Category: Writers on Writing

Writers on Writing

If You Didn’t See It Coming: A psychological novel about family violence and the warning signs we ignore

Mandy Webster

A powerful psychological novel about domestic violence, generational trauma, and the warning signs we ignore. Amanda L. Webster shares the personal experiences behind If You Didn’t See It Coming and why fiction can reveal what statistics cannot.

If You Didn’t See It Coming is a psychological novel that explores domestic abuse, generational trauma, and the quiet warning signs that too often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Told through three interconnected perspectives, the story builds tension around a single, haunting certainty: someone is going to die. This isn’t a traditional mystery. It’s not about who did it. It’s about who will—and why.

Graphic that includes the book cover and a list of the following tropes: Multi-generational story, Domestic violence, Coercive Control, talks about the red flags we ignore. "You know someone is going to die-- you just don't know who-- or why."

The novel follows three generations of women—Marilou, Carrie, and Emma—each navigating her own version of control, fear, and survival. Marilou appears to have built the perfect life, but behind the façade is a marriage that has slowly eroded her sense of self. Carrie, her daughter, is doing everything she can to hold her life together after escaping an abusive relationship, only to have her ex forced back into her life through the legal system. And Emma, Carrie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, is caught in the middle—trying to make sense of attention, danger, and the complicated legacy she’s inheriting.

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Writers on Writing

Demons of the Night: A horror novel about good, evil, and finding your own path

Mandy Webster

Demons of the Night is a horror novel that asks: who gets to decide what is good and what is evil? It follows Docia, a young woman whose parents have gone to great lengths to hide the truth about who she really is. They want her to be a “good Christian woman” and believe secrecy is the only way to protect her. But their plan is about to backfire.

The cover of Demons of the Night was designed by my friend, author and artist Lance Savage, who created a fictionalized version of Holy Hill to reflect the novel’s dark atmosphere. Visit Lance’s website to see more of his work.

Docia longs for independence, for a life beyond her family’s overprotection. She wants normal experiences—friendships, romance, freedom. When Blane appears at a church lecture on demons, Docia is intrigued. But he’s there for the wrong reasons, and she quickly realizes that the life she desires may require confronting truths her parents have worked so hard to conceal. As the story unfolds, Docia must grapple with her identity, her morality, and the question of whether she can define herself outside the rigid framework her family imposes.

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Writers on Writing

The quiet power of foreshadowing: How great novels prepare readers for what’s coming

Mandy Webster

The best plot twists in fiction rarely come out of nowhere—they feel surprising and inevitable at the same time. That paradox is usually the result of careful foreshadowing. When done well, foreshadowing prepares readers for events long before they happen, creating the sense that the story’s outcome was always embedded within the narrative. I was thinking about this recently while reading Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton. The novel includes a central revelation that attentive readers may begin to suspect early on, yet the author never makes the answer obvious. Instead, she carefully plants clues that guide the reader toward the truth without spoiling the experience. That balance is the essence of effective foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is the quiet trail of clues that leads readers toward the ending long before they realize it.

What is foreshadowing?

Foreshadowing is a narrative technique in which an author plants subtle hints about events that will occur later in the story. These hints might appear as dialogue, imagery, symbolism, or even small details that initially seem unimportant. The goal isn’t to give the plot away. Instead, foreshadowing creates narrative cohesion. When the key event finally arrives, readers recognize the groundwork that made it possible. The story feels intentional rather than arbitrary.

In Ruins, for example, the opening sections contain small details that feel slightly out of place. The world seems familiar but not entirely so. Certain descriptions, structures, and assumptions about society invite questions. None of these clues explicitly reveal where the story is going, but together they form a pattern that becomes meaningful later. The result is a reading experience that rewards attention without demanding it.

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Writers on Writing

What dystopian stories teach us about who controls history: An exploration of cultural narrative in Ruins

Mandy Webster

While reading Ruins, the latest novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, I found myself thinking less about the far-future world it imagines and more about the stories civilizations tell about themselves — and why those stories so often begin to unravel the moment someone steps outside their borders. Set in a distant future where American civilization is long gone and no written records survive, Ruins follows an archaeologist who begins to question the official histories preserved by Leadership. In this world, what is accepted as truth has been shaped over thousands of years of retelling, and stability depends on the population’s belief in those narratives.

Civilizations survive through stories — but whose stories get left out? Inspired by Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, this post explores rules, exceptions, and the hidden structures of society.

It wasn’t just the mystery at the heart of the novel that stayed with me, but the way it mirrors a recurring pattern in literature: civilizations rely on shared stories to create order. Without these stories, cooperation becomes fragile, meaning begins to fray, and identity itself can feel uncertain. But stories, by necessity, simplify. They smooth contradictions, minimize uncertainty, and quietly remove perspectives that do not fit the larger arc. And what disappears is often invisible to those living comfortably within the story.

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Writers on Writing

DIY High: A young adult novel about resilience, alternative education, and building your own path

Mandy Webster

DIY High is a young adult novel about a high school student forced to take control of her own education when both her school system and her family fail her. Inspired in part by real-life struggles with bureaucracy, poverty, and addiction, the novel explores what happens when traditional institutions stop working—and what young people can build in their place.

Get your copy of DIY High from my independent online bookstore today!

I wrote this book during one of the hardest seasons of my life. My son was recovering from a traumatic brain injury after being hit by a semi truck while riding his bike. When he returned to school, it felt less like support and more like resistance. Instead of helping him get back on track, the system seemed to work against him. Eventually, when he turned seventeen, I made the decision I never imagined I would make: I let him drop out.

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Writers on Writing

How to generate content efficiently when you already have a full-time job

Mandy Webster

If you want to build an audience for your books—or grow a platform that actually sustains interest—you can’t post once in a while and hope for the best; consistency is the engine, and efficiency is the fuel. The problem, of course, is time.

Breaking the work into parts doesn’t cheapen it. It makes it possible.

If you’re like me, you work a full-time job. You have family obligations, errands, laundry, dishes, and a life you’d like to live outside of your laptop. And yet, I typically update my blog five days a week. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because I treat content creation less like a burst of inspiration and more like an assembly line.

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Writers on Writing

F‑ing Freddy Fisher: A novella about seeing what others miss

Mandy Webster

F‑ing Freddy Fisher started as an experiment. I was taking a class on poetry for children and young adults, and we did a unit on novels in verse. I loved the way those books could convey emotion and perspective so efficiently, and I wanted to try something similar. I quickly realized I’m not enough of a poet to carry a full story in verse—but the inspiration stayed. What I ended up with is a novella made of brief, tightly written chapters, each told from the perspective of a different character. I aimed to be concise and to the point, like poetry, but the story is told in prose.

Get your copy of F-ing Freddy Fisher from my independent online bookstore today!

I still remember my great aunt Viola’s reaction when she read it. “Wow, Mandy—I didn’t know you had it in you,” she said. That cracked me up, because my family grew up thinking of me as the shy, quiet child who almost never spoke—a child I now suspect had selective mutism, though I was never formally diagnosed. I’ve mostly outgrown that, but I still notice moments when I can’t speak up, and I’ve learned to trust the intuition that tells me when I’m not in a safe space. (If I’d listened to that intuition when I met my ex, I would have never married him—but that’s another story.) My Aunt Rosetta is another huge fan and probably the book’s biggest promoter, telling anyone who will listen that everyone—teenagers, teachers, parents—needs to read this novella.

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Writers on Writing

Valley of the Bees: The novel I wrote in 16 days—and the story that refused to end

Mandy Webster

Valley of the Bees is the book that taught me I could actually finish a novel—or at least something very close to one. I wrote it right after finishing my creative writing graduate program, at a moment when I had plenty of ideas, plenty of ambition, and absolutely no completed long-form fiction to show for it.

Get your copy of Valley of the Bees from my independent online bookstore today!

Up to that point, I considered myself a pantser. I wrote by instinct, followed my curiosity, and trusted the story to reveal itself as I went along. The problem was that nothing ever made it to the end. Clearly, my preferred method wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go.

So, I set myself a challenge.

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Writers on Writing

Reading a lot of books is a skill, not a personality trait

Mandy Webster

By the end of 2025, my social feeds were flooded with book-count roundups. Fifty books. Eighty-seven books. One hundred books, neatly stacked in Canva graphics and celebratory captions. Mixed in among them, especially on Threads, I kept seeing the same question pop up again and again: How are people able to read 100 books in a year?

Reading isn’t a race. It’s a skill you build, a habit you choose, and a joy that looks different for everyone.

The tone of the question always felt half-amazed, half-defeated—like asking how people finish marathons when you can barely make it around the block.

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Writers on Writing

Writing adult novels with a young adult point of view: Challenges, opportunities, and why it matters

Mandy Webster

There’s something uniquely compelling—and uniquely tricky—about writing an adult novel through the eyes of a young adult protagonist. You want the story to resonate with adult readers, but the voice will inevitably feel youthful, immediate, and shaped by the character’s limited experience. That tension can be powerful, but it can also trip up both writers and readers if it isn’t handled thoughtfully.

It’s difficult to write an adult novel when telling the story from a young adult point of view.

Take Casey Dunn’s The Wind Witch Murders, for example. The novel is marketed as adult fiction, but its protagonist, Raven, is young, searching, and emotionally raw. The book is written in first-person point of view, which makes it even more difficult to escape the natural YA headspace. Every detail, every observation, every emotional beat is filtered through Raven’s young adult perspective.

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