Writers on Writing Barbara DeMarco-Barrett and Marrie Stone

Megan Miranda is the New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls; The Perfect Stranger; The Last House Guest, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick; The Girl from Widow Hills; Such a Quiet Place; The Last to Vanish; and The Only Survivors. She has also written several books for young adults. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children. Follow @MeganLMiranda on Instagram, @AuthorMeganMiranda on Facebook, or visit MeganMiranda.com. Her latest book is Daughter of Mine, published by Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books.

Megan joins Barbara to discuss her path to writing crime fiction, voice, transitioning from YA to adult fiction, ensemble casts, setting, plotting, pacing, and much more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.

(Recorded on March 8, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

A.J. Jacobs is the author of nine books including the NYT bestsellers The Year of Living Biblically, The Know It All, Drop Dead Healthy, and The Puzzler. His latest, in the spirit of The Year of Living Biblically, is The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning.

A.J. joins Marrie Stone to talk about making yourself a guinea pig for your work and how to set up the rule system to do that, researching a bottomless topic and when you know you’ve done enough, walking the political tightrope in divided times, as well as how this book changed A.J.’s thinking on a variety of subjects and the impact of the project.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on May 16, 2024)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of 15 novels of suspense. She has won multiple prestigious awards for her crime fiction, including five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. She’s the on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, and has won 37 EMMYs, 14 Edward R. Murrow awards, and dozens of other honors for her groundbreaking journalism. Hank’s novels have been named Best Thriller of the Year by Library Journal, New York Post, BOOK BUB, PopSugar, Real Simple Magazine and others. Hank lives in Boston with her husband, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney. Her new book is One Wrong Word, a twisty non-stop story of gaslighting, manipulation, and murder.

 Hank joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about her journey to writing, the crossover from broadcast journalism, voice, multiple points of view, avoiding the muddled middle, twists, pacing, and much more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.

(Recorded on April 4, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Debut novelist Ela Lee is author of the breakout novel Jaded, published in the US by Simon and Schuster and in the UK by Vintage. Prior to becoming a novelist, Ela was a litigator who grew up in London.

Ela joins Marrie Stone to talk about a lot of writerly topics, including writing about sexual violence and misogyny in the post #metoo movement, writing about racism and microaggressions in the current climate where diversity, equity and inclusion are hot button topics, and creating a cast of characters to represent various viewpoints without being didactic. They also discuss how to write a query letter that will grab an agent, finding an agent and publisher without an MFA, how to get your manuscript out of an agent’s slush pile, marketing your book on social media, and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.

(Recorded on April 16, 2024)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Alexander Sammartino was born in Rhode Island, grew up in Arizona, and now lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University. His debut novel, Last Acts, was published by Scribner in January and was selected as a New York Times’ Editors Choice. Last Acts has been described as “hilarious and wrenching,” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “irreverent” by the Chicago Review of Books, and “a wholly American novel about salvation” by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Alex has been called “a magnificent sentence writer” by the New York Times Book Review. And George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, said, “What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn’t stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere, Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage—that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards, has found a worthy heir."

Alex joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss father/son novels, writing short chapters, multiple perspectives, beginnings and endings, interiority, backstory, influences, and much more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and to receive extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. Listen to past interviews on our website. Another way to support the show is by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.

(Recorded on April 11, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels, two which came out on the same day in 1984 and, her most recent, Hieroglyphics, to great acclaim. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. Her essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in The American Scholar, was selected for Best American Essays. Jill has published five collections of short stories. Her latest, that she discusses today with Marrie Stone, is Old Crimes.

This conversation parses through several of these stories, using them as examples to discuss point of view choices, how to manage time in fiction, how to balance backstory, how to incorporate humor into difficult material, how you can get your stories to talk to each other in a collection, and so much more.
For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We’ve stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You’ll support independent bookstores and our show by purchasing through the store. Finally, on Spotify listen to an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
(Recorded on April 11, 2024)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)