Unedited: From Idea to Manuscript and Shelf to Screen

Inkshares
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Arts
  • Updated Semiweekly

Whether you're an aspiring writer, an established author, a story professional, or just a story junkie, Unedited is a behind-the-scenes trip into all facets of the global story economy. Join us for a discussion of all things story, from idea to manuscript and shelf to screen with the globe's best writers, book professionals, booksellers, and adaptation stakeholders. We’re going to keep it informed, unfiltered, and unedited—not a salon, think a bar, whatever your drink or genre of choice.  Before he was published, Tom Clancy sold insurance. Stephen King worked in a laundromat. J.K. Rowling was a secretary. Wherever you work and whoever you are, welcome to Unedited: From Idea to Manuscript and Shelf to Screen.

  1. Oct 2

    Harlequin Rising, Dad Books Falling, and the Automation of the Slush Pile

    Unedited is back! After a summer devoted to editorial and book-to-screen conversions, the Inkshares team returns to discuss some of the biggest news and trends in the global story economy in 2026.  Joined by the ever-insightful Will Gish, we examine Harlequin’s partnership with Dashverse, an AI company, to create “microdramas” inspired by the romance publisher’s vast catalog. But would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet when masticated and regurgitated by an LLM? Speaking of AI, some lit agents fear publishers are now using artificial help to sort the slush pile. Besides the privacy concerns, does this reduce fiction to a fraction solvable only by a supercomputer? And on the topic of homework help, what is happening to the books our dads read? Some say podcasts are responsible for the fall of certain strands of nonfiction, but we aren’t so sure.  Join us and catch the full discussion, out now on all platforms.

  2. Apr 30

    Stupid, Part Three: How Historical Fiction Can Save Our Brains

    Today on Unedited, three authors of historical fiction join us to parse the state of modern entertainment and ponder whether we’re really living in a uniquely stupid era. We as creatures have been weaving epic fictions since at least the Iron Age—and authors have been called out for their overuse of sex and violence since at least Herodotus. But with millions of books being published (or self-published) each year, and a disproportionate number of those books trying to out-Scoville each other, can any prior century claim as stupid a literary legacy? Writer of historical thrillers Marjorie DeLuca, master of Golden Age mysteries Christopher Huang, and award-winning Western novelist and returning Unedited guest Chase Pletts help us understand what publishing houses today are asking for, why we don’t remember much of the stupid fiction from prior eras, and how stories set in other times can help us more accurately understand our own.

  3. Mar 30

    The Road to Dumb: The Long March from Faulkner to Fifty Shades & Walter Cronkite to Tucker Carlson

    If you, like Theseus, got trapped in a maze with a Minotaur, how would you escape? Except in this case, the maze is made of video games, nonstop TV, and the 3.5 million books published on Amazon KDP in 2025. And you don’t have a ball of string to retrace your steps. Last week on Unedited, we began a discussion of stupid. Where have all the smart books gone, and, maybe more importantly, where has the appetite for smart gone? This week, Adam diagnoses our entertainment culture sickness by examining a string of symptoms: the fall of boredom, the saturation of stimuli, and the erosion of institutional guardrails.  But guard rails against what? Is stupid something with an actual lineage, or just a matter of changing tastes? To answer that, we explore the “thought-terminating cliches” of our time and contrast what the authors of today are trying to do when compared with those of yore. Join us, if you dare.

  4. Mar 13

    The Case for Thinking People's Fiction: From the Brontes to Bridgerton

    After a kickoff discussion of sequels last month, we’re pivoting in the next few Unedited episodes to a debate around what happened to good fiction and why so many of the novels we read these days feel, well, stupid.  Is it nostalgia talking to say that the novels of fifty or one hundred years ago felt smarter than the stuff getting praised in the (increasingly decimated) newspaper reviews of today? Or that the books kids once read in school presented better lessons, better stories, and just better writing than the BookTok trends of the month? We don’t think so. In this episode, Noah gives a brief introduction to the subject of “stupid” by asking what, ultimately, fiction is, and how the novel’s adaptation to changing times and technologies turned it from a canonical artform to a beehive of buzzwords. To cap it off, we ask how (and why) to recover smart in an age of stupid.

  5. Feb 13

    The World of Sequels, Part 2: From Neanderthals to Narnia (and Peter Rabbit to Poirot)

    Last week, we jumped into sequels—what are they, and why are they everywhere? This week, Noah gives us a different spin on the subject by asking, where did sequels come from? How did they develop? Which books and movies turned sequels into the ubiquitous format we’re surrounded by today? From caveman campfires to the books we curled up with as kids, stories with a “part two” are so common we almost forget that aren’t innate to the artform. Or are they? Are sequels as natural as sunrise and sunset? And if that’s the case, is there any difference between the three Lord of the Rings novels and the thirty three Hercule Poirot mysteries? And do the serialized stories we gobble up as kids prime us for a story landscape that’s all sequels all the time? Tune in as we weave all these threads.

  6. Feb 4

    The World of Sequels: Don Quixote, Die Hard & "Donroe"

    This month, Unedited: From Idea to Manuscript and Shelf to Screen returns. Adam — accompanied by a surprise guest, his youngest daughter — kicks us off with an introduction to the topic of the next several episodes: sequels. Here at Inkshares, we’ve been thinking a lot about sequels as we work on follow-ups from authors like Scott Thomas, JF Dubeau, and Christopher Huang. Pretty much all of our favorite books and films have sequels of some sort or another.  But what is a sequel? And why is a sequel? What purpose should a sequel serve? What separates the good ones from the bad ones? Did the book series we read as kids condition us to consume sequels? And in an age where it seems like everything is an extended universe, is it time for sequels to die? Equally importantly, has our real world itself become nothing more than a sequel...

  7. 07/21/2025

    Jurassic Special, Part 2: Hobbesian Ethics, Male Readerships, and the Orgiastic Love of Story

    In episode 26 of Unedited, we continue with Part 2 of our Jurassic discussion, this time joined by writer, podcaster and returning guest Will Gish. Together, Gish and Gomolin take a magnifying glass to the techniques Crichton uses to rope readers into his story, from the authoritative and academic introduction, to the pulse-pounding prologue, to the deceptive lull of the first chapter and the gradual unfurling of the plot. The G gang also unpack the Hollywood of it all, pondering how the latest entry in the franchise matches up against the first and whether a story that so elegantly balances cerebral and spectacle would—in today’s cultural climate—break out like it did thirty years ago, as either a book or film. Will / William / Bill / Who? Gish is a novelist and screenwriter living in Los Angeles whose work has appeared nowhere and received zero accolades. Growing up in both New Jersey and Vermont, he was drawn to theater, earning awards for playwriting before graduating high school (full disclosure: he gave himself most of these awards). Will has a BA in Art History and Japanese Language & Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an MFA in Feature Film Screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University. He is the writer of an untitled Mexican sci-fi family dramedy film (sounds fake but it’s not!), currently in post-production and White Devil, currently in editorial with Inkshares. He likes dogs and knows nothing about wine.

  8. 07/11/2025

    Jurassic Special, Part 1: Crichton’s Book vs. Spielberg's Movie and the State of the Franchise Today

    Episode 25 of Unedited is a special one. In Part 1 of 2, Adam sits down with current Inkshares editor Noah Broyles and former Inkshares editor (and accomplished novelist) Matt Harry to discuss one of the most successful book-to-film adaptations of all time, Jurassic Park. Noah brings first impressions of the film, while Matt shares a lifelong appreciation of each version of the story. Throughout our discussion, we contrast the artistic choices of the book and the film and, as the latest installment storms into theaters, ponder why dino DNA spawned one of the most successful franchises in story history.  Noah Broyles was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. He started out writing in a notebook, upgraded to a typewriter, and finally graduated to a laptop. At the age of fourteen he sat down to write his first novel and at the age of twenty-three his debut novel, The House of Dust, was published by Inkshares. He has been a member of the Inkshares publishing team since 2021. Matt Harry has been writing since he was a middle grader. He learned to make movies at the University of Southern California, which was the closest he could get to attending Hogwarts in the real world. He has worked as an editor, screenwriter, director, producer, college professor, and pizza delivery technician. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons, both of whom (thankfully) like to read.

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About

Whether you're an aspiring writer, an established author, a story professional, or just a story junkie, Unedited is a behind-the-scenes trip into all facets of the global story economy. Join us for a discussion of all things story, from idea to manuscript and shelf to screen with the globe's best writers, book professionals, booksellers, and adaptation stakeholders. We’re going to keep it informed, unfiltered, and unedited—not a salon, think a bar, whatever your drink or genre of choice.  Before he was published, Tom Clancy sold insurance. Stephen King worked in a laundromat. J.K. Rowling was a secretary. Wherever you work and whoever you are, welcome to Unedited: From Idea to Manuscript and Shelf to Screen.

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