Author of the week: B.J. Novak

last updated 8 January 2015

B.J. Novak might have just reinvented the process of writing fiction, said Rachel Deahl in The Boston Globe. A year after finishing a seven-year run as an actor, writer, and director for the hit TV comedy The Office, the 33-year-old Harvard grad found he’d compiled dozens of notebooks filled with random story ideas. Instead of picking one and developing it, he pulled out 100, polished them, and began reading them aloud to audiences at comedy clubs and bookstores on both coasts. “The audiences were the best editors a person could have,” he says. “If you write something kind of boring and you read it in front of 100 people, you will feel how boring it is. You will be ashamed and embarrassed, and will never want to say those sentences again until you make them a lot more interesting.”

The book shaped by those road tests—the story collection One More Thing—has “shattered expectations,” said Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal. Novak hasn’t merely been accepted in publishing; “he’s being heralded by many in the literary establishment as a major new talent.” If the writing eventually eclipses his acting career, that’s not likely to bother him. “I realized a while ago that I never once had a fantasy of a role I wanted to play,” he recently told NPR. He fantasizes instead, he says, about creating a perfect book or script. “That’s what wakes me up with a smile on my face in the middle of the night—something I want to write and then test, and then see if other people love it the way I do.”