As part of my ongoing questionnaire series designed to support and guide emerging and established authors, I invited author S.P. Brown to participate. She graciously agreed, sharing thoughtful insight into her writing journey, creative process, and the personal experiences that shape her storytelling. This interview is part of a series created for writers seeking insight into craft, process, and the realities of authorship.
S.P. Brown is the author of Gifts in Brown Paper Packages (2021), a fictional coming-of-age novel inspired by her real-life experiences, as well as The Gifts Journey middle-grade series, which includes Kyrie’s School Blues (2022) and Kyrie’s Difficult Decision (2024). Her work explores themes of literacy, character building, resilience, friendship, and confronting bullying through the power of words. She is also the creator of a children’s writing journal that encourages word collection, self-reflection, and identifying personal strengths drawn from life’s challenges. For more information about Gifts and S.P. Brown’s inspiration for authoring the novel, please visit www.spbrownwrites.com.
S.P. Brown’s thoughtful responses to questions about her path to authorship, her love of writing for young readers, and the creative practices that continue to guide her storytelling can be found below.
Writing as a Lifeline: How S.P. Brown’s Journey Began
1. Have you always wanted to be a writer? If not, when and how did your writing journey begin?
I did not always know—at least not on a conscious level—that I wanted to be a writer. However, writing has been my preferred communication medium, particularly when I needed to express difficult feelings and emotions. I spent my teenage years exchanging long handwritten letters daily with my best friend. We were both growing up in difficult home situations, and we would write letters every night about whatever we were experiencing—in real time–and how we were feeling about it. Five, ten, fifteen, and sometimes over twenty handwritten pages on lined loose-leaf paper, front and back. How challenging the prior evening was, predicated the length of the letters that we exchanged between classes each day. We had no awareness of how profoundly therapeutic this practice was. Writing our stories became our respective coping mechanisms. This was how my writing journey began. I began writing creatively as an adult in my thirties, about twenty-five years ago.
Finding Her Genre: From Fantasy to Coming-of-Age Stories
2. Have you always wanted to write children’s books. What about them attracts you? Have you considered writing other kinds of books? What genre and why?
In 2010, I began writing a young adult fantasy tale about an African-American teenage heroine with powers that she is unaware of at the beginning of the story, and a quest to control the powers and save humanity. Fantasy was my favorite genre growing up, and I yearned to create a story about a character of color. I wrote 75 percent of this story and put it down, realizing sometime later that I had another story within me. Several years later I wrote Gifts in Brown Paper Packages, my coming-of-age novel written in 2017 and published in 2021. Eventually, I would like to return to fantasy and complete my inaugural writing project. I have also mused about writing romantic comedies.
Writing for Young Readers: Taking the Leap into Children’s Books
3. What made you decide to take a chance at writing children’s books?
I began writing The Gifts Journey children’s chapter book series in 2022 after receiving consistent feedback from educators who read my novel and encouraged me to recreate the novel’s character-building and resilience-focused themes for younger audiences.
Creating Characters with Purpose and Personal History
4. Where do you get your ideas for your characters and for the story?
So far, the characters in my published work have been created and written to represent my voice, i.e., I wrote Gifts in Brown Paper Packages to find healing in my story. Similarly, Book 1 of The Gifts Journey Series, Kyrie’s School Blues, encompasses fictional characters who represent real people from my childhood. However, my character in the fantasy narrative awaiting completion is one I created from my imagination–triggered by a desire to see a young Black heroine with magnanimous powers be the main character superhero in the story.
Letting the Story Lead: S.P. Brown’s Writing Process
5. How long does it take you to write the story? Do you do any outlining or storyboarding? Why or why not?
Kyrie’s School Blues took me only two weeks to write because I merely lifted an excerpt from my novel, fleshed out the themes, and created dialogue. Book 2: Kyrie’s Difficult Decision took about four to five months. I have not done outlining or story boarding in the past. My process is to think through a loose overarching scope of the story—and then start writing. The story comes to fruition on the page.
6. Is there anything you would like to add or tell us about your writing process?
Music is therapeutic to me. I love to listen to music as I write; it stimulates my creativity. Because I also love to sing, I usually stick to jazz when I am writing to reduce the possibility of being distracted by singing along with the lyrics.