The 7am Novelist

How to handle multiple perspectives, voices, and even timelines in your writing and not lose your reader (or drive yourself nuts). We have two fave authors helping us out: EB Moore and Mark Guerin.

EB Moore, a metal sculptor turned poet, published a chapbook, New Eden, A Legacy, then thanks to Grub Street’s Novel Incubator, switched to being a novelist. Her first two books, Stones in the Road (Kirkus starred review, ‘One of the Best Books of 2015) and An Unseemly Wife are dark stories based on her family with Amish roots in Lancaster Pennsylvania. Her third novel Loose in the Bright Fantastic will come out in the fall of 2023, the story of gray-haired Maggie, who, thrilled to escape her children, embarks on a quest to reclaim independence. Moore, the mother of three, received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Vermont Studio Center. She lives with her partner in Scarborough Maine.

Mark Guerin is a 2014 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program. He also has an MFA from Brandeis University and is a winner of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, the Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting and Sigma Tau Delta's Eleanor B. North Poetry Award. His debut novel, YOU CAN SEE MORE FROM UP HERE (Golden Antelope Press, 2019), was the December, 2019 selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club and was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel prize. A contributor to the novelist’s blog, Dead Darlings and to Writer’s Digest, he is also a playwright, copywriter and journalist. 

Read more about the Rashomon effect, based on the story and later film of the same title (though sometimes also called “In a Grove”) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: https://artofnarrative.com/2021/02/21/the-rashomon-effect-how-to-use-it-in-your-story/

Two of the more unusual point of view choices, but they can be fun (and necessary) all the same: The Second Person and The First Person Plural (or the snobbier term “Royal We”). What are they? Why experiment with them? What effects can they grant you on the page and what might they take away? Special guests David Abrams and Allison Amend help us find out.

Allison Amend, a Chicago native and a diehard Cubs fan, graduated from Stanford University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the IPPY award-winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novels A Nearly Perfect Copy and Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her most recent book, Enchanted Islands, was on the longlist for the International Dublin Award. Allison teaches creative writing at Lehman College, in The Bronx, New York.

David Abrams is the author of two novels: Brave Deeds and Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” It was also a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, 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. David has also been a manuscript consultant for Grub Street for the past four years. He lives in Helena, Montana with his wife and their many cats.

The omniscient point of view, beloved by 19th century authors and most often found in the western literary canon, but this perspective came under suspicion in the early 1900s, only to recently make a strong recurrence. And it might just be the most difficult point of view to handle. What is third and first person omniscient? What are the best practices behind handling this point of view and why might you want to avoid it? We discuss these questions with our guests Weike Wang and Julia Rold.

Julia Rold is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright whose work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, the Best New Voices collection, and named for a Pushcart Prize. Her plays have been staged at the Boston Center for the Arts, The Electric Theatre, and the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. A winner of Artist Grants in both playwriting and fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she has also received awards from the St. Botolph Foundation, has been a Fulbright Scholar to El Salvador, and has twice been among the winners of the Faulkner-Wisdom Award for Novella. She currently is on faculty in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles. 

Weike Wang is the author of CHEMISTRY (Knopf 2017) and JOAN IS OKAY (Random House 2022).  She is the recipient of the 2018 Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Barnard College. 

Also recommended during our discussion: Robert Boswell’s chapter “On Omniscience” in his craft book The Half Known World. Find my list of favorite craft books and the most recent works by our guest authors here: https://bookshop.org/shop/the7amnovelist

The pros and cons of writing in the third person limited, likely the most favored point of view. What freedoms might it grant you in terms of language and providing context? How might it hold you back in terms of intimacy? Our guests Linda Schlossberg and Whitney Scharer help us find the answers.

Linda Schlossberg received her Ph.D in English Literature from Harvard, where she now serves as Associate Director of Studies for Women, Gender, and Sexuality and teaches courses in gender, literature, and creative writing. Schossberg was the recipient of a 2022 and 2019 Somerville Arts Council/Massachusetts Cultural Council grant as well as the recipient of the Writer's Center 2016 Emerging Writer Fellowship. She is the author of the novel Life in Miniature and the co-editor of Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including McSweeney’s, The Belladonna, and Post Road. Her new novel, The Incubator, is represented by Aevitas Creative Management.

Whitney Scharer holds a BA in English from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her first novel, The Age of Light, was published in 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and has been published in over a dozen other countries. Whitney has been awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship, Ragdale and VCCA residencies, a St. Botolph Emerging Artists Grant, and a Somerville Arts Council Artists Fellowship.  She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, MA, where she runs a freelance graphic design business and is at work on her second novel. To find out more, visit www.whitneyscharer.com.

First person may grant you intimacy with your character and the reader as well as help you establish the voice of your book, but it can also limit the experience you put on the page. We’re looking at the pleasures and pitfalls of this popular point-of-view choice today with authors Maya Shanbhag Lang and Lauren Acampora.

Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry, named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Best Book of 2020 by Amazon, Parade, Times of India, Bookshop.Org, and others. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June, long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and hailed a "Must Read Novel" by CBS and In Style. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and lives with her daughter in New York.

Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the New England Book Award; and The Paper Wasp, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her most recent novel, The Hundred Waters, was named a Best Book of 2022 by Vogue. Lauren is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared Paris Review, Guernica, The New York Times Book Review, and LitHub, among other places. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband and daughter. 

Stakes: What your characters can lose and what they might gain in the course of your story, both in emotional and concrete terms. This is the WHY of your story: why we should care, why the character pushes so desperately for what they yearn for, why the writer is interested in writing the story in the first place.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice that was also longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN is the USA Today bestselling author of 13 novels of suspense. She has also won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction, including five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. • She’s also the on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, and has won 37 EMMYs, 14 Edward R. Murrow awards and dozens of other honors for her groundbreaking journalism. National book reviews have called Hank a "master at crafting suspenseful mysteries" and "a superb and gifted storyteller." Hank’s novels have been named Best Thrillers of the Year by Library Journal, New York Post, BOOK BUB, PopSugar, Real Simple Magazine and others. Her current book is HER PERFECT LIFE was an Agatha Award nominee for Best Novel. Her upcoming thriller is THE HOUSE GUEST, coming February 2023.

(Also, it’s Hank’s birthday! Happy Birthday Hank!)

What are Secondary Characters? How do you develop them? And how do you keep them from taking over your books?

For thirteen years, Nancy Crochiere wrote a humor column about family life for Massachusetts newspapers, then published a collection of those columns titled The Mother Load. She has worked as a development editor for various educational publishers and has written essays for The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. She began her fiction career by penning creative notes excusing her daughters’ tardiness at school. With her girls now grown, she lives north of Boston with her husband, a lawyer and marathoner, and a few house plants that could use more attention. Graceland, her first novel, was workshopped in Year 8 of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, and will be published by HarperCollins in May 2023.

Suzanne DeWitt Hall (she/her/hers) is the author of the Where True Love Is devotionals, the Living in Hope series which supports the family and friends of transgender people, The Path of Unlearning faith deconstruction books, and the Rumplepimple children’s books. She is mildly obsessed with vintage cookbooks and the intersection of sexuality and theology. Her debut novel, The Language of Bodies launched recently with Woodhall Press. It’s the story of Maddie Well's mission of vengeance after the murder of her wife: a transgender woman of color. Wally Lamb calls it “…a film noir between covers—dark, tense, and sexy.”

Backstory. The killer of many a novel. But the complexity of today’s world and its many voices makes more demand on backstory than ever, so what to do? Listen in to debut novelists Aube Rey Lescure and Shilpi Suneja to hear how they solved this knotty problem in the process of writing and revising their first books.

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. She currently works as the Deputy Editor at Off Assignment. Aube is the co-author of Creating a Stable Asia (Carnegie 2016) . Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Jellyfish Review, Entropy Magazine, Medium, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” will be featured in Best American Essays 2022. Her novel River East, River West is due out 2024.

Shilpi Suneja was born in India. She is the author of the novel House of Caravans, which comes out in June, 2023 from Milkweed Editions. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Cognoscenti, and the Michigan Quarterly Review among others. Her writing has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, a Grub Street Novel Incubator Scholarship, and she was the Desai fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She holds an MA in English from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University, where she was awarded the Saul Bellow Prize.

Also mentioned in the episode: Ben Percy’s wonderful craft book Thrill Me

One of the best ways to develop your characters is to figure out their attitude to others and the world, from the way they enter a room to how they cut their steak (or refuse steak altogether). Listen in to our discussion about what informs our characters’ sense of themselves and others from writers Margot Livesey and Courtney Maum.

Margot Livesey grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands.  She is the author of nine novels, a collection of stories and a book of essays about the craft of fiction. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spends much of the year in Cambridge, Ma.

Courtney Maum is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking publishing guide BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL and the memoir THE YEAR OF THE HORSES, chosen by The Today Show as the best read for mental health awareness. A writing coach and educator, Courtney's mission is to help people hold on to the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. You can sign up for her publishing tips newsletter and online masterclasses at CourtneyMaum.com

Weaknesses, flaws, misbeliefs, wounds, all our characters have them, so how do you get them on the page? How do you write character change? And how do you write about a character whose lesson learned needs to be more nuanced, particularly for characters who don’t have much power to begin with? Then the lesson may be more about the idea that they don’t have to adjust to broken world at all.

Meghana Ranganathan is a graduate of the Novel Incubator program and is currently in the final stages of revision on two novels. She’s also interested in science journalism and has had articles printed in Scientific American. In her other life, she’s a climate scientist and glaciologist, interested in understanding how much ice will be lost from the Antarctic ice sheet due to climate change. 

This episode is dedicated to writer Brion Dulac. You can read his work here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41104255. We’ll miss you Brion. You were one of a kind.