second story collection. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida.

Julie Carrick Dalton’s debut novel WAITING FOR THE NIGHT SONG has been named to Most Anticipated 2021 book lists by CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and Buzzfeed, and was an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Books of the Month. Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, The Chicago Review of Books, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and other publications. She is an alum of Tin House, Bread Loaf, and GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator and is a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League. She is a frequent speaker on the topic of fiction in the age of climate crisis at universities, libraries, and conferences. Her second novel, THE LAST BEEKEEPER, will be published in March 2023 by Tor/Forge Macmillan and is available for pre-order now.

Because you need a lot of tools in your toolbox for holding up your book’s middle, today we discuss additional tension tricks as well as the all-important idea of the Crucible. Helping us out our authors Desmond Hall and Erica Ferencik.

Devoted to authenticity in her craft, Erica Ferencik spent weeks in the northern Maine wilderness to research her debut best seller, The River at Night. For her “hair-raisingly vivid” (Kirkus) follow-up, Into the Jungle, Ferencik journeyed a hundred miles up the Amazon to experience firsthand the lush and perilous Peruvian jungle. Inspired and informed by a month-long trip to Greenland, Ferencik sets the New York Times, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal’s editors’ pick, GIRL IN ICE, in one of the most unforgiving, unforgettable landscapes imaginable.

Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He’s the author of YOUR CORNER DARK, a YA novel that was one of Bank Street’s Best YA novels of 2022, a finalist for the New England Book Award, A Nominee for the Yalsa audio book award, Essence Magazine’s 19 Children’s book list, and included on several MUST READ lists including Buzzfeed and WBUR. He's worked as both a high school biology teacher and English teacher, counseled at-risk teens from Riker’s Island prison, and served as Spike Lee’s creative director in the advertising business. He’s also written and directed the HBO movie, A DAY IN BLACK AND WHITE, which was nominated for the Gordon Parks Award. He’s written and directed the theater play, STOCKHOLM, BROOKLYN, which won the audience award at the Downtown Theater Festival at the Cherry Lane Theater. He’s also served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, and was a judge for the Addys, and the Downtown Urban Arts Film Festival. Hall was named one of Variety Magazine’s 50 Creatives to watch. 

Establishing a clock in your book adds tension and interest to every page. A clock can be the simple sense of time passing in the background of your story ensuring us that everything in the front story matters, an expected upcoming event that adds interest or anxiety, or the pressure on a character to accomplish a goal/desire within a set period of time. It’s the container for your book. It’s why you’ve chosen to write it in that time period in the first place. To help us wade through these ideas are authors Sabina Murray and Steve Yarbrough.

Steve Yarbrough Steve Yarbrough is the author of twelve books, most recently the novel Stay Gone Days, due out in April 2022.  He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters—Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris—and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. They divide their time between Boston and Krakow. Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.

Sabina Murray is the author of three short story collections and four novels including her most recent, The Human Zoo, set in the Philippines under Duterte's presidency. Her third collection of short stories, Vanishing Point, a collection of stories with gothic themes, is due out soon. Murray is also a screenwriter and wrote the script for the film Beautiful Country, released in 2005. Murray has been a Michener Fellow at UT Austin, a Bunting fellow at Radcliffe, a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a UMass Research and Creativity Award and Samuel Conti Fellowship, and a Fred Brown Award for The Novel from the University of Pittsburgh. She now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts.

According to Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel, the Fun & Games beat is pivotal for laying the groundwork of your story as you move into the second act while getting your characters moving. So how to do it? And how do the Fun & Games lead to your book’s all important Midpoint? To help us out, we talk to authors Annie Hartnett and Sara Shukla.

Sara Shukla is an editor and writer for Cognoscenti, WBUR Boston Public Radio’s ideas and opinions page, and a graduate of Grubstreet’s novel incubator. Her novel, Pink Whales, a humorous take on lies, drugs and yacht clubs in an exclusive seaside New England town – think “Mean Girls,” but moms — is forthcoming from Little A. She has writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, short humor in McSweeney’s and elsewhere, and interviews in Dead Darlings. She lives in Mass. with her husband and three kids. 

Annie Hartnett is the author of two novels: her first was called Rabbit Cake and her new novel, Unlikely Animals, just came out in April with Random House. Along with the writer Tessa Fontaine, Annie runs bi-weekly accountability groups – workshops designed to give you community and support on your writing projects without the pressure and confusion of feedback. Annie is also the co-host of the Here to Save You podcast, a podcast about writing while parenting young children. Annie lives in Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and their dog.