Write The Book: Conversations on Craft

Vikram Chandra - Interview #317 (10/20/14)

Vikram Chandra, author most recently of Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, published by Graywolf Press.

Today's Write the Book Prompt is to write about someone's first experience using a computer. 

Good luck with this prompt and please listen next week for another!

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students, now alums). 

Tana French, Jon Turner, and Claire Benedict - Show #316 (10/13/14)

New interviews with best-selling novelist Tana French, whose new Dublin Murder Squad mystery is The Secret Place, published by Viking; Vermont poet and veteran Jon Turner, who has worked extensively with the Warrior Writers Project and Combat Paper, and is now a member of the Farmer Veteran Coalition; and our own book mentor, Claire Benedict, co-owner of Bear Pond Books in Montpelier.

During this show, Claire recommended:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

The Secret Place by Tana French

Museums of America by Gary Miller

A House In the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett

This week's Write the Book  Prompt might involve going into your attic or basement. Find a box in your home whose contents you’re not entirely sure of. Write about what might be inside. Include memories of events that the possible contents trigger. Then open the box, and write about what you do, in fact, find there. 

Good luck with this prompt and please listen next week for another!

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students, now alums). 

James Kochalka - Archive Interview #315 (10/6/14)

2011 Interview with Vermont comic book artist and writer, and rock musician James Kochalka, who was Vermont's first cartoonist laureate.

Today's Write the Book Prompt is to read cartoons, online or in the newspaper or in books, for pleasure and to open your mind to the way comic book authors handle plot and character. If this is not your normal fare, try to let go and enjoy! Then, keeping in mind what you've learned about the cartoonist's approach, write!

Good luck with this prompt and please listen next week for another!

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students, now alums). 

Julie Metz - Archive Interview #314 (9/29/14)

Interview from 2011 with book jacket designer and author Julie Metz, about her memoir, Perfection.

Today's Write The Book Prompt is to write about a bounced check. 

Good luck with this prompt and please listen next week for another!

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students, now alums). 

Howard Norman - Archive Interview #313 (9/22/14)

Interview from the archives with Vermont author Howard Norman, whose new novel is Next Life Might Be Kinder. This is our first of two interviews, during which we talked about an earlier novel, What Is Left The Daughter? 

This week's Write the Book Prompt is about ghosts and hauntings, a theme that exists in some of Howard Norman's work. Don't think horror, don't think "ghost story," but consider what haunts you. Or what haunts a character. Or even what haunts a story, a setting, a situation. Then write about it, but try to keep it subtle. Write about a haunting in a way that makes a reader do a double take, as if  she just saw something flit by out of the corner of her eye. Did I just see that?

Good luck with this prompt and please listen next week for another!

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students, now alums).