Category: Book Review

How to Write a Book

Not everyone shares the love of goal planning like my sister and I do. Is there a better way to wake up than having coffee on the front porch and discussing a to-do list? We don’t think so.

Daniel Pink explains in If you want 2026 to be the best year of your life, please watch (this video) his way of thinking about work, sitting down to do the work, and reflecting on the work. I saved the Monday/Friday screenshot to my desktop and like being reminded of his methods.

The act of writing about your week before it begins establishes a narrowed focus that allows the mind to start with the important work. Reflecting on what you hoped to accomplish on Friday allows you to express gratitude for taking the time to do the work and to prompt a positive kick-off for the next week. These methods were how I started each day of my sabbatical: sitting down to begin the work of writing.

Curated by Piergabriele Mancuso, Alice S. Legé, and Sefy Hendler, the exhibit at the Pitti Palace in the fall of 2023, titled The Jews, the Medici and the ghetto of Florence, was quite a find after trying to piece together information about the plan for the demolished Ghetto of Florence, Italy. The ghetto plans and sections provide a comprehensive understanding of the ghetto entrances, the location of the two synagogues, and the stairways leading to the various upper floors. The videos, with English subtitles, make the disappearance of the Ghetto’s foundations come to mind for those visiting the Piazza della Repubblica today who want to recall the Jewish influence in the center of Florence one hundred and sixty years ago.

Find out more about The Medici Archive Project here.

Through a friend of a friend and across the world, I met Oronzo in the Piazza Santo Spirito for coffee. The next day, he met me at the Architecture Library of the University of Florence (Biblioteca di Architettura – Università degli Studi di Firenze) to initiate access to their collection. After helping me find the books I needed, he let me stay in the study room to research. His kindness was an incredible gift.
Working on the long novel project has built a community of unexpected relationships.

Life kept giving Lilli pinholes to see the world beyond the ghetto. As a girl, racing around the fountain and jumping over cracks encompassed her whole fun world. When she began working at the Sarti, her father’s tailoring shop, she understood that the fabric came from Egypt, Great Britain, and Paris, but those places felt like dreams. Lilli believed in the places, but they weren’t real for her. Now she’d met a man from a place far away, from Venice. Vincenzo told her about sidewalks of water, a Basilica made of gold, and his childhood move to Florence. They’d been running past one another for years before her father’s friend introduced them.

More from THE ARCONE to come soon. Hear my pitch next week.

Characters take on their own personalities as you write, and they make decisions for you. My sister-in-law gave me the book Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, which has been a great resource on human emotions. Many writers use The Emotion Thesaurus, a writer’s guide to character expression. If you develop the characters before you begin writing their story, give them purpose and desire, false beliefs, or, in the case of one of my characters, a reason to exact revenge, then the reader is engaged.

Vincenzo, a budding architect in THE ARCONE, lost his mother and father in his youth. He believed that to be great, you had to have the strength of family behind you. So, to be a great architect, he had to have a family. That’s why he fell quickly and fully for Lilli Russo. Vincenzo wanted her, her family, and her Jewish community in the Florentine Ghetto to be his. If family equals success, he’d be a great architect.

Stay tuned to hear about Vincenzo’s wife, Lilli, next week.

Beyond the Morgantown Writers Group, I have found great writing partners through conferences. Exchanging work with a friend I met at the WVU Writers’ Workshop led me to draw the inside cover of his upcoming book. (More on that to come!) The WVU Writers’ Workshop is in July this summer. Register here. I pitched my work to literary agents through the Midwest Writers Workshop fall Agent Fest. Upcoming MWW events are here. If you’ve attended the Historical Novel Society conference I’d love to know. I plan to attend the June 2027 conference in Pittsburgh, PA. In Beverly, MA, the History Through Fiction group will kick off its inaugural conference in a month. I wish I could attend it.
Conferences give you the time to focus on your craft and meet others doing the same. I encourage you to look into one and find a writing circle.

Two Podcasts and three Books continue to have the most significant impact on my writing.

Fiction Writing Made Easy by Savannah Gilbo
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing by CeCe L., Bianca M, Carly W.
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
The Last 50 Pages by James Scott Bell
Plot Perfect by Paula Munier

Savannah Gilbo’s podcast, webinars, and free resources have incredible tips and organizing strategies. TSNOTYAW gives you an inside look at how literary agents find stories. I listen to 90% of the episodes, and in the case of Savannah Gilbo’s short-and-sweet sessions, I have listened to them again and again as I go through different phases of a manuscript.
Prose’s book, Reading Like a Writer, is a book I’ve never stopped reading. Once I finish it, I begin it again. I can put it down and pick it up anytime, anywhere, no matter if I’m in the middle of her chapters about paragraphs or a chapter about sentences. Every word in her book is a gem.
The last two books by Bell and Munier have guided me to start and to finish my book with the best advice.

Start with a problem

Throw in an oddly acting character

Squeeze the character in a difficult place

Layout the plot

Chop through the scenes

Read

Write

Edit on repeat

Find the right-sized critique partner

Bake

Critique partners establish accountability, and a student who wants to develop a novel from the stories he told his cousins as a child is the perfect accountability partner. Last year, we met weekly for two semesters to go chapter by chapter through Paula Munier’s Plot Perfect: How to Build Unforgettable Stories Scene by Scene, and strengthened our manuscripts. I wrote THE ARCONE and learned how to write a book. To plot out a second book, I started with Munier’s PLOT PERFECT, and found the magic of making something better the second time around. 

Beta Readers of THE ARCONE have been people who like historical fiction, who seek out 19th-century Florence literature, and architecture lovers. Some are friends, some are writers who have become friends. The earliest reviewers read the manuscript with its plot holes and unbalanced story arcs. (But, they read the book to the end! Thank you!) Their comments enhanced my characters, making Vincenzo and Lilli come to life on the page and feel more like people I’d want to get to know. Without their encouragement, finishing the project would have been difficult.
How can you find the person who might choose your book off the library shelf? I explored Scribophile and considered The Spun Yarn. Finding the right reader is challenging. Oftentimes, I’ve exchanged reading and reviewing my work with other writers in the editing stages, too. Writers come to the table engaged, ready to hear how someone else has interpreted the work.
Close friends and family have been the most supportive readers—they know they can be honest. They came to my work with the best of intentions. I so appreciate their time, given how many other great published books there are to read.

THE ARCONE is the first novel I’ve written, and using QueryTracker to find literary agents open to historical fiction submissions has been a positive experience overall. I researched and submitted query letters to sixty agents, and only one asked for my manuscript. (It was then declined.) So, either my manuscript needs work, or I’m trying to drive a hole-in-one in the dark. Maybe it’s a little of both. However, I found the QueryTracker website critical to finding the right agents and organizing the submission process. Agents are found by genre, the firm they work for, and whether they are open for submissions. Emails, websites, and preferred submission style information are all included. I told myself I’d submit to at least forty agents, and then consider a hybrid or self-publishing alternative to traditional publishing. After attending conferences and meeting publishing professionals who gave me a glimpse of their world, I think I’ll just be patient. I can write another book while I wait and continue perfecting a craft.