HeyJaredSriram Tawker
A fiction writer building in public. Mondays I write about the craft and the struggle. Fridays I publish the fiction itself. Both tracks feed each other.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 9, 2026
Latest issues
The Grisham Rule: How to Keep Readers Turning the Page (opens the original)
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In 1989, a small-town lawyer published his first novel and it flopped.The publisher printed 5,000 copies. He bought 1,000 of them himself and sold them out of the trunk of his car at libraries. Today his books have sold more than 300 million copies.His name is John Grisham, and he is the second master in this series.Why Grisham, and why nowLast time I wrote about Agatha Christie and promised Archer and Grisham next. Grisham gets the second spot for a simple reason. He is the writer who pulled me
How to Build a Writing Routine When You Work Full-Time (opens the original)
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Some Mornings I Shouldn’t Write At All. Here’s How I Tell.I have one hour to write before my full-time job starts.Not a spare hour. The hour. The only clean, uninterrupted block I get before the day fills up with meetings and emails and problems that have nothing to do with fiction. Everything I publish gets built inside it.Here is what nobody tells you about that hour. Some mornings, using it does more harm than skipping it.The one-hour windowFor the last six months I have published a new chapt
Temple of the Gods is finished. Now you can read it all. (opens the original)
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A British archaeologist breaks into a tunnel beneath a 1,000-year-old Indian temple and falls into the year it was built. The entire serial is now live.Twenty-two chapters. Prologue to epilogue. After six months of publishing a chapter at a time, Temple of the Gods is now finished.There is the satisfaction of finally typing The End. But there is also the odd feeling of missing a story that I have been living with every week for the last six months.Here is how the whole thing started.It started w
How to Write an Opening Line Readers Can't Ignore (opens the original)
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The first line is the only line a reader is guaranteed to read.Everything after it is optional. They keep going because the opening earned it, or they put the book down and never come back. You get one sentence to make the case.Here is how I actually do it, and five angles you can use to get there.How I write my opening linesI don’t try to nail it in one go. I never can.For any story, I write five or six versions of the first line, each from a different angle. One opens on a line of dialogue. On
How to Fix a Sagging Middle in a Thriller: 5 Pacing Lessons (opens the original)
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I put a two-week deadline on my whole story and the pacing still sagged.Every craft blog says the same thing. Add a ticking clock. Give your thriller a countdown and the reader can’t look away. So I did it. I built my detective novel around a two-week window and figured the pressure would carry the pages. It didn’t. Somewhere in the middle the story slowed right down, clock and all. Here is what I got wrong, and what actually fixes it.The clock runs in your head, not the reader’sThis is the part
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