Page 6 - May/June HER 2020

6 MAY HER
HER Feature
In
H o t S p ri n g s &
L i t tl e R o c k
up in Boston to go get my MFA in creative writing.
“My whole life growing up, ev- erybody had always said ‘You can’t make a living as a writer. That’s not really a job. You can’t do that. You’re gonna have to go find a real job.’ Sure enough, I get to gradu- ate from school and at graduate school they were telling me it’s really tough to make a living as an author, even though that’s what I wanted to do since I was seven.”
An L.A.-based program through Emerson opened the doors for Storey to take her craft to the Pa- cific by way of internships before officially making the move after graduating. Her first position was on “Exhale” with Candice Bergen in 2000, as she moved up the to- tem pole to producer.
For Storey, Hollywood was her “Plan B.” Even with credits such as “The Tavis Smiley Show” and the Emmy-nominated show “The Writer’s Room” on her resume, Storey truly desired a career as a novelist just as the idea for her first book came to fruition.
“I was producing five nights a week of television for hosts inter- viewing all the most famous peo- ple you could think of,” she said. “Think of a famous person. I’ve produced an interview with them. ... I wanted to be a novelist. That’s what I wanted to do. I was just sort of cooling my heels in L.A. working in television until I could figure out how to be a novelist. I would get up in the mornings, and I would write in the mornings. I would write in the afternoons. I would write on weekends.”
In 2006, Storey and her hus- band went to Italy, and “I told him the story of my first novel. ‘Did you know that in Florence, Leon- ardo and Michelangelo lived and worked in this town? They hated each other while they were living and working in Florence those years when Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa and Mi- chelangelo was carving the David.’
“So I started writing it as a screenplay. I’ve always been a fic- tion writer and I was just afraid that I wasn’t good enough to write that story as a novel. I just had one of those self-doubt things. Then I had one of those moments where you realize life is really short and it’s not gonna last forever. I said, if there’s one thing I wanna do if life is gonna be short is to write the story as a novel. So that moment was in 2011, and ‘Oil and Marble’ came out in 2016.”
6 May/June 2020 ¯ HER MAGAZINE
With “Raphael, Painter in