Jacob Paul / Patrick Nolan - Episode #359 (8/3/15)

Award-winning author Jacob Paul, whose new novel, A Song of Ilan, was published this spring by Jaded Ibis Press. 

Patrick Nolan, Vice President, Editor-in-Chief and Associate Publisher of Penguin Books, which is celebrating its 80th anniversary.

This week’s  Write The Book Prompt was suggested by my first guest, Jacob Paul, who in 2014 collaborated with friends Sarah Martin and Adam Moser to create a project titled Home for an Hour. Moser invited seven couples to each spend an hour by themselves in his apartment in Greensboro, North Carolina. The couples were encouraged to do whatever they wanted, with no one watching. Meanwhile, outside on the snowy lawn, Jacob Paul sat with his laptop, composing a fictional narrative about each of them. In one of his resulting stories, a participant meditates on the meaning of the word common; another story presents an imagined conversation between two people as  they sit in the apartment, drinking a box of wine. None of the stories was revised before being collected into the Home for an Hour book. So the prompt for this week, generously offered by Jacob Paul, is to have a friend or friends go do something that you can’t watch and, in real time, while they’re doing it, write a fictional documentary account of what they might be doing.

Good luck with this exercise and please listen next week for another.

Music credits: 1) “Dreaming 1″ - John Fink; 2) “Filter” - Dorset Greens (a Vermont band featuring several former South Burlington High School students).