My podcast this week is from a fiction story. After I wrote this part, I realized I started in the wrong place. So you get the benefit of reading something I will definitely change later today.
Yes, I write fiction exactly the same way I write nonfiction. I start where I think the piece starts. Then, as I cycle to clarify, I do the equivalent of a face-palm and change things around.
It doesn't matter if I write fiction or nonfiction. Regardless of what I write, I learn as I write.
Remember this: The writer's experience of writing is not the same as the reader's experience of reading.
The Podcast:
The Transcript:
This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for September 26, 2025, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress.
This is the opening of a (hopefully) solarpunk short story.
The final low-pitched train whistle of the Solar Amtrak train as it left the Libby, Montana, station meant Isa Block was on her own. And thank goodness she was.
She had taken her seat at the far end of the observation car on the upper level of the train. She’d already counted the length of the car as she walked down the central blue-carpeted hallway—a grand total of eighty-five feet. The car was arranged as if she had designed it, for maximum comfort and minimal human interaction. Each side of the car had seventeen plush brown chairs with bio-plastic white backs separated by a small white bio-plastic table facing the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Isa thought it looked as if everyone could be off in their own little sightseeing world. Which was just fine with her. She welcomed the privacy.
The Video:
The video link is here.