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Write of Passage by Vanessa Riley

Write of Passage by Vanessa Riley

De : 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 Sciences sociales
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  • Your Lying Manuscript

    Your Lying Manuscript
    Oct 20 2026
    Walter Mosley said it a month ago on a Zoom for The Center for Black Literature’sSummer Series. And in his MasterClass. I say it all the time. To get your novel finished, you need to have your butt in a chair and write every day. Whom are you going to believe—us or your lying unfinished manuscript?Putting Yourself and Your Words FirstWhen you’ve written a lot of books, people want to know how you do it. They ask about plotting techniques. Are you a pantser? A planster? Do you bounce between scenes or write straight through? What craft books do you recommend? Are you a morning writer or an evening writer?All valid questions. I enjoy talking about the work.But the advice I give that seems to generate the most consternation is this: write every day.“Now, Vanessa. When you say every day, do you mean every day? Don’t you take Sundays off? Don’t you go on vacation? What about Christmas? Surely you take off for Christmas.”Some of you are already looking at your work calendars, making me your HR rep trying to get me to approve your days off.Here’s what I mean by writing every day: take those words as literally as you need to take them to establish, in your own mind and spirit, that your writing matters.You need to believe that writing deserves a respected place in your routine.Your words don’t always have to wait until another month of research. Until you read another craft book. It doesn’t need to wait for a new, different notebook. You shouldn’t have to wait for a weekend when nobody needs anything from you.If you’ve allowed your writing life to build up excuses, forgive yourself. Begin anew. But let’s begin with vigor and consistency.But Write Every Day?Yes, there are days when—clutch the pearls—I don’t work on a manuscript. But I’ve written something, probably an essay for a podcast. Hint, hint. Or a little reflection for social media. Or something in my journal.Does that finish my novel?No. And I have to be honest with myself about that. A beautifully written caption will not resolve the emotional conflict or lack of tension I left my characters in three chapters ago.But every bit of writing keeps my writing muscles taut. Stringing coherent words together are like calisthenics. Arranging sentences are yogo. Any attempt at trying to get what’s in my head onto a page is a useful one. For me, daily writing makes returning to the manuscript easier.I’m telling you that writing is a muscle. And I want mine limber and strong, ready to work when I need it.Have you ever joined a gym or bought exercise equipment?In the beginning, there’s so much excitement. You have plans. You have goals. You have sneakers.Naturally, the sneakers need to be cute.Maybe you buy athletic wear. A matching set. Something that announces you are a person who intends to take this exercise business seriously.Then you do the workout.And the next morning, your legs have questions. Parts of your body angrily ask what are you doing.Eventually, the excitement of buying the equipment and icy heat lotion wear off, and you have to decide whether you’re going to keep at this.Writing asks that question, too.You bought the notebook. You downloaded the software. You found the perfect pen, the best journal. But, will you return to the work when the first burst of excitement wears off? How about when a scene is difficult? What about when you see words on a page and none of it comes out bearing any resemblance to the beautiful ones you imagined?That’s where I believe many stop, when they need their muscles to push through.This past week, I was at the Writing Sisters Summit, hosted by Nina Foxx, in Taos, New Mexico.The air was fresh. The mountains were magnificent. The dirt roads were scary.I want to be clear: I appreciated the scenery. I have lingering questions about the roads.But the sisterhood at the treat was amazing.Wanda Morris, Pamela Samuels Young, Sheila Williams, and I joined the faculty, bringing our experiences to a vibrant group of women writing across genres and at different stages of their careers. Some were working toward their first books. Others had been at this for years.We had time to talk about the writing and industry challenges. To ask questions and stay for the answers. To hear someone describe a struggle and recognize a little of our own.And yes, I got up early. I know. Another revelation.I walked the trails outside, feeling the crisp morning air on my cheeks. There was a slight breeze that smelled of sage. I took pictures, lots of pictures. I want to remember and treasure this experience.Then I switched from my camera to my Notes app and dictated thoughts about the project I’m working on.A phrase. A possibility. Something I was beginning to understand about the next new book.That counts, boys and girls.Was it the most productive writing session of my life? Word count-wise, no.But I was able to work out and articulate the premise of my next book. Something I’d been reaching for ...
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    17 min
  • A Writing Life You Can Actually Live

    A Writing Life You Can Actually Live
    Oct 13 2026
    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 min
  • Finding the Idea You Have to Write

    Finding the Idea You Have to Write
    Oct 6 2026
    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 min
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