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In this episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show, I’m talking with novelist Whitney Cubbison, who lives in Paris and writes romantic comedies inspired by her experiences as an American expat navigating dating, divorce, friendship, and life abroad. 

But what makes Whitney’s story so interesting isn’t just the Paris setting or the dating disasters—it’s how she became a novelist in the first place.

Whitney didn’t grow up planning to write novels. She spent many years working in communications and PR for Microsoft, writing speeches and corporate communications. Writing was always part of her life—she journaled for years—but fiction wasn’t something she had seriously considered. 

That all changed after her divorce, when she found herself going on a series of truly terrible dates in Paris. Every time she told the stories to friends, they kept saying the same thing: “You have to write a book.”

Eventually, she did.

She started writing down her experiences on a plane after a work trip, without really knowing how novels worked or how to structure a story. Like many first-time writers, she wrote first and figured out structure later. 

She describes that early draft as basically pouring her life onto the page and then trying to figure out how to turn that into an actual novel. What followed was a long learning process—hiring editors, restructuring the story, rewriting large sections, pitching agents, getting rejected, hiring another editor, and rewriting again. 

Through that process, she learned how novels are built and what it really takes to turn a story into a book.

Her first novel, Will There Be Wine?, grew out of that experience and became a romantic comedy about an American expat in Paris trying to rebuild her life after divorce. 

But her second novel, Will There Be Love?, was a completely different challenge. This time she wrote a fully fictional story told from four different points of view and set mostly over the course of a single dramatic weekend in Ibiza. She intentionally wanted to challenge herself as a writer by working with multiple narrators, writing from male perspectives, and compressing the timeline of the story.

One of my favorite moments in this conversation was when Whitney said that after her first book, she still wasn’t sure she was really a writer. But after writing the second book—from a blank page, building characters and story from scratch—that was when she finally thought, “Okay, I think I’m a writer now.”

We also talked about self-publishing and marketing, because of course when you self-publish, you’re not just the writer—you’re also the marketing department. Whitn