Interview with Elizabeth White

Elizabeth White’s day job is teaching chorus and piano at LeFlore High School in Mobile, Alabama, and her hobbies include playing flute and pennywhistle and painting. But her real passion is writing romance and romantic suspense. Her novels for Zondervan and Love Inspired have been finalists for the American Christian Fiction Writers Book of the Year award and have won Romantic Times Book Club’s Reviewers Choice award, as well as the Inspirational Readers Choice.


Would you please share with Favorite PASTimes about your road to publishing? What were some of the surprises along the way?

Even as a teenager I enjoyed writing stories in a big flowered notebook hidden under my bed. But it wasn’t until I took a fiction-writing course at the University of South Alabama in 1986 that I realized there might be a market for what I wrote—romance with a Christian world view. To make a long story short, the first book I finished and submitted got close to publication. Even after the ultimate rejection, I was hooked—called, if you will, to write. I was determined to learn whatever it took to write a publishable novel.



I joined Romance Writers of America, then joined the Gulf Coast Chapter of RWA and met other writers with similar goals to mine—generous women who were also great teachers. At our local conference in 1998, I met an editor who was instrumental in my first sale to Tyndale’s HeartQuest romance anthology series. I’ll never forget her phone call telling me that my submission looked great! One of the biggest thrills of my life.

Surprises? That writing is harder than it looks. Well, it’s easy in some ways, but finishing a product that people other than my family would be interested in reading is excruciating. Write, rewrite, revise, edit, re-edit. It seems to never end! But then, finally, there you are one day with a published book in your hand. I think that’s amazing.

Please tell us something about Redeeming Gabriel.

Redeeming Gabriel is about a jaded Union spy who infiltrates Mobile, Alabama, with the goal of finding and destroying an underwater torpedo boat rumored to be under construction in the sleepy Confederate port city. Gabriel’s mission is complicated when he falls in love with Camilla Beaumont, whose father is the financier of the boat. But Camilla has secrets of her own, including an active role in the coastal leg of the Underground Railroad. Divided loyalties make Camilla and Gabriel’s journey to peace in a time of war unlikely—but God has a way of making the impossible come to pass.

What influenced you to write Redeeming Gabriel?

The idea for Gabriel came to me when I visited the Museum of Mobile with my son’s fourth-grade class. One look at a replica of the Hunley, the very first operational submarine, which was constructed in Mobile during the Civil War, and I knew I had a story. I tried to imagine what would happen if the Union naval command found out about it and tried to stop its deployment by sending in a spy. And further, what if the spy fell in love with a Confederate belle while he was undercover? And what if she were an abolitionist and couldn’t tell anybody?



What are some of the historical novels that you’ve most enjoyed reading?

I’ve always loved historical romance and adventure. I read piles of Regencies and westerns as a teenager, and devoured Elswyth Thane’s "Williamsburg" series as well as Samuel Shellabarger’s historical novels. So as a genre it’s a natural fit for me.

My favorite Regencies include Georgette Heyer’s Faro’s Daughter, Carla Kelly’s One Good Turn and Loretta Chase’s The English Witch. I love all of Zane Grey’s westerns, but my favorite is The Mysterious Rider, and I own about 45 Max Brand paperbacks. Another favorite historical is Escape from Bucharest by Robert Tyler Stevens, which is set at the end of WWI. Classic.

The titles of your historical novels, Redeeming Gabriel and Reforming Seneca Jones seem to have similar themes. Could you share more about this? And does a similar theme cross into your contemporary works, as well?

Wow, good call. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that before. Yes, both those books feature heroes who are good men with strong ethics and commitment to patriotic ideals, but whose spiritual foundation is cracked by abandonment and abuse. Seneca is set during the Pony Express era when men who survived the settling of the American West were hard and adventurous. Similarly, Gabriel Laniere’s background in espionage has made him spiritually cynical. The young Christian women who fall in love with them must be both patient and careful about developing a friendship with an unbeliever. Part of what I wanted to do in each of these novels was to show emotional restraint, allowing God to work in the loved one’s heart before committing to a permanent relationship. I touched on a similar theme in Fireworks (the hero is a believer, the heroine is not), but in more recent works I’ve found it absorbs too much of the emotional conflict of the story if one or other of the lead characters is completely separated from God. There are so many other spiritual difficulties to work through than that first step of being born again.



Is your fiction usually more plot or character driven?

Sometimes one, sometimes the other, it depends on the story. But usually the characters push the story along. More than half my books are sequels – not exactly a formal series, but sort of a spin-off where a secondary character captures my imagination to the point where I need to know what happened to him or her.

For example, Gabriel Laniere appears in my upcoming Love Inspired Historical, Crescent City Courtship (June, 2009). In trying to imagine where he would be 15 years after the close of Redeeming Gabriel, I sent him to New Orleans and gave him a career as a medical school professor. Then I developed a couple of interesting students for him to mentor—brilliant, wealthy and difficult John Braddock and his nemesis, Abigail Neal, a young woman with the impossible dream of earning a license to practice medicine in 1879. I spent a year or so figuring out Abigail’s background as the daughter of missionaries to China and John’s spoiled, arrogant family; the story of their romance flowed from there.

Who or what inspires your writing? What keeps you going with your writing each day?

Come back tomorrow for the answer to this and more questions.
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