Alison Louise Hubbard On The 5 Things You Need to Know to Become a Great Author

1) Write daily. Find a time and place that works for you. 2) Read daily. Nourish your mind with inspiring words. 3) Put your work out there and cull through the criticism to decide what is useful. Sometimes the smartest ideas come from the most unexpected places. 4) Rewrite until you can go no further. You will sense when it is finished. 5) Learn how to “kill your darlings;” let go of anything that doesn’t serve the whole, no matter how much you love it.

As part of my interview series on the five things you need to know to become a great author, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alison Louise Hubbard. Her historical novel, THE KELSEY OUTRAGE, was published by Black Rose Writing in 2024. Her short story, Wildflowers, was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 2022, and her story, Belladonna, won the Slippery Elm Prize for Prose and was published in the 2021 print edition.

Before writing novels and short stories, Hubbard had a long career as a musical theatre lyricist in New York…