Write The Book: Conversations on Craft

Sydney Lea and Chard deNiord - Interview #458 (6/19/17)

Two interviews about one book: former and current Vermont poets laureate Sydney Lea and Chard deNiord have collaborated to edit a new collection, Roads Taken - Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers' Press: Dede Cummings, Publisher). 

This week's Write the Book Prompt is to go outside and listen to the sounds around you - be they from birds, frogs, peepers, or your neighbors around the barbecue - and write. 

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion. 

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

 

Paula Martinac - Interview #457 (6/12/17)

Paula Martinac, author most recently of The Ada Decades (Bywater Books). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by our guest, Paula Martinac. Observation + imagination = fiction. Paula’s novel The Ada Decades got its creative start when, on a walk in her neighborhood, she observed an elderly woman scurrying nervously into her bungalow. Raymond Carver said he got the idea for a story when he was on an airplane and watched the passenger next to him pocketing his wedding ring just as they were landing. Think about the action of a stranger that caught your attention; you observed it, but didn’t understand what it meant and will never know for sure. Let your imagination roam and “explain” the incident in a fictional narrative. 

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion. 

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

Bill Schubart - Interview #456 (6/5/17)

Vermont Author Bill Schubart, whose new novel is Lila & Theron (Charles Michael Publishing).

This week's Write the Book Prompt is to consider the following lines from Bill Schubart's essay "On Exigency," and to write from that point of inspiration: 

“There is an intrinsic self-reliance in those who see life’s exigencies as challenges to be overcome. Development in the person who feels victimized and overlooked by life becomes stunted since he is always looking outside himself for someone or something to blame.”

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion. 

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

Brian David Johnson - Interview #455 (5/29/17)

Graphic Novelist Brian David Johnson, author of MWD: Hell Is Coming Home (Candlewick). 

Brian David Johnson suggested a great Write the Book Prompt from his work in business journalism. Go to a Walmart or a hardware store, pick up any obscure part or item, look at where it is from, and then research that town; try to come up with a story that has to do with that place. 

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion. 

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro

 

Denise Mina - Interview #454 (5/31/17)

Critically acclaimed Glaswegian crime writer Denise Mina, whose latest novel is The Long Drop (Little Brown). 

This week’s Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Denise Mina. She says, if you don’t know what to write, start with the most explosive thing you can think of, and then follow all the shards.

Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please listen next week for another prompt or suggestion. 

Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro