Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop

When I was twelve years old, I wrote a story called THE MICE WHO LIVED IN THE WHITE HOUSE because I grew up in Washington D.C., but in the days before computers. I left my story handwritten in a notebook on the bus and never got it back so that was discouraging. However, I kept writing in journals and hiding them in my room away from my five brothers and it soon became a great way for me to express myself. I found out I was a storyteller. I published my first book when I was 24.

People often ask me this question and I think the answer is different for every writer. For me, my stories often start with setting. If I don’t know where my characters go to sleep or where they play or go to work, it’s hard for me to imagine them living their lives. So a setting can start a story as in ISLAND JUSTICE, modeled on an island I visited as a child. IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE began with memories of my grandmother’s white clapboard house in New England and to my amazement, grew into a three-generational saga which opens in New York City in the 1880s. But there are lot of other ways that stories get started. A photograph by Lewis Hine, the great child labor photographer of a little girl who worked in a Vermont textile mill prompted me to write the historical novel COUNTING ON GRACE. I wrote THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC because my son’s beloved nanny was leaving and I was as sad about her departure as he was. Stories start in unexpected ways. The writer has to be alert to the emotional prompts coming from the imagination.