Adam Roberts on Becoming a Novelist
And being a food person
There is NO cost to sign up for this newsletter, but subscribing insures you’ll receive new posts and stay up to date. If you like what you read, please let us know by hitting the ❤️ at the bottom of the post. We love your comments, shares, and restacks, too. We do welcome paid subscribers for anyone able and interested in further supporting the show.
When I was young, I dreamed of being a novelist. I read voraciously, I signed up for classes, I studied anything I could find on the craft of writing. I put pencil to paper and fingers to keyboard and tried. For years, I tried. The trouble was that my stories were never any good. The writing was okay, but the stories were boring. The best of them were weird but still boring. Thankfully (for both my livelihood and well-being), I eventually stopped trying to invent stories and shifted my writing ambitions to topics around food and cooking—something that I knew a thing or two about—and any dreams of becoming a novelist were left in a box of notebooks and papers somewhere in my past.
“Identifying what you should be writing about is a hard process. It’s a part of the process that no one really talks about. You can learn craft, and you can learn how to put a sentence together, but you can’t learn what the right thing is to write about. Only you can figure that out.”
This sound advice comes from Adam Roberts, our first repeat guest on the show, and someone who has worked incredibly hard figuring out what to write, not by sitting around mulling it over, but by spending years writing and publishing his work.
When Kate Leahy and I first spoke to Adam (back in October 2022), we had already seen him shape-shift as a writer across several platforms: a pioneer food blogger (The Amateur Gourmet), the author of a book of essays and two cookbooks, and a writer for TV and film. Towards the end of that first interview, we asked Adam what he was working on next, certain that it would again be something new. Sure enough, he had launched himself into yet another genre and was writing a novel. “I think writing a novel is much harder than I thought it was. But I am enjoying the process and I'm learning a lot,” he explained. “I'm working on it every day, and really trying to crank out.”
When Adam’s debut novel, Food Person, came out in May of this year, we were eager to discover if this was the same novel he’d been working on three years prior, but it wasn’t. Not even close. According to Adam, that first novel, “just didn’t work on so many levels.” So he scrapped the project entirely and started over, inventing a new storyline and new characters, loosely based on his personal experience as a cookbook ghostwriter set in New York City, a place he loved and knew. About a year later (at 1,000 words a day), Adam had a manuscript to sell, and all the pieces fell into place for his first novel.
While Adam describes the experience of finding the right agent and publisher for his book as a “fairytale,” I can’t help but disagree. All I see are the years of work and dedication that he has put into honing his writing skills and bringing this book to life. If you haven’t already listened, I hope you’ll tune in to our conversation with Adam to hear more about his journey to becoming a novelist. It’s a conversation packed with lessons on writing, humor, heart, and self-knowledge. Lessons that may have saved my younger self a few years of angst trying to become a different kind of writer. Or maybe not. These may be lessons we can only learn on our own.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support the Everything Cookbooks podcast, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Links from the episode:
Adam Roberts’ Website
His Instagram
Our first interview with Adam: Episode 26: Blogs, Books and Broadway with Adam Roberts
Casey Elsass website
Food Person, by Adam Roberts
Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway, by Adam Roberts
The Amateur Gourmet, by Adam Roberts
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, by Jenni Ferrari-Adler
After Taste, by Daria Lavelle
What Can I Bring, by Casey Elsass
Visit the Everything Cookbooks Bookshop to browse all books mentioned in the show (purchasing books here supports the show, independent bookstores, and authors. A win-win-win! 🏆)
Next week on EVCB:
Next week on the show, it’s an all-host chat with Andrea, Kate, Kristin, and me tackling the all-important topic of comp titles: what they are, what they’re used for, how to identify them, and why publishers sometimes come up with their own. The four of us share examples from our projects and suggest potential resources to help authors find the right comp titles for their book proposals. We wrap up with a frank discussion about why comp titles matter more than ever in the publishing business.
Bye for now. We’ll be back here next week and hope to see you. In the meantime, keep on writing, reading, and cooking. ✍️📚🍳
Molly and the EVCB gang
Lots of ways to support Everything Cookbooks
There is no cost to subscribe to our Substack — and no pressure — but subscribing does help support the show. Please tap the ❤️ at the bottom of the post if you like what you read here. We appreciate your comments and restacks, too. And of course, we welcome paid subscriptions if you’re able and interested in further supporting the show. There’s even a special category for superheroes for our super fans.
Shop for EVCB merch on our website and any book mentioned on the show can be found at our affiliate shop at Bookshop.org. Every bit of support helps!