Essential Guide to Writing a Novel

A podcast by James Thayer - Fridays

Categories:

109 Episodes

  1. Episode 109 - How we can stop stalling and get going.

    Published: 4/19/2024
  2. Episode 108 - Every description should do double duty.

    Published: 4/12/2024
  3. Episode 107 - The differences between literary and commercial fiction.

    Published: 4/5/2024
  4. Episode 106 - How to write a scene's sequel, and plotting the novel's middle.

    Published: 3/29/2024
  5. Episode 105 - A technique for plotting scene to scene, and my failed writing experiment.

    Published: 3/22/2024
  6. Episode 104 - Let's get to work, and showing with dialogue.

    Published: 3/15/2024
  7. Episode 103 - The joy of creating something out of nothing. And, is our new plot point a strong one?

    Published: 3/8/2024
  8. Episode 102 - Lovely sentence-by-sentence writing, and pumping up our creativity.

    Published: 3/1/2024
  9. Episode 101 - The phrases notebook, and avoiding our plot bogging down.

    Published: 2/23/2024
  10. Episode 100 - Getting into the flow, and the power of fiction.

    Published: 2/16/2024
  11. Episode 99 - Traps when writing character-driven stories.

    Published: 2/9/2024
  12. Episode 98 - Counterintuitive techniques that new writers might resist.

    Published: 2/2/2024
  13. Episode 97 - Clothing our characters. Also, how to end a scene.

    Published: 1/26/2024
  14. Episode 96 - How to create emotions in our characters and readers.

    Published: 1/19/2024
  15. Episode 95 - More strong dialogue techniques.

    Published: 1/12/2024
  16. Episode 94 - Seven big dialogue writing techniques.

    Published: 1/5/2024
  17. Episode 93 - Can we avoid stupid writing?

    Published: 12/29/2023
  18. Episode 92 - Fourteen scene mistakes and how to avoid them.

    Published: 12/22/2023
  19. Episode 91 - The benefits of a buddy, and Willa Cather and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

    Published: 12/15/2023
  20. Episode 90 - Techniques for creating riveting settings.

    Published: 12/8/2023

1 / 6

Hosted by James Thayer, the podcast is a practical, step-by-step manual on how to craft a novel. It presents a set of tools for large issues such as story development and scene construction (Kirkus Reviews said Thayer's novels are "superbly crafted') and it also examines techniques that will make your sentence-by-sentence writing shine. The New York Times Book Review has said Thayer's "writing is smooth and clear. it wastes no words, and it has a rhythm only confident stylists achieve.