The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.
Here’s what we talked about in this episode:
After a looooong time away from the first-draft page, I finished my first book in forever today. I talked about how that felt and what I had to re-learn to do it … and asked the crew whether or not I should “celebrate its completion” like Stephen King talks about doing.
We talked about tense and voice of prose: first versus third-person narratives, as well as past tense versus present tense. We had a great discussion about suiting the style of narration to the book in question.
On the topic of following “the rules implied by a certain style of or device for writing,” we talked about my old phrase “put a unicorn in it,” which bridges the at-some-point decision writers need to make about how much they want to follow the rules vs. how much they want the reader to actually understand the story.
Most of the remainder of our chat today was consumed with talking about our preparations and excitement to hand-sell books in person at the RAVE book event in Vegas two weeks from when we were recording.
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