The Rumpus Interview with Kea Wilson
Kea Wilson discusses her debut novel We Eat Our Own, the influence of film on her work, and what she’s learned from working as a bookseller.
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Posts Tagged: first novels
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pinpricks
Time is king. Believers, agnostics or atheists—humans or not: time rules us. We submit to it, surrender to it, and are shaped by it.
...moreThe Long and Winding Road
The stories are woven together with my life and my life moved across the globe as I wrote, so the stories too took that long journey. My map of becoming a writer goes all the way around the world. At Lit Hub, Ramona Ausubel writes about the roads that led her to her first novel, No […]
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The Rumpus Interview with J. Aaron Sanders
J. Aaron Sanders discusses his debut novel, Speakers of the Dead, his writing process, and the wisdom of sharing his early drafts with his students.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sharon Oard Warner
Sharon Oard Warner discusses her latest book, Sophie’s House of Cards, Breaking Bad, how a sense of place informs fiction, and the Republican war on Planned Parenthood.
...moreDebut Novelists and the Books That Shaped Them
Lit Hub asked the seven first-time novelists shortlisted for the 2015 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize what book inspired them to become the authors they are today. Sophie McManus says, I was ten and reading A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin when the understanding that I’d make my life with books […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisabeth Egan
Elisabeth Egan discusses her debut novel, A Window Opens, life as a book lover, workplace jargon, and the question we should ask ourselves in place of can we “have it all”.
...moreKeep Working, Keep Submitting
Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief Lincoln Michel released his debut collection of stories, Upright Beasts, earlier this year. For the Quivering Pen, Michel explores the challenges first-time authors experience in writing and submitting their work to publishers: It would be nice here to craft a story of how those first publications inspired me to new heights of […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Sean Bernard
Sean Bernard talks about the placid, annoying heaven of his debut novel, Studies in the Hereafter, why he’s both optimistic and cynical about human nature, and the difference between writing short stories and a novel.
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Risk Hallberg
Garth Risk Hallberg talks about his debut, City on Fire, living in New York City now and in the ’70s, and the anxiety and gratitude you feel when your first novel generates so much buzz.
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The Rumpus Interview with Neil Smith
Author Neil Smith discusses his latest book, Boo, the suffering inherent in being thirteen years old, and how friendship can help pull us through traumatic events in our lives.
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The Rumpus Interview with Andrew Ervin
Andrew Ervin discusses his debut novel, Burning Down George Orwell’s House, social media and writing, and how video games can serve as a way to understand the post-human world.
...moreCreating a Contrary Character
I think she’s half pursuing these conventions of romantic love, and half rejecting them. Which produces this kind of contrariness. There’s this line in the first chapter where she says, “I only want what I hate.” These contradictions of desire and behavior run all the way through the story. The Believer blog talks to Zoe […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Julie Iromuanya
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Julie Iromuanya about her new book Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, writing an unlikeable main character, and worrying about your parents reading your finished book.
...moreNow, Writing is for Extroverts Too
When my wife proposed writing a novel together last year, I was initially resistant but not for the most obvious reasons. I wasn’t worried about our ability to work together. I wasn’t even worried about whether we could actually produce a good novel. We had decades of writing experience between us, mostly as reporters for […]
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Guildtalk #1: The Rumpus Interview with Eddie Joyce
Guildtalk, brought to you by The Rumpus and the Authors Guild, brings attention to exciting new voices in American literature. The first installment features Richard Russo and Eddie Joyce.
...moreThe Second Time Around
2014 wasn’t just the year of the debut—plenty of authors released their second novel, often considered the most challenging for writers to write. Slate sat down with some second-time novelists to discuss their sophomore efforts, like Family Life author Akhil Sharma who spent a dozen years on the novel: If you write for two or […]
...moreSlow and Steady
It took Gene Oishi 50 years to write his debut novel, a story about Japanese American identity and family during and after World War II. Over at The Nervous Breakdown, Oishi interviews himself about the process of writing Fox Drum Bebop: I had a lot of excuses, but the reason I didn’t want to write […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Wayne Harrison
Wayne Harrison discusses his debut novel, The Spark and the Drive, fiction, working as a correctional officer, and Carl Benz’s three-wheeled Motor Car.
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The Rumpus Interview with Will Chancellor
Debut novelist Will Chancellor talks about successful satire, destroying drafts of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall to get to the finished version, and the advantages of fiction over competing media.
...moreNovels Are a Long Time Coming
Contrary to the mission of National Novel Writing Month, most novels take far longer to complete, as stay-at-home dad Ryan McSwain learned when he set out to write his first novel, Monsters All the Way Down. The book, due out next month, took more than three years to write and another year to finalize. He […]
...moreA Family Affair
I always think of you as a more novelistic novelist than I am. I’m not predisposed to like poetry. I’m not the kind of person who thinks of poetry as charming or who says of something, “it’s like poetry,” as a turn of phrase. I like poetry, but if I like a poem, it’s earned […]
...moreI Am Not My Protagonist
At Buzzfeed Books, novelist Catherine Lacey writes about an interview she had with a reporter who assumed Lacey had based the protagonist of her first novel on herself. To an extent, Lacey finds this frustrating, but then she considers the way all writers are and are not their characters: What I should tell anyone who […]
...moreRevelations of a First-time Novelist
Ted Thompson recently published his debut novel, The Land of Steady Habits. Like many first-time novelists, he had quite a few expectations about what publishing a novel meant. Over at Salon, he discusses how reality diverged from those expectations. For instance, his book sold for $25,000, but even after foreign rights’ sales, he’s not much closer […]
...moreNot Writing to Write Better
Julia Fierro has a debut novel Cutting Teeth, but for much of the last decade, the writer was so dispirited by the rejection of her first manuscript that she stopped writing. Instead, she launched Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a Brooklyn-based writing institution that has helped introduce a generation of successful novelists. Only after years of teaching […]
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Back to the Beginning: Why I Write
In the beginning the words flowed like honey, like maple syrup, like corn syrup; yes, the metaphors flowed just like that.
...morePortrait of the Author as a Debut Novelist
Over at BuzzFeed Books, Lincoln Michel asks Alena Graedon, Scott Cheshire, Julia Fierro, and D. Foy, who all just released their first novel, to talk about their writing influences, literary commitments, and elevator pitching their first books.
...moreHow to Keep Writing That First Novel
The odds that your first novel will ever be published may not be great, but some new writers do manage to get published. NPR Books asks Chad Harbach and Tara Conklin about the process of writing and selling their first novels. About The Art of Fielding, which took Harbach ten years to write, he says: […]
...moreFirst Novels and the Art of Revision
Most first novels are really second novels, since most first novels go unpublished. Writing for ZYZZYVA, Rumpus contributor Aaron Gilbreath talks through his experience having his debut memoir rejected, eventually leading an agent to suggest he write a novel instead: He wasn’t telling me to call a novel a memoir, or to capitalize on a […]
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