AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Treat Writing Like A Scientific Experiment
- Jarred McGinnis treats writing as a scientific experiment, dissecting books he loves and hates to learn what works.
- He kept a “wormery” for bad books and iterated drafts until his short-story habits yielded a true novel form.
Use Meta Declarations To Free Narrative Honesty
- McGinnis deliberately destabilised author/character conflation by naming the protagonist Jarred and declaring the book a fiction.
- That admission unlocked honesty: readers praised the book's candour because the author owned the character's ugliness.
Writing Reopened Long Buried Vulnerabilities
- Writing the book forced McGinnis to revisit vulnerabilities he had compartmentalised during 20 years in a wheelchair.
- Researching newly injured people and reliving those fragile questions gave the protagonist the necessary vulnerability.