Today I'll speak with Susan Wittig Albert, the author of the popular China Bayles Mysteries, the Darling Dahlia Mysteries and many other must-read books spanning the mystery, historical fiction, and nonfiction genres. As well, Susan will tell us all about her own writing process while offering advice to new authors who might be considering writing their own book series.

1:15 - Can you start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about you?

• Well, I’ve been writing full time since the middle 1980s, when I left my left my academic career job. I was down in southwest Texas at the time, and while I was doing that, I was writing some young adult novels.
• I just started out by going down to the bookstore and buying a batch of them and reading and studying them, and then I began writing and that worked out very well.
• It wasn't long before I was able to attract an agent and publisher, and it just grew from there.
• I moved from young adult to adult and started my first series of adult mysteries in 1992.
• It's been a process of growing by addition and then deciding which ones were important to me as the writer. Which ones I could grow the most. I've also done a couple of memoirs, nonfiction, and after about 2010 or so I began wanting to do some standalones and that's where a lot of my attention has gone in the last few years. I've done four. I'm in the process of writing the fourth.

3:10 - So did you always have ambitions to become an author, or did you sort of stumble into it?

• No, no, I always wanted to. When I was a child, I wrote my first novel when I was 9. I took some typing paper and folded it over and wrote my little novel. And it was always something I wanted to do.
• I kind of got sidetracked by going to the university, getting a PhD and doing an academic thing, but the writing was always there. Fiction was always there at the back of my mind. That's what I wanted to do.

3:45 - Now, you write what we call "cozy mysteries" and how did you land in that genre?

• Well for me, cozy is kind of a misnomer because one of my series that began as a cozy series is actually pretty hard edged. The character is an ex-lawyer, and she has a strong take on what is justice and what isn't. And while I use some of the tropes from cozy fiction, that very first novel in that series has the ‘F’ word frequently.
• The later series I do, a historical mystery series that is set in the 1930s in the South is a little cozier. These are mysteries for women primarily, although I do have quite a few male readers.

5:10 – What stage of writing or crafting a novel do you enjoy the most?

• Well, I'm a research person. I really love doing the research. It's always been my theory that I write what I want to learn. If I already know it, I'm less interested in writing about it.
• I wrote a book called The General’s Women, which was about Dwight Eisenhower and the love of his life during the Second World War. That took a lot of digging into World War II history. So, learning about the context of what I'm writing about, that’s the most fun for me.
• And on the back end, I love to edit. I really enjoy going back through drafted material and editing.

6:30 - Is that difficult to edit your own work?

• No, because I'm very critical. I'm critical of myself and I love a good sentence.
• I write for readers. I once was on a panel of males and the question came up, “do you write for your readers, or do you write for yourself?” And all those guys, they wrote for themselves, and I found myself saying I write to be read. I love it when readers read the books and tell me what they like and what they don't like. So, writing for readers is, I think, a different kind of thing, rather than just writing to please myself.
• I do think that women writers are more likely to make efforts even beyond the writing itself, to connect with their readers. They are out there in the marketing world and on social media, you know, connecting with readers. And I think that influences our writing.

8:20 - A lot of authors have a great idea for a book, but they sit down to start writing and they get stuck. Do you have a specific method you use to avoid that?

• It really isn't an issue for me. Everybody's got their own way of doing it. I think most of us don't sit down and say, oh I'm going to write this great series.
• The marketplace for publishing fiction is really a series-oriented marketplace, and that's been the case ever since Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
• If you want to stay in the in the writing business, it's important to conceive of an idea that's big enough and has enough richness, to develop a number of ideas out of it.
• I was really interested at an early point in the British children's book illustrator Beatrix Potter. She wrote Peter Rabbit, and I became interested in her life. And I wrote a series of 8 mysteries that covered 8 years of her life. So sometimes you can look into or choose a time period or a character that has a defined experience.
• That sure didn't happen with China Bayles. Whether that was going to go beyond three books, who knew? It was an open question until the publisher that I was working with at the time decided that series had enough sales potential to keep on going.
• When I sit down to write a new book or a new entry in a current series, what I really love is when I can develop more than one plot strand and then the book doesn't get stuck because one or the other or even a third plot is going to carry it forward until the plot gets unstuck. It’s tricky but it keeps the book going and the reader engaged.

12:08 - When you sit down to write a book, do you already have the ending in mind, or do you just write as long as the ideas are flowing?

• My theory with mysteries is that if I know the ending when I begin the book, it's probably not going to be a mystery to the reader by the time I get here. So, I really love when there are three or four possible endings, and the final ending develops organically, and it surprises me.
• I usually try to imagine about half of the book before I start writing, and when I get to the end of the half first half, I stop and go back and start over again with what I've drafted.
• But I don't start really working towards the end until I'm about 3/4 done. And it somehow magically ends up about 87,000 words. Always kind of a miracle to me.

14:05 - Writing a book can feel like a very daunting, long process. You've obviously figured this out because you've written so many books and series. Do you have anything that you've brought into your process? To achieve that efficiency and consistency?

• Well, I'm lucky enough to write every day. Not all of us have that kind of situation. When my husband and I decided that the writing life was a lie for us, we paired things down and we moved out to the country. But it's also important to remember that you don't have to write a book every day.
• I really loved what E.L. Doctorow said, “writing is like driving at night in the fog,” and it really is. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you make the whole trip that way. And that's sort of what it is to write every day.
• Also, writing series is wonderfully efficient. Because you already know the main character. It's a matter of building on what's already there. You don't have to invent it.
• Every time I start one of my standalones, I realize how important that is because it really does save a lot of wear and tear on the imagination.

17:00 - Looking back, what advice would you give to yourself if you could go back to when you were just starting your first book?

• I wouldn't want to do that because there was no Internet at that time and so connections with readers had to be face to face. So back in the day, we went to bookstores and libraries. That's the only way we could interface with readers.
• If I were starting up now, I would say to myself, “connect with readers,” “get your website up,” and “make yourself an expert on some aspect of your work.”
• These days a blog is kind of a basic thing that every writer needs to have. Start a blog, blog often, and get that blog out on social media. And give stuff away. By that I mean give your writing away.
• And course, you know there are the indie bookstores and the libraries and other authors as well. Connecting with them is important. One of the first things I did was join Sisters in Crime, which was a wonderful organization.

19:38 - I know that one thing you are passionate about is uplifting female authors and their work, and you created the Story Circle Network, which is an organization that empowers women writers to tell their stories. So, can you speak to that network and the impact that a community like this can have on a writer?

• Well, writing can be a lonely business, especially for people who are just starting out. And often women don't have confidence in their stories. They feel they have a story to tell, but they're not sure that anybody cares to listen. So being a part of an organization that gives you a friendly ear and a shoulder to cry on if you need to a support network can really help.
• And if you decide that your writing needs to turn into a book and that you want to get your story out there where people can read it, the book business can be enormously confusing, especially these days when there are so many different paths to publishing.
• So, it's important to find a group that has the information you need, and also within a writing group as an individual writer is awfully easy to get discouraged, and other writers can help. It really can be really helpful to have somebody along for the journey that can give you a hand. And women are networkers.

21:55 - Can you tell us a bit on what you've been working on lately and how our listeners can keep up with you?

• Well, a few years ago I began working on a series. In fact, I didn't think of it as a series at the time I began working on a project involving the writer Rose Wilder Lane. Her mother wrote the little house books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but behind the scenes, Rose really wrote those books. And so, I wrote about that and the next person I got interested in was Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. I was beginning to think about writing about hidden women. Women who stood in the shadow of another person
• Now I'm working on a project involving Georgia O'Keeffe and her friend Maria Chabot.
• So, for me it's a really exciting research project that will turn into a novel, probably in another year and a half.
• People can find out about my work by looking for my website, www.susanalbert.com and there's a link on there to subscribe to the blog and to subscribe to an Email newsletter than I do every month.
• I’m so happy to see stories coming forward of women who have been standing in those shadows. It’s a wonderful time for women's stories.

24:45 - Well, as a successful writer with many bestselling novels, what parting advice might you have for our listeners who are just getting started on their journey as an author?

• Well, you’re going to get a lot of days that you’re really discouraged days, so find ways to take care of yourself. Pamper yourself. Don't give in to that discouragement.
• And for me, that means setting little goals every day that I know I can manage.
• I think it's really good idea to start learning where the book business is right now. And especially where the book marketing business is right now. If you want to publish it, but if you just want to write a book for yourself and your family, that's wonderful.
• But if you want to write for a wide range of readers, if you want to write more than one book or want to start a series. Start learning about the book business. There's never a better time to start than right now.

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About Susan

An Illinois native, Susan grew up on a small farm near Danville, where she loved walking through the fields, bicycling and–of course–reading. She read the Little House books so often that she practically memorized them, and was a devoted fan of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. So it’s no great surprise that she began her writing career when she was still in her teens, selling short stories for young readers to magazines like Calling All Girls, Jack and Jill, and American Girl.

But that writing career had to wait almost three decades. Marriage, kids (two boys and a girl), college and graduate school, and appointments as an English professor and university administrator intervened. It wasn’t until midlife that Susan decided that it was high time to do what she loved most. She left the university, returned to writing, and never looked back. A prolific writer who is always exploring and experimenting with form and style, she is the author or co-author of over 100 mysteries, historical and biographical fiction, memoir, and nonfiction.

Read more about Susan and her work here: https://susanalbert.com/about-...