Writing Stories
Each episode of Writing Stories features an interview with a contemporary author about how her book went from an idea in her head to an object on a shelf. Join us on Writing Stories for honesty, struggle, and triumph, for writing community, publishing insight, and inspiration to persist in whatever difficult but meaningful journey you've chosen for yourself.
Episodes
Danielle Teller tells the story of Forged and talks about:
success as a writer
rule-breaking
the pitfalls of newspaper articles in novels
When your agent can't place your manuscript
How her work as a doctor has informed her writing process
Learn more about Danielle here
Christine tells the story of FLOOD and talks about:
Copy editing your own work
Thinking about text structure like architecture
Agent shenanigans
Shampoo and sugar as essential writing tools
Combatting perfectionism
Jaclyn Gilbert and Drift(less) Literary
Poets and their memoirs
Learn more about Christine here
Buy FLOOD here
Deesha Philyaw tells the story of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Along the way she covers:
Being in the Norton Anthology of Literature
The ways Church Ladies is proudly Black
Ways white supremacy shapes the stories we read and tell
Misconceptions about race in publishing
Revision for her novel
Boundaries
Sasha Hom tells the story of Sidework.
Along the way she covers:
Profluence
Including multiple nows in your writing
Making appreciation a discipline
Polyphonic nature of restaurants and motherhood (especially when living in a tent!)
Living life as an artist's residency
Black Lawrence Press (Immigrant writing series)
Learn more about Sasha here or here
Jennie Case tells the story of We Are Animals.
Jennie talks about:
- control, safety, and risk in the creative process
- speaking to the current moment
- how to gesture toward the place beyond concepts in writing
- agent troubles
- writing a letter to your book
- publishing with a university press (Trinity)
Rebe talks about:
querying (and querying again!)
hiring a publicist
writing about grief
art vs archiving
enjoying the ride
the changing publishing industry
Libby Maxey talks about:
- using sonnets to put the pandemic in a box
- writing 'off of' other writers
- the ancient tradition of starting a book with an author's address to the book
- poetry land vs. fiction land, and how time doesn't matter
- editing other poets' poems
- giving dignity to small things
- being 'bad' at 'pub days'
Dori Lumpkin talks about:
Comp titles and queries
Religious tea drinking
Setting up a book signing
Method writing (like method acting)
Book tattoos
Emma Pattee talks about
Postpartum creativity
Writing by hand
Navigating the distance between one's own vision and feedback and finding one's breaking point with a project
Confusing a desire to make art and a desire to be famous
Going on sub for only 24 hours
Lidia Yuknavitch and Reading the Waves
Wayne Scott talks about
Writing well-rounded characters that can surprise us
Trying to sell a book that publishers don't think will sell to women
Marriage as a story
EM Forrester's Aspects of the Novel
Publishing a Modern Love piece, getting an agent and then having your agent lose steam
Memoir as coping strategy
Mariam Rahmani talks about:
Preserving voice
How to know when you are ready to bring editors and other readers in to your process
Racialized pay gaps and racialized double-standards in publishing
Streamlining of stories in publishing
Putting a manuscript of 7 years aside
Challenges of short story versus novel
Cally talks about:
Hardware and software in a story
A need to detox from the marketplace
Woeful inefficiency in the writing process
Zadie Smith and 'obsessive perspective disorder '
Furious throat-clearing
Pregnancy creating writing urgency
Keeping a manuscript under wraps and writing as solitary
The sense in which approval is contagious
Nicole Graev Lipson tells the story of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Along the way we talk about:
Sexism in publishing
The 'mother shelf'
Microscopic truth and Brenda Ueland
Writing from "low-grade embarrassment" and "both-and-ness"
Growing up with with the belief that you can be anyone you want to be and do anything you want to do (and how that might affect the ways you constru...
Shubha Sunder talks about:
Constructing a narrative through the things that people say to the main character
Characterization as a "portrait in the negative"
Writing through divorce and Covid lockdown
Writing from an immigrant perspective and immigration as a step in one's path to becoming an artist
Characters as caricatures and the ways some caricature can strengthen a narrative
How long it took for &ap...
Nanda Reddy talks about:
Deadlines and focus
Manuscripts in drawers
Querytracker
critiquematch.com
Accepting previously rejected parts of ourselves as part of the process of writing fiction
Assimilation
Belonging
Identity
BookPage review by Stephanie Harrison
Elyse Durham talks about:
Remaining open and flexible in the process
Following your fascinations
Focusing
Most adorable book deal celebration
Ballet, Greek Orthodoxy, and the body
Historical fiction
Alison Hunter Trellis Literary
Cameos from Brianna's kiddo Andy (he would like you to know that he DOESN'T have candy)
Find out more about Elyse here!
Emily J. Smith talks about:
Graphing plot points and clues
That whole job/money/housing/social class/art tangle
Validation, connection, tech, and writing
Bouncing back from failure
Bringing an engineer mindset to writing and bringing a tech mindset to publishing
"Prestige thrillers"
Writing friends
Interesting theory about relative challenges of agents and editors
Olufunke covers:
-The importance of the relationships in the process of publishing your work
-What makes her a 'real' writer
- Savoring
-How good feedback can shift your relationship with your own writing
In this episode, Lidia talks about
-story-telling space as a magical shape-shifting place of healing and growth
-how to talk to yourself when your writing is lousy
- pillow forts
- creative coping strategies
-being trained to retell the same story
-how we and our stories change over time
-writing a fable from something that happened to you
Find out more about Lidia here
Why write 'bad' characters? Why write 'bad' female characters?
Being patient and having faith
The line between good and evil exists within every man
Stephen King and kinds of fear
It Follows directed by David Robert Mitchell (film about sexually transmitted haunting!)
Dracula
Picture of Dorian Gray
(please excuse my terrible pronunciation of 'macabre'!!!...
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