Success story of young novelist

From today’s New York Times, comes a story of Brit Bennett, who started writing a novel when she was 17. Now it’s been bought and 100,000 copies are about to be published.

But notice what happened. She started as late as possible. She began with the ending. And in the revising process, she focused on the place in which the story happened. That made the story come alive.

“The Mothers” begins with an abrupt ending of sorts. Nadia, who is grieving after her mother’s suicide, starts dating Luke, a pastor’s son, and becomes pregnant. Determined not to let her life be derailed, she gets an abortion and leaves for the University of Michigan. Years pass, and Nadia’s friend Aubrey, a committed Christian, begins dating and eventually marries Luke, living a version of the life that Nadia ran from. Nadia’s story is framed by the recurring chorus-like voice of “the mothers,” the gossipy elder women of the church who serve as her hometown’s eagle-eyed morality police.

In the years Ms. Bennett spent writing the novel, the narrative morphed from a narrow story focused on Aubrey, Luke and Nadia into a layered portrait of a community. She modeled the setting on her hometown, a multiethnic beachside city in San Diego County with a large military population, which often felt suffocatingly small to her.

“I’ve had people be shocked that the book is not set in the South or some Northern urban city, but it’s like, black people exist everywhere,” Ms. Bennett said. “There’s a way in which we have these familiar expectations from black narratives, of where they’re set and what they’ll be about, and it wasn’t something that I felt I had to push back against or whatever, but I wanted to represent the place that I was from and the people I knew.”

I encourage you to read the whole story. And when the book comes out, it sounds well worth reading.