Sarahlyn Bruck

Sarahlyn Bruck writes contemporary, book club fiction and is the award-winning author of three novels: Light of the Fire (2024), Daytime Drama (2021), and Designer You (2018). When she’s not writing, Bruck moonlights as a full-time writing and literature professor at a local community college. She’s also a co-host of the pop culture podcast, Pretty Much Pop. From Northern California, Bruck now lives in Philadelphia with her family.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I love this question because I do sweat the title. It takes awhile for me to find the right fit. First off, I like a title that hints at a meaning or theme of my book, and I think Light of the Fire does that.

But this was not my original title. The original title was Offside, which is a soccer reference. It does very little to indicate what the book is really about—two estranged high school besties and former soccer teammates, who are forced to face a twenty-year-old accident that was blamed on someone else. It is something they’ve kept secret for all these years and that subsequently destroyed their friendship. Now, when circumstances bring the two together again, they must decide to what extent they’ll go to keep their secret hidden or face the consequences of finally coming clean. It’s a story about the power of friendship, forgiveness, and healing from past mistakes.

My editor at Lake Union suggested we change the title and came up with Light of the Fire, which hints at the women’s rekindled friendship, the fear they each have as they muster the courage to live outside of their comfort zones, as well as the secret they’ve kept hidden all this time. Are they willing to finally face the consequences of their twenty-year mistake?

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage reader self might not be too surprised—though the focus is truly on the friendship between Beth and Ally who are the two main characters, to a certain extent the book takes place in the soccer world. I played soccer all through high school and think it’s not exactly a shocker that I chose to incorporate this piece of my life into one of my books. It’s definitely a personal slice of my past that made it into this story.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Definitely beginnings. Early in the writing process, I like knowing how the book will end because endings are what I write toward. Sometimes those endings change or shift around a bit. But even if I need to make a pivot at the end, it’s as an organic result of the story leading up to it.

Beginnings are different. A beginning that felt right for me when I started might not work once I get to the editing stage. Or once I send the draft to my beta readers or my editor. So for me, my beginnings can take many, many tries to get right. It’s important that a story start in the right place. I want my readers to be drawn in.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Sure, I think there’s a little bit of me in each of my characters. But, one of the best parts of creative writing for me is immersing myself in characters who are very different from me. I love finding connections with my characters–they end up feeling like real people to me–and I think those connections come from relatability. And that’s kind of the beauty of it, right? We can relate, we can empathize with people who experience the world differently.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m inspired by movies and television for sure–I love all forms of storytelling. But I’m also inspired by conversations I overhear at a restaurant or by people I see on the subway. I live in Philadelphia, so just being out and about can influence whatever it is I might be working on at the moment.

Visit Sarahlyn Bruck's website.

My Book, The Movie: Light of the Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Sammartino

Alexander Sammartino lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University.

His new novel is Last Acts.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A good amount, I think. It establishes a mood, a feeling.

What's in a name?

Oh, so much. Theories about naming—like Kripke’s idea that the meaning of a name is identical to its referent, or Frege’s notion that there’s some abstract sense a name also refers to—have long fascinated me. When writing, I try to take each opportunity for a name as its own situation. Sometimes I might choose a name to create a sense of geographic or historical realism, and, other times, I might choose something that sounds poetic or funny to call extra attention to that character or that location. The names all depend on how they fit into what’s happening in the story, the context.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings, definitely. For me, that’s where all of the pressure is. If the beginning does not work, there will be no ending, because a good ending comes naturally if the beginning has been logically pursued. The beginning is overwhelming because the logic does not exist yet. You have to start, somehow, even when there are so many possibilities. I’ll constantly change an opening, constantly revise an opening. I also know for me, as a reader, I can forgive a bad ending, but a bad beginning? I’ll drop a book if I’m not intrigued by the first paragraph.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I do, I do, and I wish there was less. I feel like a narcissist sometimes, but what can you do? I know there are people who say you have little control over the story you tell, over what you’re obsessed with, and the emotions of my characters, many of which I experience, are something I want to examine. Robert Bresson said his films were driven by what he wanted his viewers to feel. If I think my own particular emotional experience might seem worth analyzing, it can be the inspiration around which to construct a scene.

Visit Alexander Sammartino's website.

The Page 69 Test: Last Acts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lea Carpenter

Lea Carpenter is the author of the novels Eleven Days (2013), Red, White, Blue (2018), and Ilium (2024).

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was valedictorian. Carpenter has written the screenplay for Mile 22, a film about CIA’s Special Activities Division, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg and John Malkovich.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Probably not enough, if I am honest. The story of the novel all started when I saw a series, or “cycle,” of paintings by Cy Twombly, one of my favorite artists, called Fifty Days at Iliam. Iliam, for Twombly, was with an “a” not a “u,” which makes it foreign, yet uncanny. The paintings are Twombly’s take on the Trojan War, which is a war that has hung around, or over, so much of what I have written, beginning with Eleven Days, my first novel. That title referred to the eleven-day period at the end of the Trojan war when Achilles agrees to stand down his army to allow Priam to properly bury his son, Hector, who was killed by Achilles to avenge the death of Achilles’s best friend, Patroclus. Cycles of violence: the idea that all conflicts are at risk of becoming “forever” (the word Dexter Filkins brilliantly affixed to the terror wars) is at the center of a lot of what I write and is certainly at the center of Ilium. Hopefully by the end of the novel, which I close with a quote from Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, the reader will like the reference in the title. I have never been very good at titles though. It is hard to top the best ones. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Or The Thin Red Line. Everything I have ever titled is an attempt to get closer to that kind of feeling.

What's in a name?

A lot can be in a name, I think. If we are talking about titles think about Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Everything is there about, in that case, what Didion was trying to say about the sixties. If we are talking about character names, I just wrote a novel where my narrator/heroine does not have a name. Names are hard. Aaron Sorkin, I have heard, gives his characters names of NFL players in early drafts. There is a needle to be threaded with a name between “Johnny” and “Huckelberry,” isn’t there. You want to be new, unique, but you also do not want to sound ridiculous. My own name, Lea, is pronounced “Lee,” and that’s been an ongoing thing in my life. And yet I love my name as I was named after my godmother, my mother’s best friend, and a woman who had a critical impact on me. I love carrying her name and trying to live up to certain things she exemplified. She was fearless. She never suffered a fool, not one. My mother is like that, too. And my mother has a great name: Carroll.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Not surprised at all. My teenage self was constantly imagining elaborate stories in which I was the heroine, usually being rescued or working on a rescue mission, which is preposterous as I grew up in a small very quiet town. I recently started watching Fauda, the television series, and have thought more than once that the show reminds me of my teenage hallucinations about what I could be, a kind of warrior on a complex mission where everything is at stake, but my hair is still perfect. Little did I know, then, that my father had had so many experiences that could have informed those inner monologues, and those dreams. I never asked him about his life before me. Children are narcissists in that way. Children look ahead. He died before I became a writer.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I once heard John Irving deliver a talk in which he said he always writes endings first, then starts at the beginning writing towards that moment. He talked about A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the scene where everyone is holding Owen in the air, and how he knew he would be writing towards that moment. In the novels, I have had a sense of the endings in each one, but I did not write them down until the end of the process. Endings, in theory, should be harder, as they will be what the reader is most likely to remember., at least if we trust neuroscience. I have always re-written my openings. With Ilium, I wrote an entirely new first chapter just before the pages were typeset. I need to have the reader glimpse the third person, which returns at the very end, so that the end felt less like an exotic add on than like a revelation, along the lines of oh I get it all now.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

As a writer you are all of your characters, I think. And yet, like my silly teenage self (or, my ambitious dreamer teenage self) I write about exotic people and places. Warriors, spies, diplomats, Navy SEALs, oligarchs. I have not been afraid to write into these kinds of people, and in this way, John le Carré was a true inspiration for Ilium, too. Le Carré knows the spy world is, above all, just a really fine metaphor for how we all live, only heightened. If you’re going to be betrayed, why not be betrayed by an arms dealer, or a princess? Ditto for falling in love. Falling in love with a prince is a story as old as time but that can end (as we all now know, and if you don’t know, watch The Crown) just as tragically as falling in love with an arms dealer. Richard Roper, in The Night Manager, is a sort of irresistible arms dealer. The finest villains are usually irresistible.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My father, though he was very literary, so perhaps he does not count. He, and who he was, runs through all my work. I am inspired by visual art, too, painting in particular, which plays a central role in Ilium. I have learned a lot from television, a distinctly non-literary form, and one that can be a master class in plot and story architecture. And travel is always inspiring. I love writing about places I have either been or dream to see. I wrote a screenplay last year set in Niseko, Japan, mainly as I wanted an excuse to go there and see the Ice Village. So, people and places. People and places, and HBO.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nashae Jones

Nashae Jones is a kid lit writer, because at an early age she learned what the magic of books could do for a developing mind. She always dreamed of creating worlds that would stay for a reader long after they put down their books. Jones is also an educator and book reviewer (kid books, of course). She lives in Virginia with her husband, daughter, son, escape artist husky, and two black cats that Jones is convinced are reincarnations of Pinky and the Brain.

Her new novel is Courtesy of Cupid.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My title went through many different iterations. While writing my first draft, my book took on the working title Cupidly Ever After. Before going on submission to editors, we decided to change the name to Stupid Cupid, something my agent and I felt reflected the clumsy actions of the book’s demi-god protagonist. After the book got acquired by Aladdin, and the book went through editorial changes, we decided as a team to change the name again, finding that Courtesy of Cupid was the perfect title to reflect the quirky humor and sweetness in the book.

What's in a name?

I wish there was something that I could point to as distinctly literary about my characters’ names, but instead my characters are named based off of people and things that I love. My protagonist, Erin Johnson, has the nickname EJ which pays homage to my husband’s family. He and his siblings all go by nicknames that end in J. Other characters are ripped from my everyday life. For example, Erin’s English teacher, Ms. Richmond, is modeled and named after my real-life friend.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think my teenage self would’ve enjoyed reading my novel. It would have made me laugh, and it would’ve brought me joy. I think at the same time, I would’ve also been hard on myself for reading something that was very clearly genre-fiction. Teenage me was a bit of a snob.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think there is something invigorating about starting a new project. I’m fresh-faced and filled with hope, and it is always easier for me to come up with beginnings to my stories. Conclusions are definitely harder for me since by the time I reach the end of the story, I’m anxious to be finished.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

The character I connect with most in my book is my protagonist, Erin's, mother. Erin’s mother ghostwrites romance books, and she throws Erin a Valentine’s Day themed birthday party even though Erin despises Valentine’s Day. As a mother of a tween and teen, I understand how mothers can sometimes misconstrue what their children want.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

As an eighties baby, I love older eighties and nineties music, tv shows, and movies. I find that, subconsciously, a lot of eighties and nineties references slip into my writing.

Visit Nashae Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucy Connelly

Lucy Connelly loves traveling the world, but her favorite place is at home with her dogs and family. That said, she's always up for adventure and is constantly on the lookout for killer inspiration--as in who will be the next killer in her books? She has a master's degree in humanities and enjoys learning all the things. And she's been published by many other names.

Connelly's new novel is Death at a Scottish Wedding.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Death at a Scottish Wedding tells the reader precisely what they are getting into with this mystery.

What's in a name?

Dr. Emilia McRoy name means strong woman. That’s why I picked it. I gave her a Scottish last name because looking into her heritage, something she knows little about is integral to finding her place in the world.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self would be astonished that I wrote a book, but maybe not that it was a mystery. I’ve always loved mystery novels. The genre has been a favorite since those Nancy Drew books from my childhood.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings?

Beginnings are the most difficult. It is the introduction into the world that is the novel. Which do you change more? My endings tend to come more naturally than beginnings do. So, I probably change the beginnings much more often. However, sometimes the person I thought was the killer changes by the end of the book.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters?

A bit of the writer slips into their main characters. I tend to write about strong women with great friend groups that are supportive and kind. That’s where real life may bleed into the work. I don’t know what I would do without my friends.

Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

This depends on the book I’m writing. Dr. Emilia McRoy in Death at a Scottish Wedding is someone different from me. However, we have some things in common, like those strong friend groups. She’s much braver than I could ever be.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Scotland was a big inspiration for this series. It’s a beautiful country, and the people there are fantastic.

Visit Lucy Connelly's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death at a Scottish Wedding.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katia Lief

Katia Lief is the author of A Map of the Dark and Last Night published by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown under the pseudonym Karen Ellis. Earlier work includes USA Today and international bestselling novels Five Days in Summer, One Cold Night, and The Money Kill, the fourth installment of her Karin Schaeffer series published by HarperCollins and nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She teaches fiction writing at The New School in Manhattan and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Lief's new novel is Invisible Woman.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title Invisible Woman should instantly tell the reader a lot about the book. It clearly imparts a sentiment that we women often experience the world from behind a veil of invisibility, overlooked and silenced and unheard. Since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements burst on the scene in 2018 and ripped the veil aside, we’ve at least been able to openly name the experience. The novel’s protagonist Joni peers back into her past through a newly focused lens and is surprised by what she sees. There’s also a hidden secret tucked into the title that reveals itself much later in the book; obviously I won’t discuss that here.

What's in a name?

Joni Ackerman is the novel’s main character. Joni comes from my love of Joni Mitchell’s music. Ackerman was a name that felt right for reasons I can’t begin to explain.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self wouldn’t be at all surprised that her older self wrote this novel because she never hesitated to say exactly what she thought. What would surprise (and disappoint) her would be learning that the times of her future life would not have kept the promises of her youth. In the seventies, when I was a teenager, the second wave of feminism was everywhere. In the idealism of my youth, I never imagined how quickly it would vanish.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The beginnings are much harder. There’s so much to do at the start of a novel, from jump starting the plot to creating characters to establishing place. They’re all important and they have to develop simultaneously. I will go back again and again until the beginning is just right, and once the first draft is finished it’s not unusual for me to completely rewrite the first chapter.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

The answer is yes and no. Characters grow out of a writer’s imagination, and the stuff of our imagination is fed by the world around us as it’s filtered through our perceptions. In other worlds, our minds are a filter for the world, and what gets in becomes the material we work with. So yes, in that sense, I’m in all my characters. No one character, though, is literally ‘me.’

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Everything!

Visit Katia Lief's website.

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

My Book, The Movie: Next Time You See Me.

The Page 69 Test: Vanishing Girls.

My Book, The Movie: The Money Kill.

The Page 69 Test: Last Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Angela Brown

Angela Brown’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Real Simple, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young children, where she is currently at work on her second novel.

Brown's debut novel is Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

If I’m being honest, I really love the title and think it captures so much about the story that readers will discover within the book’s pages. The title arrived to me very early on – I was only about twenty or so pages into the first draft – and never strayed from it (my agent and editor ultimately loved it, too, so at no point in the process of writing or production did the title ever change). There are really three things I admire about the title Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time. First, I love that it’s sort of a big, clunky type title (my favorite kind!) which I think perfectly suits the protagonist, Olivia. She’s a bit of a mess at the start of the story, and so I don’t think a very neat and tidy and simple title would quite suit her. I also love that her full name is included in the title. It lets readers know right away that this is very much her story. At the start, Olivia is a bit self-absorbed, too – something she really works at changing throughout the text – so for that reason I also like that her name is the very first thing readers see when they pick up the book. Lastly, the second part of the title captures the primary theme of the story and also provides a similar sense of urgency that Olivia herself feels right from the get-go.

What’s in a name?

The book is very much about Olivia’s journey toward learning to live her best life, while also being about life and death (and one woman’s fear that she’s running out of time to live). I loved the idea of the protagonist having this theme embedded right into her name. Her nickname, which she’s more often than not referred to in the book, is “Liv.” As she points out early on: “That’s the irony of this whole thing: the fact that my nickname is Liv. Live. To live! And yet…”

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think my teenage self would really love this book and think it was pretty cool. I was very much the bohemian kid growing up, so I think sixteen-year-old me would be excited to read about, and also proud that I wrote about, a woman who still finds ways to explore this side to herself.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more? 1000% beginnings! Even if I have a very clear vision for a story, if the first ten or twenty pages don’t feel just right, I can’t create anything beyond them. Like all writers, I go through many drafts before I arrive at a final product, though there’s something about the beginning of a novel that just feels so different for me. It has to “hit” right from the first draft, which makes them much more difficult for me to craft. For Olivia, the opening pages in the final book are nearly identical to those in the very first draft. Endings are very different – those just pour right out of me.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters?

The whole book, of course, is fictional, though I drew a lot of inspiration for Olivia’s character from my own life. Like her, I’m a suburban mother of a certain age, a former educator, and at the time I wrote the book, was an aspiring writer. I think Olivia and I also share many personality traits: we’re both overthinkers who can be a bit sarcastic or witty at times but are (I hope!) ultimately very tender people.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music was very important to me while I wrote this book. There was a specific playlist I listened to on repeat the whole time I worked on this project, which consisted of songs that reminded me of a certain point in my life (one that Olivia herself longs for). It consisted of a lot of Magnetic Fields, Tom Waits, the Velvet Underground, stuff like that. I’m also really inspired by just plain old everyday life. I live a very simple, suburban existence, and I love to find relatable stories hiding just beneath the surface of my day-to-day. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever find me writing a story about, say, some fictional superhero. I think I’ll probably always, to some extent, focus in my adult work on women like me and work to discover what makes them so interesting and to find unique ways to tell their stories.

Visit Angela Brown's website.

The Page 69 Test: Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time.

--Marshal Zeringue