Sarah Strohmeyer: On Having Confidence in Your Writerly Voice
Bestselling author Sarah Strohmeyer discusses combining home improvement with suspense in her new novel, We Love to Entertain.
Sarah Strohmeyer is a bestselling and award-winning novelist whose books include The Secrets of Lily Graves, How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True, Smart Girls Get What They Want, The Cinderella Pact (which became the Lifetime Original Movie Lying to Be Perfect), The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives, Sweet Love, and the Bubbles mystery series.
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Boston Globe. She lives with her family outside Montpelier, Vermont. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
In this post, Sarah discusses combining home improvement with suspense in her new novel, We Love to Entertain, her advice for other writers, and more!
Name: Sarah Strohmeyer
Literary agent: Zoe Sandler, CAA (ICM)
Book title: We Love to Entertain
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: April 25, 2023
Genre/category: Suspense
Previous titles: Do I Know You?; The Secret of Lily Graves; How Zoe Made Her Dreams Come True; This Is My Brain on Boys; Smart Girls Get What They Want; Kindred Spirits; The Penny Pinchers Club; Sweet Love; The Sleeping Beauty Proposal; The Cinderella Pact; Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives; Bubbles Reboots; Bubbles All the Way; Bubbles Abroad; Bubbles Ablaze; Bubbles in Trouble; Bubbles Unbound; Barbie Unbound: A Parody of the Barbie Obsession
Elevator pitch for the book: Instagram-ready couple in heated, online, home-remodeling contest go missing after stealing a mountaintop property out from under a disturbed homeowner leaving their assistant (and her mother) to investigate their disappearance before he gets them, too.
What prompted you to write this book?
As the elected town clerk of Middlesex, Vermont, I’m privy to the greed and tensions that arise when wealthy out-of-staters buy up beautiful Vermont property unaffordable to the locals who can be suspicious and squirrely in their own right. The acquisition and ownership of land brings out the worst in humans, turning otherwise normal people into possessive monsters.
I also LOVE HGTV and home renovation, so I combined the two. Houzz meets Investigation Discovery!
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The idea’s been swirling in my brain since my husband and I purchased at tax sale a $400,000, 3,200-square-foot log cabin on 11 pristine Vermont acres for $13,676 in 2019. The tension between us, the original owner, the guilt we felt (that the missing couple in We Love to Entertain definitely don’t feel), the unfairness of the system that allows a municipality to seize a property and sell it for taxes owed, along with the giddiness of getting this property set a perfect stage for suspense.
I started writing it shortly after I finished Do I Know You? in 2020. So, with lots of editing, close to 18 months. In fairness, I do work 32 hours/week as a town clerk—at least that’s my excuse!
I’m really lucky to have a fantastic editor—Emily Griffin at HC—who can pinpoint the plot points and identify what’s gripping for the readers and what’s not. Being so close to the actual story, it was too easy for me to get lost in the weeds. (Pages and pages of the intricacies of tax sales were blue penciled.) Emily would steer me in the right direction—which is why the book took so long to write.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I think when you’re writing a story based on personal experience, you have to step back and critically examine your perspective. What the reader might find interesting versus what you, the writer, find interesting are often at odds.
I also realized that no matter how hard I try, I cannot—nay, SHOULD not—disown my natural tendencies toward humor. All of us writers contribute our unique voices to our work. If we all sound the same, we’d write the same books. (I’m looking at you, AI.) Instead of trying to be like INSERT MEGABESTSELLING AUTHOR HERE, we should polish our quirks and bring them to the page.
My favorite books were often rejected numerous times by other publishers because they were too unique. And, yet, when they were finally published, readers raved. Lessons in Chemistry is a prime example.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I suppose the biggest surprise was my editor’s first developmental edit. Boy, had I gotten off on a wrong foot. Back to the drawing board. Always difficult. Always ultimately rewarding.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Entertainment, mostly. I want them to love the primary characters Erika, the daughter/assistant, and Kim, the mother/town clerk, and laugh at the collection of oddballs in their orbit. I hope they’ll be amused by the home remodeling snafus, anxious about what happened to Holly and Robert, the Instagram-ready couple, and on the edge of their seats when Erika and Kim get themselves in way over their heads.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Please, please, please write your story to the best of your ability without looking over your shoulder at what the other guy is doing—or getting in return. We are a community of writers—celebrate one another’s success. Tell the green monster to take a hike.
So maybe you haven’t been invited to join a writers’ colony. Perhaps, instead of five-hours of uninterrupted peace to write each day, you’ve got a job and a houseful of kids. Yep. Been there. Done that.
You can write in 20-minute sessions. Close the door and write in the bathroom. Get up early and write before the house wakes up. Write at your lunch hour. At night after work. In the car while the kids are at the dentist or in sport events.
Just get those 1,000 words in a day if you can. You’ll have draft in three months—a crazy, nonsensical, poorly-written draft—but there will be words on the page. And that’s a primed wall. Now, you can start really painting.
To quote the beloved Nora Roberts: “I can fix a crappy page; I can’t fix a blank one.”
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
