S5 E8 Jasmine Guillory: The Art of the Messy First Draft

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This week, I’m joined by Jasmine Guillory, bestselling author of The Wedding Date and her latest novel, It’s Only Dancing , for a deep dive into the nitty-gritty of how she actually makes a book. Jasmine walks me through her “messy first draft,” where she lets herself put every idea on the page, knowing she’ll come back later to chip away at it, reshape it, and figure out what the story actually needs. During the pandemic, that process even led her to handwrite an entire novel because, at the time, that was the way of writing that felt least scary. We talk about how she learned to write dialogue, which, spoiler alert, was not simply a magical gift she was born with. We dig into what happens…