by Writing Workshops Staff
A month ago
Carol Goodman has written twenty-six novels. Her debut, The Lake of Dead Languages, hit the New York Times bestseller list. The Seduction of Water won the Hammett Prize. The Widow's House and The Night Visitors each won the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She has taught creative writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz for more than two decades. She knows what it takes to write a novel, and she knows what stops people from finishing one.
None of that happened because she had a secret formula or an outline that never failed. It happened because Goodman learned, over the course of a long career, how to recognize the specific obstacles that stall novelists at every stage and how to work through them without abandoning the book. Two unpublished novels preceded The Lake of Dead Languages. She has described herself as a slow learner. She wrote her breakout debut during one of the most painful periods of her life, grieving her father's death from stomach cancer, and only later recognized that the book was, in some essential way, about grief and how we talk to the dead.
What follows is a craft guide drawn from Goodman's own writing process, her essays, and her interviews over the years. If you've ever started a novel and couldn't finish, or finished one and knew something was wrong but couldn't name it, these are the lessons of someone who has solved those problems twenty-six times and counting.
The Novel Starts Before You Know It Does
Most writers believe they need a complete idea before they begin. A premise, a protagonist, a plot. Goodman's experience suggests something different. Her novels tend to begin as fragments: an image, a setting, a character whose life she can't stop wondering about. The Lake of Dead Languages started as a short story about a Latin teacher at a girls' school. There was no lake. No mystery. No dead languages, really, beyond the literal ones. For two years, she carried the idea around without knowing where it belonged.
Then, on vacation at Mohonk Mountain House in the Shawangunks, she went swimming in the lake and wondered what it would feel like to swim in cold water if you had lost someone you loved there. That single question gave her the book. The Latin teacher was grieving. She had lost someone in a lake. When she swam, she felt the pull of cold water as the pull of a lost love. Suddenly the character had a wound, and the wound gave the story its shape.
This is how many novels actually begin. Not with a blueprint, but with a question that won't leave you alone. Goodman wrote a short story called "Girl, Declined," about a divorced single mother taking a teaching job at a private school. She workshopped it at The New School with the writer Sheila Kohler, who told her to keep going with the Latin students. Goodman put the story aside for years but couldn't stop thinking about those characters. Why was Latin such a comfort to them? What had happened in their lives that demanded such comfort?
The lesson for aspiring novelists is not to wait for the complete idea. Instead, pay attention to the images, situations, and questions that keep returning. A character you can't shake. A setting that lingers. A premise that nags. These are the seeds of novels, and the mistake most people make is dismissing them because they don't yet look like books.
Ask yourself what she's passionate about. Whether it's fairy tales or stained glass or Latin poetry, that passion gives the character depth and gives you the material to build a world around her.
— Carol Goodman on developing a narrator
Place Is Not Scenery. Place Is Story.
One of Goodman's most distinctive qualities as a novelist is her relationship to setting. She doesn't choose locations and then populate them with characters. The places choose her, and they arrive carrying stories.
Her first five novels were set in upstate New York: a lake in the Adirondacks, a hotel in the Catskills, a college modeled on Vassar, an artists' colony. Each of these settings came from personal experience, but the fiction emerged when the place intersected with an emotional question. Mohonk Lake gave her the drowning at the center of The Lake of Dead Languages. The Catskills hotel where her narrator's mother had worked became the world of The Seduction of Water.
When she decided to set The Sonnet Lover in Italy, she was terrified. She didn't have the time or money to live abroad for a year, and she worried about whether short visits could produce a believable setting. Her solution was practical and instructive: she set the novel at an American school housed in a Renaissance villa, an enclosed environment she felt she could manage. Then she traveled to Italy with her family, balancing research with finding the best gelato, and let the place work on her imagination. She visited the Villa La Pietra in Florence, whose rotunda became the heart of her fictional setting. She heard about a villa in Sorrento with a rose petal floor so delicate it was closed to visitors. She went back a year later and was refused again. The image grew large in her imagination precisely because she couldn't see it. She began inventing stories to explain such an unusual floor.
For writers working on their first novel, this is critical. Setting is not something you describe once and forget. In Goodman's work, the setting is a character with its own moods and secrets. If your novel's setting feels inert, you probably haven't found the right emotional connection to it. Ask yourself not just where the story takes place, but why it has to take place there. What does this specific location reveal about your characters that no other place could?
Writing Through the First Act Without Knowing Where You're Going
Goodman does not outline. She has tried, but her muse, as she describes it, is not the kind that arrives with a thunderbolt and a complete plan. It moves at the pace of translating Latin, picking at words, sorting through images, slowly building up layers of meaning. She has compared it to the experience of translating Virgil in college: the slow, labored process of looking up words and checking declensions, which forced her to stop and savor language instead of rushing forward for plot resolution.
In practice, this means she writes her way into novels without knowing the ending. When she started The Lake of Dead Languages, she knew there was a story in her protagonist's past, but she didn't know the full shape of it. She wrote fifty or sixty pages of the present-day narrative, then stopped and wrote the entire backstory section before returning to finish the first section. She needed to write out the past before she could resolve the present.
This approach can feel reckless, especially for first-time novelists who want assurance that their story is going somewhere. But Goodman's method reveals an important truth about novel writing: the first draft is an act of discovery. You are not transcribing a story you already know. You are uncovering it. The first act of a novel often exists to teach the writer what the book is about, and it may need to be substantially rewritten once you reach the end and understand the whole.
Carol Goodman is leading a year-long novel writing program through WritingWorkshops.com. Write your first draft from start to finish with a NYT bestselling author as your guide.
Learn About The Novel Journey →Research as Fuel (and as Trap)
Goodman is a voracious researcher. For each novel, once she knows what her narrator is passionate about, she reads widely, takes classes, visits museums, and travels to the places where her characters go. For The Sonnet Lover, she studied Italian villas and gardens, Renaissance history, Shakespeare's life, women poets of the Renaissance, the history of the sonnet, and Florentine marriage rituals. For The Drowning Tree, she immersed herself in the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, the arts and crafts movement, and Hudson Valley painters. She took a stained glass class. She went kayaking.
But her essay about writing The Night Villa offers a cautionary tale for novelists who use research as a way to avoid writing. She traveled to Naples to visit the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, the real archaeological site she planned to use as her primary setting. The trip was grueling: a missed connection, a cramped convent hotel whose room she compared to a cell, a taxi strike on the morning of her planned visit. When she finally reached the site, she discovered that the villa had been only partially excavated. There were a few rooms and a private bath. Not nearly enough to support the elaborate plot she had imagined.
She felt the trip had been a failure. Then, wandering through a quiet room dug from solidified lava, now open to sunlight, she stumbled upon a household shrine. She felt, for a moment, the presence of the people who had knelt to pray at that spot every day of their lives. Her eyes filled with tears. That was where the novel was born, not in the facts she had gathered but in the emotional encounter she hadn't planned for.
The breakthrough came on a boat from Capri to Sorrento. She realized she didn't have to write about the real villa. She could create her own. She could give her papyrus project a rich benefactor who had built a replica somewhere nearby. The restriction became a liberation. This is a pattern that experienced novelists recognize: the research that matters most is not the information you collect but the unexpected feeling that strikes you while you're collecting it. And the novel itself, in the end, is not bound by fact. It is free to invent.
The Middle of the Novel Wants to Kill Your Book
Goodman is direct about this. The middle of a novel is where most books die. You've exhausted the excitement of the opening. The ending is too far away to feel real. You're deep enough into the story to see its flaws but not deep enough to know how to fix them. This is the stage where novelists start to doubt their premise, question their characters, and fantasize about starting a different, better book.
Goodman has written about the psychological dimension of this problem with unusual honesty. The temptation to start over is not a sign that your book is broken. It's a predictable stage in the process, as reliable as the changing seasons. New ideas always feel more promising than the messy, complicated, half-built thing sitting on your desk. That's because new ideas haven't been tested yet. They haven't had to survive the scrutiny of two hundred pages of actual prose.
Her approach to surviving the middle is rooted in something she learned from her study of Latin. Translating classical poetry forced her to slow down and work through difficulty rather than around it. She couldn't skip the hard parts. She couldn't jump ahead to see how the poem ended. She had to sit with confusion and ambiguity and trust that meaning would emerge from patience. She has described writing as a faith in language to make sense of the world, and the middle of a novel is where that faith is tested most severely.
For her own novels, the middle is where she examines the central themes and conflicts of the work and pushes toward a resolution she doesn't yet see. She has said that at some point, while looking up the etymology of a word or tracking down a mythological reference, the words themselves lead her to what happens next. It doesn't feel like inspiration. It feels like translating. Slow, deliberate, painstaking. But it moves the book forward.
I don't have a muse who lends wings to my words, who more often demands that I stop to consult a dictionary. But she moves at the pace I used to translate Latin at, picking at words, sorting through images, slowly building up layers of meaning.
— Carol Goodman on her writing process
The Bones Beneath the Story
One of Goodman's most illuminating essays traces the origins of The Seduction of Water back to the stories her mother told her as a child. Not fairy tales, but stories of an Irish-Catholic childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, stories about a burlesque-dancer aunt arrested in New Haven, a baby brother who died young, a mother who collapsed in the kitchen at forty-four. These were stories told and retold, and Goodman watched her mother make sense of her life through the telling. Details emerged as Goodman grew old enough to understand them, but they also grew as her mother understood them through repetition.
This is the key insight for novelists who wonder where their material comes from. Goodman argues that storytelling, at its deepest level, is the process of making sense of your own life. Not autobiography, exactly, but the transformation of lived experience into something shaped and purposeful. Her Lake of Dead Languages began from a real situation: she was thirty-five, recently separated, broke, living in her parents' house with a two-year-old. She imagined what she would have done without generous parents to come home to, and that imagined deprivation became the emotional core of Jane Hudson's story.
But the distance between fact and fiction is where the novel lives. Goodman has pointed out that Jane Hudson's father is one of the most absent characters in The Lake of Dead Languages, even though Goodman wrote the book while grieving her own father's death. She wasn't trying to write about her father. She was writing about grief itself, how it changes the language we use, how the dead leave us searching for a way to keep the conversation going. She only understood this after the novel was finished.
For novelists, the exercise is not to transcribe your life but to identify what you've been circling in your own experience. What questions keep returning? What losses haven't been fully understood? These are the bones beneath the story, and they give fiction its emotional authority even when the surface details bear no resemblance to the writer's biography.
The Novel Journey pairs you with Carol Goodman for a full year of weekly workshops, individual meetings, and craft instruction designed to carry you from first chapter to finished draft.
Apply to The Novel Journey →Revision Is Where the Novel Becomes a Novel
When Goodman's agent agreed to represent The Lake of Dead Languages, she did so on one condition: Goodman would revise the manuscript before it went to publishers. Goodman thought this would take a month. It took eight.
The process was grueling. Her agent would identify problems. Goodman would write them down, hang up the phone, sob, and then get to work. In earlier drafts, the entire backstory was confined to the novel's middle section. Through revision, Goodman pulled some of that material out and wove it into the final third, so that revelations about the past continued to surface even as the present-day plot accelerated. She and her agent understood that suspense depended on the reader not knowing everything that had happened, so the past had to unfold strategically, not all at once.
This is where Goodman's classical training proved invaluable. She has compared revising a novel to translating Latin: you pull apart a complex sentence to understand its parts, then you reassemble it so it reads as a unified whole, not a patchwork showing its seams. A translation isn't finished until it reads like a poem again in English. A revised novel isn't finished until it reads like it was written this way from the beginning.
The most common mistake first-time novelists make with revision is treating it as proofreading. They fix typos, tighten sentences, maybe cut a few paragraphs. But real revision often means restructuring the novel at the level of plot, timeline, and point of view. It means recognizing that the scene you love most might be in the wrong place, or that a character who seemed essential is pulling focus from the protagonist, or that the backstory you spent months writing needs to be dismantled and redistributed across the narrative.
Goodman swore, during those eight months, that her next novel would be simpler. Then she used the same complex, interlocking structure for The Seduction of Water. The lesson is that your books will teach you what kind of writer you are, and the revision process is where you learn to inhabit that identity instead of fighting it.
Finishing the Book You Actually Wrote
Goodman's first two novels were never published. She wrote them, failed to sell them, and went back to writing short stories. She enrolled in an MFA program at The New School, convinced that working on a novel in workshop would be too difficult. She went back to teaching. She remarried. She nearly gave up writing altogether more than once.
What kept her going was not a mystical belief in her talent. It was something more practical and more stubborn. One of her former Latin students, a boy named John Chavez, the only Hispanic student in her Latin classes, used his lunch money to take the bus to Certamen meets. She would pick him up in front of his aunt's house, where he stood with his hair combed and his Latin textbook open to his declensions. If John Chavez could save his lunch money to study Latin, Goodman reasoned, she could sit down and write another book.
The end of a novel presents its own specific dangers. You are close enough to see the finish but newly aware of everything the book doesn't do. The gap between the novel you imagined and the novel you wrote becomes painfully visible. Goodman addresses this tension directly: resist the temptation to start over. Build a revision to-do list instead. Distinguish between the book's real problems, which can be fixed, and the inevitable distance between your ambition and your execution, which is part of every creative act.
She doesn't promise that finishing a novel will lead to publication. She's been in the business long enough to know that publishing involves luck and timing and forces beyond any writer's control. What she does promise is that the act of finishing transforms you as a writer in ways that no amount of planning or workshopping can replicate. You learn what kind of books you write. You discover your themes, your rhythms, your structural instincts. You confront your weaknesses and find that some of them are, in fact, strengths you haven't learned to trust yet.
Goodman's career is proof that this process works even when it doesn't look like it's working. Two unpublished novels taught her how to write the third. The third became a bestseller. Every subsequent book has built on what came before, including the failures.
Writing a Novel with Carol Goodman
If Goodman's approach to novel writing sounds like something you'd benefit from studying in person, she is offering exactly that opportunity through WritingWorkshops.com. The Novel Journey is a year-long program designed to take writers from the first spark of an idea through a completed first draft of approximately 70,000 to 80,000 words. The program is divided into four quarters that mirror the stages described in this post: launching your novel, building the first act, surviving the messy middle, and finishing the book.
What makes this program unusual is Goodman's combination of experience and empathy. She has more than twenty-five years of teaching creative writing at the university level and twenty-six published novels to draw from. But she also remembers what it felt like to be broke and divorced and writing a novel she wasn't sure anyone would read, in the months after her father died. She brings that knowledge to her teaching: not just the technical elements of point of view and pacing and structure, but the personal and psychological challenges that stop writers from finishing. Doubt, distraction, the seductive pull of the next idea, the paralysis that comes from not knowing your ending.
The program meets weekly on Zoom, with a cohort of no more than ten writers. Participants receive individual meetings with Goodman, guest lectures from publishing professionals, and the sustained community of writers committed to the same year-long goal. The program addresses not only how to write a novel but how to revise one, and it ends with strategies for the publishing process: developmental editing, finding an agent, and understanding the differences between traditional, self, and hybrid publishing.
No more than ten writers will be accepted. The program begins in September 2026 and meets weekly on Zoom for a full year. Applications are open now.
Apply to The Novel Journey →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
