Finding the Great Idea: Niblack Author Shares Journey with Storytelling

“Foxcroft kind of goes back a little bit in my writer DNA,” confided Williams. ”When we were first married, I started hearing stories about Foxcroft because [my husband’s] grandmother was Class of 1930, so she was back in Miss Charlotte's day, and I loved all these stories about her and about Miss Charlotte. So when I was writing a book called The Summer Wives, I thought it would be interesting if my two main characters had gone to Foxcroft together back in the late 40s/early 50s. I loved bringing that little bit of my husband's background into the book.”

After this fun revelation, Williams, a graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, talked about how she became a writer. “A lot of people ask me, so if you got an MBA in finance, how did you transition to writing books? The real story there is what the heck was I doing going off and getting an MBA when all I really wanted to do was write books?”

“When I was your age,” she told students, “all I wanted to do was write books.” Williams, who is originally from Seattle, WA, then shared how her love of stories began as a young child with her family’s summer pilgrimages to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and winters with season tickets to the Seattle Opera. 

“[Growing up] was kind of a lonely existence,” she confessed. “I had no one to talk to about my Shakespeare and my opera. But the great thing about growing up, as I'm sure you're all starting to learn yourselves, is that the things that make you a little bit different when you're younger, that make you feel like maybe you don't fit in, are actually the things that become your superpower as you get older — and all of this became my superpower; all of these things that my parents did for me … became the foundation of my writing.” 

But, as Williams alluded to earlier, she didn’t start her career as a writer. She took her finance degree from Columbia and worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before her first novel was published in 2012. “I figured it'd be easier to succeed in business than to succeed as a writer, so I did that.”

“Then, I started having kids,” she revealed, “and all of a sudden, I wasn't scared of failure as much because my kids would still love me. It was what freed me to do what I really wanted to do. It was not an easy process. I sent out a lot of manuscripts that got rejected. I had to learn to pick myself up and try again. Eventually, I did find the great idea. I finally had the writing skills not just to bring this story to life, but also to put the sentences together to keep the reader on the page.”

Williams then answered several questions from students about her writing process, including advice on how to get better at writing: "Practice, practice, practice. There's this idea that writing is one of those talents that you just have or you don't have. I am here to tell you that yes, it's partly that, but it's also practice. You just have to write." — and dealing with writer's block: “You have to write your way out of it. You write a sentence, you write another sentence, and you have to not care whether they're good sentences. That's the thing. Writer's block is just the fear of writing a bad sentence. If I can get beyond that, if I can just get some sentences on the page, it starts. That's where you start getting into the flow.”

After her presentation, Williams stayed to sign copies of her books for those who wished, before having lunch with several students interested in writing careers. 

Established in 2007 by Austi Brown 1973 in memory of her mother, the Helen Cudahy Niblack 1942 Arts Lecture Series seeks to bring a variety of fine, literary, performing, and practical artists and designers to Foxcroft to share their work, the nature of the creative process, and the breadth of artistic pursuits with both students and the community. It has sponsored visits by a Broadway actor and director, a champion cowboy poet, hip-hop artists from Senegal and New York, musicians, storytellers, and more.