『Write of Passage by Vanessa Riley』のカバーアート

Write of Passage by Vanessa Riley

Write of Passage by Vanessa Riley

著者： Vanessa Riley
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Join bestselling author Vanessa Riley as she delves into untold histories, reflects on current events through a historical lens, shares behind-the-scenes writing insights, and offers exclusive updates on her groundbreaking novels.

vanessariley.substack.comVanessa Riley 社会科学
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  • A Writing Life You Can Actually Live

    A Writing Life You Can Actually Live
    2026/10/13
    I believe in writing every day. Sometimes that means a hundred words. Sometimes 2500. Did you hear me say good or great words? No, I didn’t say that. Today, let’s talk about the actual writing life we should achieve.A Writing Life You Can Actually LiveThree proposals, a Vermont retreat, and figuring out the writer I want to become.Before I get started, this week’s download, the writing goals calculator, is available in my resource shop for free. Get the link at Substack or my website. I just turned in three book proposals. One new idea. Two reimagined, tires kicked, engines inspected.And absolutely no pages of an actual story.I need my agents buy-in and I don’t know those people yet. We’re still being introduced. I’ve just stocked piled articles in Newspapers.com, Wikipedia and YouTube Rabbit holes, and the occasional ancient tome on my shelves.But in Vermont—the writers who shared that retreat with me—gave me space to think about what I want my writing life to look like over the next three years. The answer kept coming back to multigenerational stories that tie our present to a vibrant, often hidden past. I want to focus on sisterhoods carrying love, ambition, secrets, and unfinished business across time.Apparently, even after all these 31 books, I’m still asking: Who do I want to be when my writing life grows up?Truthfully, that’s a question that all of us need to ask and keep asking. Heck, it’s the secret to staying young.Everyone’s trying to figure themselves out. Writers do it on the page and in front of an audience.As we figure ourselves out, we ask:What do we want to do?Whom do we want to become?All while balancing the real world: Those other occupations that pay bills. And what about our relationships? Do we have them? Are we keeping them: Family, friendships, peers, romantic and platonic coexistence—all of this makes up our complicated and gloriously messy thing called our lives.Did I mention the money? Most of us need it—unless we’re nepo babies, but sometimes that gift doesn’t work out. We all do need the money.But I digress.I’m not a writer who can sit still. You may have figured that out already. Yet every time I commit to a book idea, I need it to do more than sound interesting. It has to stir something inside me. It has to give me a reason to say: Yes. These are the people, the questions, the history I want to spend the next year or two researching, writing, revising, promoting, and talking about.A proposal can be a few pages. The commitment behind it is considerably larger.As authors, we spend a lot of time worrying about our brands. Some of us are still trying to figure out what that word means when applied to a human being who occasionally writes in pajamas and tiaras.My slightly Type A personality has helped me think about the direction of my work from the beginning. I knew I wanted to tell historical stories. My first avenue was Christian fiction. Then came Regency romances. My work expanded into historical fiction that brings the Caribbean diaspora into view—a history my very Southern American education too often skipped or downplayed. Or obliterated—thanks to United Daughters of Confederacy.What I like to write or read changes as my curiosity grows. Each book has helped me see more clearly what I want to explore in the next.Vermont gave me time to listen to that curiosity without immediately demanding a word count from it.Which brings me to this week’s lesson: Get comfortable in your own writing skin.It’s tempting to want to be the writer who sits down and produces a 80,000-word book in three or four weeks. Sounds enviable, but often we miss the preparation that it took to get there. Some writers I know who work at the speed of light have already spent months deeply studying their subject, developing their characters, and figuring out the story—before sitting and writing.We as voyeurs see the words arriving. We miss the months of work that made it possible.My friends call me a fast writer. We’ll sort of. I can produce a lot of words when I’m sufficiently caffeinated, the research is done, the characters are clear, and I know where the story needs to go.There have also been times when my Type A personality took the wheel and I checked myself into a hotel with room service to crank out ten or twenty thousand words in a day.That habit can get expensive in more ways than hotel bills.Sleep deprivation. Health. Family time. Isolation. Everything leaning out of alignment with that elusive word: balance.Even if I can do this pace, I must consider what it costs me.This week’s writing tool is the word-count chart. Download it. Keep it displayed. It shows how steady effort adds up and gives you a realistic sense of how long a draft might take at your current, realistic pace.A hundred words a day.A thousand words a week. Whatever fits the life you actually have—these numbers help you make a commitment and understand how long it will take ...
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    14 分
  • Finding the Idea You Have to Write

    Finding the Idea You Have to Write
    2026/10/06
    For me, the most hectic—and refreshing—moment is when one book is finished and turned in. My mind doesn’t like to be idle, so I find things to do. I read. I explore. I bake. And eventually, I reach that moment when my brain says, “The heck with this. Let’s write. The question becomes, what do I write.”This week’s tool: Idea Assessment: Finding the Idea You Have to WriteGetting started is one of the hardest things a writer has to do.Where do you begin when you want to write the next great American novel? My first piece of advice is simple: take your expectations down.That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream big. Dream as big as you want. But no great novel can come from you if you aren’t committed to writing the novel in the first place.Writing is one of those endeavors where best intentions, wishes, and all the things you would’ve, should’ve, could’ve written don’t count for much. At some point, you have to show up and put words on paper. That’s how you win the game—or, more accurately, how you put yourself in the game.Before there are chapters, however, there is an idea.And an idea doesn’t have to arrive fully formed.Where Story Ideas Come FromFor me, book ideas tend to come in three ways: a person, a circumstance, or a fascination that won’t let me go.Because I write historical fiction, I may happen upon an unusual fact or discover a person in history who immediately piques my interest. Something about that person catches hold of me, and I need to know more.That happened with Queen of Exiles. While researching and writing Sister Mother Warrior, I encountered the story of Marie-Louise Coidavid Christophe, wife of Henri Christophe. Christophe rose as a soldier in the Haitian Revolution to the liberator Dessalines’s right hand man and then became the king of Haiti, which made Marie-Louise its queen. But what fascinated me was how this simple hotelier’s daughter grew to handle herself on the world stage through building a kingdom in Haiti, then in exile arriving to Europe.I wanted to know her.Who was this woman? What happened to her? What did she experience? How did someone live through such extraordinary transformations?That curiosity became a story.Sometimes, though, it isn’t a person. It’s a circumstance.My Lady Worthing Mysteries grew partly from my fascination with the complicated political and social world surrounding abolition, race, class, and freedom in Regency England. But another piece came from something much more personal: watching Murder, She Wrote with my mother. Those seemingly unrelated things could live together in my imagination—an amateur sleuth stumbling across murders and a historical world filled with political intrigue—catnip.Thus a circumstance became a playground for story.And sometimes an idea begins with nothing more complicated than something you can’t stop thinking about.A question. An image. An experience. Something strange you read. Something that happened to you. Something you wish had happened. Something that makes you angry, delighted, curious, or confused.Pay attention to the thoughts that keep coming back.They may be trying to tell you something.The StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment: Start With the BubbleThis is why I created the StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment process. That’s a lot of fancy words for the way. Vanessa’s brain works and how she teaches story craft.As an engineer, I love spreadsheets and forms. But I love love, magical forms that help build to something. So I built a bubble form where I throw ideas into them, play with those ideas, question them, and gradually refine them until I find the story I know I have to tell.At the beginning, I don’t want perfection. I want possibility.The Idea Bubble is deliberately simple. Give yourself ten minutes and fill the bubbles. One way to get moving is to use a basic story pattern:Subject + Verb + Object + ConflictA girl wants to become an astronaut, but she’s afraid of heights.Is that your novel? Maybe. Maybe not.That’s not the point.The point is that you’ve made something where nothing existed before.Fill another bubble. And another.Don’t edit yourself, not yet. Don’t decide whether an idea is literary enough, commercial enough, original enough, or important enough. Generate first. Assessment comes later.Then take the ideas that create a spark and begin asking questions.What is the situation or circumstance?What fascinates me about it?What question keeps returning?What connection do I have to this idea—something I’ve lived, witnessed, inherited, studied, or wondered about?Now we’re moving from having an idea to discovering whether there might be a story inside it.Give Yourself Permission to Want What You WantThe next question is one writers sometimes don’t want to answer:Why do I want to write this?Maybe you’ve never heard of this subject before and you’re fascinated.Maybe you want to explore something you don’t understand.Maybe there’s ...
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    19 分
  • Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?

    Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?
    2026/09/29
    Three names: Crystal Mason. E.L.A. Chanel Miller.Their stories are different, but each bore the brunt of injustice while others—the folks society deemed worthy of protecting—well, their futures were too promising to ruin. So they were given grace.Until the outcry became too loud to ignore.How loud can you scream?Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?The last seven days have had my mind spinning.On September 24, Crystal Mason was finally able to breathe.You see, in 2018, Mason was convicted of illegal voting in Texas and sentenced to five years in prison after she cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election. At the time, she was still on federal supervised release for an earlier tax-fraud conviction, and she did not know being on supervised release made her ineligible to vote.Her provisional ballot was never counted, but the law came for her anyway.Think about that for a moment. A ballot that never counted. A woman who said she did not know she was ineligible. Well, that situation gave her a five-year prison sentence.After years of appeals, in March 2024, the Texas Second Court of Appeals reversed Mason’s conviction and entered a judgment of acquittal. The court found the evidence insufficient to prove that she actually knew she was ineligible to vote.But prosecutors didn’t want to take the L. They continued to try to revive the conviction.But in the last seven days, on September 24, 2026, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the state’s highest criminal court—rejected these efforts and left Mason’s acquittal in place.Eight years after her conviction for casting a ballot, she’s finally free of the charges. I guess justice delayed is better than denied, right?Then on September 25, another court confronted the disturbing use of government power. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher found the federal government in contempt after immigration authorities deported a young asylum seeker identified as E.L.A. to El Salvador despite court orders to protect him here.E.L.A., the young minor identified in the papers, had come to the United States as an unaccompanied minor at sixteen. The government wrongly deported him, acknowledged the error and facilitated his return to the United States. Then it deported him again.Judge Gallagher has now ordered the government to facilitate his return. One wonders what will happen, to a teen imigrant who came here seeking a better life.So, you’re asking yourself, Vanessa, what do these two events mean?At first glance, perhaps nothing more than two court rulings happening within twenty-four hours of each other.But I can’t unsee who gets swept into the mashing jaws of American justice—and gets grace.Crystal Mason is a Black woman who casts a provisional ballot and was given a 5-year sentence.E.L.A. is an immigrant: a young Salvadoran asylum seeker who came to this country for asylum, and despite court orders, was deported. Twice.The woman—the Black woman, and the immigrant get the harshest penalties.Which brings me to Cornell.On September 28, a criminal investigation was reopened into allegations involving a former Cornell University student and members of Cornell’s student Greek fraternity, Chi Phi.Jane Doe has been trying to get justice since October 2024, because no one wanted to purse her case beyond school discipline.In a civil lawsuit filed this month, Doe alleges that she’d been drinking, went to the Chi Phi fraternity house, was pressured to take what she was told was ketamine, became increasingly impaired, and was sexually assaulted by multiple men over a period of hours.These are allegations. The men have not been convicted of these alleged assaults, and the reopened criminal investigation will have to determine what the evidence establishes.One particularly disturbing part of the complaint involves an alleged Snapchat group conversation among fraternity members. According to the lawsuit, messages alerted fraternity members that a woman was upstairs and available for sex. Doe alleges that additional men subsequently entered the room and that assaults continued for hours.She reported the incident to Cornell University Police. Cornell conducted its own disciplinary investigation. The university says the resulting sanctions included suspensions and expulsions, and Cornell permanently removed the Chi Phi chapter from campus.But criminal charges did not follow.Then, on September 14, 2026, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell, Chi Phi, seven former fraternity members and others, alleging negligence, sexual assault, sexual battery, breach of contract and other violations of New York law.So today, two weeks later, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced that he was reopening the criminal investigation and present evidence to a grand jury.And I couldn’t help thinking: Haven’t we been here before?White young man or men, sexual assault, no punishment. Yes, we have, with the case of Chanel Miller.In 2015, ...
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    20 分
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