The 7am Novelist

One of the best ways to hold up the middle of your book is to concentrate on arcs: the rise and fall of your characters’ internal and external worlds, the worlds of your other characters, as well as other arc possibilities: setting, mystery, theme, and much more. To help us think through tracing these arcs are authors Jennifer De Leon and Patricia Park.

Also referenced in this episode: Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me and Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World. Find these and my other fave craft books and books by our guests on our bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

Patricia Park is the author Re Jane, a modern-day retelling of Brontë’s Jane Eyre named The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, NPR "Fresh Air" pick, American Library Association Best Books, and others. Her debut YA novel, Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim, is forthcoming in February, 2023. A former Fulbright scholar, Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence, and Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, she has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, and others. She is a professor of creative writing in American University’s MFA Program. She is also working on an adult novel about the Koreans in Argentina during the Dirty War. ww.patriciapark.com Twitter/Instagram: @patriciapark718 

Jennifer De Leon is the author of the YA novel Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (published by Simon & Schuster) and White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, and Writing (winner of the Juniper Prize and published by the University of Massachusetts Press), and the editor of the award-winning anthology, Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education (published by the University of Nebraska Press). She is currently the Visiting Writer in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at UMass Boston and the founder of Story Bridge LLC, a series of programs and workshops that bridge storytelling and DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging). Her next novel, Borderless, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2023. Visit her at www.jenniferdeleonauthor.com 

A good Dramatic Question provides the engine that drives your characters’ actions but also makes them matter. So how do you determine if you’ve got a good one? What is a Dramatic Question and what is it not? And how does a good Dramatic Question complicate over the course of the book to become something larger? To help us answer these questions are writers John McClure and Christine Murphy.

A recovering philosopher, John McClure just can't keep Aristotle from coming up in conversation. Really he's sorry about that. His short fiction has appeared in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and he is a graduate of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator. An amateur baker, musician, and crackpot, he prefers to write about the ordinary as if it's profoundly weird and spends most of his time debating with his husband, his crazy dog, and lots of dead and made-up people. He's currently finishing a novel in verse about a family, a cabin, and a maybe-maybe-not-imaginary bear.

Christine Murphy is a vice president of individual giving in Portland, Maine. She holds a PhD in Religion, specializes in International Development, languages, research, teaching, and mentorship, and is a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program. She recently signed with an agent for her first novel.

Because one size does not fit all. Today we discuss how to find alternative structures and shape your own with writers Christopher Boucher and Ethan Gilsdorf. Referenced in today’s podcast: Matthew Salesses Craft in the Real World and Jane Allison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. Also, the traditional plot structure in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literature known as Kishōtenketsu. Read more at https://bookriot.com/kishotenketsu/

Christopher Boucher received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 2002. Chris is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Golden Delicious and Big Giant Floating Head (a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award Finalist). He’s also the editor of Jonathan Lethem's More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers. He's an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College and the managing editor of Post Road Magazine. 

Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, memoirist, essayist, critic, poet, teacher, and the author of the award-winning memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Esquire, Boston Globe, Wired, Salon, National Geographic, Poetry, The Southern Review, North American Review, among other publications, and twice was named "Notable" by The Best American Essays. He teaches creative writing at GrubStreet in Boston, where he leads the 9-month Essay Incubator program; he also leads writing workshops for non-profit social justice organizations. He presented the TEDx talk "Why Dungeons & Dragons is Good for You (In Real Life)” and has appeared on NPR, The Discovery Channel, PBS, CBC, BBC; and in the documentary Revenge of the Geeks. More info: ethangilsdorf.com, Twitter @ethanfreak.

For the short fairy tale, “The Rosebud,” that I promised at the end of the show as an example of “intuitive logic,” which breaks from our usual Cause & Effect expectations, check out Kate Bernheimer’s essay on fairytales: https://www.academia.edu/3174316/_Fairy_Tale_is_Form_Form_is_Fairy_Tale_

The story itself along with other wonderful translations of fairy tales, can be found here: https://i-share-uiu.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?vid=01CARLI_UIU:CARLI_UIU&search_scope=MyInstitution&tab=LibraryCatalog&docid=alma9931305812205899&context=L

Phillip Gerard in his essay “An Architecture of Light” speaks of the idea of the Signature, a through-line that buttresses the ceiling of your novel so that it doesn’t sink in the middle (or collapse altogether). But that through-line also needs to rise and escalate for the book to reach that transcendent place (or that ceiling) to begin with. Helping us think through these ideas is writer Nicole Vecchiotti.

Nicole Vecchiotti has worked in the publishing since 1997—working at a large publishing house, with small boutique literary agents, booksellers, and even a book distribution company. In 2006, she founded Union Park Press, a Boston-based book publisher specializing in regional non-fiction. She sold the press in 2019, but her titles are still being published by Globe Pequot Press. Her Novel Incubator manuscript, Mommyland, is currently locked inside a drawer, screaming to get out while she finishes a second novel, The Weather Girl, a dark comedy featuring an ensemble of quirky characters, including a superhero trying to save the planet by stopping climate change, the meteorologist who leaves her family to join his cause, and the meteorologist’s son, who vows revenge against his one-time idol.  

Noted in this Podcast: “An Architecture of Light: Structuring the Novel and Story Collection” an essay by Philip Gerard in Creating Fiction edited by Julie Checkoway.

Also, here’s a link to George Saunders’ essay on Escalations: https://paulsaxton.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/saunders-barthelme-a.pdf

And here’s Donald Barthelme’s story “The School” that Saunders bases his essay on: https://electricliterature.com/the-school-donald-barthelme/

Best practices for getting your dialogue right, waking up your scenes, determining what dialogue to keep and what to cut, and staying true to your characters’ internal worlds as they speak (or don’t speak) their minds.

Michele Ierardi Ferrari currently teaches Novel In Progress at Grub Street, a topic she knows very well. She completed GrubStreet's Novel Generator and Novel Incubator programs. She has participated in Breadloaf Sicily, the Tin House Summer Workshop and the Sirenland Writers Conference. She is a TedX Beaconstreet speaker and a Moth GrandSlam storyteller. This year she has been querying a novel set in the punk scene in 1980s New York City, and is currently working on a memoir about her brother's unexpected death as well as revising a different novel. She lives in Cambridge, with her husband and Jack Russell, Zelda.

Pam Loring is a writer and editor who completed Grub Street’s Novel Incubator in 2017 (“Season Six”). She’s currently working on a novel called THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BELMIRA ALVAREZ, whose main character has plenty of attitude and isn’t afraid to say so. Some people might say a little of loud, angry women goes a long way, but writing characters who won’t toe the line is one of Pam’s favorite things to do. Happily, Belmira’s voice resonated with the Barbara Deming Fund which awarded Pam a grant this year, and this year too Pam received the Michael Kenneth Smith fellowship from Porches Writing Retreat, where she worked with Greg Michaelson in a 3-day one-on-one workshop. Pam also runs the Salty Quill Writers’ Retreat, which she co-founded in 2015 with writers Deb Parsons and Anna Da Silva, who’s been attending 7am Novelist every morning at 6am from Chicago (Go, Anna!).

One of the hardest tricks for a writer to get right: convincing the reader that time has passed while avoiding sluggish pacing. Here to help us think about this difficult topic are writers Sharissa Jones and Stacy Mattingly.

Mentioned in this episode: The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber. Find more of my fave books here: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

Sharissa Jones is the author of many, many ill-fated novels most of which are related to her childhood growing up on a farm in rural Nebraska. Sharissa graduated from the Grub Street Novel Incubator in 2015. Her essays have been published by Cognescenti and The Houston Chronicle. She also currently serves on the GrubStreet board of directors. She holds a B.A. in Ethics Politics and Economics from Yale College. In a previous life, Sharissa was a partner at a New York-based private equity firm. She has appeared in the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fortune Magazine, The Omaha World-Herald, and other publications. Sharissa once won fifty dollars in a barrel-racing jackpot and was named Miss Congeniality by a sorely misinformed Miss Southwest Nebraska Rodeo pageant judge.

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. 

Best practices and tricks for getting sensory detail into your work and ensuring we feel the particular consciousness of your characters with writers Lara Wilson and Dan Fogarty.

Dan Fogarty is a novelist and journalist born and raised in New York City. He’s a former senior editor of digital sports at USA TODAY, a former senior editor at Boston.com, and former advisor to the Concussion Alliance, a non-profit that helps patients navigate brain injuries. Dan’s background in journalism helps inform his work, including his debut novel KILL THE PRINCE, which was heavily researched over nine years. A boxing hobbyist, Dan suffered a mild traumatic brain injury in 2016 during a sparring session. Although the injury required 5+ years of recovery, he was able to get his life (and his brain) back. His recovery influenced KILL THE PRINCE’s storyline.

Lara Wilson is the curator of the Concord Festival of Authors (now in its 30th year) and the founder of Be Well Be Here, a mindful wellness educational collaborative whose mission is to build connected community through experiential well-being practices, including mindful writing workshops. Her short stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, American Fiction, Confrontation and Indiana Review, among others, as well as anthologized in Printers Row. An essay about her breast cancer journey was featured 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. For many years, she served on the board at GrubStreet, where she taught master fiction workshops. A 40-year meditator, Lara devotes her life to exploring the intersection of personal narrative and mindful well-being.

How do you ensure that a scene in your story earns its keep from one scene to the next? How does what happens in a scene create emotional and physical consequence? What do we even mean by “consequence”? To help us answer these questions, we talk to Sandra Scolfield, author of one of my favorite craft books: The Scene Book. (For more of my favorites, check out our Bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist)

Sandra Scofield is a native Texan who has spent the last forty years in Oregon and Montana. Since 2006 she has been on the faculty of the Solstice MFA low residency program at Lasell University. She has also taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival since 1993. She is the author of seven novels, a memoir, a book of essays about family, a book of stories, and two craft books for writers. Her work has been warmly praised; she was a finalist for the National Book Award, among other honors.

What is a scene’s turning point, why do you need it, and how do you write it? How do turning points help you with your scene’s pacing and determine the scene’s most important moment? Helping us answer these questions is author Henriette Lazaridis.

Henriette Lazaridis’ second novel Terra Nova comes out from Pegasus Books on December 6. Her debut novel, The Clover House, was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her work has been published in such  publications  as Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and Pangyrus, and has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette received degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She was the founding editor of The Drum Literary Magazine and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel about athletic and creative challenges.

When writers talk about conflict in their stories, what do they really mean? How do you establish inner and outer conflict? How do these conflicts reveal themselves in your scenes? And are we really talking about conflict or simply the negotiation of the characters’ intentions? For some answers, we talk to author Crystal King.

Crystal King is the author of The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow, 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 and Boston University, as well as at GrubStreet, one of the leading creative writing centers in the US. A Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and former co-editor of the online literary arts journal Plum Ruby Review, Crystal received her MA in critical and creative thinking from UMass Boston, where she developed a series of exercises and writing prompts to help fiction writers in medias res. She resides in Boston. You can find her at crystalking.com.