The 7am Novelist

It might seem a simple question, but it has enormous repercussions on your writing approach and success: What is the difference between scene and summary? We talk about the continuum between these two ideas with Susan Bernhard and Rosie Sultan as well as how writers determine what material needs to be written in scene and what can be more compressed or regulated to summary.

Susan Donovan Bernhard is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program, a 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers Conference, and a pantser. Her debut novel Winter Loon was an Amazon bestseller and won the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. Susan was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and lives near Boston where she is currently at work revising her next novel, More Scouts Than Strangers. 

Rosie Sultan’s novel Helen Keller In Love (Viking) was praised by The Washington Post, Booklist, and The Library Journal and was an American Library Association book club pick. Rosie won the PEN Discovery Award for Fiction and a Virginia Center of the Creative Arts fellowship. Her marvelous agent is shopping around her children’s book, What Color Is Think. Her new novel, The Best Way to Disappear, is nearing completion. Rosie has taught writing to first-generation students, story-curious adults, and everyone in between at Suffolk University, Boston University, Grub Street, The Muse and the Marketplace and venues across the country. She’s a manuscript consultant and helps novelists get their stories into the world. As a literary activist, Rosie raises awareness and money for racial and reproductive rights with Writers For—a stellar group of women writers who use their voices to make our world a better place for all.

For the definition of a Scene and the difference between Scene and Summary, I love Anna Keesey’s essay “Making a Scene” in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. (Find this and more of my faves on our Bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

How do you offer your reader enough mystery on the page to keep them reading and spark their thinking caps while also avoiding the problem of withholding too much or outright confusing them to the point that they close the book in frustration? Helping us find that fine line are mystery authors Emily Ross and Jessica Bird.

Emily Ross is the author of Half in Love with Death, an International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards finalist for best young adult novel, inspired by a true crime from the sixties. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist award in fiction for Half in Love with Death. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Menda City Review, and Yarn (Young Adult Review Network).  She is an editor at Deaddarlings.com and reviews mysteries and thrillers for New York Journal of Books. She used to work in tech. Now she writes full time and is currently working on The Black Sea, an adult mystery / thriller set in a fictional version of her hometown of Quincy MA. When not writing she enjoys art, crime fiction, bourbon, and attempting to train her delightful and uncontrollable kitten, Obi.

Jessica Bird, a former academic and current novelist, completed Novel Incubator program as a scholarship recipient. She grew up in the age of missing kids printed on milk cartons, and as a younger sister attuned to sibling dynamics, wondered what life was like for brothers and sisters who didn't disappear. This fascination inspired her book, THE ONLY BROTHER, a character-driven narrative with elements of mystery, about grappling with grief, and building relationships through loss. Jessica has taught literature and composition, ghost-written a business textbook, temped at a variety of high-drama workplaces, and published television recaps for now-defunct websites. An avid baker, Jessica lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two persnickety dowager cats.

Establishing your setting and time period from the get-go of your writing process is vital in creating a memorable book, real tension, dynamic characters, and a more complex reading experience. Writers Hesse Phillips and Louise Berliner help us figure out how to do it.

Hesse Phillips (she/they) was born next-door to a chicken farm in Western PA but now lives in Spain. Their Novel Incubator project Lightborne, about the mysterious death of queer Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and is now out on submission. Their poetry and prose have appeared in The Bridport Review, the epoque (pronounced “epoch”) press e-zine, Embark: A Literary Journal for Novelists, and is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, The Hyacinth Review, and other publications. They have a PhD in Drama from Tufts University and are obsessed with all things relating to sixteenth and early seventeenth century English theatre and its intersections with religion, gender, sexuality, and politics.

Another lucky Novel Incubator grad, Louise Berliner’s work has appeared in VQR, Porter Gulch Review, Ibbetson Review, The Mom Egg, Sacred Fire and various chapbook collections. Her first book, Texas Guinan GuyNan, Queen of the Night Clubs, written in part thanks to an NEH grant, is a biography of a Roaring ‘20s night club hostess famous for saying “Hello, Suckers!” Her middle grade novel, Houdini's Elephant, is with her agent and she's currently working on an adult literary novel with a magical realism kick. Her work is heavily influenced by New York City and the 20th century, as well as the ghosts of her matrilineage.

Also discussed: Ben Percy’s chapter “Activating Setting” in his craft book Thrill Me. For more book recs, check out our bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

What do we really mean by “tension” when we’re discussing the story writing process? And how do you know you have it in your work? What writing tools might you use to ensure that you do? We talk about all this and more with author Katrin Schumann.

Katrin Schumann’s latest novel This Terrible Beauty has been called "luminous and unflinching," "unputdownable," and "hard to forget." It was chosen by SheReads as among the "Most Anticipated Women's Fiction in 2020."  Her debut novel, The Forgotten Hours was a Washington Post and Amazon Charts bestseller. She is also the author of several nonfiction books. Her work has been featured multiple times on TODAY and in Woman’s Day, The London Times and on NPR, as well as other national and international media. For the past ten years she’s been teaching writing, most recently at GrubStreet and at local prisons through PEN New England. She now lives in Boston and Key West, and is the Program Coordinator of the Key West Literary Seminar and Workshops.

To paraphrase Henry James: Character Determines Incident; Incident Reveals Character. Writers Katherine Sherbrooke and Lise Haines explore the complicated but necessary relationship between character and event in your story, how to discover that relationship, and how to deepen it as the story progresses.

Lise Haines’ fifth novel, Book of Knives, is just out from Sourcebooks. Rick Moody says of her work: "Haines is an astute psychologist, a cool, unsentimental investigator of humans, who often locates the hard truths.” Her four earlier books are When We Disappear, Girl in the Arena, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity and In My Sister’s Country. Her work has been optioned by HBO and other production companies. She has been a fellow at VCCA and Ragdale, a Briggs Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College. 

Katherine Sherbrooke is the author of a family memoir called Finding Home and three novels: the New York Times notable Leaving Coy’s Hill, which was selected for 2022 MA Book Award’s Honors in Fiction prize, and Fill the Sky, the winner of a 2017 Independent Press Award and finalist for the Mary Sarton Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her newest novel, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF ASTER KELLY is set to publish in April of 2023. She currently serves as Chair of the Board of GrubStreet, the nation’s largest creative writing center and Boston’s first public arts space dedicated to the written word. She shares her newly empty nest in Cohasset with her husband and black lab.

What is the Point of Attack? How does the concept go beyond plot (or deepen it?) as a way for your story to find urgency, either in character, event, image, or language ? Helping us understand this idea in both the short story and novel is writer and teacher Ron MacLean.

Ron MacLean is author of the story collections We Might as Well Light Something On Fire and Why the Long Face? and the novels Blue Winnetka Skies and Headlong, winner of the 2014 Indie Book Award for Best Mystery. MacLean’s fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, Fiction International, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and teaches at Grub Street in Boston.

What is the Inciting Incident? What is it not? How is it tied intrinsically to your protagonist(s) and how do you discover one (or two?) that really works? Fiction writer and celebrated screen writer Devi Snively helps us find the answers.

An award-winning screenwriter/filmmaker, modestly published short fiction author and contributor to Beyond the Bechdel (a feminist cinema blog), Devi Snively is an alumnus of AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women and Fox Studios Filmmakers Lab, and scholarship winner of the Nostos Screenwriting Retreat and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She recently graduated from GrubStreet's Novel Incubator and is currently revising her first novel and working on a collection of short speculative stories.

What is the Unstable Ground Situation? Why might you need it for your story? How do you find it? What does it have to do with character development and where your story should really start? We talk through these questions with Steven Lee Beeber, fiction and nonfiction author, editor, and longtime writing teacher.

Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, The New York Times and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Framingham State University and GrubStreet, and was the recipient of Somerville Arts Council/Mass Cultural Council Grants in 2019 and 2022. A documentary based on his book about the Holocaust origins of punk, has been optioned by Determination Pictures.

What is voice? How do you find it for your characters, your book, your dialogue? What mistakes can you make when trying to push the voice of your book or characters too hard or making the voice “too real.”

EB Bartels is a nonfiction writer, a former Newtonville Books bookseller, and a GrubStreet instructor, with an MFA from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Toast, and The Butter, among others. She is the author of Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, a narrative nonfiction book about the world of loving and losing animals, exploring the singular nature of our bonds with our companion animals, and how best to grieve for them once they’ve passed away. E.B. lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Richie, and their many, many pets.

Rachel Barenbaum is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Atomic Anna and A Bend in the Stars. She is a prolific writer and reviewer. Her work has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. She is a scholar in residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis and is the founder/ host of the podcast Debut Spotlight. She has degrees from Harvard in Business, and Literature and Philosophy. She is an elected member of Town Meeting in Brookline, MA.  

For more help on voice and POV, I recommend Adam Sexton’s Master Class in Fiction Writing. Find all my fave craft books here as well as recent books by our guests: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

Frederick Reiken’s discovery of what ailed his creative writing students: the Author, Narrator, Character merge, when the author doesn’t envision an identity, intention, perspective, and range of knowledge about the story for their narrator and character as separate from one another and separate from the author themselves. To help us out with this difficult topic, we’ve got authors who are working in the thick of things, both in nonfiction and fiction: Shuchi Saraswat and Karen Wilfrid.

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.

Karen Wilfrid is seventh-grade English teacher and author of the forthcoming middle-grade novel JUST LIZZIE, about an asexual teenager who is trying to figure out her place in world. She specializes in fiction, essays, and teaching middle schoolers the finer points of comma usage. After receiving her degree in Creative Writing and Spanish from Oberlin College, she taught English in Spain for two years on a Fulbright grant before settling in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Cicada magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Embark literary journal. JUST LIZZIE is Karen's first novel. 

You can find Reiken’s own words about this topic in the first essay of his book on craft: A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft. Among others of my fave craft books, it’s available here: https://bookshop.org/lists/best-craft-books-for-wanna-be-wanna-be-better-writers