The simple beauty of storytellilng

I was thirteen the first time a book made me forget where I was sitting.

The novel was Granny Dan by Danielle Steel, and I still remember the exact feeling of falling through its pages into Imperial Russia — a world of shimmering gold jewelry and gowns, of ballrooms lit with hundreds of dimmed candlelights , and underneath all that glitter, a current of intrigue so dark it kept me up past any decent hour for a 12 year old. . It was a world built equally out of nightmares and devotion, cruelty and a fierce love that had a tragic end. I was completely mesmerized. The words on the page had transported me back in time. And I loved that feeling.

"Every so often, we all need to escape from the boring if not worrisome life we live."

People sometimes say reading fiction is "just escapism," as if that is a bad thing. Personally, I think it is a gift to have an adventurous look into another person's life [even if they are fictional], and be able to step outside of your own world for a while. Fiction is one of the few escapes that costs nothing [or at least very little] and harms no one, and I think that makes it one of the great quiet gifts we've given ourselves as a species.

That's why I chose the profession I did.

When I open a manuscript, I get to live a hundred lives I'll never actually live. I get to walk through a market in a city I've never visited, sit at a dinner table with a family whose traditions are nothing like my own, feel the particular ache of a grief I've never personally carried. Fiction hands me a passport with no expiration date. Or at least good fiction does.

And it is this vivid new reality that I am passionate about helping other authors create. A new world; brimming with attention to detail, passionate description, honest longing and jaw dropping beauty.

That's what pulls me to this work, day after day: the chance to be the very first outsider to step into a world an author has spent years building. Before an agent sees it, before a reader ever holds it, I'm there — testing the floorboards, checking whether the world holds together, searching the words for truth and genuine human experience.

Every Manuscript Is Someone Else's Tale, Waiting

My favorite thing about being an editor is the brainstorming sessions that we have. It is a great honor to come alongside my authors as a creative partner. It is sheer joy watching an already amazing tale become thick with intention, intrigue, deeper and more twisted character motivations, laced with cultural history and foreshadowing. I love reaching the end and finding that we've shocked the reader. Or that we've shown the reader a truth about humanity, that can't be shown otherwise.

If you strip away genre, format, and market trends, storytelling is really just this: one person trying to make another person feel something true. That's it. That's the whole ancient, universal project.

That's why I can't imagine doing anything else. Every manuscript that lands on my electronic desk is a door to somewhere I haven't been and a window into someone else's world. My job is to help that door open a little wider, a little more smoothly, so that when a reader turns the first page, they fall head first into the story until they don't want to leave it.

If you're a writer working on a novel and wondering whether your story's world feels fully alive to a reader who's never set foot in it — that's exactly the kind of question I love digging into. Tell me about it by dropping a comment below. I read every single one.

-Lyndsay