I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between writing a story and telling one. They aren’t the same thing — not even close. A story written on a page and a story spoken aloud are almost separate creatures. And a story delivered as a letter? That’s something else entirely. Something I’ve discovered only recently, with a series I’ve been quietly building called Letters from Caroline.
All three of these formats have been part of my life as a storyteller. Each one has taught me something the others couldn’t. And I’ve started to believe that the way a story reaches us — the vessel it travels in — shapes what we actually receive.
The Novel: A World You Can Live In
When I wrote Call of the Blackbird, I was building a world. That’s the only word for it. A novel doesn’t just deliver a story — it constructs the conditions for a reader to inhabit it. The smells, the silences, the texture of an afternoon in another century.
That kind of immersive storytelling requires time — yours and mine. You bring an hour, a quiet corner, a willingness to let your present life recede. I bring years of research, hundreds of decisions about what to include and what to leave out, characters I’ve lived with long enough to know how they take their tea and what they look like when they’re frightened.
The novel is the most complete form I know. There’s room for everything: the historical record, the emotional truth, the question that can’t be answered. A reader told me recently that she had to stop and Google something from Call of the Blackbird to see if it was real. That’s the moment every historical novelist lives for. When the line between documented history and imagined life blurs in the best possible way.
But novels are also slow. They take years to write and hours to read. They are, by design, a commitment — and a wonderful one.
The Spoken Story: History That Breathes
There’s something that happens when I tell a story out loud that doesn’t happen on the page, and I didn’t fully understand it until I started speaking at events.
When I speak — at a book club, a historical society, a literary gathering — I can watch the moment a room connects. I can see the face of the woman in the third row who suddenly leans forward when I mention a date, a name, a photograph. I can feel the room go quiet when the story takes a turn they didn’t expect.
Oral storytelling is ancient. Before books, before writing, this is how history traveled. Mother to daughter. Elder to child. The story was kept alive not in ink but in breath. There’s a trust built into that exchange that writing can’t quite replicate. You are telling someone a story directly, watching it land.
When I speak about the research behind Call of the Blackbird — about the archival discoveries that became turning points, about the real people who inspired fictional ones — I see something happen that doesn’t happen as readily with the book alone. People reach back into their own family histories. They tell me about their grandmothers’ trunks and their great-uncles’ letters. The story opens a door, and they step through it into their own past.
That is a kind of connection I treasure more than I can say.
And it’s why, of all the things I didn’t expect to love about having Call of the Blackbird available in audiobook form, the response I hear most often is this: “I listened to it at night.” Who doesn’t love a bedtime story? There’s something about hearing a voice in the dark — the room quiet, the day finally finished — that carries us back to the oldest form of storytelling there is. Someone is reading to you. You don’t have to do anything but listen. That, too, is history traveling in breath.
Letters from Caroline: History in Your Hands
The newest format I’ve been exploring is one that started as an experiment and has grown into something I can’t stop thinking about.
Letters from Caroline is an epistolary series — a collection of stories told entirely through letters. Not letters as a framing device, but letters as the story itself. The intimacy of a letter, its directness, its particular mixture of the formal and the confessional — I’ve become convinced it’s one of the most emotionally honest forms of storytelling that exists.
There’s a reason we keep letters. Long after the person who wrote them is gone, the letter carries their voice. I’ve held letters in archives that were written two hundred years ago, and I could hear the person clearly — their worry, their love, their careful attempts to say something true without hurting someone they cared for. That tension lives in a letter in a way it lives almost nowhere else.
Writing Letters from Caroline is a different experience than writing a novel. A novel gives me room to explain, to contextualize, to move between perspectives. A letter forces discipline. Every sentence must carry weight. The narrator can only know what she knows. And what she doesn’t say is sometimes the loudest thing on the page.
Letters from Caroline is available now as a subscription — six months, twelve letters, arriving in your mailbox one at a time as the story unfolds. That pacing is intentional. A novel asks you to sit down and give it hours. A letter asks you to wait. And something happens in that waiting — the last letter settles before the next one arrives, and you find yourself living inside the story’s rhythm rather than simply reading it.
If there is someone in your life who loves history, who has ever unfolded an old letter and felt the presence of the person who wrote it — Letters from Caroline makes a beautiful Mother’s Day gift. Whether or not you’ve spent time with Call of the Blackbird, I think you’ll find yourself watching for the mail in a way you haven’t since childhood.
If you’ve ever been moved by a letter — really moved, by the handwriting or the words or the date at the top of the page — you’ll understand why this format found me.
What I’ve Learned from All Three
Here is what I’ve come to believe: the same story, told three different ways, does three different things to the person receiving it.
The novel invites you into a world. The spoken word invites you into a conversation. The letter invites you into a confidence.
None of them is more or less valuable than the others. They reach different parts of us, at different moments, when we’re ready for different things. And for a storyteller, learning to work in all three forms isn’t just a craft exercise — it’s a deeper understanding of what stories are actually for.
They’re for connection. They’re for remembrance. They’re for the moments when we look at the past and recognize ourselves.
If you haven’t yet spent time with Call of the Blackbird, I’d love for you to start there. It’s available in paperback, Kindle, audiobook, and now letter by letter to your mailbox. Caroline’s story is finding its voice, and your heart.
With love for the past,
Nancy