Listen now (29 mins) | First pages are impossible… so we’re hearing from authors about how they got them right. In this episode, Nathaniel Ian Miller discusses the first pages of his debut novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, and how his discoveries about the character’s inner life allowed him to go back to his book’s beginning again and offer readers a fuller, more nuanced sense of Sven. We also discuss the power of distance in a reminiscent narrator, what writers might borrow from memoir in terms of voice and complexity, and how world building can be a very physical experience more than anything else.
Passages: Nathaniel Ian Miller on The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven
Such a gorgeous reading. I could listen to the entire novel.