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 Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita 

Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life

(Nonfiction, November, Avid Reader Press)

“ An infectiously edifying, not-so-saintly self-help book that dives into the wild, wise, and unconventional lives of 16th- and 17th-century nuns, offering advice for our modern age and proving one thing: no matter the century, nuns know best.”

Writes from: Halfway between Madrid (Spain) and New York.

Pre-Convent: We like to think that the seed of Convent Wisdom was planted the night we first met in August 2016. We weren’t the only prospective graduate students visiting Brown University that summer, but we were the only two ones matching our very specific freak: a passion for the lives and texts of 16^th– and 17^th-century nuns. That night, we knew that we would spend years of sleepless nights trying to reduce our fascination for nuns to the rigid formulas of academic writing.

What we didn’t know was that, four years later, in 2020, we’d decide to take our nuns out of dusty archives and aseptic academic journals and bring them to more playful realms. “Las hijas de Felipe,” our podcast devoted to unearthing hidden stories from the 16^th– and 17^th-century stories, confirmed what we already suspected: 16^th– and 17^th-century nuns were refreshingly relatable today. By the time we embarked on Convent Wisdom, we were used to spending most of our days writing—whether our PhD dissertations, academic papers, or podcast scripts—but this book demanded something new. It required us to craft a new voice—the two of us merged in one—and a new genre—rigorous academic research turned into a playful self-help guide.

Time frame: Once we started writing, we finished Convent Wisdom in about a year. But we had been researching, first separately and then together, for more than a decade.

Enter the agent: Our agent found us! She had been listening to our podcast for a while, and she had the feeling that we might have an idea for a book. In fact, when she approached us, we were already conceiving the general idea for the book with our Spanish editor.

Biggest surprise: When we received all the offers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023—nine countries plus an auction between seven U.S. publishing houses—we were shocked. It was both a huge surprise and a well-deserved confirmation that our intuition was right: in the crumbling 21^st century we live in, we all need a portable convent to find solace. It was comforting to see that, after all the years spent in libraries and archives, we had found a way to share the stories of those nuns who had captivated us and helped us survive throughout the most challenging moments of our lives.

What I did right: We were not in a hurry to publish, and that helped. Well before the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, we were approached by a couple of publishers, but we decided not to go ahead with them. We felt it was hasty at that point, and that their aim was to make a hurried and shallow translation of our podcast into a book. Instead, we decided to wait until we had reached a more elaborate and nuanced idea of the book.

What I would have done differently: We had no idea how to navigate those situations, but somehow our intuition was right. However, we would happily erase all the anxiety and the self-doubt that we went through.

Platform: Our podcast and our social media are great platforms, but only for Spanish-speaking audiences. We’ll have to work on English content to try and gain new international readership

Advice for writers: You don’t have to write on your own. Sometimes, it can be so much better with friends. It worked for us, and it worked for many of our nuns.

Next up: We’re working on a historical audio fiction. We’d also love to launch some episodes of our podcast in English.

Website: LasHijasDeFelipe.com

Mia Jay Boulton and Laurel Boulton 

Of Swamp & Sea 

(Romantasy graphic novel, November, 23^rd Street)

“A woman possessed by a monster must embark on a dangerous and magical journey, accompanied by a monster hunter who could be friend, foe, or lover.”

Writes from: Gulf Shores, Ala.

Pre-Swamp: We’ve really been building the bones of this story since 2014 (the year we got married), and back then, it was almost unrecognizable aside from the characters’ names. It really evolved and transmuted throughout the decade as we worked on the story back and forth alongside our other projects. Of Swamp & Sea began in prose form, as all our work does, before making the leap to an illustrated comic in 2019. We finally wrapped up the art for it earlier this year, meaning it took us around six years to write, illustrate, and color close to 5,000 individual panels. But it only took us less than a year to format them into a five-novel series, the first of which is coming out this November.

Time frame: When we first went searching for an agent, there were still very few Webtoon properties that had made the leap to print—we think the industry was still really figuring out how that could work. We searched high and low through online databases like Manuscript Wish List, looking for someone with a mind for art, romance, and the supernatural. We were so happy when our agent, Lane Clarke, decided to hear us out.

Enter the agent: We were surprised by just how difficult it could be to take a vertical-scrolling comic and reimagine it for print format. Every new page felt like a puzzle to solve and an exercise in problem-solving. The goal was always to have the art look as natural as possible, like it was born for the printed page. We really do think we accomplished that goal, and we’re looking forward to current and new readers discovering the story of Mercy and Jonah in a whole new format.

Biggest surprise: Measured persistence has really been one of the keys to getting this far. Every step of the way from creating to publishing has felt like a new obstacle course to learn to navigate and overcome, but we never let a failure steep for too long before trying again. However, we also didn’t let an output goal control our lives, and we still made time for the things we love, for our hobbies, and for each other. It’s important to never give up, while never letting it burn your candle down entirely.

What I did right: I joined a writers’ group. I’ve been in my writers’ group now for over seven years, and I’ve learned so much and grown so much from being in that group. When we started, none of us had books published, and most of us didn’t have agents yet. Now, everyone has at least one book published. Seeing my friends in the group go through that process taught me a lot about what publishing is like and what to expect. So actually, not a lot of things were a surprise to me about the publishing process because I’d already seen how everything plays out through my writers’ group.

What I would have done differently: We do plan on doing it all again, because we want to keep creating forever. Next time, we’ll put more of a focus on future-proofing our projects, mainly through the way we’ll keep our files organized and prepared for both digital and print outcomes.

Platform: Our platform of readers on WEBTOON has followed us through the whole Of Swamp & Sea saga, and we’re endlessly grateful for their loyalty. We hope that many of them will pick up its first print installment for their shelves when it hits storefronts, as a print edition has been much requested since the very earliest days. Of course, we also want to bring the story to the eyes of a new audience, which we’re working on building via social media with the help of our publisher, 23^rd Street.

Advice for writers: Never stop loving what you do: people change, and it’s okay for their stories to change with them. You can’t let the fear of losing what you already have in a project stop you from exploring what it could be. In the end, your finished work is always going to look different than how it started, and that’s a good thing. You just have to see it through to find out what your story becomes.

Next up: After book one, we’ve got four more Of Swamp & Sea volumes on the way. After that? We want to write more adventures about love and magic, and continue telling stories through art. 

Website: Linktr.ee/ofswampandsea

Marco Anderson

This Book Is About Nothing

(Children’s picture book, November, Moon + Bird)

“A hilarious and colourful picture book about a child’s unique journey to making new friends.”

Writes from: London.

Pre-Book: I wrote this book coming out of COVID lockdown. I had not written a book before, so when I had the idea, I definitely did not think that it would get published. But, as the idea kept growing, I became more and more confident in this idea and the reality of it actually being published. 

Time frame: I originally wrote this in a PowerPoint, and we developed the story into what it is now over the next couple of years. I had this idea back in spring of 2021, and we just got the ideas out into a basic PowerPoint presentation. About a month or two later, I first met with the publishing team and showed them my concept. We continued working together over the next four years and turned the idea into a real book.

Enter the agent: I do not have an agent. After coming up with the concept, I was introduced to Etan and the team at Moon + Bird. They helped me do this, and I worked with my dad on this book as well.

Biggest surprise: One of the things that surprised me most was simply how long it takes to get a book published. I originally had the idea in 2021, and now four years later, it’s about to get published.

What I did right: I was really lucky because I didn’t know what I was doing and the team at Moon + Bird was really amazing at guiding me through the process.

What I would have done differently: I really don’t think that there’s anything that I would have done differently with this book, but there are a lot of skills that I learned over the process of creating this book, which I would apply to future books.

Platform: No, I don’t currently have a platform because I’m too busy with my middle school studies.

Advice for writers: The best piece of advice that I can give you is to just keep on going and trying to make what you want a reality.

Next up: Honestly, I have too much homework right now to think that far into the future.

The post Breaking In: November/December 2025 appeared first on Writer's Digest.

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Rhonda Dechambeau

Top Heavy

(YA verse novel, June, Holiday House)

“After landing a spot on a competitive dance team, a top-heavy dancer dreams of breast reduction surgery amidst her family’s growing financial problems, a deteriorating friendship, and a first love romance.”

Writes from: Southeastern Massachusetts.

Pre-Heavy: After many years of writing on my own and taking classes here and there, I earned my MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2019. I applied and was selected as the 2022-2023 Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence with the first twenty pages of Top Heavy. This amazing program provides a generous stipend and an office at the Boston Public Library for an unpublished writer for children or young adults. This was actually my sixth time applying for this amazing opportunity. I’d been named a finalist twice before, and I really felt like I had something special with this story.

Time frame: When I was selected for the Writer-in-Residence program, I had about twenty-five pages of Top Heavy drafted. I also had a sense of where the story was headed. I threw myself into the writing, determined to make my year-long residency count. After about three months, I had a completed draft.

Enter the agent: My agent, Elizabeth Bennett from Transatlantic Literary Agency, reached out to me after I’d won the Writer-in-Residence fellowship. She’d read the description of Top Heavy and was interested from the start. I sent her my beginning pages, as well as some pages from other projects. Because she’s based in the Boston area, we met in the Boston Public Library over coffee. We seemed to be a good match, so I was thrilled when she offered to represent me! Having been in the querying trenches with other projects, I knew what a gift this was.

Biggest surprise: How long everything takes! From the submission process to the editorial process to the production and actual printing of the book! I’m still amazed at what a tremendous amount of work goes into the final product and how many people are involved in making it become a reality!

What I did right: I kept going! And I never stopped writing new things. Top Heavy is the fifth novel I’ve written, including some really early, really awful novels. Some of the more recent projects have potential, and there’s a chance I’ll go back to them. But I believe that you have to keep writing new projects, pursuing new ideas, and trying new things. Top Heavy was the first verse novel I’d written, and I’m so glad I tried my hand at that format.

What I would have done differently: There is no substitute for putting the time into your writing practice and for getting feedback on your writing. If I could do it over, I’d try to be more consistent in the time I put into my writing. (Although, between raising a family and working full-time, this didn’t always seem possible!) I’d also start getting feedback on my work (through classes, workshops, or critique groups) much earlier than I did.

Platform: I think being a good literary citizen and building community is key to gaining readership. I’ve offered free poetry workshops for teens at my local library and make a point to attend book festivals, conferences, and other writers’ book events. I recently launched a new website and offered a free newsletter for subscribers. It’s all about building meaningful connections with those who love to read and write!

Advice for writers: One of my favorite quotes comes, not from a writer, but from basketball legend Julius Erving: “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

Next up: I signed a two-book deal with Holiday House. My second book, Stained, a middle-grade verse novel, will be released in Fall 2026! And of course, I’m on to the next new project, a YA novel with multiple points of view.

Website: RhondaDeChambeau.com

Hazell Ward

The Game Is Murder

(Crime fiction, July, Penguin Berkley)

“A whodunit based on an infamous unsolved case, where the reader gets to examine the evidence, interview the witnesses and solve the case.”

Writes from: Wrexham, North Wales. Home to the third oldest (and best) football club in the world.

Pre-Murder: I wrote this novel as part of a PhD in Creative Writing, which meant that, rather than starting with a plot idea,

a character, or even a snatch of dialogue, I began with a research question about the contract between a writer and their reader. Which, admittedly, doesn’t make for a great elevator pitch.

Because I have always loved crime fiction, particularly whodunits, I thought it would be fun to use the game element of the whodunit to explore my research question and write a novel that involved the reader in that game at the same time.

It also meant I could read a lot of crime novels and call it work!

Time frame: I have a very inefficient way of working. I start writing at page one, I keep on writing linearly until I reach the last page, and I constantly rewrite as I go. I have read dozens of How to Write books over the years, and nearly all of them tell you not to do this, because when the novel takes an unexpected turn, you have go back to page one and start again. Which can be very frustrating. On the upside, however, when I get to the last page, the novel really is finished.

It took three years, and dozens of restarts, for me to write the novel, and what I ended up with is very different to the book I planned to write when I began. But it is a better book because I allowed myself time to figure it out as I went, I think.

I am hoping that the next novel won’t take quite so long to write!

Enter the agent: While I was writing The Game is Murder, I decided I needed to have a strategy to attract an agent. My writing CV up to that point consisted mainly of non-fiction magazine articles and a couple of minor fiction pieces in small circulation magazines. I decided to write some short crime fiction and submit to competitions. One of those short pieces was shortlisted for a Crime Writer’s Association dagger, which is a prestigious UK crime writing award. I went to the awards ceremony knowing I wouldn’t win, because all the shortlist-ees, except me, were published, even award-winning, crime writers, but I was determined to network with agents and editors if I got the chance and try to interest them in my novel. In the end, I didn’t need to, because Sarah Such, of the Sarah Such Literary Agency, was seated at my table.

Much to my surprise, I won the dagger, and Sarah bought me champagne to celebrate. We drank the champagne. We chatted about my novel, and she asked me to send it to her. Sarah has been my brilliant agent ever since.

Biggest surprise: I was surprised at just how long everything takes, and how very complicated publishing contracts can be. I thought I had a fair idea of how it all worked, but I really underestimated what a huge operation it is, and how many people are involved in publishing a single book. I have been very lucky in having great editors who not only loved the book but also wanted to make the process easy, or as easy as such a complex process can be, for new writers like me.

What I did right: I just kept trying to improve. The Game is Murder is not the first book I wrote. It isn’t even the second or the third. And some of those early novels were truly awful. You have to be able to look honestly at what you have written and admit it (to yourself) when you haven’t pulled it off. I never sent those early novels to anyone, because I knew in my heart that, although they were the best I could make them, they weren’t good enough.

But I got better with each failure. I took courses. I joined writing groups. And, of course, I read a lot. The thing that really helped, though, was entering competitions. Being listed in a writing competition, even if you don’t win, is great for your writing CV. It can help to bring you to the notice of agents and publishers. Most importantly, it demonstrates to you, as a writer, that your writing is good enough and that the effort is worth it. Writing is so hard. You can spend years writing a novel that no one wants to read, and you need enormous self-belief to keep going in the face of rejection. So every win, no matter how small, should be celebrated. Preferably with champagne.

What I would have done differently: I would have kept better track of my sources! Because my novel was based on a real case, I needed to do a lot of research. And my referencing systems just weren’t good enough, which meant I spent far too much time rifling through books and articles to double-check the distance between the crime scene and the front door, or what the blood group of that stain next to sink was.

If you record it properly the first time, it saves you so much trouble!

Platform: The subject of platforms did not come up during our initial negotiations. As we made a deal very quickly, as a result of a pre-emptive bid, there was no time for them to check on this. Which was lucky for me, because, until recently, I had virtually no social media presence at all. I am still very much a novice when it comes to socials, but I do know that, increasingly, publicity departments expect authors to have some kind of presence. And, though there are always some downsides to being online, it’s been nice to see such a flourishing book community on these platforms, so I am converted. I don’t think that a small platform would necessarily prevent a publisher from making an offer if they liked the book (unless the premise of the book expected it). In any case, the period between agreeing an offer and publication date can be anything from twelve to twenty-four months, plenty of time to build up a following if you need to.

Advice for writers: 

Next up: I am hard at work on the second book, though it is not a sequel to this novel. While it might be tempting to write a series of novels in the same way, or with the same detective, I’m glad that I have left myself room to experiment. Second novels come with their own problems, I’m discovering, so I am just trying to keep on learning, and write the best book I can.

Website: HazellWard.com

Tre Johnson

Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy

(Nonfiction, July, Dutton Books)

“Black Genius is a cultural exploration of the ingenious ways that Black Americans use our collective wit, relationships, art, and sense of community to navigate the sometimes unforgiving terrain of American society.”

Writes from: I’ve written and write all over—Montreal, New Orleans, NYC, LA, DC, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Bay—and whenever it’s been possible and necessary, my home of Philadelphia.

Pre-Genius: Around 2017, I started getting my writing published in Philly Mag, Rolling Stone, The Grio, and other outlets. In the beginning, I spent a lot of time covering everything from tribute performances to Prince, how we were all trying to unpack the spate of Black American deaths that spurred so much of the BLM movement. Eventually, though, I also started segueing into more cultural analyses—examining thematic trends in Black films, asserting the cultural importance of Black Panther, and just developing a deeper critical eye about everything ranging from social topics in graphic novels to bringing a sense of contextualization to understanding artifacts and moments like This is America.

But on top of that, I was still often struggling to find spaces to write about so much of the everyday culture that I was experiencing, seeing, and grappling with—especially within and how it pertains to Black life in the country. As a longtime educator who most often worked in urban communities across DC, Philadelphia, and Camden, that work brought me into people’s most precious spaces—their homes, schools, churches, community centers and neighborhoods—and there were so many things about just spending time with everyday people, Black people in particular, talking and figuring out everyday things that I wanted to talk about too. I didn’t find a lot of places that wanted stories and experiences around Black jobs, ingenuity, and nimbleness, and more and more I found that those stories and perspectives could be joined with my published writing in Big Media, which could all together make a book of reflections.

Time frame: Lord, what a journey. I started Black Genius back in Spring 2021, and after about three significant rounds of editing with the amazing Lashanda Anakwah, I submitted the final, pre-copy-edited version of the book in August 2024. It’s hard to know if that pace is fast, slow, typical, or atypical, but it was, at the end of the day, my pace, especially against the backdrop of life in general. One of the things that I think really helped me finish the book was just owning my desire for movement and following the muse of place and space—some of my biggest book epiphanies tended to come walking at night, sometimes related to the book, sometimes not.

Two moments come to mind as a result:

–One summer night, I was horrendously stuck trying to figure out how to address some edits, so I walked over to the Philadelphia Art Museum steps (most non-Philly people know them as the ‘Rocky Steps’) and came across a group of amateur motorcycle and motorbike enthusiasts that had gathered there in front of the steps. There’s a traffic circle in front of there—the Oval—and I sat on the museum steps for like 30 minutes watching bikers take off and weave themselves in and out of traffic, yanking their bikes up and doing wheelies, sometimes standing up and doing small tricks. There was an ice cream truck, and families, couples, and solo watchers like me were milling about the truck, getting a cold treat and watching the racers. Now, of course, something like this is considered illegal and dangerous, but it was amazing how much the scene felt like this night show, night festival, of sorts. I sat there feeling really in awe and inspired by a combination of community, daring, spectacle, and just enjoyment.

-In Montreal, 2023, I was staying in a friend of a friend’s apartment that I’d rented for the month. One night, there was a massive blackout in the Plateau Mont Royal area. The blackout took up several blocks—just entire grids of the area wiped out and blanketed in darkness—so I had to stop writing and just took a series of circular walks all through there and nearby Mile Ex. It was still dinner and drinks time for a lot of people, so I walked by a lot of bars and restaurants where people refused to leave, sitting at their tables lit with their cellphone lights, or waitstaff had trotted out candles and flashlights. Everywhere had this dreamy, intimate, tender feel to it—every window stop looked like peering into a silent film—and ultimately, seeing people continue on with the time with each other, still eating, not letting this bigger inconvenience disrupt the small things—got me to head back to the apartment and get back to writing in the dark.

Enter the agent: Sabrina Taitz, aka AgentBae, and I met through Suzanne Gluck, who plucked me out of a freelance writers’ webinar I was attending where she was the main speaker that session. That space was curated by the amazing David Hochman, who reached out to me after that seminar and said, “Suzanne Gluck wants to talk with you. Can I share your contact information with her? By the way, the answer is ‘yes.’” Ha! And so, after chatting with Suzanne, she introduced me to Sabrina—a junior agent at the time—and we joined forces to start the book journey of Black Genius. That all happened in late Summer 2020.

Biggest surprise: How much a book can and will truly change over the course of writing it. What I set out to write through my book proposal process way back in November 2020, when we took it out for consideration, is significantly different than what the end result ultimately was. It changed, I changed, we changed together.

I think another learning experience or surprise is how much tension there is at times with the fact that what you write is a distillation of what you think or thought about a given topic when you were engaging with it. There’s some nuanced thinking and feelings that I have about aspects of things that I bring up in Black Genius, and those nuances and changes make you wish that books could be living, iterative things. Instead, I thought that there was also a journey of accepting the idea that you will continue to live and evolve while your book or aspects of your book, will remain in a certain time and place of who you were at various moments.

What I did right: I always think that writers write. And because of that, one of the biggest things that has always helped me was the willingness to focus on writing for and in the places that allowed me to write what I wanted to write about. I mean, I’ve written for obscure blogs, started and ended my own obscure blogs, and written for ‘big’ outlets and ‘small’ outlets. I’ve never really cared about the ‘prestige’ of my placements, and if you look at the body of my work, you’ll see that. I think that’s helped because there are amazing editors, conversations, and opportunities in all sorts of places.

The other thing I think that helped is just plain developing real relationships with the people who are your peers and your editors. And I mean real in the sense of checking in with people, paying attention to people’s lives during big, small, happy, and sad moments. I think you can figure out how to work on things with people by understanding each other and nurturing connections instead of being transactional with people. Writing in places, writing in writing groups, writing every day—and reading, loads and loads of reading across all topics and people—are big helps for me.

What I would have done differently:  God, sometimes I really flagellate myself for not having pursued writing in a public, published way sooner. I love writing so much; it’s the most enriching, liberating, intimate, cerebral, and honest thing I get to do. It’s a balance at the same time; the (discouraging) professional experiences in particular that I’ve had before really investing myself in writing and being a writer have still ultimately informed things like my maturity, temperament, patience, and work ethic as a writer. But especially gratitude; there are a great many experiences and situations that I’d never want to go back to ever again.

So, knowing what I know now, I might’ve tried being less scared and bolder. An editor, Myles Johnson, spent a good year egging me on to leave what he called my ‘corporate life’ and embrace being a writer. I was too scared and insecure to believe it or listen until lots in life made me realize that I not only needed to, I wanted to step away from it all and into myself more.

Platform: I’m a longtime Instagram person, though lots about social media and their owners are making me reconsider my engagement and presence. So in that sense, yes, a platform (IG: @tre_john_son), but I’ve also started a Substack (TreJohnson.substack.com)  now and have a website (TreJohnsonWriter.com) that captures a lot of my work and another way to reach out to me.

I really don’t focus much on building a platform and gaining a readership via social media—it always feels like a fool’s errand to me to overly produce original writing in those places, not only for free but also as it is susceptible to algorithm suppression. I think you build readership by continuing to write and share your writing—through published pieces, through relationship building with peers, through email essays and blogs—my IG has the occasional essay in a post, but I’ve really stopped indulging that space that way so much.

Advice for writers: Write every day. Read every
day. Read inside and outside of your comfort zone. Share your writing, especially when you’re worried it
’s shitty. You can’t be your own writer, critic, editor, and promoter—let others engage with any or even all parts of that process whenever possible.

Next up: Like a lot of writers, I’m ready to explore other genres too and just continue to challenge myself and readers on engaging with cultural stories, but also the types of conversations and dynamics that we need to spend more time on. So, to that end, I’m hoping to segue into more creative writing— screenplays, graphic novels, and the like—but I’m also becoming more and more curious about collaborative writing with others.

Website: TreJohnsonWriter.com

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The post Breaking In: July/August 2025 appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Pat Barker is a writer’s writer. Though she’s accumulated numerous accolades over her decades-long career, including a Booker Prize and a Guardian Fiction Prize, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to literature, she still concerns herself with things like what it means to write effective dialogue and looking past the bad first draft to see if a story has legs. “The thing about writing is it’s not difficult,” Barker says, now in her early 80s. “The rules of good writing are incredibly simple. It’s just that it takes you 50 years to learn.” 

This sense of humor about her writing life filled our conversation ranging from her opinion on whether a writer’s unfinished work should be published posthumously (“I do actually have a horror of leaving an orphan book where you can imagine your publisher and your executor and your agent say, ‘Oh, well, it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? But on the other hand, perhaps we can just about rescue it and push it out.’ I don’t want all that. I want any book that’s published under my name to have been finished”) to what she told herself about winning the Booker prize to be able to keep working (“It’s such a stroke of luck. But that’s all it is. … Julian Barnes said it was ‘posh bingo,’ and I said, when I won it, it was three lemons in a row. And that’s the way to look at it. If you start seriously thinking that you have written the best novel of the year, then you are in trouble. You haven’t. You’ve written the novel that five random people agreed on, on a particular afternoon. That’s what you’ve written.”) 

Joking aside, Barker is best known for her novels set during times of war. Her Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road—which won the Booker in 1995) follows the poet Siegfried Sassoon, psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, and soldier Billy Prior as they deal with the horrific effects of trench warfare in World War I. Likewise, the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, Noonday) begins with art students Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant, and Kit Neville in 1914 and traces the intertwining of their lives from the earliest days of World War I through the destruction of London during the Blitz of World War II. 

Currently, Barker is in the midst of her Women of Troy series, beginning with The Silence of the Girls. The 2018 novel, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, retells the story of The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan queen who was awarded to Achilles during the Trojan War. Briseis’s story continues in The Women of Troy, as the Greeks’ departure from Troy is delayed due to unfavorable winds, courtesy of the gods they’ve offended during the destruction of the city. The newest book in the series, The Voyage Home, shifts the narrative from Briseis to that of Ritsa, a healer who has been given to Agamemnon’s war prize, the virgin Cassandra, as her slave, as they travel from Troy to Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife awaits. 

When asked what appeals to Barker about writing a trilogy or series, she says, “The great thing about writing a trilogy is that you can’t get away with just repeating. You have to have central characters, but you can’t just have them thinking and doing and saying exactly what they did in the previous book, so you are obliged to dig deeper into that person.” Which is exactly what she’s done with the stories of Briseis and now, Ritsa. 

And while Barker is dedicated to completing Briseis’s story in The Women of Troy series, she says she won’t be embarking on a new trilogy or series: “… of course, I am now too old to write another trilogy. So somehow or other, I’ve got to come to my senses and write a single book or books.” 

We began our conversation with what interested Barker about revisiting ancient mythology.

Before I got The Voyage Home, I went back and read your Life Class Trilogy, and there was a line in there about the silence of the girls as Achilles and Agamemnon fought over them. That book was published in 2007, at least in the United States.

You know, I’d forgotten that I wrote that. So, when people ask me when The Silence of the Girls was published, “When did your interest in The Iliad and the women in The Iliad start?” I thought it was comparatively recent. Whereas in fact, it went back quite a way. I’ve forgotten I wrote that about, Elinor Brooke sitting in the Cafe Royal noticing how silent the women have become, and how objectionably loud the men have become.

So, if you didn’t remember you had that interest before, what did spark the idea for this trilogy?

We’ll perhaps call it a series, yes, there will be something next. Certainly, because the character [Briseis] is not finished. 

What did spark it? Well, I suspect an even earlier introduction to The Iliad, because I read it out of general interest. Like lots of young women, my predominant experience was, well, the grandeur of the language, and how almost inconceivably ancient these stories are, some of the earliest stories that we, as human beings ever told each other that took final form, or not final form actually, in The Iliad. But there were these girls, and the girls were saying nothing, and I think quite a lot of men, not all men by any means, would read that, and they wouldn’t hear the silence. But I think almost any woman would hear that silence. So obviously the thing to do if you’re a woman writer is to try to break that silence, to try to express what the women are feeling and not able to say.

Did you know the scope of what these three books would cover before you started writing the first one?

No, and I don’t think I really knew, even at the end of The Silence of the Girls, because I do tend to get very down on myself at the end of the book. When I sent off The Silence of the Girls to my British publisher, Penguin Random House—it’s the same publisher on both sides of the Atlantic now—I thought it was absolute rubbish. I said that in an event at which my editor was present, and he couldn’t believe it. But it was absolutely true, because the book that you actually hand over is never the book that was in your mind when you started to write it. Every book falls short, I think, of what the writer intended. That one fell dramatically short because I was seeing it against the backdrop of The Iliad, which is one of the greatest books ever written.

At what point did you decide to continue the story with the next two books?

It’s always this nagging when a story is finished. And unfortunately, for my sins, I seem to finish a book at the point where it’s the end of a movement, but it’s not the end of the piece. There is something left on set, just like the Regeneration Trilogy, when at the end of Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon is going back to war, but he’s still not convinced that the war is anything other than a dreadful mistake. Yet he has to go back and face the horrors of that again. No way is that the end of the story. You need to follow this person. You need to bring your central character to a moment of more than momentary peace. And that is the end of the story. I’ve now written three trilogies, and I don’t seem to be very good at ending it at the end of one book.

I wanted to talk about completing the story of a character because with The Voyage Home, you did shift narrators. With the first two, Briseis was the narrator, but in this third book, it’s Ritsa. What challenges did you face writing from this different character? Or did it open things up for you?

I think it opened things up for me, and it also restored me to the earliest voices in my work, which were very much the voices of working-class women in the northeast of England. Very poor women, women who were up against it. And Ritsa, although she’s living in a very different society, her relationship to the other characters in the story is very much that she is the bottom layer. She is the ground feeder if you like. She’s a slave. Before she was enslaved, she was a healer. She was a woman with independence. She was a woman with a professional reputation, a home of her own. So, although she hasn’t fallen from the great heights of Briseis, who was a queen in her previous life and then a slave, she, nevertheless, has suffered a very dramatic loss of status. She has become Cassandra’s slave, at her beck and call 24 hours a day. She doesn’t like it very much. She doesn’t like Cassandra very much. 

Nevertheless, her voice is a very pragmatic voice, a voice which is focused on survival rather than on ideology, if you like. She wants to be alive at the end of the story, and she’s in a better place at the end of the story than she was at the beginning. So, I think from the point of view of the reader who is identifying with Ritsa, this is an awkward trajectory. 

I do think this very simple thing is quite important, that you don’t want to take your reader into a pit and leave them there. Apart from anything else, I think it’s quite immoral to do that. I think you should always offer hope. And it’s honest, because if you are actually despairing, you wouldn’t be writing. The act of writing is itself an affirmation of hope that things can be better.

That’s so interesting considering that you write so much about war.

I do write about a lot of traumatic events. But I also write a lot of recovery stories. And I would say that the survival rate in my books is higher than the survival rate in life. In that sense, I’m a very optimistic writer.

Going back to the narrators, I can guess why you chose to have the few chapters in The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy that are from Achilles’ and Pyrrhus’ perspectives in the third person, since they’re the men and this is about the silence of the girls and giving them a voice. But I was curious about, in this new book, why you chose to give Cassandra’s and Clytemnestra’s perspectives in third person.

Yes, and Ritsa’s in first. But in a way, it’s brutally simple: Ritsa’s alive at the end. You can’t get trapped inside the viewpoint of a woman who is not going to make it all the way through. I mean, I think some books do this, or they flip into the afterlife or something like that. But mainly if the word I is being used, you expect that I not to be in a coffin at the end of the book, because otherwise they’re describing their own death and can’t describe what happens after it. … 

It’s a way of saying, although these characters are very evenly balanced in the call for the reader’s sympathy, nevertheless, the first-person narrator is generally the person the book is about. In my books, the first-person narrator tends to be an honest narrator. They are telling you what they know. They might be misleading you, but if they are misleading you, it’s only because they don’t know the truth themselves. I don’t play games with the reader in that sense.

In another interview, you talked broadly about why retellings of mythology are experiencing a surge these days. But I’m curious, for you personally, what appeals to you about reimagining myths?

It’s that imaginative power of knowing that you are dealing with the story which has been around for at least two and a half thousand years. Because the stories that formed The Iliad, for example, had been around probably a thousand years before it was actually captured in the form that we now know it, and there’s a danger in thinking that capture, The Iliad, is the final form. But of course, it isn’t. The myth can’t be frozen in that way. The myth goes on, so that Shakespeare in 1602 writing about Troilus and Cressida is also telling one of the stories in the myths that made The Iliad, and so on into modern-day retellings. It’s endlessly rich because it delves into some of the deepest emotions and convictions of human life. I think it’s very humbling to be part of a chain of writers telling a particular story. You are a custodian of the story. In the end, it is not about you, and that’s what I like about it.

Have you found any benefits in writing about wars or events that are so far in the past, compared to trying to write about something that is in the relatively recent past?

There’s a great benefit in the sense that if you’re writing about the contemporary scene, the reader already knows what they think about the contemporary scene. The point about writing about myth or writing about the relatively distant past is that the reader doesn’t have the knee-jerk reaction, Oh I know what I think about that. So, you come in under their radar, and you move past the automatic prejudices and get them to look at the basic situation again, and to feel different things about it. For me, that’s the main reason. 

The other thing of course, is this: Even the very distant past, you are still dealing with homo sapiens. The human brain has not evolved during that time. So, as [A. E.] Housman said, the person who’s looking at the storm on Wenlock Hill in Roman times is essentially the same man who’s looking at it now. The trees have changed, but the human brain has not changed. It’s a way of getting down to a deeper level of human complexity.

What comes first for you when you’re starting a new project? The idea for the story or a character’s voice?

I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it “the breath on the mirror.” If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly. 

I wish I could tell people how to hasten that process, but I don’t know how to. It can take ages to get to the point where you are hearing the characters talking, or it can happen almost immediately. I think the only real tip I’ve got is if you’re writing in third person and the characters are not coming to life, switch to first person. Even if you don’t intend to stick with it, at least write something in first person and do the sensory things. …

When you let the characters talk to each other, as you’re figuring out this story—

I can’t stop them. [Laughs] If it’s working, they won’t shut up!

Are you actively writing this down or typing it? Or are you allowing it to happen in your head until you do get that spark of the story?

I allow it to happen in my head, and I’m grateful that it’s happening. Now and then, if I think somebody says something vaguely significant, I will write it down in a notebook and wait for the moment in the story where they’ll reach the point of saying this. But, the first-person narration—and part of the last three books now have been first-person narration—is, in fact, dialogue. It’s a monologue. The person is talking to the reader. So, first person and reliance on dialogue do go very much together. 

I think dialogue is absolutely key to everything, and it’s very difficult because you can read books on characterization, narrative, conflict, and all that. But dialogue is so dependent on the individual ear. You probably could get more from a scriptwriter or somebody teaching theater writing than you could get from somebody teaching a novel on dialogue. 

I actually have quite a bee in my bonnet about dialogue when I think about it, because I think a lot of the things that are said are nonsense. Like “every person has to sound completely different from every other person,” and it’s not the way things are. I mean, if you’ve got five blokes going into the bar of a golf club for their hard-earned pint at the end of the day, you can make them sound completely different because you can say that one is Scottish, one is Welsh, one is Irish, one is a visiting American, and they will sound different. But it misses the point because what they are doing is to make the same sounds about the same subject. What they are saying is, “We belong here.” There’s no actual content in the speech at all. It’s the weather. It’s who was par or whatever—I know nothing about golf on the course—and things like that. It’s just saying: “We belong here, and we don’t threaten you. We are prepared to be friends.” 

It’s exactly the same when the kittiwake lands on the ledge and watches a thousand other kittiwakes. It says, “Kittiwake.” If it says anything else, it’s in trouble. It’s the kittiwake theory of dialogue. It’s the voice of a community, not the individual voices. Just like, for example, as you get in James Baldwin sometimes, where you get people in the religious community and they’re saying things like, “Praise the Lord.” They are saying, “We belong to this community. We share these beliefs.” They’re not saying anything that reveals them as an individual. And obviously, you need dialogue that reveals the individual, but you also need the voice of the community out of which the individual voice emerges. But, you know, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about dialogue. [Laughs]

Do you have a writing routine: time of day that you write or a target word count?

It varies at the moment. I write in the mornings. It’s 1,000-plus words a day, which I’m just starting a new project. All I need it to do at the moment is grow. And I need to stifle the voice in my head saying, This is rubbish. It’s not worth doing. The only way to do that is to plow on day by day because you can’t make any sensible judgments about a project until you’ve got a first draft. I used to have a little thing on the top of my screen: “It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be finished.” And you worry about it being good when it’s there. Until that point, it doesn’t matter really. It just has to be there.

So, you’re not one of those writers who has to revise the previous day’s work before you move on to today’s work?

No, I leave sometimes in the middle of a sentence, deliberately, or in the middle of a word so I can finish the end of the word and the end of the sentence with no thought at all. Then just move on. 

It’s all about conning yourself at the early stages. You’ve got to con yourself into finishing. Because everybody, at some stage, everybody who isn’t a complete—I won’t use four-letter words—thinks their work is rubbish some of time. I would distrust any writer who never thought their work was rubbish. So, it’s a matter of shutting that voice up long enough for you to be able to see what you’ve got.

I talk to writers all the time, but I still find it so reassuring to hear writers of your stature feel the need to con yourself, to make yourself believe that your work can be something good, even if it’s not right now.

You’re only as good as your last paragraph, and if you’re writing a very rough first draft, your last paragraph is always rubbish. If you’ve got a problem, you’ve got a problem of belief, and somehow, you’ve got to find a way to believe, even though your last paragraph was rubbish. Winning prizes and stuff like that, which you might think would help, it doesn’t help in the least.

Is there any advice that you have for the readers of WD that we haven’t talked about?

Keep going, but don’t focus too much on the externals of recognition and publishing. You have to enjoy the journey. 

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The post The WD Interview: Pat Barker appeared first on Writer's Digest.

We first connected with Sarah Daniels during her debut novel’s publication and featured her in our January/February 2023 issue‘s Breaking In column. Now that her next publication hit shelves, we’re reconnecting with her for a quick Q&A.

What was the time frame for writing this latest book?

This book was so different from book one. The Stranded was written over almost ten years (while I was also doing my PhD and having kids!). It was my first book, so I was very much learning as I went along. The Only Way Out was way faster. I wrote most of it during COVID lockdown, I planned a lot of the story before I wrote it, and I focused on it exclusively for about 8 months. It was a very different experience. 

Has your perspective on the publication process changed since your debut was published?

Absolutely. I’ve learnt so much over the publication of these books, including how long everything takes and just how much time and energy go into getting a book out in the world. It’s a team effort (and not even a small team). Editors, designers, cover artists, proofreaders (multiple), agents, and that’s before you even get to marketing and publicity, which takes another team. When it came to writing the acknowledgements, I was terrified I’d miss someone!

What was the biggest surprise while getting this book ready for publication?

Without doubt, it was the sense of responsibility I felt. My main focus when I’m writing is to produce something entertaining, after all, people are spending both their hard-earned money and their precious and finite time on it. And with book two, this intensified. I was worried about letting down the readers who had stuck with me.

What do you feel you did really well with this novel?

I’m really pleased with the setting of The Only Way Out. In The Stranded, it was quite easy to get this sense of eerie claustrophobia because the characters are literally trapped aboard a derelict cruise ship. It was a very contained, almost pressure-cooker environment, which naturally built tension. It was a little bit more difficult in book two because (spoilers!) they’re no longer on a ship. I needed to find a way to keep the atmosphere of confinement and unease, even though the world had opened up. So, I drew on the time I spent in Sheffield, where there are these massive factories and metalworks, some of which are derelict, while others have been repurposed for people to live in. It gave me exactly the unsettling atmosphere I was looking to create.

Anything you would have done differently?

Outlining. Always. It’s the bane of my writing life. I could halve the editing time if I could just learn how to outline. I’m working on it, but I’ve also made peace with the fact that I’m a messy writer and that messiness is good for my creativity.

Would you like to share some advice for our readers?

Write what you love without worrying too much about whether it’s fashionable. If you enjoy the story, chances are other people will too.

What’s next for you?

Right now, I’m drawing on my roots as an archaeologist, and I’m working on a novel that has to do with skeletons.

Where can our audience find you online?

Instagram: @sarahdanielsbooks

Substack: InPrep.substack.com

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Jared Lemus

Guatemalan Rhapsody

(Literary fiction/short stories, March, Ecco Press)

“Guatemalan Rhapsody tells the stories of saints and sinners, holy men and vagabonds, and holds the country of Guatemala up to the light so that it may shine to the point of synesthesia—a place so real you can taste and hear the music.”

Writes from: Most of the collection was written in Pittsburgh, where I did my MFA. Currently writing from North Carolina, where I am teaching a 1/1 as the 2024-2025 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as applying for tenure track positions. I have no idea where I will be writing from next year.

Pre-Rhapsody: Leading up to this, I was writing stories that appeared in Joyland, Story, Cleaver, Kweli, The Porter House Review, The Pinch, and other literary journals, with the “biggest” publication being a non-fiction piece in The Kenyon Review Online. I also wrote a novel for my MFA thesis, which I shopped around a bit. As far as first attempts go, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t publishable either, so it was left to rot in the sun and is now being picked apart by my fingers—the talons of a vulture—searching for scraps and remains of meat to be used in my current project.

Time frame: It took me five years to write this book. I am a very slow writer and I edit as I go; I write one sentence, then I rewrite it, then I do it again, and one final time for good measure (maybe even a few more, because why not?). Afterward, I move on to the next sentence and do the same thing, but I also have to make sure the rhythm of the sentence that came before works with the new one. It’s tedious, but I’d like to think my editors appreciate it.

Enter the agent: I found my agent, Eric Simonoff—heavyweight champion of the publishing world (at least I think so; quote me!)—using the 100^th-anniversary edition of the Writer’s Market. It lists agents and agencies and the type of work each is looking for. It also teaches you how to write a good query letter.

Biggest surprise: My biggest surprise was finding out just how long it takes for a book to go from being sold to a publishing house to being sold on bookshelves. Eric Simonoff sold Guatemalan Rhapsody to Sarah Birmingham and Gabriella Doob at Ecco in the Spring of 2023, and it’s being published in the Spring of 2025. Talk about anticipation. I think another thing that surprised me was how many people it takes to make a book happen. It’s like raising a child—it takes a village.

What I did right: I think the one thing I did right was failing and learning how to fail better. I know that sounds weird, but I wrote failed stories, failed novels, failed poems, failed articles, even failed grocery lists. The thing is, with each of those failures, I learned something new—pieces of craft, like, how to write a believable character, what good setting can do, how to manipulate points of view, etc. But, the thing I failed into the best was finding my voice. I think that if I hadn’t failed time after time, I would have never found that unteachable thing—my voice. Each time I wrote something, I got closer and closer to finding it—this ephemeral thing all writers talk about. With each word, sentence, paragraph, I was training my ear to listen for that cadence and rhythm that makes writers stand out to those in the industry and readers alike.

What I would have done differently: I have been fortunate enough to be accepted or invited to writing conferences, including The Tin House Summer Workshop, where I was a scholar, the Colgate Writers Conference, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and multiple AWPs. How many invaluable and famous contacts did I make along the way, you ask? Zero. Up until a year ago, I suffered from debilitating anxiety that I quelled with imbibements. So, I was either sober and too anxious or too inebriated to interact and make meaningful connections with anyone. I met people like Melissa Febos, Tim O’Brien, Omar El Akkad, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, to name a few, who have no idea who I am because I said or slurred “Hello,” and ran away. So, if I could do it all again, I would apologize to them from here and introduce myself anew.

Platform: The only platform I’ve had for a while now is Instagram, with, like, 60 followers. But, as I published, I would find people in the same issue or on the masthead of previous issues of that journal and add them. A lot of them added me back. Of course, I also followed big names in the publishing and movie industry, but they typically don’t accept your friend request or reciprocate (still waiting for that follow-back, Oscar Isaac—fellow Guatemalan! Just kidding. He doesn’t have an IG. I checked). I also built a website the year before I graduated from my MFA after seeing that others in my cohort had them. I didn’t blog or anything, but it was there, and I’m glad I did it when I did because, well, once you make a website and show your friends, you’d better fake it ‘til you make it or they’ll disown you.

Advice for writers: Everyone says read and write a lot, which is true; even I said it under the “things you [did] right” section of this interview. If I could expand on that, I would say read craft books; just like actors, painters, musicians, and any other artist needs to understand method acting, color theory, music theory, and other fundamentals, so do we as writers need to understand the building blocks of scenes, pacing, and, well, writing. I would also encourage people to read things they don’t like. I know: why? Well, sometimes you learn even more valuable lessons from things you don’t like. Why? Because you pick apart what’s “wrong” or “not working” for you as a reader. From that, you learn what you would do differently or how you would change things; in essence, you’re learning your craft by other’s “mistakes.” For instance, after I read Moby Dick, I learned I would never write about whales. I also learned how to bore my readers to death—write 300 pages about whale blubber, ambergris, and the whaling industry. Thank you, Melville!

Next up: I am currently working on my first novel. Here’s the working tagline: When the fictional town of Huecotenango, Guatemala, a location you don’t end up in by choice, is threatened by two brothers with a new vision for the place the residents reluctantly call home, they divide into two groups: those who want to take the chance on something that might improve their lives and those who know that it’s better to have a little than it is to have nothing. Along with this, I really want to work on a book that takes place in Central America; by which I mean a work ranging from Panama to Guatemala. I read The Motorcycle Diaries in high school and again not long ago, and I still feel the pull to do something—a fictionalized version—along the lines of what Che Guevera did for South America in Central America. I still don’t know what shape this would take—a classic or episodic novel; short or connected short stories; diary entries or a non-fictional account, but I do hope that with some funding or advance, I’ll be able to make something like this happen.

Website: JaredLemus.com

Victoria Hutchins

Make Believe: Poems for Hoping Again

(Poetry, March, Convergent Books) 

“The poems in Make Believe are an invitation to return to childlike joy, wielding nostalgia and memory as lenses to explore reconnection to our bodies, our past, our desires, and our wonder.”

Writes from: Houston! When I’m writing casually, I write at home. But I wrote a lot of Make Believe at this coffee shop in Houston, Agora. It’s open until 2 A.M., which is nice when you’re on a deadline. I also travel often and love to write on planes and at airports. I do my best thinking in the most inopportune moments—like at the airport gate when my laptop has 3 percent battery, and my flight is boarding.

Pre-Believe: I wrote very few poems and drafted lots of contracts. I was a corporate attorney who did not consider myself a creative person, let alone a writer. I’ve always loved writing, but lost that part of myself in my twenties in a fog of burnout. It’s been very tender to watch creativity take root in my life again. I feel like a little kid again.

Time frame: It felt like 30 years, but also 30 seconds. The deal for Make Believe closed in September 2023 and the manuscript has been (mostly) finished since October 2024. Make Believe was announced the day after I left my job as an attorney. I wrote the proposal during the summer of 2023 while still practicing law full-time. All summer, I drafted contracts by day and frantically wrote poems late into the night.

Enter the agent: My friend Brianna Pastor introduced me to my wonderful agent Steven Harris. At that time, I was starting to hear from publishers who had seen my social media. I did not know up from down in the publishing world. I reached out to Brianna—who is an incredible poet and had just announced the forthcoming publication of an expanded edition of her poetry collection Good Grief with HarperOne—and she helped me find my way. I’m forever grateful.

Biggest surprise: I did not realize how deeply a book changes during the editing process. I’m so glad it did. Without my editor, Leita Williams, Make Believe would be a shell of itself.

What I did right: Putting myself out there. It can feel so embarrassing to shout into the void of the Internet. Especially before anyone is talking back. My biggest fear was people from work finding my social media. But embarrassment is par for the course of changing your life. And people will surprise you! On the last day of my job as an attorney, my boss gave me a crystal butterfly. The subtext was, Go spread your wings. I wept.

What I would have done differently: I waited too long to ask for help. When I first started hearing from publishers, I did not have an agent and knew nothing about publishing. I was so far out of my depth. I knew almost no writers at that time, and none well. I wanted advice. I wanted writer friends. But I was afraid that if I reached out to the few writers I did vaguely know, they would be annoyed by me or think I just wanted to extract information from them. As a rule, people are far more generous than anxiety tells you they are.

Platform: Make Believe would not exist without my social media community. In 2022, I started sharing on TikTok. I have been a yoga practitioner for years and a registered yoga teacher since 2018. So, at first, I mostly used social media to share about my yoga practice. At some point, I bought a wireless microphone, intending to use it to teach online yoga classes. Instead, I used it to talk. I talked about love, hope, friendship, childhood, purpose—whatever was on my mind. People watching those posts started calling them poetry long before I did. Most of the poems in Make Believe are completely new, but it also has expanded versions of previously shared community favorites.

Advice for writers: Unfortunately, I think consistency is huge. There’s no secret sauce. I love how Mary Oliver describes the creative spark as a cautious lover that waits to see if you will prove your devotion to it by showing up when you say you will. If you do, it starts to show up frequently too. If you don’t, it rarely appears either. In A Poetry Handbook, she says, “Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime.” As someone who kept her creativity locked up in a dusty corner of her soul for a decade, that remark gave me chills.

Next up: I am currently working up the courage to admit to myself that I want to write another book.

Instagram: @thedailyvictorian

Roanne Lau

The Serpent Called Mercy

(Fantasy, March, Daw Books)

“A sentimental book thief and a religious ex-brawler join an illegal monster-fighting arena for some fast coin to pay off debt but quickly discover the most dangerous beasts are outside the ring as they get embroiled in a game of politics orchestrated by a cunning match-master.”

Writes from: Malaysia.

Pre-Mercy: I’ve been writing for fun since I was a kid, drafting some deeply embarrassing things that will never see the light of day. I also started building a paracosm back then, a fictional world for my stories to be set in. I’d toy with various plotlines set in it, exploring different characters and ideas. The Serpent Called Mercy was the first story in this world that I actually finished though.

Time frame: I started my first draft all the way back in 2015—a decade ago (always terrifying realising how much time has flown!). I drafted it fairly quickly, whacking out the words in about two months—but even I could tell they were pretty rubbish words. So over the years, I rewrote it countless times, fleshing out different aspects of the book, refining my prose, tightening my character arcs, homing in on what exactly was the story I wanted to tell and the themes I wanted to explore.

Enter the agent: I did attempt querying the traditional way a few times over the years, usually firing off a few queries and getting a couple of full requests that would ultimately end in an “I enjoyed this but I don’t think I’m the right agent for this” rejection. I’d then hit the pause button on querying to try to figure out what exactly was the X factor I was missing, launching yet another rewrite of the book to experiment with another angle.

Then in 2021, the Pitch Wars mentorship program opened for applications, and I decided to toss my hat into the ring. The brilliant Saara El-Arifi, author of The Ending Fire Trilogy, plucked me out of her slush pile and chose me as her mentee, helping me polish my book up in time for the agent showcase at the end of the program. Thankfully, I did wind up signing with an agent through the showcase! Alas, just a few months later, she wound up leaving the agenting world before we could even begin actually working on the manuscript together, but I then moved over to another agent, who’s been brilliant to work with since.

Biggest surprise: How non-linear the journey can be. From the outside, it always seemed fairly straightforward: write a book, get an agent, get a book deal, book gets published, rinse and repeat. But now that I’m going through my first bout of publishing, there’ve been a lot more bumps in the road than I expected: getting an agent, then losing the agent, getting a book deal, then losing the editor who offered the book deal—various unexpected hiccups and setbacks along the way. But all those lows are balanced out by the highs—getting the news from my second agent that my book was going to auction, getting my first glowing review from Publishers Weekly, getting my first DM from a reader saying my book had restored her love for fantasy novels, etc. The rollercoaster ride never ends!

Another surprise? How chaotic my email inbox would become, with emails from my agent, editors, publicists, interviewers, and more flying in willy-nilly, new deadlines appearing left, right, and centre. Still struggling to stay on top of it and not let things slip through!

What I did right: Letting myself take breaks whenever I needed it, but never fully giving up on my book. Throughout the years, I hit several periods of frustration and resignation as I racked up rejection after rejection, thinking that traditional publication might not be in the cards for me. But whenever I came close to burnout, I’d put my book aside, and either swap to another project or just take a break from writing entirely. I think that was integral for me to maintain the motivation to keep trying. Because eventually, once I was rested and my creative well had been refilled, I’d be drawn back to The Serpent Called Mercy, ready to tackle it from another angle and see if I could crack the code this time. So to anyone who’s getting tired of their book and starting to lose hope in it: chill for a moment, put your book aside, and do whatever makes you happy. When the time’s right, you’ll come back to your book

What I would have done differently: I don’t regret anything, to be honest. I imagine everything I’ve done so far—the good, the bad, and the ugly—has led me to this point. Even my mistakes were necessary lessons for me to learn from via first-hand experience. If I really had to give an answer, then I suppose I’ll say I would’ve prioritised protecting my joy throughout the years, rather than letting it be occasionally extinguished by anxiety or frustration at the publishing process. But hey, I’ve always managed to find my way back to joy, so no (permanent) harm done!

Platform: Nada. When I got my book deal, all I had was my Twitter account with barely 100 followers (90 percent friends made through Pitch Wars, 10 percent spam bots with suspiciously attractive profile pictures), and an Instagram account with a grand total of 1 follower (that being my agent, hah!). During contract negotiations, my agent fought on my behalf to get social media expectations for me whittled down to the bare minimum. At one point, she said to them something like, “You can’t expect her to have any impact with social media, she doesn’t even have any followers!” which I found hilariously blunt.

I am trying to be a little more active on social media now because I do think it can be a fun way to engage with readers. But honestly, trying to learn all the newfangled features and idiosyncrasies of each app makes me feel like a cavewoman discovering modern society for the first time.

Advice for writers: Follow your heart and write what is authentic to you, regardless of how it’ll be received. There were periods where I’d try to understand the publishing industry better by reading all the recently published books in my genre, studying market trends, absorbing books on the craft of writing, imitating the techniques of others, and trying to figure out how to make my book palatable to a wider audience.

It was good and necessary for me to do all this to improve my craft in the early stages—but trying to forecast trends and obey every publishing rule out there just led to me feeling deeply unhappy with my book and writing itself, cheapening an act of creativity and authentic expression into an act of conformity. It felt like I was squeezing my brain into the confines of someone else’s skull.

So at a certain point, I decided to just trust my instincts as a writer and lean harder into my idiosyncrasies to write a book that would truly hew to what I liked to write—a story that maps the patterns of my brain and what I’ve always wanted to read but couldn’t find out there.

I imagine following this advice runs the risk of writing a largely alienating book—but the readers who’ll love your weird book will absolutely love it, because there’s nothing else like it out there. Authenticity seems a better thing to strive for than acceptance.

Next up: I’m working on the second book in my contract, which is also in the fantasy genre. I’m not allowed to say anything about it. Top secret. My publisher will send hitmen after me if I leak too much information. There’s a red laser dot appearing on my forehead as I type this. Send help!

Website: RoanneLau.com

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In this interview, Elyse discusses how her love for ballet helped inspire her debut novel, Maya & Natasha, how drastic changes in the writing process helped the story come together, and more.

Name: Elyse Durham
Literary agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary
Book title: Maya & Natasha
Publisher: Mariner Books
Release date: February 18, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Elevator pitch:Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born during the Siege of Leningrad and raised to be dancers with the Kirov Ballet, like their late mother. But at the start of their senior year, they learn the devastating truth: the Kirov can only take one of them.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

I fell in love with ballet after one of my favorite musicians did a collaboration with the New York City Ballet. I’d grown up around dancers, but this ballet looked nothing like anything I’d ever seen; it was contemporary and fresh and so, so human. I became ravenous for all things ballet, and soon I felt like the titular character in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie: I loved watching ballet so much that I had to start taking classes, and I loved taking classes so much that I had to learn everything I could about dance. The book was born out of that obsession. Reading about Soviet dancers in particular intrigued me—I wanted to immerse myself in that world. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be born into those difficult and unusual circumstances and then build a life around making art.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Between research, drafting, editing, and publication itself, it took me six years to finish this novel. And the concept changed a lot! It took me a very long time to figure out when in history I wanted to set the novel. At one point, it was set during the Russian Revolution, though I eventually became fascinated by the Cold War and shifted the story accordingly.

But the biggest change of all came about halfway through the process: For about two years, one of my characters was an actual ghost (the working title was Maya and the Ghost), and this was causing all kinds of logistical problems and muddling the story. I started wondering what would happen if I cut the ghost character altogether, so I tried it out. To my astonishment, this not only solved a number of problems, but made the rest of the story immediately gel. The process was never easy, but after that it became a heck of a lot smoother. It was a good lesson for me—sometimes cutting work feels like going backwards, but in reality it can be a huge leap forward.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The biggest surprise for me was how quickly everything happened. My plan had been to spend all of 2023 working on edits and then start querying late that year. But an agent reached out in early 2023, we spent the summer polishing the novel, and then sold it in the fall. I was incredibly lucky—and spent the entire year feeling like I had whiplash. But it was a good experience in learning to trust myself and my instincts. The book was ready—I just had to catch up with it!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Probably the biggest surprise was discovering how much I love working with omniscience. It was a steep learning curve at first—when I started, I knew the effect I wanted (I’d loved opinionated narrators since childhood), but I didn’t even know what omniscience was called! And this novel had so many moving parts that I often wondered why I’d picked something so complicated as my first project. Omniscience turned out to be the glue that held everything together; it was what let me weave together multiple timelines and locations, not to mention the consciousnesses of several dozen characters. It was exhausting and utterly exhilarating, like spinning plates or juggling (two skills, alas, that are not in my wheelhouse).

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

My sincere hope is that they’ll feel fully immersed in this world. For me, one of the deepest pleasures of reading is getting to feel like you’re somewhere else—and someone else—if only for an afternoon. I also hope that they come away with a deeper appreciation of ballet and what dancers sacrifice to perform so beautifully. And in a pie-in-the-sky kind of way, I hope they walk away with just a little more compassion. That’s the true joy of an omniscient narrator—it’s easier to be patient with someone when you know what they hope for, what they’re anxious about, what they don’t like about themselves. That’s the dream, anyway.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

That old axiom that the work itself is the reward—well, like it or not, it’s true. Publishing and other milestones are very joyful, but they’re not going to heal you. Do whatever you can to keep working, don’t compare yourself to others, and don’t forget that writing is just one piece of who you are. Your art should support your life, not the other way around. (Was that more than one piece of advice?)

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(Stan Lee’s 1947 Guide to Writing and Selling Comics.)

Segura has been open about the demands of being a full-time writer, and some of his productivity must stem from those outside pressures. But he’s also passionate about a wide variety of styles, finding unique ways into new spaces. Alter Ego confronts the realities of making a living from art with unexpected honesty. Protagonist Annie Bustamante explains, “Comics had chewed me up and spit me out, and at the moment I wasn’t sure I wanted to go for another twelve rounds.” Still, Segura’s own love of comics shines through in every chapter of this enthralling mystery novel. For Writer’s Digest, we talked about moving between genres, overcoming writing fears, and learning from other artists.

You made a bold choice to set the sequel to your award-winning Secret Identity decades in the future. What prompted that decision?

I think it was the feeling that the story had more to unfurl, if that makes sense. Without spoiling too much about the ending of Secret Identity, it felt like the protagonist’s story, Carmen’s story, was mostly resolved—but there was one thread that needed to be touched on. So my editor, Zack Wagman, suggested an epilogue to Secret Identity. When I wrote that, though, I realized there was an entire, other chapter to the saga that needed to exist—but also couldn’t be from Carmen’s perspective. So that’s where Alter Ego came from.

Comic book readers and mystery readers are voracious—and can be particular. Did you have any worries about combining these two worlds in either Secret Identity or Alter Ego?

I didn’t have any worries, and I was actually really grateful to hear from readers of comics who weren’t mystery fans but found themselves transported into the genre by the book, and similar feedback from novel readers who had a limited comic book experience. If there was one big worry with Alter Ego it was making sure the story not only counted—but needed to exist. I think, as a culture, we’re wired to think every story merits a sequel or trilogy or series, and I’m a firm believer that stories can end, and things can be resolved. So I struggled with that—and my answer was to make Alter Ego feel like its own thing, with some connective tissue to Secret Identity, but also the ability to stand on its own and have its own story to tell. I think we succeeded, but it’s up to the readers!

Early in Alter Ego, you write, “Comics were meant to be read, not embalmed.” It made me wonder how you see the comic book industry changing as new writers and illustrators emerge. Or—I almost hate to even mention this—AI interferes.

Well, AI isn’t art—it’s a mish-mash of art that makes something else. It cannot create an original idea or thought, and will never replicate that creative spark that artists create. But I think that was more me referring to collector culture—which is a big part of comics: getting your book signed then slabbed in plastic and forever frozen in time. It appeals to a lot of readers and I’m happy to sign those books for them, but for me—and for Annie, I believe—as a fan, it was always about reading the comics and enjoying the story. I rarely thought about the value of my comics or keeping them in pristine condition. Maybe I’m not good at business!

Your books seem to be love letters to the creators of comic books but also send-ups of the industry at large. How do you strike a balance between these impulses?

I think I just try to reflect it honestly. Every industry is flawed and has bad actors and not-great moments in its history. Comics is no exception to that. But there is a wonder and power that keeps readers connected to the medium, so I didn’t want to discount that. In fact, it’s the wonder and awe that propels the book, I think.

We did an event together recently, and an audience member had a compelling question about intellectual property. He wanted to know about the responsibility you might feel while writing an entry in a beloved series like Star Wars or Daredevil.

It’s a huge responsibility, because you’ve been handed the keys to this nice toy or car or whatever metaphor you want to use, and it’s your job to not only do something cool with it, to entertain, but to not break it or mess it up. It’s a balancing act—but also a fun writing challenge. My default is to usually go back to the core of the character, to what appeals to me as a reader or what brought me into that character’s world as a fan, and try to recapture that. Because I think everyone’s attraction to a story or character is slightly different, so that might present a unique opportunity for people to engage with your take. So many of these characters and worlds have complex and detailed canons and continuities, so the bigger challenge is sifting through those stories and trying to see what matters most and what should be reflected. What are the stories you can’t ignore? Which are the stories you can use to make your own? It’s a really wonderful and unique way to write.

What’s it like to move between writing genres? What do you take from comics into crime fiction and vice versa?

I love writing in different mediums and genres, and comics and novels are quite different—but they help each other. I think writing in comics has helped me write more visually with my prose, in that I write to the imagination of the reader. I don’t over-describe or fall into hyper detail with my prose, unless the plot demands it. Like, I won’t spend pages describing someone’s clothes, unless it’s material to the plot. In comics, the artist brings that to life, and in my head, the reader does it for prose. With comics, prose has taught me to value each word, and that’s extra valuable in comics where you have a certain amount of space per page, per panel, per balloon—so you have to make those count. It’s almost like a structured poem. So they all feed into each other which is fun when you realize it’s happening.

You’ve also recently published a science fiction novel, co-written with Rob Hart, Dark Space. What was new about that experience?

I think the world-building, and the level of time and detail that went into that, before Rob and I even got to the bigger plot, was a surprise—but it shouldn’t have been! We had to think of every aspect of life, from scientific to geopolitical to social. It was fascinating and a lot didn’t necessarily make it onto the page, but it had to exist.

Any other genres you might like to try?

For sure! I’ve got a few nonfiction things in the hopper, and I’d love to take a stab at a horror novel at some point, if I can get over my own fears. Ha!

You seem to be turning the loner writer stereotype upside-down. What appeals to you about collaborative ventures, which coincidentally are also central to Alter Ego.

I love learning from other writers and artists. I love peeking into their processes and, selfishly, adding new things to my own toolkit. My hope is that I pass along my own fun tricks of the trade to them, too.

Check out Alex Segura’s Alter Ego here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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Sometimes you’ll face skeptical anchors or interviewers who push back on what you say. It’s important to be prepared for those moments so you can handle them with poise and grace.

I’ve been on both sides of this—both as an expert answering questions and as a journalist asking them. If your ideas push back on convention, offer a new solution to a problem, or are unexpected, your interviewer might ask you probing questions or ask you to defend your perspective. They’re not out for a “gotcha” moment. It’s their job to get the full story. But it can feel uncomfortable if you’re not expecting it.

Here are five ways to get through unexpected moments in an interview.

1. Prepare for pushback.

It’s OK for people to disagree. It’s OK for people to question your ideas. But it’s also stressful.

The way to reduce that stress is to prepare. Here are some questions you can ask yourself and prepare answers for:

• What might someone ask if they wanted to play devil’s advocate?
• What is the mainstream viewpoint that you’re challenging, and why are you taking that position?
• What evidence do people who disagree with you have, and what would you say to refute that evidence?

You might not be asked about any of these things—but you might be. That’s why it’s important to have thought through your talking points prior to your interview.

When I work with authors, I help them speak in soundbites by developing short, medium, and long answers to likely questions they’ll be asked. I call it the Accordion Method and I use it myself when I prepare to do media. It’s something I dig into a lot in my online training, Media-Ready Author.

2. Pause and have grace.

Say you’re on live TV and someone asks you a question that you just didn’t expect. Before you answer, take a breath. Make sure you respond with grace rather than getting defensive.

Smiling is always a good idea during media interviews—and especially if you’ve just been asked a difficult question.

You don’t need to invent anything on the spot and you don’t need to “win”—it’s not a competition. Instead, embrace pushback as an opportunity to make an even stronger point.

3. Return to your talking points.

After you take a beat, return to your talking points and apply them to what you’ve been asked.

I often go on TV to talk about productivity, so this is something I’ve experienced firsthand.

For instance, I was once speaking on PIX 11 News in New York City about how to have a four-day work week. One of the anchors was skeptical about the idea.

It definitely rattled me! But I took a deep breath and stayed on topic. I wasn’t there to convince him. I was there to share my tips with you, the viewer.

So I stuck to my talking points and responded to his pushback to the best of my ability. I looked at the facts. People who work four days a week report that they’re more productive. It’s hard to argue with that.

4. Embrace imperfection.

Not everything is going to go perfectly in every interview. Especially if you’re doing a lot of them.

If you stumble a little as you try to get back on topic, it’s OK! Don’t beat yourself up about it. You did your best. You kept your cool and you kept going. You are your own worst critic, and other people probably didn’t experience the moment the same way you did.

[Learn more from Paula Rizzo at WD: Media Training for Authors]

5. Use it as a learning opportunity.

Every time you’re asked an unexpected question, you get better at responding. It’s true! The first time is always the trickiest, no matter how diligently you prepare.

Use these moments as opportunities for learning and growing. Rewatch or re-listen to interviews and decide if you want to respond differently next time or if you liked your reaction. There will always be another interview—one response isn’t the last word!

Keep getting your message out. Not everyone will be receptive to every message, video, or post. But that’s OK—you’ll find your audience.

Click to continue.

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Steven Rowley’s novels are intimately epic—stories about people who are thrown into the deep end of life’s defining moments. Where there is love, there is loss, and with it, the unifying power of grief. In a word, Rowley writes about change, and while change is something many of us fear, it’s the very place he finds a way to infuse both comedy and sincerity.

“Even though I’m often writing about grief, I try to find the humor in the situation,” he says. It’s that signature blend of heart and humor that resonates with readers and critics alike. In 2023 alone, Rowley won the 22^nd Thurber Prize for American Humor for The Guncle, and his novel The Celebrants was a Read With Jenna book club selection with Jenna Bush Hager, as well as earning a spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. While it was a gratifying and rewarding year, the stakes felt high for his next novel (and his first sequel) to deliver on the laughs.

“Winning the Thurber Prize halfway through writing The Guncle Abroad, I felt an enormous amount of pressure suddenly that the book had to be really funny,” he says. “Some days I would think, Oh my God, is the book too funny? Not that I was such a comedic genius, but rather, was I focusing too much on jokes and not enough on the other things that resonated with readers from The Guncle—the heartfelt, emotional moments? I was right back to trying to find that balance that I always do.”

In 2021’s The Guncle, we meet semi-retired television actor Patrick O’Hara who has temporary custody of his niece Maisie and nephew Grant while his brother, Greg, deals with a health crisis after the death of his wife and Patrick’s best friend, Sara. It’s a summer spent helping the children explore their grief through witticisms, wisdom, and warmth. For Patrick, not only do the children help him navigate his own immense loss, but they also instill in him that reinvention is not a faraway hope.

In The Guncle Abroad, we follow Patrick five years later across Europe, niece and nephew in tow, while he tries to persuade them through experiences that their father remarrying doesn’t have to be the nightmare they’re anticipating. It’s a natural continuation of one of Rowley’s most beloved characters, and a profound study on the difference between moving on and forward.

Character is where we begin our conversation.

I’m so happy to be back in Patrick O’Hara’s orbit. How did it feel for you to get back into these characters’ minds?

I think a lot of people assume that I wrote the sequel because I missed Patrick. There’s a large part of me in Patrick. Certainly, our senses of humor are the same. So, if I want a dose of Patrick, I can access that pretty easily. But I wasn’t able to tour for The Guncle; it came out in May of 2021. Although we were just getting vaccines, for the most part, events were still virtual. It wasn’t until I toured last summer with The Celebrants that I really noticed something had changed in my career. The crowds were different, the enthusiasm was different. There were people there who were passionate about The Guncle and they were as excited to talk about that book as The Celebrants. So, getting question after question about The Guncle really turned my attention back to the kids. Maisie and Grant are the reason I wrote the sequel because, for many reasons, their grief journey was just beginning at the end of that book. I needed to make sure that the kids were all right.

That’s true about The Guncle coming out during COVID, especially because your books in general are very much about community—however your characters define that—and you being able to feel that palpably, not just for the book that you were promoting at the time, it must have felt like a delayed satisfaction for you.

Yes. An author has absolutely no control over the state of the world when their book is released. And to the extent that this was a book about a character living in self-isolation for a time and finding his way back to the light—coming out at a moment when we were emerging after a dark year. It was an interesting book in an interesting moment.

This one is, too. The Guncle Abroad is your fifth published work, and it’s your first sequel.

Thank you for saying “published,” by the way. For aspiring writers who read this, I always want to be honest about that. I have several novels in a drawer that I wrote before my first novel, Lily and the Octopus, was published, and they should remain in that drawer. I did not officially study creative writing in school, so I consider those my education. And I’m grateful for them, even though they’re not—and should not be—published. I even have another one in the drawer that I wrote in 2020 after I wrote The Guncle, but before it was released. When people started to respond to The Guncle, I learned a lot about what resonated with my readership. And although I like that book a lot, it wasn’t the right one to follow up The Guncle with. So, we’ll see. We may revisit that one day.

Order a copy of The Guncle today:

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Well, in terms of your writing process, how did writing a sequel differ for you than writing your standalone novels?

This is my first time having books back-to-back in back-to-back years, and I’m not a book-a-year writer. I’ve learned that about myself, but I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t know the characters so well. That’s the number one way I was able to tackle an undertaking like this in a year like last year, which was so busy for me.

So, to write this book, it was really helpful to know the characters. And also, because these books are kind of a hat-tip to the Patrick Dennis Auntie Mame novels from the 1950s, the sequel to Auntie Mame was a book called Around the World With Auntie Mame. I never planned to write a sequel, but I had that idea in the back of my head if there were ever to be a sequel that I would take these characters abroad as a kind of homage to Patrick Dennis’ work. And then the third thing that helped my writing process was actually being a real-life guncle to kids who are growing much faster than I would like.

I’m glad you mentioned that. Something that was really lovely about The Guncle Abroad was seeing how the characters changed off the page between books, and having young characters as part of the main cast really helps achieve that. The ways that Maisie and Grant are different from the first book really help this book stand on its own two feet. How did you go about building new characters out of characters that already exist?

Oh, I love how you phrased that—because there are brand-new characters to this, but you’re right, the kids for all intents and purposes are brand-new characters. They were 6 and 9 in the first book, 11 and 14 in this book. There’s a tremendous amount of growth in those years. Patrick relocates to New York at the end of the first book, and he’s been in their life for five years. Not only have they grown on their own, but they’ve grown under his tutelage in a way. They’re not as charmed by his antics as perhaps they once were. I liked seeing them grow and the way that all kids grow in that age, but also imagining how they would grow with his influence in their life.

Read The Guncle Abroad:

Bookshop.org | Amazon

A through-line in your work is this contrast of experiences—how something can be life-affirming but also heartbreaking. Often, your characters experience life-changing moments, either on the page or off, that inform the comedy of their lives, but also the drama of their lives. How do you manage that tone?

The books are all very different. The characters are different, the plots are very different, they take place in different times. But you’re right, if there’s a through line, it’s tone and humor. That’s what I endeavor to nail with each book. And it’s not easy making somebody cry; and likewise, making someone truly laugh out loud. We say “LOL” all the time in our vernacular, but how many times are we actually laughing out loud? It’s the highwire act that I spend the most time perfecting. Because there are times on the page when you go one joke too many, and it really throws the balance of what you’re trying to do. Likewise, if I go too long without giving the reader the opportunity to take a breath through a joke, I think it can color the work in the other direction, perhaps make it feel darker than I intended. I’ve worked with my editor Sally Kim very carefully to get that balance just right.

Let’s go back to The Guncle Abroad. Something else that I would imagine is a challenge in writing a sequel is making the conflict feel unique to the new story and not the same exact conflict as the first book.

Yeah. 100 percent. I mean, I have complicated feelings about sequels in general, other than I will go to the grave insisting that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a superior film to the first Mamma Mia!.

And it’s an 11th-hour tear-jerker.

Yeah! It’s amazing. The sequels that are cash grabs you can sort of feel are the ones that go back and undo a happy ending from the first book. And what I had going for me, I felt, was that while the first book ends on a on a high note, it wasn’t a happily ever after. There was still so much more story there. And so, you’re right, I wanted fresh conflict that was different from the original. The time jump was helpful in establishing fresh conflict. I needed Patrick to be in a different place in his life. He shouldn’t just be the magical caregiver who flies in on the wind like Mary Poppins and out when the wind changes.

Do some stories feel more comedic and other ones feel more dramatic?

I don’t approach them differently. Humor has always been my way through dark times. I think we’re particularly bad at grief as a Western society. It often can feel very isolating when we’re in the throes of it, or that we have to go through it alone, when in fact grief is one of the most uniting parts of the human experience. If we love, we’re going to no doubt lose one day. So, I really want to try to bring people together. And I think humor is the best way to do that.

Yeah. Loss is an inescapable quality of life.

Of being alive, yeah. It’s also in response to my age and the time that I came out in the early 1990s. I think of when I was first coming out and the stories that were available to me at that time were largely about lives lived in the shadows or lives cut short or lonely existences. And that’s what I feared my life would be. I do think it’s important for me to write stories that address sad things, but also infuse them with joy and with found family and community. I think that’s one reason why I think it’s so important to infuse my stories with humor. So many stories, while great and beautifully written, sometimes lack the joy that would’ve given me more confidence as a young person.

When you announced that you had written The Guncle Abroad, it immediately made sense to me. The first book really sets up for tons of stories for these characters. But I am curious: When did you feel like you knew that these characters did have more story to tell?

That’s a good question. I wish it were a more emotional answer, but the honest to God’s truth is when I found out that The Celebrants was picked as a Read With Jenna book club pick. I was afraid of being one of those writers who just repeats themselves. And the way those book club machines work, I knew in late 2022 that The Celebrants was going to be the June 2023 selection. That gave me the confidence to know that my other books could find an audience, that I wouldn’t just be known for The Guncle. And that gave me the confidence to revisit that in a way where I said, “OK, I can do other things too that people seem to find some value in. I don’t need to worry about being pegged as a one-trick pony.”

You mentioned location earlier, and your stories are so character-driven, but setting also does play a huge role in your books.

Place adds so much atmosphere to a story, especially for the kids in the first book. It was partly a fish-out-of-water story, right? Because the hippie-ish, Palm Springs desert is very different than suburban Connecticut. Where I set my stories is always important, but I try also only to write places I’ve been. A lot of the places in the sequel are places that I have traveled to myself, and I don’t know as extensively as I would like, or I’ve never lived in any of these places, but I’ve certainly been to all of them, and I think that’s important.

Something else you’re really good at is misdirection. I don’t want to give The Guncle Abroad’s ending away, but as the ending was happening, I went, “Oh, this is what it’s about.” Is misdirection something you keep in mind as you’re writing, or is it something that reveals itself along the way?

A little Column A, a little Column B, I think. I am not a plotter. I am the definition of a pantser. I usually have a sense of the ending or where I’m going. It’s the long middle stretch that I don’t plan out, mostly because for me—and I think for many writers—the hardest part of the job is butt in chair. So, if I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen that day, I’m more excited to show up to work to find out. In that sense, not planned. Conversely, I’m not a plot-heavy writer. I’m much more interested in character and tone and setting. I do think about little moments of misdirection because I don’t want it to feel flat. Even though I could never write a full-out mystery because I don’t know how to do those kinds of real twists, I can do emotional misdirection and reveals. If I can put in some element that will allow there to be some surprise for the reader, I think that’s important.

There’s also a moment in The Guncle Abroad where Patrick is reflecting on entering middle age, and he’s thinking about how challenging that can be for queer people, particularly gay men because almost an entire generation of gay men was lost due to the AIDS epidemic, leaving many of us without role models for how to navigate life’s middle. It’s a fleeting moment in the book, but it sort of encapsulates Patrick’s circumstances of having all of this life experience, but also the story itself feeling like a unique coming-of-age narrative for him to navigate. Why was this important for you to include in the story?

I feel the loss of that generation immensely; it’s the generation right above mine. I know but for the grace of God, if I were born five years earlier, I probably wouldn’t be here—10 years earlier, certainly. Not only do I mourn those people, but I think of them constantly. When I turned 50, the cliché thing was to sort of moan and groan and want to hide your age or go, “I’m 39 forever,” or whatever-ninth birthday again. And I was like, no, I’m going embrace this, because so many people were not able to celebrate this birthday, and what they wouldn’t do to still be here, you know? This is a great privilege, growing older. I try to do it with grace, but it’s strange to experience changes on your own face and in your own body when there’s not a lot of that generation above me to say, “Oh, this is normal. This happens to every gay person,” or whatnot. It’s difficult to reconcile sometimes what I see in the mirror with the way the natural progression should be because that natural progression was interrupted. It’s something I think about in my daily life a lot. And I think that’s what writers do, right? We explore things through our characters sometimes, and it leads to one of my favorite moments in the sequel, and I think one of the biggest laughs. I won’t give it away, but in that scene with his agent Cassie, when they’re having dinner.

I love his relationship with Cassie, and the storyline about gay men and lesbian friendships.

I love writing women. I will say, there is a slight misogyny sometimes with gay men, and certainly with Patrick’s dismissal of Cassie in the first book until she cannot be dismissed, until she becomes such a formidable presence. That’s something I did deliberately. And in this book too, there is a dismissal from Patrick of lesbians until there’s a reveal. The history of the relationship between lesbians and gay men is important to explore.

I thought that was really thoughtfully done, and not without humor.

Yeah, I try to walk a fine line with that, too. I said when I won the Thurber Prize, there are those who think it’s impossible to be funny in politically correct times. And I think those people are often mistaking humor for cruelty in the first place. It’s very important not to punch down. There is incredible room for humor and sometimes biting humor, but still kindness.

It’s funny you say that, because that part of your speech at the Thurber Prize awards was my next question.

Yeah! That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. I have jokes that go too far. I’m not perfect. Sometimes you take a swing, and you realize reading a draft back, you’re like, “Oh, this really tonally is not right.” And, I’ll take it out. But it’s always best for someone to get the best of Patrick, a little bit. [Laughs] He’s a character who deserves to be taken down a peg every once in a while.

What do you hope readers take away from Patrick’s story now that it’s been extended?

This is a punt, but I almost leave that to readers to tell me what they have taken away. But I will say for me there’s a new act for Patrick as he ages, and it’s a little bit of a mirror for me. I was a late bloomer in terms of finding career success. It’s one thing I value about writing and publishing is that it’s not as ageist as some other industries. It’s hard to become a movie star maybe at 50, but look at some of the biggest publishing phenomena of the past decade. Bonnie Garmus—debut writer at 60. It is something you can break through at any time. There is room for reinvention, whether that means emotional reinvention, new opportunity, or just room for growth. I think that’s what I would hope that people take away. It’s never too late. 

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From The Perfect Daughter by D. J. Palmer to the TV show “The Crowded Room,” popular media continues to use DID for its tantalizing plot twists and the unique opportunity it presents to explore the expansive possibilities of identity.

One of Alyssa Cole’s primary goals was to not add to the harmful narratives surrounding DID, a mental illness that impacts an estimated 1 percent of the population according to the National Institutes of Health. And in this interview, Cole discusses her efforts to represent the disorder responsibly.

Cole is a New York Times bestselling author who first made a name for herself in contemporary romance. Her debut thriller, When No One Is Watching, won the 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Paperback Original and the Strand Critics Award for Best Debut.

WD spoke to Cole about One of Us Knows, which was published by William Morrow in April.

Since the main character has DID, you wrote several characters at once who are both autonomous and deeply connected. What was the most challenging aspect of this?

The most difficult thing for me was really trying to be cognizant of DID as a real diagnosis. There are people who have it. From the beginning, even though it became so deeply important to the story, I didn’t want the story to be about it. I wanted it more to be about a group of people who happened to be a DID system figuring out how they interact and learn to trust each other. I didn’t want it to be a sensational aspect. So often in stories with DID—and this is why I chose Ken as the main protagonist apart from liking prickly heroines—every time you see a movie or read a book or a story about the identity that is not written by someone who has it, it’s always: “Surprise! You have DID!” And then: “Surprise! There’s a secret bad guy who is doing something bad just because they’re a sociopath.”

So, I wanted to subvert that and say, here we have this system. They know they’re a system. They’ve already gone through the “surprise we exist part”—what happens after that navigating and what happens when the main person who is causing trouble is also the one that has to get them out of trouble. Making sure that I was accurate within reason and respectful, but also showing all the messy sides of people who are dealing with mental health issues, outside external factors, a pandemic, a recession, and everything else going on.

What was your research into DID like to portray it in a normative way?

I read lots of memoirs, but first, I tried to come up with a basic story because I didn’t want to read someone’s story and then be like, Oh, let me make a story based on this thing. So, I wanted to have the basic structure of what I wanted to happen and then read more information from first-person sources and see if it was within reason. The basic plot did change as I was researching because some things were, not necessarily bad, but I don’t know if it was my place to write something like that. Then other things were like, Oh, OK, so something like this can happen, and I can then add that to the story without it being something fantastical.

So, I read a lot of memoirs; I read first-person accounts on Reddit and other online sources. I read with the grain of salt because I didn’t know who those people were. There are a significant number of people who [are diagnosed with] DID—I feel like 1 percent of the population is a significant amount—and there are a significant number of people who have it and don’t know it, and then there are people who think they have it. For example, reading Reddit isn’t the same as talking to a psychiatrist or something, but at the same time, people know their brains and what’s going on. I have a lot of things that I would not assume someone could talk about better than me just because they have a degree. And even if the person doesn’t actually have DID, they’re using the same brain as the person who has DID to imagine the situation and what they’re going through. …

But I did have a system I consulted with to make sure I wasn’t putting anything that would be harmful to DID systems in pop culture since there are already so many harmful stories out there. They would read through and generally it was like, “Oh yeah, this is how it can happen, or this happened in our system.”

Some of the more fantastical things I won’t reveal because I don’t want to give spoilers were based on something from my childhood, but I didn’t know if it was crossing a line presenting the idea as something supernatural. I did discuss with the person how best to present this idea of how the ghost plays into the story and the idea of interacting with ghosts and what happens with that when you then have neurological differences and mental health issues and playing around with how real is what’s going on.

Do you have any best practices to share about writing characters who have identity components that you don’t share?

For me, I’m always thinking about how people work and also how not to hurt people. There’s one aspect of how would I feel if someone was writing someone similar to me? What are the things I would not want them to talk about? What is a framing that would be uncomfortable for me? I try to think of it to the best of my ability as someone who is not in someone else’s brain, what could be hurtful to someone?

I also then try to think about what are similarities that I would have with this character? Even if it’s not the same thing, what overlapping experiences do I have that I can draw from to better inform their experience?

So when you’re growing up and there are not a lot of books that have people who are like you, and then you pick up a book and there’s a character who is supposed to be you, my main goal if someone like that picks up one of my books and sees a character like that, I want them to put down the book feeling happy. Even if they have some quibbles with certain things, they feel well-represented and glad that they read the book.

I’m certain some people will not like it and some people will like it, but my main goal is to try, to the best of my ability at the very least, to not be harmful to someone, and at the best, to try to explore their humanity the same way I would want my own explored and not as a trend or a trope or here’s some diversity spice sprinkled onto it. My characters are fictional, but I want them to feel as fully formed and human to someone who has a similar background as I would want to feel reading about someone like myself.

Can you talk about writing characters who are actively deceiving or lying to each other? How do you keep them true to themselves while deciding what hints to give the readers about their true character and their reliability?

For some reason, I really enjoy writing this, and in reality, I hate lying, and I’m super strict about it. I feel like there’s some relation somewhere in my brain between examining all the different ways that people can lie to each other and themselves and also a neurodivergent sense of being able to tell when people are lying and having to figure out: Is this malicious? Do they know they’re lying? Are they lying or are they just hiding something, because that’s not lying?

On some level, I’m subconsciously parsing what is true at all times. Then I really enjoy the dynamic between people [who] are not necessarily maliciously lying. The things I find more interesting are the ways that we lie to ourselves, that we lie to other people to protect ourselves or to protect other people. The ways that people learn to trust one another and [are] learning to trust themselves. I think the lying is also a way to work toward characters discovering how to trust.

I don’t like stories where the lying leads to the character being completely invalidated in their ability to believe in themselves. People lie just to get through the day, even if it’s not malicious.

Talk about trust, then. The main characters are figuring out who to trust in the outer world while learning how to trust themselves.

When I first started writing it, I was thinking of the DID system as a ragtag band of misfits in one body and how they would have to learn to work together, as well as how that dynamic plays out in similar stories or group dynamics, except, in this one, they’re all stuck together. Because they are in one body, I thought it would be a great way to examine both the idea of self and the idea of community and the way that trust is so necessary for the equilibrium with yourself and within a community. With Ken, what does it mean when someone does not trust themselves so much that they can’t see who they are? Even if they’re not necessarily a good person, I wanted it also to be like, is the bad guy always really a bad guy?

There’s conflict happening in the characters’ inner world and outer world at the same time. How do you manage pacing and timing between the two?

Yeah, that was hard. I generally write stories—whether it’s a romance or thriller or sci-fi—whatever mystery is happening, it’s generally burning slowly and then explodes at the end. And with locked-room mysteries, often they’ll get to it right in the beginning and then spend the entire rest of the book exploring it. But because there are two mysteries here—two locked-room mysteries—it was going to have to be different. At the beginning, we’re getting more of the inner world mystery from one point of view and the outer world mystery is more slow burning. Then we get more explosive towards the end.

There is a variant story where both would’ve been happening at the same time, but I felt like it would’ve been too much because there were so many points of view and different things going on.

Also, when I was first thinking of the book, the inner world story was going to be the secondary story, but I was like, the emotional and human connection between the characters was more important to me than the external actions going on. They were still relevant and important to the story, but secondary to what the characters needed to achieve internally.

For writers who like to weave different storylines into the same book, there’s a tension of which one should take the lead. Sometimes this can change the genre of the story. Do you have that conflict, or do you usually know from the beginning which storyline is going to be the most prominent and which genre it will fall into?

I generally know from the beginning. Sometimes I try to add elements that don’t pan out, but then they aren’t necessary to the story. For example, I have a book called A Duke by Default, and it’s a contemporary royalty romance set in Scotland. There’s a secret love child of the Duke, and there is a slight background story of someone trying to buy the real estate in the neighborhood and the neighborhood people are like, “Oh no, what are we going to do?” Part of the reason this guy who hates the monarchy and doesn’t want anything to do with it decides to take on this role is because he can then protect this community. I wanted that gentrification subplot to be bigger, but it was not the story for it. And that gentrification subplot then went on to be applied in a more relevant story where it could be the centerpiece in When No One Is Watching.

For me, I have the story and the characters, and sometimes they have to change the situation, but usually that doesn’t change the genre of the story. It’s more so, this situation is more fitting for something else, so we’re going to have to get rid of that for now or downplay it for now, and then maybe I’ll be able to come back to it later or maybe it just wasn’t meant to be in this one.

Conflict between romantic interests is often used to portray unconscious attraction or attraction that the characters are fighting against. How do you keep this conflict from getting stale or annoying as the book progresses?

Some things that people see as the inciting incident, I see as the resolution because the interesting stuff happens before, and it builds up to all of that instead of immediate violence and dissent. I see conflict as the resolution because I’m a person who, if there’s a conflict in front of me, will address it immediately. So sometimes particular conflict-driven stories don’t work for me because I’m not going through all of that. If there’s a lack of emotional aspects, and it’s external conflict, it’s like, this could be ended in several direct ways. …

The way that I approach conflict is I try to think of the emotional perspective and background of each character and then what is abrasive when they rub against the emotional background and personality and everything else of the characters that they’re around. This can, of course, be a bigger thing if it’s a life-and-death situation. For example, I don’t particularly enjoy “enemies to lovers” stories unless it’s fantasy or historical, but I love “misunderstanding to lovers,” obviously.

In one of my romances, A Prince on Paper, the hero and the heroine have a fake relationship. He is a redheaded step-prince, and she is the cousin of a newly married princess, and throughout the book, he hides behind his playboy façade. And she’s playing a royalty romance otome game [a story-based video game] and romancing him in the game. Throughout the book, she’s getting these phone notifications and, as it goes on, he starts to get more and more jealous because he thinks that she’s talking to another guy. Then at the end, when everything comes to a head, he realizes that she’s playing a game with a fake version of himself. Even though, on the surface, it’s a silly conflict for him, it’s deeply emotional because he is like, “This is the one person who sees me for who I am.” Then he has to wonder, Does she really see me?

There’s another way to tell that story where he gets mad, and he explodes because he’s jealous and thinks she’s cheating. Then when he finds out it’s a game, that conflict is over because that’s the superficial conflict of “I like you and I don’t want you to be with anyone else.” But for this particular couple, I thought it would be more interesting if the idea of she’s cheating on him with a game version of himself, which is the façade that he presents to everyone else, and him having to question if she likes that version of him better. So, I always try to think of the possible straightforward conflict between these two people or between these systems or between this person and this system, and then what is below that conflict that would make it personal for these particular characters. What is the specific thing that would harm them more so than the general conflict of possible cheating or possible misunderstanding?

You often use texts, chat forums, and other written correspondence in your books. Can you talk about that?

So many of us spend a lot of our time texting because our friends are all over the place or we’re busy and not seeing them every day. I just want to see it incorporated more into stories because I feel like it’s realistic. There’s a difference in the way people write and the way people talk to each other, even if the general feeling is the same. It’s just a different way to show interaction and provide a deeper understanding of the characters. What are they writing to themselves in a journal that they’re not telling other people? How do they text as opposed to how do they talk to someone?

Either showing a deeper understanding of a particular character when no one is watching or, to some extent in this book, a deeper understanding of a situation and the ways that the written word, whether it’s a letter or a text or an email, can shift the course of the story or shift your understanding of what’s going on. It can also just be there to provide a deeper understanding of the world.

You watch a lot of anime. Has it taught you anything about portraying emotion or a character’s character?

The biggest thing that it’s done for me is influence how I saw conflict, climax, and resolution in stories. I’ve been watching anime and reading manga since I was very, very young, but I didn’t know the name for the structure that you’ll find in a lot of anime and manga. Recently I found out it’s called kishōtenketsu, and it’s a story without conflict.

It’s a four-act structure, and the third act is usually called the twist. That’s where you learn something that makes you completely reframe everything that you thought you knew, and then you go onto the resolution. The twist doesn’t have to be something explosive. It can be a minor thing that changes how you view everything. Even though I don’t think my writing exactly uses this [structure], it’s been strongly influenced by it and the idea of how little details can change everything.

Do you have any final advice for other writers?

I have taken creative writing classes, and I’ve taught them, as well. But the most important thing is to see those things as a tool that is helping to shape your writing skills and style and not as something your writing style has to conform to.

Often, there’s this idea that you have to take writing classes and learn all of these rules, and I don’t think that’s true. The biggest thing is to read a lot so you can innately understand story structure. This even comes from watching movies and TV and thinking about why it was great and what points did it hit and what aspects of it resonated with you, and then how would you incorporate not the exact thing from the show, but the feeling and the craft into your own work.

You can be writing something and then you can be like, “Oh no, this doesn’t feel right.” You don’t know if it’s because you are missing a certain plot point or a certain story beat if you haven’t studied those things. Education is good, and taking classes is good, but in my opinion, reading is the most important thing. And reading to understand how the book makes you feel at certain points, not just to consume it.

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