Michelle Stephens spent two decades as an architect before she let herself chase the dream she has had since childhood: writing a book. That dream now her debut mystery thriller, The Crack, is set for release with Allen & Unwin in January 2027.
Her way into all of this was a single AWC course, taken at a point when she wasn’t even sure she’d still enjoy writing. She did – and she didn’t stop at one. One course led to the next, and eventually to The Crack, which was Highly Commended in the Copyright Agency and Australian Society of Authors Mentorship Program.
A secret first course
When Michelle first came back to writing, life was already at full stretch. “I was burning the candle at both ends, running my growing architecture practice and mothering two primary school aged kids,” she says. As she eased back from taking on new clients, a bit of space opened up – and with it, she was reminded of dream. Her husband, she says, believed in it before she did: “And my husband, bless him, said I definitely had to give it a go. He believed I could do it, well before I did.”
She wanted to start small. In her forties, and years out from writing anything but architectural specifications and fee letters, she wasn’t even sure she’d still enjoy it – and the online format of that first course gave her somewhere to hide. “I wanted the freedom to see if I still enjoyed writing without any eyes on me, because I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about my dream of writing a book,” she says. “I was still having trouble even admitting it to myself!” That first course, she says, was her private little secret, a way to keep the impostor syndrome at bay before she’d even begun.
It turned out to be far more than a toe in the water. “That first AWC course, Creative Writing Stage 1, blew my mind, and I like to think of all of the courses I’ve done over the years since as my AWC ‘tertiary’ experience!” she says. The architect in her saw the logic straight away: “I’d gone to university to study architecture, why wouldn’t I invest the same amount of time learning my new craft?”
Craft, and a writing family
One course became another, then another. “But no surprises, I caught the bug!” Michelle says. Each one taught her something new. “The way we studied extracts of writing and broke them apart – to understand story scaffolding, the tropes, the arcs, the key points that most engaging stories hit – was like a lightbulb going off inside my brain,” she says. For a woman who’d spent 20 years designing buildings, breaking a story down to its structure made instant sense.
She also learned to read differently. “The courses also taught me to read critically, so that rather than just reading a piece and saying, ‘I loved it’, I was able to understand why it worked for me. Or didn’t,” she says. That fed straight into the part of the experience she rates most highly. “Learning how to deliver respectful but constructive feedback to the other writers on the course, and receive it in return, was probably the most crucial part of my AWC experience and integral to my development as a writer,” she says.
The biggest thing she took away, though, wasn’t about craft at all – it was the people. The connections Michelle made through the Write Your Novel course grew into a writing group that still connects. “All past WYN students, we have been writing, critiquing and generally hyping each other up,” she says. She is unequivocal about what it means to her: “Even if I’d never signed a publishing contract for my work, I would still always be grateful to AWC for helping me find my writing family.”
One early bit of encouragement stuck with her. Her tutor and mentor told her, “I think you’ve got something here” – and that was enough to make her believe the dream might really happen. “So AWC helped make me braver, more confident, more willing to believe that if I did the work my life might have an exciting and new Second Act,” she says.
The story behind The Crack
The Crack is a dual-timeline mystery thriller about how far a person will go for family. Its heroine, Ren Holbrook, is racing to take revenge on her sister’s killer – and perhaps save his next victim – before police can lock her away for a crime of her own. Years earlier, Ren was a teenager on a family holiday when her younger sister, Daisy, vanished from Crackerly Bay; the case went cold, and the loss slowly tore the family apart. When another girl disappears from the same small coastal town in eerily similar circumstances, Ren is certain the killer she has always known about has struck again.
It is a taut, morally tangled read. “The Crack is a short, sharp, read-in-one-sitting type of thriller that explores the grey zone between right and wrong,” Michelle says – a theme distilled into the book’s tagline: “Good. Bad. Nobody is all one thing.”
What Michelle didn’t expect was how personal the book would become. It began with a single, startling image. “I woke one morning with an incredibly vivid scene in my head, of a good person doing something very very bad,” she says. As she followed the thread it led somewhere she hadn’t anticipated – a real moment from her own childhood, “when a man tried to take my little sister from the front of our house. A memory that had been submerged in me for close to 50 years, and that my mother didn’t even realise I’d retained.”
A publishing journey with its own twists
The Crack was not Michelle’s first manuscript. Like many writers, she had a practice novel first – the kind she now describes, fondly, as “the one that lives in your drawer – and that you’re secretly glad does.” She had even begun its sequel when the idea for The Crack ambushed her over the Christmas break and refused to be ignored.
From that Christmas-morning scene, it took around eighteen months to reach a manuscript ready to send out. Michelle pitched it to agent Catherine Wallace at an Australian Society of Authors Literary Speed Dating event; Catherine signed her and took the book to publishers, and a contract followed with Echo Publishing. Then Michelle experienced her very own plot twist.
As Michelle puts it, “publishing has more twists and turns than a good crime novel.” Just four months after she signed, Echo announced it would stop acquiring new books in Australia, leaving a string of signed-but-unpublished titles – The Crack among them – in limbo. But the Echo team championed her book to Allen & Unwin, who stepped in as her new publisher.
Michelle felt every high and low of it – twice! The first offer reached her while she was on holiday in Noosa with her husband, her phone forgotten after a day at the beach. “I sent my husband a text saying, GET BACK HERE NOW!!!, and he came running back to the apartment to find me crying,” she says. Once he had convinced her it was real, there was champagne. Months later, after the Echo news and then the Allen & Unwin deal within a week, a second bottle was opened!
If anything, the whole ordeal reminded her why she does this at all. “Publication is nice but it doesn’t replace the personal satisfaction I get from creating something from nothing. Just me, my computer and an idea,” she says.
Just getting started
These days, the swap is complete. “I’ve had a mid-life life swap, now architecture is my hobby and writing is my job!” she says. Melbourne born and bred, Michelle now splits her time between Fitzroy and the Surf Coast – the stretch of coastline that inspired The Crack – and writes most mornings at her local library, thermos in hand. She keeps proper work hours and sets herself deadlines, and she has no plans to slow down. “I feel like I’m just getting started at a time when most people are told they should be slowing down!”
There’s no sign of her running out of steam. “There’s no end in sight now that I’ve finally found my voice!” she says. A second thriller is already with her agent, a third is in rewrites, and a fourth took shape over six weeks in Sardinia.
The recognition is stacking up alongside the writing. Her short story “The Wednesday Widow” was shortlisted in the Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Awards, and she’s won a Varuna Fellowship for a new manuscript, Sleeper.
If she credits one quality above all, it isn’t talent. “Stubbornness is one of the most underrated attributes in any published author,” she says. “So many people start out to write a book but never finish, and finishing is the only thing that gives you a shot. Buckle down and type to the end and I promise you’re already ahead of 99% of aspiring authors.”
Her advice for anyone thinking about it is straightforward. “That’s easy, just do it. If you’ve ever thought, wow that’s a great idea for a great book, or enjoyed writing just for fun, or loved getting lost in the pages of a good story, what have you got to lose? Or maybe you’re looking for the inspiration for your own Second Act, or wanting to meet other writers – my advice is the same – just do it.”
And she’s quick to add that it needn’t be a big commitment: “It doesn’t have to be a huge investment of time or money to get started at AWC, and you can tailor it all to your interests, skills, and availability. You get to decide what you put in and what you get out of the experience, but I guarantee that what you get in return has the power to surprise and excite you.”
To anyone who suspects they’ve left it too late, she has one last message. “Don’t tell yourself it’s too late. I thought at my age I’d missed the boat, but publishers want our stories. No one cares how old you are, or if you’re new to the game, so just write the best book you can and be brave enough to put it out there. You might find an exciting new chapter opens up before you, just like it did for me.”
Follow Michelle Stephens on Instagram and on Facebook.
Courses taken at AWC:
- Creative Writing Stage 1
- Write Your Novel
- Short Story Essentials
- Anatomy of a Crime: How to Write About Murder
- 2 Hours to Scrivener Power for Mac
- Fiction Mentorship with Cathie Tasker
- Build Your Author Platform
