Meet prolific novelist Michael C. White who takes us inside his writing life!

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MEET PROLIFIC AUTHOR MICHAEL C. WHITE WHO TAKES US INSIDE HIS WRITING LIFE IN THIS INTERVIEW!

Michael C. White is the author of seven novels: Soul Catcher (William Morrow), which was a Booksense and Historical Novels Review selection, as well as a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award; A Brother’s Blood (Harper Collins), which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers nominee, and an Edgar Award Finalist; The Blind Side of the Heart (Harper Collins), A Dream of Wolves (Harper Collins), and The Garden of Martyrs (St. Martins), also a Connecticut Book Award finalist and made into an opera. His novel Beautiful Assassin (William Morrow) won the 2011 Connecticut Book Award for Fiction. His last novel, Resting Places, won the $5000 National Tuscany Prize for the Novel and

was recently selected as a runner-up for the Indie Author Project General Fiction Award. A collection of his short stories, Marked Men, was published by the University of Missouri Press. He has also published over 50 short stories in literary and national magazines. He was the founding editor of the yearly fiction anthologies American Fiction and Dogwood, and was the founder and former director of Fairfield University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He lives along the New England coast with his wife Reni and his two Labradors, Falstaff and Lincoln.

Who are your literary influences or inspiration?

Through my undergrad and Ph.D. programs I was influenced, sometime unduly so, by the great American writers in the canon: Melville, Crane, Hemingway, and Faulkner. I especially found myself in the thrall of the two opposing masters, Hemingway (made a pilgrimage to his grave in Ketcham, Idaho) and Faulkner. I wrote short cryptic stories in the manner of Hemingway and an entire (bad) novel trying to do a modern, As I Lay Dying, in multiple voices. For almost two decades I stopped reading or trying to write novels, and tried to learn the craft of short fiction. I read widely—Melville’s and Crane’s stories, Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, the great stories of Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever—and published over 50 stories in lit journals. I even started a couple of lit magazines, one of which is still publishing now. During this time I read hundreds and later thousands of short stories manuscripts submitted to me. I found that this was very much a second graduate degree in writing. I learned both from the good stories, but even more from the not-so-good ones. Since writing and publishing novels I have learned a great deal from both debut novelists and from those who have published dozens of books. Though I’ve published eight novels, I still try to learn something from every novel I read. They are my best teacher.

Why do you write?

I wish I could say that I was one of those bookish kids that couldn’t wait to open a novel on a rainy day and spend the time reading. But, alas, I was not. We had no books in my house—I mean none, and not a single bookcase. Until my senior year in high school, I was a three-sport jock in school. I yearned not to write the Great American Novel, but to play shortstop for the New York Yankees (I would even have considered the Red Sox). My father was a farmer, and then a carpenter. As a little boy I used to go with him to work at his jobsites, and later to earn some money (to see a dramatization of this relationship, check out my novel Skunktown). My father was a heavy drinker, and during the day as we worked, he would take nips from the pint bottle in his back pocket and tell me stories, tall, Bunyonesque tales of the Vermont woods where he was raised on a farm. After work, we’d go to some tavern or gin mill, where the drinking and story-telling continued. “What are you drinking? Tell us a story, Wes,” men would cry out as soon as he entered. I would sit in some corner booth, sipping a coke, listening and watching as grown, hardscrabble men—electrician and masons and farmers—fell under his sway of his voice. He continued to tell stories, which got bigger and bolder, as long as they continued to buy drinks for him. Though I wasn’t bookish at all, I found myself thrilled by my father performance. I thought to myself: I’d like to do that. Tell stories that people want to hear.

Tell an anecdote about an interaction between you and one of your more articulate fans.

My second novel, The Blind Side of the Heart, was a story I based loosely on a priest in Western Massachusetts accused of sexual abuse and later of murder. Because of the close connection of my book to the real priest, I got a lot of local publicity as well as letters and emails. But there was one that shocked me. I opened the letter and saw that the letterhead said it was from the maximum security men’s prison in Nashua, New Hampshire. The letter was five, typed, single-spaced page. I read the first two paragraphs with the delight that comes from an obvious fan of your work. Even more than that, I was struck by how articulate and educated the writer appeared. Here was someone who was himself a writer, I thought. But as I read on, I realized he wasn’t a professional writer; rather he was a priest, and he liked my book for having captured the interior life of a priest. More than that though, he was struck by how similar my priest’s situation in the book was to that of his own! By the end of the letter I came to understand that the writer/priest was serving a 35-70 year term for sexually abusing several boys in his congregation. Like my own character in the novel, he swore that he was innocent. He told me that a journalist from the Wall Street Journal was investigating his case in the hopes of finding him innocent. He said that since we had so much in common (I debated that) he wondered if the two of us could meet. It took eight months to get on his visitor list, but out of curiosity to see my character “in the flesh,” as it were, I finally did and was able meet him. That was one of the most surprising letters I’d ever receive from one of my readers.

Where do your characters come from?

I usually begin with story and slowly build my characters around the story. However, I often will find characters along the way that are based loosely on people I know. For instance, in my novel A Dream of Wolves, I based one of the main characters on a woman who was a good friend. I based the character’s looks on this woman, but most importantly, I used the real woman’s very peculiar laugh for that of my character. Though having said that I start with story and then find my characters, in my new novel Skunktown, I started with character first. The main character and narrator, Lyman, was based on my own life, and the father in the novel is based on my father.

How do you start a novel?

As I said previously, I usually start with story, particularly with a kernel of a story. It may be something I read in a newspaper or heard on TV, or it may come from a story someone has told me. My novel Beautiful Assassin, a novel about Russian female sniper in WWII, started from a snippet of a documentary I heard on TV. It was about a real sniper named Ludmila Pavlichenko, who had 306 German kills in the war and was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to the White House. All of this I used in the novel. In the first chapter, I put my character in a tree hoping to get a better shot at a fellow German sniper. This was based on an interview the real sniper gave to an American magazine about one terrifying moment during the war.

Where do your ideas come from for narratives/poems? Do you travel to research your book(s)?

I do a lot of research. Besides, textual research—books and articles—about the subject I’m writing about, I try to visit the places that my characters inhabit. An example of this is making over twenty trips to northern Maine for my first novel A Brother’s Blood. Visting a place helps me to see and feel what my character sees and feels. Besides helping to establish my credibility to write a particular story, I often get ideas about character and plot. An instance of this was in my novel Soul Catcher, about a slave catcher after a runaway slave. Since I envisioned my runaway traveling to northern New York to escaped slave encampment—one that John Brown actually lived at and helped to run—I went to North Elba, New York, to see the encampment for myself. While there, walking the grounds of John Brown’s old farm, I pictured two distinct scenes that would later become chapters. Also, I decided then and there that John Brown would become a crucial part of my narrative.

We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

If a writer writes only what they know, they are going to find out pretty quickly that they run out of stories to tell. But the “write what you know” dictum is still important because whatever you write about you have to prove to yourself and to your reader that you know the subject and your characters. I tell my own fiction students to write about what they are passionate about. And if they don’t know the subject or the period, they need to learn about it. For example, one of my characters in The Garden of Martyrs was based loosely on a French priest named Jean Cheverus, who survived the French Revolution’s “September Massacres” of 1792 and came to America. I knew very little about the period or about the inner lives of priests, so I had to read much. I was teaching at a Jesuit University at the time and would talk over lunch with several priests, about their daily lives, their thoughts and feelings. By the end, I felt comfortable enough to write about this topic and this priest.

When did you start writing?

As I mentioned I came to writing—and reading—late. But instead of starting the way most writers do with short stories, I jumped in the deep end. I wrote in succession two pretty bad novels. What it did teach me, however, was the discipline of writing a long narrative. I was going to college full-time and working 30 hours a week pumping gas or working as a security guard in a defense industry factory, and I’d either get up early and write, or write when I came home. Though it was only an hour a day, it did get me in the habit of writing, of thinking like a writer—looking at the world as an on-going story filled with possibilities. While nothing of note came from those early years of writing, I learned to feel that I was a writer.

Has your education helped you become a better writer?

My undergraduate and Master’s in literature allowed me to read widely, and to catch up on the reading I had missed growing up. But I can’t say that the earlier part of my education helped me as a writer. I learned the craft of fiction when I entered my Ph.D. program with a specialty in creative writing. I had never taken a creative writing course before this (big mistake). In my very first workshop with John Williams, who won the National Book Award, I learned the most basic things about the craft of fiction, like scene management, dialogue, character development, use of backstory, and the importance of conflict. I recall being terribly anxious before the workshop, being in the class of a National Book Award winner, and afterwards embarrassed that I didn’t know some of the most basic things about writing fiction. But over the next three years I would learn a great deal and I was able to apply it to my fiction. Before I left the program I had published a number of short stories in journals. Within a couple of years after the leaving grad school, I was able to publish 50 stories. So while my literature education was not directly helpful, my Ph.D. degree was extremely so.

Do you come to your writing through a particular lens? I have a friend who emphasizes style over everything else, though this approach leads him to character development and plot. Do you sketch out the plot first and work out other aspects of the story in relation to that consideration? Do characters spring up in your mind asking you write their stories?

I mentioned earlier that for me story—the “what happened” part of the novel—begins the journey. But after I sketch out a rough draft of the first third of the book (leaving the last two-thirds open), I focus on language and character, dialogue and description. Every day I read and reread my prose, often thirty or forty pages that I’ve already written, before I move on to the next scene or part. During this very fertile time of revising and rethinking and polishing what I’ve written, I also deepen my characters. I begin to see and hear and feel them in ways I hadn’t at the beginning of the novel. I know my characters more and more each day, particularly their inner landscape of thoughts and feelings. At the same time, description of their outer landscape is also important to me. Where are they? What does it look and feel like—whether it be a hospital bed of the dying Lyman in Skunktown, or town that the young Lyman grows up in. So, while my process starts with story, it soon becomes focused on language and character.

Thanks to prolific writer Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop for sharing her daily writing rhythm!

February 9, 2026 No Comments

My Daily Writing Rhythm

How to keep the characters moving in my head and on the page

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts, and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.

Follow her newsletters on Substack.

This post is from Elizabeth’s Substack January 25th newsletter,:

When I speak at writer’s conferences, I often get the same questions from beginning writers. Do you write with a pen or a computer? Do you write in a journal? Do you write at the same time every day? Where do you write? I know people in the audience are hoping to uncover some secret method, some trick I’ve discovered or invented that would unlock their unconscious so that the words flow and the characters dance off the page beckoning to them to follow.

Every writer be they published or just starting out would answer these questions in a different way. My writing day and schedule has changed over time, but I’ve discovered that committing to writing every day is the most important “trick.” So, for now, here’s my schedule. I wake up and play a number of word games to prime my brain. Then breakfast and a ten minute drawing practice with Wendy McNaughton to push me in different directions. Drawing helps me to see more clearly what is right in front of me and that can only help my descriptive powers.

Although I don’t live in a large apartment, I am lucky enough to have two separate spaces for my work life. The first, a desk 10 inches from my bed, is where I do the administrative work that a published writer must not neglect. It is here that I check royalty statements, answer appearance requests, develop marketing and publicity materials, read through contracts, answer emails from fans, my entertainment lawyer, my editors, etc. My second space is a 6 X 10 foot nook where I keep all my research books, art that inspires me, my journals and an extra card table to spread out file cards on characters, plot twists, settings. I try to keep that as my pure writing space.

The painting above my desk is of an island and I’ve written more than one book about islands. Part of the novel I’m working on is set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a mystical place on the northeast coast of England that I’ve visited to do research. Beneath that, a picture of two characters who showed up in one of my books and who keep coming back. Upper right you’ll see a charcoal drawing of my father, a journalist and memoir writer, who was my first inspiration.

Stewart Alsop at an indeterminate age. Charcoal drawing by an unidentified artist found in our mother’s basement.

Upper left is a cartoon by James Stevenson, the celebrated New Yorker artist who was inspired by my father and uncle . The bookshelf holds my daily handwritten journals and books that inspire and instruct me. And yes, knitting supplies. I’ve found that when my fingers work the needles, my brain works on plot.

Lately I’ve been hearing the term, third space. First your home, then your work and one other. Since both my home and my office are under the same roof, I often go out to my favorite coffee shop which I call my third space. I put on noise deadening headphones, hook into my Gregorian Chant playlist (my current novel is set in the 14th century), write first in my journal and then turn to the half finished sentence, the last thing I wrote the day before. In that crowded, noisy place, my characters meet me and carry me away to their world.

This is the schedule and rhythm that works for me. What is yours?

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Huge thanks to Zackary Vernon for our inspiring chat about his writer’s journey! I learned so much.

January 5, 2026 No Comments

Thank you, Zackary Vernon, for taking the time to share your professional writing journey with me and my readers.

Where did your characters come from for your debut YA novel Our Bodies Electric?

Our Bodies Electric is set in my hometown of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, during the early to mid 1990s. It’s a southern coming-of-age story about a teenager named Josh who struggles against the pressure to conform to social conventions placed on him by his religious family and community, particularly as he enters his teenage years and tries to understand his body and sexuality. Josh hangs out with a bunch of misfit teenagers who get up to all kinds of hijinks, but they also help each other through this period of rapid change and development.

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Meet prolific novelist Michael C. White who takes us inside his writing life!

November 24, 2025 2 Comments

MEET PROLIFIC AUTHOR MICHAEL C. WHITE WHO TAKES US INSIDE HIS WRITING LIFE IN THIS INTERVIEW!

Who are your literary influences or inspiration?

Why do you write?

Tell an anecdote about an interaction between you and one of your more articulate fans.

Where do your characters come from?

How do you start a novel?

Where do your ideas come from for narratives/poems? Do you travel to research your book(s)?

We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?

When did you start writing?

Has your education helped you become a better writer?

Do you come to your writing through a particular lens? I have a friend who emphasizes style over everything else, though this approach leads him to character development and plot. Do you sketch out the plot first and work out other aspects of the story in relation to that consideration? Do characters spring up in your mind asking you write their stories?

Guest Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop reveals the pitfalls of Hybrid Publishing

September 29, 2025 2 Comments

Jane Friedman, a publishing industry expert upon whom I rely for trustworthy information recently updated her very helpful guide to hybrid publishing. For anyone considering this publishing route, be sure to read this guide carefully as she outlines many of the warning signs when you consider signing with a hybrid publisher. I also recommend this list from ALLI, which analyzes the companies and individuals eager to help writers in all sorts of ways from editing to publishing to publicizing. This article in Publishers Weekly details the more successful hybrid publishers and their payment models. And finally, I always encourage writers to sign up for the regular emails from Authors Publish. Here is an article on what the author, Emily Harstone, calls the three kinds of publishing. To be clear, she does not distinguish between vanity and hybrid publishing.

But as a fiction writer, I always believe that “the devil is in the details” and so let me tell you the story of one writer’s experience with a hybrid publisher.

Geoffrey Douglas is an accomplished journalist and memoirist. You can sign up for his Substack newsletter, 5000 Bylines Later here. He modestly describes himself as “author and journalist, with six books and 100 or so magazine pieces behind me–about politics, people, gambling, migrants, murder, a town on fire, etc.” The five books he wrote before his current novel Love in a Dark Place, were all traditionally published, well-reviewed and one was turned into a movie. This novel certainly deserves to be. Kirkus Reviews calls it “…a moving, unflinching novel about human depravity, and the way love can coexist in its menacing presence… emotionally hard-hitting, with impressive psychological depth.”

However, when Geoffrey tried to interest an agent in this novel based on his real-life experiences in Atlantic City during the 1980’s, the heyday of corruption and criminality, he couldn’t get anybody to sign him on. Those who did take a look at the manuscript were unnerved by a white male author “daring” (irony all mine) to include a prostitute and a black boxer as two of the main characters, both seen through the eyes of the protagonist. (I could go off on a tangent about the politically correct atmosphere in publishing these days when writers are pushed to stay within their very narrow lanes and only write what they know personally. What happened to imagination? But I digress.) With the big 5 (as the traditional publishing companies are known) only reading manuscripts from agented writers, the doors to publishing the old-fashioned way are slamming shut. This has pushed writers like Geoffrey to seek other ways to get his work out to a wider audience and there are a multitude of companies eager to help writers frustrated with the current system. Some of these are reputable, others not so much. (Once again see the ALLI guide above.)

So, when I asked Geoffrey about his experience with a hybrid publisher, he gave me this overall view of Greenleaf, the company he worked with.

For me, there were two sides to the coin. On the one hand, Greenleaf is a solid, very professional publisher. The editing, design and production of my book were all fabulous: professional, collaborative and endlessly helpful–more so than anything I ever experienced with the mainstream guys who published me before. And the final product is as fine as anything I could’ve hoped for.

The flip side: Although everyone I dealt with was very straightforward, and there was no dissembling as such, the system itself seems almost designed to obfuscate. The numbers you see on the front end are nothing like the final reality. You’re given a set of prices and a menu of options, most of which seem reasonable enough–but no mention is made initially of printing, warehouse storage, delivery to bookstores or a number of smaller services–so, probably like many other authors, I was blindsided by a lot of it. Some of their promotional options don’t seem worth the cost; and the print-run they recommended was far greater than what’s been sold so far or what I now anticipate. But because the number was more or less in line with my past experience with traditional publishers, and because it was their “professional recommendation,” I took the advice, and am now stuck with a monthly storage bill for more than 2,000 books—not to mention the original printing costs.

So my verdict is mixed. Great service, not so great communication. The system, as designed, is almost certain to include some pretty big potholes, even for the most cautious of us. It’s a textbook case of Buyer Beware. I didn’t beware nearly well enough, so that’s on me.

And here’s an assessment of Greenleaf by ALLI (Alliance of Independent Authors) which seems in line with Geoffrey’s experience.

High pressure sales and staggeringly high fees for add-on services tarnish an otherwise excellent service.

These days with the proliferation of pitfalls for writers and the come-ons from AI generated “publicists and editors” as I wrote about recently, it’s sadly become a game of “gotcha!”

I now feel compelled to add a note at the end of this post letting my readers know that this newsletter is and always will be “human authored.”

Follow her newsletters on Substack.

Timing and the creative process

September 8, 2025 10 Comments

I’m thinking today of timing—how important it is to success. Timing and perseverance: the two go together. I’m also noticing the seasonal aspect of creativity, how cyclic it is. That too is hard to grasp. I want it all the time. I’m afraid if it isn’t there, it won’t return. But I need to remember that if I pursue my creative impulses, and if they’re in accordance with my abilities, then there will be success. Maybe not financially, though that would be nice. But I’ll experience the satisfaction of achieving what I’m capable of. (more…)

Method Writing: Stimulating Memory Is a Gateway

September 1, 2025 No Comments

Thanks to Suzanne Sherman for sharing this post on memoir writing:

There were many standout messages in a webinar I attended this week by bestselling author Janet Fitch, hosted by Memoir Nation (www.memoirnation.com/about-memoir-nation).

This is one of my favorites.

Fitch spoke about stimulating memory to recreate time and place. How to do that?

A clue: Stimulating memory stimulates something inside you as well. It is, as Fitch calls it, “a gateway to memory.”

In my memoir, which publishes in fall 2026, I needed to recreate time and place as far back as 1964, when I was four years old. Important events in the arc of my narrative occurred at that time. Fortunately, I have vivid glimpses of memory to draw from. Still, to build context I needed to write a fuller scene. I had to drop down and find sensory details to go beyond the facts I knew. Depending on facts alone would have resulted in a narrative telling about instead of a recreation of to take readers there with me.

That is where stimulating the gateway to memory comes in. The key to the gateway is sense impression.

To get sense impressions, you have to go “back there” and open to the information your senses have for you. This is particularly helpful if memory is absent for the time you’re writing about.

You may have heard of method acting. Method acting is an emotion-oriented technique in acting used instead of action-based acting. With method acting, an actor aspires to encourage sincere and emotionally expressive performances by fully inhabiting the role of the character.

Here, we have “method writing.” You need to fully inhabit the role of the character you’re writing about (yourself in an earlier time). If, for example, you’re writing a scene that takes place in a car on a hot day in an era before air-conditioning was common in cars, go take a ride in yours with the air-conditioning turned off to get a sense of being in that car you drove in. Roll down the window and get a feeling for that, get some language for it. This is a felt sense of the experience, or method writing.

In my memoir there is a scene in 1964 that takes place in a forest. There is a second scene in a forest in 1974, also important in the story. To recreate time and place for both, I went to a forest when I was writing the book—nearly 50 and 60 years later—to get details for the scenes and stimulate memory of the times I was writing about. Sure, I know what a forest is, but what does morning light do inside of one? What scents come up on a summer breeze? How does pine duff sound underfoot?

Go to the gateway to memory as often as you need by visiting a similar scene in current time. And remember: the key to get in is the senses.

About Suzanne

I’m dedicated to helping writers put their good words into the world.

– Suzanne Sherman

For 40 years, Suzanne has helped hundreds of writers find their voice, strengthen their skills, and complete their salable books. Her clients have published with Wiley & Sons, Chronicle Books, and Ten Speed Press, and others. Many have successfully self-published. Suzanne’s next memoir class is on Zoom, October 6-November 24 (suzannesherman.com/writing-life-memoir-workshop/). Her memoir publishes in fall 2026. For updates and preorders, sign up for her newsletter at suzanne@suzannesherman.com.

Writing Coach & Book Consultant

Memoir Workshops

www.suzannesherman.com

www.100yearsinthelife.com

Email: suzanne@suzannesherman.com

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Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop shares her writing journey via AI

August 25, 2025 6 Comments

The AI Generated Questions

and my answers…

As I wrote in a recent post, I was approached by a media company in the UK asking for an interview. This was the first of what has become a flood of AI generated emails from all over the web enticing writers to participate in what we’ve come to call a “pay to play” scheme. It goes like this. The writer (or rather AI) compliments you on your amazing book/writing career/ insights, etc. Here’s an example.

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Another pay to play scheme: Feeding on the dreams of writers!

July 21, 2025 4 Comments

I’ve written before about how difficult it is these days to make a living as a writer. Besides the proliferation of ways to be published (traditional, hybrid, self-publishing), entire industries now exist to convince writers that this publication or that award or this marketing company will “spread the word” far and wide about their work. I was pretty sure that after decades in this business and a recent deep dive into the bogus contests one is encouraged to enter, I had insulated myself against any of these “pay to play” schemes.

I was wrong.

This time the request for an interview came from an outfit describing itself as “a literary magazine based in London.” The first third of my memoir Daughter of Spies is set in England so this seemed like a perfect fit and one that would help increase British sales. I spent three precious writing hours fashioning thoughtful answers to their interview questions which were impressively detailed, another reason I thought this was a legitimate outfit. Someone had really researched the depth and breadth of my published work. And they included my favorite photo with the credit line.

photo by Christiane Alsop

Once I submitted the answers, I received a letter from someone calling herself the Editorial Director of this “magazine.” She should have used AI to write the letter if, as I suspect, English is not her first language. All typos are hers, not mine.

This is A, Editor In Chief of the magazine. I’d like to thank you for participating the inteview. We found insightfull to your inteview and decided to include print editotion.

And the punch line. Authors are expected to order copies of the print magazine at $35 each although Readers House can offer a 60% discount. And although they talk about distribution in 190 countries and you can buy one online from Barnes and Noble for $32.99 (!), it’s not clear, as I should have read first in an article on this excellent website, Writers Beware, that this print magazine is widely available in retail outlets in the UK or anywhere else. Two independent bookstores they list on their site had never heard of the magazine.

As Victoria Strauss of Writers Beware points out, “Reader’s House basically admits, in one of its followup emails, that acquiring readers is not its main goal: ‘Unlike other magazines, our print edition is designed for authors rather than readers.’ In other words, author, you are our customer.”

So this is not exactly a scam but it’s what we’ve come to call a pay to play scheme. As I wrote in an earlier post, “the one thing that has stopped me in my tracks is the number of “come-ons”, scams, and false promises that land in my inbox daily. Every one of these involve me spending money and, in the end, they will cost me far more than I ever expect to make in royalties. And all of them prey on a writer’s desperate desire to be lifted above others in the great cacophony of modern life where people more and more choose visuals on devices over reading the printed word.”

I’ve informed Readers House that I won’t be buying any print copies although I appreciate the online exposure.

However, I hope to include excerpts from the interview in a future Substack newsletter because, as a writer always pressed for time, I can’t stand the thought that one minute of mine was wasted.

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Suzanne Sherman offers great advice on creating characters in memoir!

March 24, 2025 No Comments

For thirty years now one of my favorite teaching topics in memoir classes is showing characters.

This week in class, everyone created character studies for the people they’re writing about. I want to share some tips for how to do this yourself. (more…)

Thanks to Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop for shining her light on “The Good Old Days in Publishing”!

March 3, 2025 1 Comment

The Good Old Days in Publishing

A nostalgic backward look

This is the second of a two part series on publishing before the Internet. You can read Part I here.

I first went to work in publishing five decades ago. It was a move I made consciously in order to understand the inner workings of what was then called Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) because I wanted them to publish my work. I started out as an editorial assistant in the department headed by the legendary Ursula Nordstrom who was a brilliant editor and an author herself. UN, as she was known in the office, took chances on unknown authors such as Maurice Sendak and risky ones like Shel Silverstein. A collection of her letters entitled Dear Genius, edited and annotated by the children’s book historian Leonard Marcus, is a book worth reading for a look back at the way an editor can honor a writer’s work while making suggestions that will improve it. UN knew better than anyone how to get the best work out of a writer.

I’ve just finished reading The Editor by Sara B. Franklin which details the remarkable life of Judith Jones who worked with writers as varied as Julia Childs, John Updike and Anne Tyler. Although her boss at the time did not acknowledge Jones’ discovery, she is finally credited with rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from the rejection pile. Jones was what has now become a rare bird in book publishing… an editor, like UN, who read carefully, made suggestions for improvements to a manuscript while always acknowledging that the writer was the one who had the final say.

Publishing has changed dramatically since those days. Publishers have consolidated and many of the largest in the US are owned by companies in France, Germany and the UK. Amazon dominates the book selling market and introduced the concept of self-publishing so the number of books published every year has exploded. Authors are often called “content providers,” a chilling term to someone who has lived through the glory days of the industry.

Some examples. I used to get letters acknowledging receipt of my manuscript and written rejection letters when it was turned down.I always received copies of my reviews, both good and bad, from outlets large and small. Reviews were not written by ordinary readers logging on to a website (when I started back in the 1970s, the internet didn’t exist yet, at least for everyday citizens) but by critics in mainstream media outlets. If my book was picked up for a foreign edition or a book club, I got a phone call or at the very least, a letter and later, an email informing me of the rights sale and the terms of the license. When I published a novel, I often received one leather bound edition from the publisher as a present.

One of my publishers gave me the original jacket art from my best-selling children’s book

and another, with the blessing of the illustrator, two pieces of inside art from a picture book.

But the best present of all I found recently in a bureau drawer.

Everybody at Harper Junior Books knew of my affection for Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. (You can read about the influence that book had on my own writing in this essay I wrote for the 50th Anniversary edition of the novel.) So they gave me a small silver notebook of my own, a place to keep my secrets, the ones that would feed my stories.

They inscribed the back with the date of my departure and HJB for Harper Junior Books.

Afterwards, when I got home, I added the one line I will always remember from Harriet the Spy.

As Harriet’s nanny Ole Golly, tells her young charge: “Gone is gone. Don’t try to hold on to people or lie down in your memories. Make stories from them.”

Sadly, I tell myself the same about the good old days of publishing. Gone is gone.

But I am still making stories.

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts,and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.

Follow her newsletters on Substack.

Suzanne Sherman offers great advice on structuring memoirs!

February 24, 2025 No Comments

Story Structures for Memoir

American films tend to follow a three-act story structure with a key turning point at the end of the first and second acts. Memoir has no single formula like that for its structure, though it’s not a free-for-all. There are options to choose from.

When I started writing a memoir a few years ago, for the first draft I used a standard narrative structure, telling the story chronologically from the start and end points I chose. That format fit well for me in what I call the discovery draft. I needed clean lines in the structure. (more…)

Have you written lately? Here’s Suzanne Sherman’s inspiring response!

January 20, 2025 2 Comments

At a New Year’s Eve party, someone asked if I’m writing lately. I said yes, I’m always writing. The next day, I decided to sit down for 10 minutes to explore the reason for my answer. Writing nonstop for 10 minutes on the topic turned out to be another good example of how writing lets us dig deeper and find out what we really think about something.

I share that writing here with you, writer to writer. I hope it inspires you to write for 10 minutes on the topic and give words to the reasons YOU write. (more…)

Riding the creative roller coaster with author Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop!

January 6, 2025 No Comments

Rejoice, Mourn, Repeat

Riding the creative roller coaster

Writing a novel is like riding an emotional roller coaster. So many ups and downs. In the beginning, you’re simply trying to create a world that a reader can enter. That means you need to develop believable characters, be they heros or villains, you need to set them in place and time so securely that your reader knows where she stands, and then you need to let those imagined creatures lead you forward. At least, as I’ve written before, that’s the way I do it. In the beginning, as I’ve told students, it’s as if you’re making a snowball that will eventually become the base of a snowman.

Once it begins to form and hold together, you start to push that frozen ball up a snowy hill where every turn of the packed base makes it larger, heavier and more unwieldy, but it’s growing. At some point, you reach the top of the hill. Stop there and take a breath because, if all is going as it should, that’s where the story takes on a life of its own and soon you’ll be chasing it down the other side, writing as fast as you can to keep up with your fully developed characters and all they have to tell you.

One day, you realize you’re done. You’ve written, you’ve revised and if you’re like me, nobody’s read it but yourself.

Here I take another pause. I’ve spent lots of time in this world I’ve created. These characters have kept me company over weeks, months, years so this is my first stage of mourning. I miss my characters and the daily structure they’ve given me. I wander about aimlessly, pretending that the sweater I’m knitting or the photos I’m taking are fulfilling my creative urges. And then when what I call my “creative anxiety” builds to an unsustainable pitch, I send the manuscript out to my editors/readers.

No matter how many books I’ve written, I always imagine and hope that the one I’ve just finished is finally the perfect one, the book that doesn’t need one word changed. Despite having published dozens of novels that hasn’t happened yet, and in my saner moments, I know it never will. My smart readers let me know that there is still work to be done, so I plunge back in, dropping a scene here, adding another one there, changing the direction a character takes and the ensuing consequences. In one book, I had to change the entire manuscript from present to past tense which is the way it should have been written in the first place. I needed a smart editorial assistant to point that out to me and I’m grateful for her honesty.

When the revisions are done and the book has been copyedited, printed and put between two covers, I have another moment of sadness. This stage reminds me of leaving my child wailing at the door on his first day in preschool as I hurry off, trying not to look back.

Now there’s no way to protect this creation from the reviewers. She must make her own way. I’ve done all I can. However, I’ve proven to be a fickle creative parent. By the time that book is out in the world, I usually find I’m getting distracted by another idea, an island setting, an overheard tale or a wily trickster whispering in my creative ear.

If I’m lucky and the publisher has done its job, the book finds its readers and fans, it lands on bookstore shelves and in library nooks, and sometimes all the way into classrooms.

Often my book is translated, published in other countries, excerpted in anthologies. The sales are robust in the first years but usually dwindle slowly over time and one day in two years or ten or even twenty, I get the inevitable letter from the publisher informing me they are putting the book out of print.

Another moment of mourning. The little one I sent out has returned to me somewhat tattered and torn, but having lived a full life in the hands of readers who for a while entered the world I created. I order some last copies, revert the rights so that I hold them should another publisher show interest in reissuing the book, and I move on.

This is an especially poignant week for me because for the first time, I am the one reclaiming the rights of a book still in print. For now, The Castle in the Attic, my fantasy novel for middle grade readers will only be available in an audio version or in used bookstores, and libraries.

I wrote more about the reasons for my decision in my last post, A Big Announcement. Even though it is the right decision for the future of the franchise (a prequel is finished, the first sequel, The Battle for the Castle, is still in print, I’m working on the final sequel and a movie deal is in the works), I am sad at this pause in the 40-year publishing track record of my novel.

But a writer is never not writing. So I’m back on the roller coaster, one third of the way into the final sequel to The Castle in the Attic. The snowball is packed, heavy, unwieldy and I’m teetering on the crest of the hill. Wish me luck on the way down.

P.S. I’m always happy to hear from my readers in any form, but I’m especially grateful if you can write your comments in the Substack app, so that others can read them and respond.

Thanks for reading Table of Contents: 1. Writing 2. Publishing 3. Notes. Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work.

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts,and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.

Follow her newsletters on Substack.

MICHELLE CAMERON is back to tell us about her new novel NAPOLEON’S MIRAGE!

November 25, 2024 No Comments

Welcome to Michelle Cameron, the author of Jewish historical fiction. Her most recent is Napoleon’s Mirage, the sequel to Beyond the Ghetto Gates. Previous work includes Babylon: A Novel of Jewish Captivity, a finalist in religious fiction in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the award-winning Beyond the Ghetto Gates and The Fruit of Her Hands: the story of Shira of Ashkenaz. Michelle is a director of The Writers Circle, a NJ-based creative writing program serving children, teens, and adults. She lives in Chatham, NJ, with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud. (more…)

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop believes Resistance often begins in art: WRITING NO MATTER WHAT!

November 4, 2024 No Comments

Writing No Matter What

Resistance often begins in art

As we sit here the week before the US elections and to my mind, the most important election in my lifetime, I wonder as I often have in the past, what’s the point of continuing to write in the face of all that worries the world. I felt this way after 911 and during the pandemic and the feeling is coming back again. I’ve been doing lots of political work which has lifted my spirits because, for me, action is the only cure for despair. But I’ve developed a powerful case of what I call “creative anxiety.” It’s happened to me before and I’m sure it will again. I’ve been away from the novel I’m working on for over two weeks. My characters are calling to me from where I left them, mounted on horses, hiding in a thick forest, searching for a young woman who has fled a convent.