It seems the first part of your writing career is simply believing that you can write. That the way you put words and sentences together, are cohesive and able to be comprehended by the masses. Do you understand the elements of storytelling? Do you have the ability to create compelling characters that lift up off the page? Are you able to capture and articulate themes that aren’t always obvious but can be read between the lines and in the margins?

This is a step that can’t be skipped. We have to arrive at command of craft first, before we can start to think outside the box. But what seems to become important rather quickly, is learning how to take risks to up the ante on books’ staying power and establishing yourself as a true player in the publishing landscape.

It doesn’t always have to be outlandish. Risk can assert itself in a variety of ways. It seems that especially in a time when more books are being published than ever, what will differentiate your work is your approach.

In reading, I came across a passage exploring Toni Morrison’s work with a deceased author named Henry Dumas, in her time as an editor at Random House.

“While Morrison never wanted to be viewed as a hero who saved Dumas from relative obscurity, her willingness to push Random House to publish not one but four books posthumously affirmed her commitment to publishing Black literature that took artistic risks, not simply Black literature that would sell.” Toni at Random, Dana A. Williams

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I often point to the idea of the writer being an observer, a recorder of history, and when I say that, it doesn’t mean that we have to be full on historians, but I think part of what it means to be a writer is to be curious about culture, about the world, about the things that are happening around us.

So when I’m asked, at times, how do you continue to have ideas to write about, I think, “how could I not?”

There is so much happening in the world at all times. If you are unsure what to write about, it might behoove you to simply look around you. What questions do you have? What are you curious about? What are you hoping to understand more?

What led me to my debut novel was working in the music industry for most of my professional career. I was in studios, at events, and otherwise integrated into this microcosm of the real world, and I saw that there were so many stories that lived there.

The aspiring musician. The one who already made it. The young ambitious woman. The studio owner. The label exec who is trying to make a name for themselves. The predatory men. The backstabbing colleagues. Whatever the case, there were all these characters and stories, and I rolled them up into a plot for my first novel.

I remember driving one day, listening to a certain R&B crooner and thinking to myself, “what happens when the playboy actually falls in love?” Following that thread is what led me to creating Tau Anderson as a character.

In Black Women Writers at Work, author Kristin Hunter talks about the subconscious part of writing that comes into play within our work.

“So much of the writing is not deliberate or self-conscious. The contrary might seem to be the case to the critic, but aspects of character, theme come about almost without intending them to.”

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Publishing is a business of hurry up and wait. There is a lot of waiting. You send off submissions, you query agents and you wait. You sell a book and you wait. You ask people for feedback, you wait. And while it can be infuriating in a time where everything is immediate, there are some good things about waiting when it comes to craft.

You may hear writers talk about taking time away from a draft. Whether it’s a personal essay, poetry, or a novel, you work on it, and then you literally put it away and don’t think about it for an allotted amount of time. For some that’s weeks, for others that’s months. But a lot is happening in your subconscious while you may not be writing words on the page.

Those plot points, language, concepts, are drifting around in the back of your mind. While you’re reading, watching TV shows or films, having conversations, you may find yourself connecting the dots in your own work by taking in the things around you. I can’t tell you how many times I’m reading something else only to understand how an idea could work in my own story. I’ll give you an example.

I randomly came across something on the internet where someone was asking what is the archetype for women like Solange or Tracee Ellis Ross. I clicked into the comments and one of the first answers was The Muse. YAHTZEE! In one of the manuscripts I’m currently drafting, I realize that the main character is the muse. Sometimes you’re wrestling with who exactly a character is on the page, how to make them 3D, and while I’d been referring to her as maneater, the muse feels a bit more in alignment with what I’m trying to convey.

I have not been actively working on that draft for months. But this is a note that I will take back with me, when it’s time to sit back down and continue drafting. It’s a framework for a character that will help inform so much of the story.

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When we think about literature at its very core, it exists as a bit of collective memory, a repository for chronicling life in different periods of time and certainly expressing shared values and belief in society. Then, not only does literature reflect these cultural moments, it also helps to shape them. Hence why often, in hostile times, the books are the first thing to be attacked or banned, but I digress.

It’s with this in mind that we broach the idea of thinking about our own work and how it fits into the larger conversation around culture, identity, and society.

Your first step, as a writer, is certainly ensuring that you have written your absolute best work. But there will come a time, when you also have to examine the work to understand something about it more broadly. Honestly, it’s in these moments that you can also sharpen the work, when you distill what it’s really about.

I would consider this, your themes.

On the surface, Good Morning, Love was a romance story (that I originally pitched as Women’s Fiction) that followed the journey of Carli Henton, a songwriter stuck between a day job and a dream, and rising R&B star Tau Anderson. That’s the story that I set out to write, but naturally, because literature is this beautiful process, these other bigger themes started to arise.

Suddenly, a book about a comeback after a 10-year hiatus is actually about grief. Or a book about a relationship curse is about intergenerational trauma and how the cycle can be broken. A romance book can be about ambitious women trying to find their way in both love and a male-dominated field.

There are different schools of thought on whether you should include a section about the themes of your book in your query letter or not. At the least, whether you choose to summarize it in your pitch or not, you should definitely spend time thinking about them.

Only from personal experience, I felt that it helped to contextualize the story in my querying process. Here is an excerpt:

“Although, a love story at the crux, this story also examines the uncertainty of being a new adult looking to chase a dream but also survive in a world that’s not always so kind to ambitious women. This is a story of shaking the outside pressures and expectations of those around us to go after what we want in spite of challenges. This is also about young women learning to assert themselves in male-dominated industries but still being open to personal connection and love. And going for it, when there’s nothing that’s holding you back but yourself.”

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Querying is the process of trying to find an agent for your book. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, the package may vary, but the process is similar. For the most part, as a writer that has not yet published a book, you will be sending your letter to what they affectionately call the “slush pile.”

This does not mean that your work is slush. It only means that these are blind inquiries with no real point of connection for the agent. And agents received thousands of these letters a day. I know this is sounding bleak, but just go with me here. It’s a normal part of the traditional publishing process.

You may be wondering, what are the other ways that books get picked up by agents that don’t involve the slush? Well, let’s talk about those before we get back to it.

Other opportunities for books to get representation.

There are sometimes festivals and conferences where they host agent pitching sessions. Many reputable agents participate in these where you would get to pitch your book (sometimes reading your query) and you may be asked to follow up with your full query package.

You can also be introduced to an agent through another writer. This is where building your community comes in. If you have a friend who is writing in your genre, they may be willing to introduce you to their agent which will help you rise above the mayhem in their inbox for consideration.

An agent may also reach out to you if you are publishing short form content. Here is where it’s important to be working alongside your book. Whether that’s pitching media outlets, submitting short stories, or publishing your own work on a blog, sites like Medium or Substack, sometimes agents come across these sites and may reach out to you about whether you’re working on a book or not.

Now, if none of those things are a reality for you, there is still hope. You can indeed make it out of the slush pile. How do I know? I did it.

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The other day, I was scrolling through social media and saw an agent open to queries and it seemed like one of my manuscripts collecting dust could be the right fit. Now, I’d told myself I wasn’t going to query that project anymore before I took a good look at it and possibly overhauled it, but I quickly reminded myself that although the manuscript has gotten some rejections, it doesn’t mean it’s not good.

When I sold Good Morning, Love, it was not the book that was on the shelves. I went through a round of edits when I signed with my agent. Not all agents are developmental, so you should ask about that on your first phone call. Then, I worked with my editor on more rounds of edits to get it in shape for publishing. You should be writing the best book possible, but you also have to realize that sometimes the meat is there and maybe you do need that objective opinion to get it where it needs to go.

The reality here is that I lost a little hope for a second. It’s been four years since my debut. The two novels I pitched after that didn’t get picked up. I don’t currently have an active agent. It has left me wondering on more than one occasion whether the traditional publishing journey was over for me.

But that one spark reignited something in me. This random agent, who seemingly described exactly what I was working on, encouraged me to take another chance. I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I know that every time I open that manuscript, I believe it’s a story that needs to be told. Believe me, you will be first to know if anything comes from it.

If your timeline is set up anything like mine, you are going to see a lot about the publishing industry and how bleak things look. The imprints are all folding into one another, editors are quitting or being let go left and right, and it feels like only celebrities that they know will sell books are getting the big advances. But that’s not the only story.

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The internet has been set ablaze again from an exchange between an author and some type of book influencer who decided that being contacted about an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) they were disinterested in reading was all too much.

Every so often, someone releases a book and finds themselves lost in the swampy waters of negative feedback and it’s hard to know exactly how to navigate those waters as a writer. But I tend to take the side of “what people think about your book is not really your business.”

Look, writing a book is a deeply personal journey. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, though I will say that nonfiction can be tougher, at times, because it’s your real life experiences being put out there on the chopping block to be judged. But I always go back to what Jill Scott said during her Verzuz with Erykah Badu, once you put the art out, it’s no longer yours.

You don’t get to control how people will react to your work. And while every bad review may feel like a personal indictment on your value and worth as a writer, it’s not necessarily.

It can be tempting to peruse the reviews of your book on Amazon or Goodreads, but I tend to advise against it. It’s natural to peek a little, but get yourself out of there as quickly as possible. Even if you have good reviews, you have to be careful not to listen to your ego when you’re up or down. It’s important to stay even because if you live by the applause you’ll also die by the criticism as the adage goes.

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I could not have been more naive at the start of my traditional publishing journey. I am literally the person who jumps out of the plane and builds the parachute on the way down. I never thought that I would be published as quickly as I was, but I think it was the right time, right place type of deal.

I know it seems silly, like “weren’t you doing all the things to be published?” And the short answer is yes, but if you knew how many things I’ve tried in life that didn’t pan out for me, you would understand more about my thinking at the time. I had more of a “let’s just see what happens,” mentality and had no real plan about how to execute a real trajectory for my writing career. Without knowing a lot about how publishing worked, there was a lot of on the job learning. Every step of my debut experience was teaching me what it takes to be a professional writer.

In many ways, we assume that publishing is some type of meritocracy. Clearly the best books are published, right? But if you know anything about creative industries that is rarely the case. There are myriad factors that go into what is published and while we want to think that the quality of our work matters most, it’s simply not the only thing that matters. Like any industry there are these unwritten social and professional norms that people with industry access learn early, but the rest of us figure out as we go. That’s why this community exists, to share the information that isn’t always available to the writer who is trying to publish alongside their 9 to 5 work or the writer who is also navigating motherhood without connections to literary circles.

So, what are some of these unspoken rules that I’ve discovered so far?

The editorial relationship has an unspoken clock. If your first book underperforms, there is a window — often shorter than anyone tells you — before enthusiasm cools and your next project faces a steeper climb. Writers who know this plan their pub strategy differently.

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A reading for the evening wrapped during this year’s AWP writer’s conference and I found myself in a conversation with a writer I’ve admired from afar for a while now. We engaged in the normal chatter of finding a connection point, and within a short time we found it. Neither of our publishers wanted our second book.

In comparison, her debut book did eons better than mine. Awards, lots of appearances, esteemed reviews and yet, we found ourselves in similar circumstances. The second project we pitched didn’t get across the finish line with our initial publisher.

Now, she has since went on to another imprint, and I am working diligently on what my next pitch will be, but I realized, at times, you’ll find yourself in rooms where everyone will seem more brilliant, awarded, and accomplished than you but ultimately, many of us are running the same race.

Sure, we may be at different parts of the track, but we’re all in this thing together. The pitching, the rejection, but most importantly, the writing.

I’ve said it numerous times in many ways that writing is hard. Period. Whether you are working on that initial publication or trying to prove yourself ten books in. There are no guarantees that you will be churning out books every year to high praise and higher advances.

And I think that’s the part nobody really prepares you for — not the rejection itself, but the quiet shock of realizing that the things you thought would protect you from it, the awards, the reviews, the momentum, don’t actually build the wall you imagined they would. You still wake up uncertain. You still wait on emails. You still wonder if the next thing will land.

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My grandmother was in a department store one day when an assailant decided they were going to rob the place. When my grandmother had to give her account because thankfully, she was unharmed, they asked her if she could remember any features of the man or what he looked like. Her response? She only saw the gun.

This is one of the stories that circulates in my family. These moments, frozen in time that have been repeated at family gatherings, or now that she’s gone, in recounting who she was and how she moved through the world.

The tradition of storytelling is deep. I have said often that some of the best storytellers I know will never write the great American novel, or the most poignant personal narrative essay. But many of us who write have learned immensely through our culture, sitting at the feet of our aunts, uncles, and grandparents, what it means to be a storyteller.

Think about how much of our history had to be remembered because our ancestors weren’t taught to read or write. Or because the powers that be would attempt to re-write history. We held onto those stories, creating a legacy of engaging, informative, and at times, down right comical narratives.

Yet, we go into schooling programs that try to teach us the “right” way of telling stories. Black oral tradition — storytelling at cookouts, the way church testimony is structured, the dozens, folktales, blues lyrics, call and response — already contains sophisticated narrative architecture.

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First, let me start by saying my apologies for a delayed newsletter this week. I started on a piece that I realized would require much more of my time and attention to be done well and life really played out in fast forward over the last couple of days. So, I will be saving that piece for next week, and this week, giving both you, and myself a bit of a pep talk, if that’s okay.

My debut was published in 2022. It is now 2026. I used to wonder what exactly was happening for writers during that down time. Why had it taken them so long to release their next project? Well, as my mother always says, which she likely got from my grandmother, “you just have to keep living.” There are things that you will not understand until you go through them. And so I wanted to give you a real look at what happens in between.

The book was released and for a year, almost two years, I was still promoting it. You have that runway to create all the fanfare for like three months before and then three months after you release the book. But as a brand spanking new author, there are so many people that have no idea who you are or that you have a book and it’s your job to market yourself so that they do. I’m still seeing new people discover Good Morning, Love every month.

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How do you write when the world is on fire? When every hour on the hour there is breaking news. When the idea of politics affecting your everyday life becomes much more tangible. When foreign invaders are coming in and tearing neighbors from their homes, how do you write?

The short answer is sometimes you don’t.

It feels urgent to complete my next project. Somehow the time since my debut is moving at warp speed, faster than I’m able to grasp. It feels like yesterday I was completing my copy edits, and getting emails about different tour dates, and coordinating efforts with a team. Now, it’s pushing four years, and I have manuscripts in multiple stages of completion, but no agent, no deal.

This is par for the course. It happens, but it’s my inability to finish the next thing that is daunting. I need to finish, and yet my brain, my body, my soul, is telling me to slow down, to take my time. Because this is about the fifty-leventh unprecedented time I’ve lived through as a millennial. Not including the personal, and tragic losses I’ve faced over the last two years. It has been a challenge to show up to normal tasks, let alone finding the mental safety to get lost in the land of make believe to write a light hearted romance.

I still, very much, have a goal of finishing my current draft by my birthday in May. But I’m taking some of the pressure off since I haven’t been able to open my word doc within the last three weeks. I was sick, there was GRAMMY Week, then I was sick again and last week was the first time I felt like a human being in a while. The ebbs and flows happen and I’m learning to surrender to them instead of fighting against them.

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There tends to be a big question around what makes something literary fiction over genre fiction, and while I may not be smart enough to do a straight comparison, I will share with you what I’m noticing as I read my latest literary fiction book.

It’s always helpful to start out with some definitions because people in publishing like to throw around terms that some of us have never heard before. Genre fiction refers to fiction written to fit into specific categories like romance, thriller, sci-fi. Literary fiction refers to a category of, usually, contemporary, realistic, or historical novels that prioritize artistic style, deep character psychology, and thematic complexity over fast-paced plots or established genre tropes.

I was introduced to Brandon Taylor right before the world shut down during the global pandemic. It was the last literary event I attended before the world went dark there for a minute in March of 2020. It was an awesome day, I was meeting a few friends in Philly there, and we listened to Brandon talk about his debut Real Life, which went on to receive much acclaim, including becoming a finalist for The Booker Prize.

The Late Americans is Taylor’s third published book, second novel, that follows a loose circle of lovers and friends in Iowa City. Also with a campus setting, it’s full of self-discovery, sex, and crisis whether real or fabricated. As I was reading, here were a few things that stuck out to me about the elements of a literary novel.

Lots of Interior

I think we often attribute description to literary novels, but that’s a given. It could be overlooked that we’re also given a lot of interior, meaning what the character is thinking. So much of a literary fiction novel is focused on the character’s arc. The way that we see how they’re changing is literally through their own mind and how they are processing the chain of events. Every book has an interior narrative, but literary fiction seems to laser focus on the inside of the mind of the characters.

Less Plot

In this way, less things are happening. In The Late Americans, we’re kind of following these characters around campus, but nothing super significant happens. We’re not racing against a clock. There are no huge twists and turns. We’re plunging deep into who these people are and how they interact with one another. Sure things happen, but it’s minute in comparison to the plot that drives most genre fiction. As the definition mentioned, it’s realistic in a way that genre fiction doesn’t always achieve.

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As many of you know, I’ve been reading through the canon of one of my favorite writers, Diane McKinney Whetstone, and I recently revisited Blues Dancing (1999), her third book release that follows the character Verdi who reconnects with her college sweetheart, Johnson. But there is a complicated history between them that Whetstone masterfully weaves into the contemporary story that finds them many years later.

It’s so important to dissect what it is that you love about a writer in order to be able to better understand your own writing process, and what you hope to bring to the world as an artist. So, this week, I wanted to share a few things that stand out to me about this Philly-bred writer’s work.

Description

For me, it starts with her languid descriptions. She has this way of sweeping you completely into the moment with her prose that personifies and tugs at the deep emotional interior of the characters. Take this passage below:

“They both looked down and watched the space between them that did appear to be moving now and rising up from the floor like a smoky-blue cloud and then separating into two distinct forms that teased and gyrated and danced to the beat of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet now. Their blues. Banishing their destructive past for this evening in the archway between Kitt’s rooms that was brightly lit but felt sultry and smoky and dim to Johnson and Verdi as they watched their blues dancing like they wished they could, until Johnson stretched his fingertips through the movable space between them, the years. And they touched fingers and then entire hands, palm against palm and now they were dancing too.”

When I tell you, I read this over and over and likely screamed when I was done. It gives a beautiful backdrop to these two characters seeing one another for the first time in a long time. Her description showcases both the weight of this reunion and their longing.

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My traditional publishing journey started on a wing and a prayer. I knew nothing about how to be a traditionally published author but I’ve always had an unwavering sense of ambition when it came to things I wanted to do in life, so I started the research.

I went to early meetups that were hosted by author and agent, Eric Smith. He would invite publishing professionals to talk about the business for free at a co-working space in Philadelphia. I pieced together what I could via Twitter (RIP). At that time, so many people in publishing were active and communal there. I pitched via one of those contests they had and received some early feedback from agents that were saying no, but still put me on game about how to improve my story.

I did the work and even still, every single step of the publishing journey, I was learning something new for the first time. You don’t sell a book and then receive a manual on how it all works. There’s no onboarding or handholding. You simply start getting emails, and deadlines, and random text messages from your editor to ensure that everything is on course for your publication.

Even still, I’m piecing together how to keep this thing going. How do I ensure that I’m not a girl who published one book and who can build a sustainable writing career? And there’s no manual for that either. But at the least, I have friends now on similar journeys of getting to their next book deals, and changing agents and we’re all encouraging each other in the process.

So, I wanted to share with you, whether you’re published already or just getting started, some of the most important things I wish I knew before I ever sent my first query letter. Ash did that, so hopefully you won’t have to go through that. (IYKYK the Jay bar).

Seeing past the first book.

I didn’t even think that I would publish my first book. And I know that doesn’t make sense because I said that’s what I set out to do. But I have this habit of doing things (impulsive) and not expecting a positive result. So, yes, I started querying my book and worked hard as hell on it, but there was still something in my mind saying, “it’s never going to happen.” Then it did. But if I could do it all again, I would have planned out my first three books. You can’t know what you don’t know, but I’m FINALLY in a space, where I have a plan for myself, to say, this is what needs to happen next. When I find my new agent, I’ll be able to say, “this is where I want to go.” Doesn’t mean that things can’t change, we must always remain flexible, but you have to have a destination to even get a little lost along the way.

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You are a writer the moment that you pick up a pen. Becoming an author takes a little more strategy, work, and preparation.

It also includes the balance of craft and commerce. The reality is that publishing is a business. And at times feels directly at odds with the art of being a writer. But most of us have to find the medium ground. Sticking to our guns with the stories that we deem important to tell, and learning how to navigate an opaque industry that wants to maintain the status quo.

This past weekend, we hosted The Manuscript Series Retreat, as an experience to try to touch all the pieces. And while most other things in life seem to be moving much faster, writing (as a human) is one of the things that continues to move at a snail’s pace. Meaning, there are no skipping steps.

I wanted to share with you some important themes that came out of the weekend’s workshops, panels, and discussions.

No one is writing for the money.

Can’t tell you how many times this came up with most, if not all, of the writers and publishing pros that joined us. No one picked this career because they thought it was going to be the thing that made them a millionaire. Doesn’t mean that you can’t have commercial success. It only means that there are faster ways to get there and writing is not necessarily at the top of the list.

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Over the holidays, as I sipped wine in a North Hollywood home filled with writers, I was reminded of some of the simplest writing advice ever, by two of my awesome friends Greg Mania and Celia Laskey, “take the book scene by scene.”

Nothing earth shattering here, but the principle is important to remember. We get so inundated with the output, finishing the book, getting the agent, selling the manuscript, but getting there is a much more daunting task than we give it credit for. What we’re trying to train ourselves to do is keep showing up because that is going to be the hardest part.

Life is going to want to get in the way. You’re going to feel uninspired, disenchanted, overwhelmed and still, there will be this part of you that knows that writing is embedded in the DNA of who you are.

I’ve been transparent about my struggles with the next book project. I shopped a book to my publisher since they had the first right of refusal, but they passed. I went out on submission with another novel that was also passed on from a first round, and decided that I wanted to leave my agency. I did a “test” round so to speak of querying with that novel and only received one full request which resulted in a pass. Now, I sit in the middle of a bunch of unfinished manuscripts trying to figure out what’s next? What will I be able to finish to shop for a new agent to subsequently secure a new book deal?

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“It’s not enough to think you can write. A real writer is always studying the works of other writers, learning and growing. Getting published shouldn’t be the primary goal. (If you are good, that will happen.) Becoming a good writer is what really matters. And that takes practice and patience.”

— Audrey Edwards, Children of the Dream: The Psychology of Black Success

By the time you’re reading this you have probably seen one million recaps of the year that have you comparing yourself to other writers. Book deals, workshops, awards, fellowships, appearances at trendy festivals and conferences. I want to let you know that it’s okay if none of that happened for you.

Zora Neale Hurston said it best in Their Eyes Were Watching God that “there are years that ask questions and years that answer.” In this context, sometimes you will be able to announce all the things, but other years will be spent underground, doing the work of becoming a better writer.

If your biggest writing accomplishment this year was that you didn’t quit, bravo! You’ve just surpassed millions of other people who decided that writing was much too hard to pursue. That allowed themselves to be silenced because they didn’t get the agent or win the writing prize. As Edwards mentions in the quote above, practice and patience is a part of this work that simply cannot be ignored.

You may have written a whole manuscript that didn’t get picked up. You may have pitched a fifty-leven outlets a story or essay. Regardless of the outcome, every single time you sit down to massage words into a completed piece, you are becoming a better writer.

So now, we’ve made it to 2026. (Barely, for some of us), but we made it. We have the opportunity to think about what we would like this year to look like for us. Doesn’t mean that we can control the outcomes, but we can control our output. How much we’re writing, how much we’re reading, how many times we’re going to put ourselves out there. And the very best part about this is that you don’t have to do this alone.

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