10 Minute Writer's Workshop

Some of you may know Manoush Zomorodi as host of the podcast Note to Self from WNYC. She is also, now, an author. Her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self came out of her own experience and curiosity about the creative process and confronting digital distractions - one of the biggest challenges for writers. She asked her audience to help her figure out what it would mean to let all of that go and to learn to shut down in order to build your creative juices up. Bored and Brilliant is the result, and it begins with an extreme case of writer’s block – what Manoush refers to as “a blankness.”

Episode music by Ryan Andersen

Follow us on Twitter @10MinuteWriters and find Manoush at @manoushz and @NoteToSelf

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Conventional, linear narratives are not really Jennifer Egan’s thing. She's a shape-shifter of fiction – jumping through time, space, voices and forms. She's written a graphic novel, a short story composed of tweets, and, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, a kind of novel-as-concept album. Jennifer Egan takes on historical fiction in her newest novel, Manhattan Beach. We called her at her home in Brooklyn to ask about her process and how she begins her unpredictable novels.

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Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink, co-creators of the phenomenally popular Welcome to Nightvale podcast, the “Nightvale Presents” series of podcasts, and New York Times bestselling co-authors of the new novel, It Devours, their second book set in the fictional world of Nightvale. We caught up with them at the 2017 Boston Book Festival. Episode Music by Disparition

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The blockbuster 2003 thriller The Da Vinci Code launched Dan Brown into the best-selling stratosphere. More than 200 million copies of his books have sold worldwide since. Three of his novels have been made into films starring tom hanks as fictional Harvard professor Robert Langdon. Brown is a disciplined writer, rising at 4am to a breakfast smoothie and "bulletproof" coffee, writing every day, and throwing himself into his research. He spent four years researching Origin, his latest novel, which again thrusts Langdon into a 24-hour scavenger hunt for keys, codes and symbols in spectacular European locations. The breathless action drives bigger questions about faith, conspiracies, and organized religion. The question of whether contemporary notions of god can withstand scientific scrutiny is at the heart of Origin. We caught up with him just before discussing the book at The Music Hall in Portsmouth for Writers on a New England Stage.

Music in this episode by Gregory W. Brown, used with permission by PARMA Recordings, and Podington Bear.

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For many writers, hitting their stride means finding their voice. Success for Sarah Hurwitz is in creating a voice for others. Sarah was candidate Hillary Clinton’s chief speechwriter during the 2006 Presidential primary, and was quickly snatched up by the Obama campaign team. She landed in the White House, soon being named First Lady Michelle Obama’s head speechwriter. We asked Sarah about her work and confirmed that she worked on that 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention that was plagiarized by then candidate Trump's wife, Melania at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

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