Bianca Marais

speaker

5,233 appearances 41 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 2d ago

Bianca Marais’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 41 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 9.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing · Author Insights From Chris Bohjalian, Bailey Hannah and Tarah DeWitt · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

Chris, I need to pick your brain about that opening chapter. voice-verified

It is absolute wizardry what you did there. voice-verified

And I know it must have been incredibly difficult to pull off. voice-verified

So you begin in a way that feels like an omniscient point of view. voice-verified

We feel very pulled out of the scene. voice-verified

And you kind of draw us into it slowly. voice-verified

And then I was thinking, OK, we're in Kenny's third person point of view. voice-verified

At the end of that chapter, we establish that we are in Mira's first person point of view. voice-verified

So can we speak a bit about the intentionality of framing the chapter that way? voice-verified

Yeah, there was so much to unpack there. voice-verified

And for our listeners who are writing these kinds of characters, and I never want to use the word unlikable female protagonist because I'm so sick of that word when it comes to female protagonists, but someone who is damaged, someone who is very vulnerable, someone who makes bad decisions because of that, that the reader sometimes wants to grab this character and shake them, voice-verified

This is a masterclass in how to get the reader so on board with this character that you are rooting for her every step of the way. voice-verified

And we're going to come back shortly, Chris, to grief and how that can be used to drive plot. voice-verified

For now, I want to focus on specificity. voice-verified

So on the podcast, we're always saying you need to focus in on specifics. voice-verified

And sometimes readers interpret that as meaning they need to write like, I don't know, three pages description of something, which is not right. voice-verified

So I'm going to read you a paragraph here that we can unpack two things here. voice-verified

So it goes, my face was buried in my pillow, but my mother was sitting close enough to the headboard that she was rubbing my back. voice-verified

through my shirt in great gentle circles the motion honed from years of dusting the dining room table and then we have this part in parentheses we had a housekeeper who came once a week a woman my mother's age named felicia who baked us sweet potatoes at thanksgiving and brought us crispy golden fried okra in july but that dining room table had been in my mother's family since the 18th century voice-verified

And she cared with it with the sort of gentleness and devotion more sane people reserved for elderly cats. voice-verified

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