- November 22, 2024
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by: Julia Abrose
Contributing Writer
Port Orange’s Michelle Lee, a professor at Daytona State College, recently had a novel published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She recently spoke with the Port Orange Observer about the writing life and what inspired her story.
Where did your interest in writing begin?
It began when I was a kid. I read a lot when I was a really, really small girl. One of my earliest memories is writing a little short story and wanting to send it off to a publisher. So as long as I can remember, I’ve loved reading stories and writing stories. I would just hand write them on a piece of paper, and, when I was in high school, I would write stories for my friends and they would read them at lunch.
Do you keep a schedule for when you write? Are you just writing when you feel inspired?
I have to keep a schedule because I teach at Daytona State and I have a family, so I have to be really careful about making time to write. This year I have a new schedule. I’m getting up really early, at 6 to 8 in the morning, and then writing in the afternoon as well. So I definitely try to carve out time for it.
Do you face any challenges when you are writing on that schedule?
Of course: Struggle is part of writing, unfortunately. And so sometimes, you might have an idea for a scene, but it just doesn’t work the way you want it to. It’s just not the right direction to take. Sometimes you sit down and the words just aren’t coming or they seem awkward. So there’s a lot of that, like this afternoon, for example. I was going to write this afternoon, and I needed to actually get off the computer and go to paper and start brainstorming some different directions for a scene because I thought I knew where I wanted it to go, but I needed another kind of another path. So yeah, I think definitely there’s a lot of thinking involved, and a lot of time involved.
What drew you to writing a novel that was classified as middle grade instead of doing another age group?
I started out writing literary fiction when I went to graduate school. I was in the fiction program there, and so I was definitely writing what you call literary fiction and poetry.
I picked up a young adult novel one day, and then I picked up a middle grade novel, and I realized that the characters in the middle grade were so fun to read because they haven’t experienced a lot in the world, or, if they have, they look at it with very different eyes than adults do. They have a lot more belief, hope, things to experience, humor and risk. I think when you’re younger, maybe you can say things or do things that you couldn’t as an adult because of different responsibilities or situations. I just fell in love with the world, and it enabled me to go back to different situations. There’s a lot of magic and realism. I love stories that are grounded but then all of a sudden there’s a twist or something really interesting that takes them out of reality.
Where did you first get your idea for ‘Between the Lighthouse and You’?
It’s easy for us. We live in a town not far from the beach. So I was thinking one day about just a quintessential message in a bottle. You’re walking along a beach and you find a message in a bottle. But then I started thinking, Well, what if that message was from someone that you knew? What if that message was from someone that you have lost? And then I thought, well, that would be very interesting to get that message. You would open it up and it wouldn’t be from a stranger like that story always goes. What if this was a tradition on an island that people could get these messages every year and they were still washing ashore, and they were communicating with all of the ones who had gone? So that’s the seed that began a story.
I have two main characters, and one of the characters was in search of her mother. She didn’t believe that her mother had died in a boating accident. So what happens when a character is searching for their mom?
Has the development of the book in any way changed the way you view yourself or the way that you view the outside world?
I think this story especially because there’s the element of belief, especially in this time, and so with this story, it does give me a little bit of magic thinking about possibilities that are beyond life. What if we could communicate with those? What would that look like? What would that feel like? What would I say? I think with hope and belief at the end of it, and that’s all the novels that I’ve written, all the things that I’m going to write will have that element of hope and the, what if, what if this thing were to happen?
Do you have any writing quirk or something that makes your work unique to you?
As a reader, I always tell people, “Everyone has that unique voice. Everyone has their own way of telling stories.” It is a way of seeing the world. I definitely know that the concept of the island and the uniqueness drew my agents in.
I started writing in verse, which was interesting, so that’s a whole other voice. When I first had the seed of the story, I had the idea that it would all be in poetry. We decided that prose and a traditional novel format would be better for it, just because of the voice and because of the character development. So when you’re writing in prose, in traditional fiction format, it slows everything down and makes things a little more richer.
Why are you most excited for the release of ‘Between the Lighthouse and You’?
I’m excited to have to see what readers think. I’ve had people telling me that they’ve been reading it, and it’s both exciting and vulnerable at the same time, but I’m anxious to get it to readers. It’s scary because you wonder, even though your editor and your agents love the book, and other people surrounding you love the book, you hope that kids, readers, librarians, media specialists, will love the story. You hope that they walk away thinking of the story. I know when I was a kid, I would read a book and it would stay with me for a really long time. I keep thinking of a story where I wish it hadn’t ended or wish I was still with the characters. I’m hoping that my story does the same for them.
