First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

First Draft interview with Elizabeth McCracken. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jess Walter is the author of The Beautiful Ruins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sunil Yapa is the author of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lauren Groff is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her latest novel is Fates and Furies. Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House,One Story, McSweeney’s, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of theBest American Short Stories.  She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winner, discusses the challenges of writing a biography on King David, the portrayal of his wives, the real story of David and Goliath, and the complexity of the main character. She also shares insights on her writing process and how to deal with rejection.

Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anthony Marra is the New York Times-bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. It was selected as one of the ten best books of 2013 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, New York Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, among numerous other year-end lists. He is the winner of the Whiting Award, the Pushcart Prize, and currently teaches at Stanford University.  www.anthonymarra.net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jack Driscoll is the author of four books of poems, two collections of short stories, and four novels. In addition, he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the NEH Independent Study Grant, two Pushcart Prizes and Best American Short Story citations, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award, and seven PEN Syndicated Project Short Fiction Awards. His stories have been read frequently over NPR’s “The Sound of Writing,” and his work has appeared nationally in magazines, literary journals, and newspapers such as Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, Civilization, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You  (Penguin Press), which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and Amazon's #1 Best Book of the Year 2014. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award.  Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel, The Hunters(1957), led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.” His latest book, All That Is, was published to critical acclaim in 2013. He died in 2015.  This interview was recorded in November 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices