The 7am Novelist

How to keep the faith and find the time when writing gets tough and you need to begin again (because you always can). Authors Rosie Sultan and Jessica Keener give us some helpful pointers to get us going. For a list of my fave craft books and the most recent works by our guests, go to our Bookshop page. Rosie Sultan’s novel Helen Keller In Love (Viking) was praised by The Washington Post, Booklist...

When is your book “done”? Or at least, when is it done enough to send to readers, to an agent, to an editor? What is the difference between exhaustion and completion? And how good is good enough? To help us answer these questions, we’ve got author Kasey LeBlanc. Kasey LeBlanc (he/him) is a 2015 graduate of Harvard College, and an alum of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator program where he was an Alice H...

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/Ha...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to...

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 resh...

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 novel...

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,...

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 Awar...

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 he...

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...

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 Cogn...

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 Pe...

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 reco...

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:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.o...

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  be...

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, wh...

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...

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 Thrill...

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...