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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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  • From GPS to Jolene

    From GPS to Jolene
    2026/09/01
    One gave us a better way to navigate the world. The other wrote songs that imagined a bigger one. But Gladys Mae West and Dolly Parton had something else in common: they outsmarted the stereotypes waiting for them.From GPS to JoleneLast week’s death of Dolly Parton and hearing the story of her roots got me thinking about another little Southern woman we lost earlier this year—Dr. Gladys Mae West. Now, Gladys Mae West and Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean are probably two names you wouldn’t expect to hear strung together in a sentence, much less an essay. But stay with me.I’d like to offer you a bit of knowledge about these two super women and who they became because of stereotypes.Dr. Gladys Mae West and Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, both products of rural America, both faced stereotypes as obstacles to their success, and both understood education made a difference. Both changed the world.First, a little bit about Dr. West.Gladys Mae Brown was born in 1930 in rural Dinwiddie County, Virginia. This was Jim Crow Virginia. And America had a picture of a Black girl from the South: ignorant, incapable, intellectually inferior. So, opportunities for a Negro girl were limited. Her options were working in the tobacco fields, growing corn or cotton, or finding a position in the local tobacco-processing factory.Gladys Mae wanted something different. Education or book-learning called to her at an early age. She excelled in school, became valedictorian of her high-school class, and earned a scholarship to Virginia State College, now Virginia State University. There she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1952 and her master’s in mathematics in 1955.Think about those dates. She was fighting for higher education before Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. Segregation ruled the land as she pursued higher degrees in mathematics.In 1956, she was hired as a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was the second Black woman hired there and one of only four Black professional employees at the facility. This was her big break in science. Gladys Mae became a programmer working on computers and sophisticated data satellites. In the 1960s, she helped study the relationship between Pluto and Neptune and worked on satellite ocean-monitoring projects.West used complex algorithms that accounted for gravitational, tidal, and other forces, and programmed an IBM 7030 computer to produce accurate mathematical models that became crucial to satellite geodesy and the precision of GPS.She worked at Dahlgren for 42 years. When she retired, she returned to school and earned a doctorate at Virginia Tech at age 70. This is a stupendous accomplishment for the girl who could have spent her life in a tobacco factory.It becomes extraordinary knowing that every time you pull out your phone and ask for directions or track a package, you’ve touched Dr. Gladys Mae West’s technology.When a plane finds its route, a ship crosses an ocean, an ambulance finds an address, your Uber or Lyft or Instacart finds you, it’s because of the little lady who didn’t let Jim Crow stereotypes stop her.Now that Other little Southern LadyDolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946 in rural Tennessee, one of twelve children.Her family was poor. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, couldn’t read or write. America had a stereotype for her, too: the poor, uneducated Appalachian hillbilly.But Dolly learned to read and write, and when she encountered the town tramp, she wasn’t reviled by this Appalachian woman. She was intrigued by her beauty and red fingernails. As Dr. Gladys Mae pushed away from the stereotypes, Dolly leaned in. She took that stereotype, put it in heels, added rhinestones, teased its hair toward the heavens, made it work for her, and started a music career.At age 10 she began writing songs and performing publicly. At age 13, she performed at the Grand Ole Opry and was introduced by Johnny Cash. She received 3 encores. After high school, she moved to Nashville to pursue music full-time and landed a spot on the Porter Wagner show in 1967. This gave her the opportunity to perform on TV and to continue developing her songwriting talents. We know her for “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5,” and “I Will Always Love You.”“I Will Always Love You,” written as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1974. Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston recorded her famous cover for The Bodyguard in 1992, and it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1992.Whitney Houston’s recording became one of the biggest-selling singles in music history. Dolly, who wrote the song and retained publishing rights, received royalties, some of which she donated to charities and invested in Black Nashville neighborhoods. Dolly is one of the most charitable singers in the world, having given through her foundation, the Imagination Library, money to provide free books ...
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    10 分
  • Euphoria

    Euphoria
    2026/08/25
    The Five-Minute High. Writers, you know that glorious feeling when you finally hit Send? Enjoy it. Because in about five minutes, you’re going to remember everything you should’ve changed.Euphoria: The Joy of Hitting SendThere’s a particular state of euphoria that happens when a writer finally hits Send.If you follow authors on social media—and hopefully you’re following me—you’ve seen us post about this magical, mythical thing called THE END.We celebrate it. We take pictures of it. We announce it to the world.And it is absolutely worth celebrating.But here’s the secret: the end isn’t really the end.It’s not the end until that book is published and out into the world.Still, one of the greatest moments in this entire process is when you attach that finished version of the document to your Trad editor’s email or if your Indie to your developmental or line editor’s email, and hit Send.There is nothing quite like it.Before the EuphoriaLet me back up for those who don’t know my process.I write the book, but I also work with a personal editor—someone who knows my gifts, knows my weaknesses, and, most importantly, knows how to push me.That editor is actually the first person who really sees the book.They see it as pages in the rawest, ugliest version. The version where someone has to say, “Girl, what were you thinking? I cannot get from A to Z with this.”Sometimes it’s not that bad.Sometimes it absolutely is.But that relationship matters. One of my editors has been with me for twenty-nine of my books. Think about that. They know my writing. They know what I’m capable of.That’s part of my process.Your process may look completely different.And that is exactly how it should be. Whatever it is, you work that process and finish.You Have to Get to the EndFor me, I have to hit the end.I need to write the book from beginning to end before I can step back and ask the most important question:What is this book really about?Now, if you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I am a serial outliner, serial timeline maker, serial spreadsheet girly.I do in-depth character analysis. I chart tension arcs. I study character journeys. I build character profiles. I work through scenes. And we haven’t even started talking about the historical research. That is an entirely different bucket.I do all of that work.And yet something organic still happens during the writing.Some arcs I imagined at the beginning become sharper and more important. Others disappear. A theme that seemed small suddenly becomes the heartbeat of the entire book. A character reveals something I didn’t fully understand when I started.That’s why I need to reach the end.Only then can I look backward and ask: What journey did I actually put these characters through? What changed? What survived? What is this story saying?Sometimes the answer is a deeper version of what I thought the book was about.Sometimes it is something completely different.But I cannot fully know until I get to the end.Stop Polishing Those First Three ChaptersWhen I was a young writer, I would polish and polish and polish those first three chapters.Then I would polish them some more.Now?Let’s just call me a pro.I know better.There is more than a fifty-percent chance that the synopsis I write before I start a book is not going to be the synopsis of the book I actually finish.That original synopsis is an educated guess. It is based on facts, research, character work, structure, and everything else I know at that moment.But it is still a guess.By the time I hit the end, I finally know what book I wrote.And then one of my favorite parts of the process begins.Editing.That is when we spit-shine the prose.That is when I deepen the dialogue so the words say what I need them to say while the subtext whispers everything the characters aren’t willing to admit.That is when I paint the house.That is when I put clothes on the characters—and those clothes need to do more than look pretty.Jane Austen understood that. Clothing can tell us about accomplishment, aspiration, money, status, personality, and how someone wants the world to see them. Is this a person of high style? Or did they just roll out of bed?Every detail should carry meaning.But I don’t necessarily know what the meaning should be until I know the whole story.Sprint to the EndSo, to every writer out there struggling to finish the book, my advice is simple:Finish the book.Work in sprints.Write out of order.Write the scenes in your head that are so vivid you can practically see the characters standing in front of you.Get words onto the page.You can stitch them together later.Don’t spend months polishing something when you don’t even know whether it belongs in the final book.Sprint toward the end.Dirty write.Put down the thoughts. Put down the dialogue. Put down enough description to remind yourself what is happening.Literally, anything can be fixed when you have reached the ...
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    14 分
  • Young, Black, and Digitally Lynched

    Young, Black, and Digitally Lynched
    2026/08/18
    I’ve done it.Last week, I told you I was on deadline, and now I am free. That is right—I have finished my 32nd book.I turned it in to my publisher. It will be my next historical fiction, coming in at 105,000 words, and I am so excited.I did something I’ve never done before. Multiple POVs. Caribbean history blended with American history. I have cars and horse-drawn carriages. Letters written and sealed under wax. Candlelight and electric lights.I can’t give you much more detail yet, but it is my brand—a powerful saga, women-centric, with women doing things we need to know about, finding rooms they weren’t supposed to be in and pushing forward questions we all should be asking and answering.So I should be coming out of deadline talking about nothing but joy.But at the same time, one of the most disconcerting things has been happening.There is always nonsense going on in the book sphere, the academic sphere, and the tech sphere—the three worlds I pay a lot of attention to.And this past week, it was academia.There was a young Black professor at Cambridge named Jason Arday. He was not a perfect person. None of us are. But he suddenly became the center of accusations of plagiarism and an enormous public storm.In a matter of days, it became a nightmare in the press.An investigation by NewsCord, which I will link her, counted every substantive and distinct article about Jason Arday from July 24 through August 14, 2026. Their count was:* 249 articles in 22 days* 188 articles in the final nine days—from his August 5 resignation through August 14* That’s an average of 20.9 articles per dayArticle after article. Imagine the tons of social-media impressions fueled by this much press. People attacked him, defending him, picked him apart. 9 days, his final 9 day, 188 articles.That looks like a digital lynching.It must feel like that.And it proves something I’ve talked about: when somebody has a grievance, when somebody needs a scapegoat, why so often a Black neck, a POC neck, or a woman’s neck becomes a doormat to step on.Today, I don’t want to use my words to talk about what happened to Jason Arday.I want you to hear his family’s words.While the rest of the world was debating a professor’s humanity, they watched someone they loved go through this storm.Now they are grieving him.This has been an incredibly painful time for our family, and we are still coming to terms with the tragic loss of our beloved Jason. What has become clear over the past 72 hours is the profound impact he had on people.We are grateful to all who have created light in this dark time through kindness, generosity and solidarity. Your presence here to remember him this evening means a lot to us, and while we cannot be there in person, please know that we stand with you in spirit.The public cruelty Jason was subjected to was too much for any man to bear. The outpouring of love, support and grief since his death means so much to us, although it is bittersweet. Kindness is needed in life, not just in death. We’ll never know what might have been different had he experienced more of it while he was still here.What we do know is how deeply he was loved, and we wish to especially thank those who knew Jason in life and tried to get through to him, who supported him in his darkest hour, and who saw the person in the middle of this awful storm.If you would like to share a message of condolence, memory, or support with Jason Arday’s family, please do so using this contact:TheArdayFamily@gmail.comNo book recs today. I want to publicize a legitimate Go Fund Me for his family.https://gofund.me/ce60c7ec0And if you are struggling with your mental health:In the United States:Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It is available 24 hours a day.In the United Kingdom and Ireland:Call Samaritans at 116 123, free, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.In England:For urgent mental-health help, call NHS 111 and select the mental-health option.If someone’s life is in immediate danger, call emergency services—911 in the United States or 999 in the United Kingdom.If you are worried about somebody, ask about them. Help them connect with professional support.Kindness is needed in life, not just in death.Let’s be better and have a better week.* Support your local bookstores, especially your indies.You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.Hey. Let’s keep building together. I need you. That is the truth. Like, share, subscribe, and stay connected to Write of Passage.Thank you for being here.I want you to come again. This is Vanessa Riley. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vanessariley.substack.com/subscribe
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    9 分
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