Lauren Morrow: On Starting Over to Move Forward With Writing

Lauren Morrow studied dance and creative writing at Connecticut College and earned an MFA in fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She was a Kimbilio Fellow and an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow and is the recipient of two Hopwood Awards, among other prizes. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares and the South Carolina Review. She worked in publicity at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now a senior publicist at Dutton, Plume, and Tiny Reparations Books. Originally from St. Louis, she lives in Brooklyn.

In this interview, Lauren discusses what inspired her debut novel, the copyediting process after it was accepted for publication, and more.

Name: Lauren Morrow
Literary agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler           
Book title: Little Movements
Publisher: Random House
Release date: September 9, 2025
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: A page-turning, tenderhearted debut about a Black woman who is finally given a chance to pursue her dream of becoming a renowned choreographer, only to find that it comes at a tremendous personal cost.

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In the summer of 2020, I was dealing with a whole-life upheaval. I’d left a great full-time job at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York to get my MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program the prior fall. My then husband and I were doing long distance, and I was overwhelmed with being alone in a new place, examining new ideas, inspirations, and theories.

Notably, one of the first courses I took was an examination of African American literature and what makes something so—does it need to tackle “African American” themes or does a book fall into that category by virtue of the author’s identity? We also discussed how and why certain books succeed, and the issue of slavery came up—up to that point, nearly every book by a Black author that had won a National Book Award centered on slavery. Bleak!

These ideas were still floating around my mind in 2020, when my world turned upside down—everything had been canceled, the next school year was in flux, and oh, my marriage had imploded weeks before the pandemic hit. So, I had some time on my hands. While things were going pretty awfully in my life, bigger things were happening in the world, so I also felt like I couldn’t complain. Instead, I wrote.

The process was about five years in total.

Draft one was a glorified journal about a woman in an MFA program in Illinois—I thought that would throw them off. It was bad. I wrote it in a frenzy that summer, then returned to it in the fall, when I thought I might shift my plan and submit a novel for thesis workshop in my final semester, rather than a short story collection as I’d planned. I’m so glad I never showed that version to anyone—it wasn’t even interesting. But I needed to get it out, and it gave me the groundwork for Little Movements.

So much of those early feelings remained. But I wanted to move the narrative away from the writing world, and I’d always wished for more fiction about the modern dance world. When I left Ailey, my dear colleagues gifted me with a framed Toni Morrison quote: “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” I looked at it one day and thought, Damn. Here we go.

There have been at least six different drafts of this novel, not including the rough draft journal version. Each round of revision has reshaped and tightened the novel. I’m so grateful for every single person who’s laid eyes on this book to help bring it to life.

I work in the publishing industry, as a publicist, so I was relatively prepared for what the process would involve. Still, I think there were two things that aren’t typically a part of my professional work that surprised me as a first-time author.

The first was landing on the cover. Some people have a clear vision of what they want for their book cover, but I didn’t. The one thing I felt quite certain about was that I wanted some sort of figure on the cover, given that it’s a book about dance. But when I started getting designs, none of them felt quite right. I didn’t want to telegraph what the protagonist looked like, but it was difficult not to do that with a body on the cover, even without a face. But in the last batch, after encouraging them to ignore what I’d said and just go for it, the cover that ended up being the final was sent. There’s no figure, but there’s beautiful movement, and I think it’s perfect.

I was also struck by the copyediting process. I thought it was going to be all typos and grammar fixes, but there were some pretty big timeline issues that came up and sort of knocked me off my center. I spent a lot of time over the weeks of that process remapping things, researching cultural references (because some of the ones I’d included didn’t line up in terms of age, time, etc.), and hoping I could pull this off. These edits required something different of me than the plot/character/setting notes I was used to. It was a somewhat mathematical process.

My copyeditor and designer saw so much in the book that I didn’t, and I’m so incredibly grateful to both!

I think I was surprised that I was able to do it!

For so long, I’d written introspective 20-page short stories. Crafting an entire novel felt daunting, and a lot of the early feedback I got from queries was that the book was a little “quiet.” This is the same word that was used to describe me for much of my life. But when I found myself at the center of a rather dramatic event in 2020, my creative voice opened up.

Much of the work I did with my agent involved adding additional layers of conflict and tension. So many things have to happen in a novel. The early drafts were so much feeling (along with a comical number of scenes of the character eating various cheeses), but I was surprised at how, with a little prompting, I was able to activate the characters and the world.

This is, in many ways, a book about starting over. It can feel like a risk to make a big change when you’ve settled into your life—whether that means moving to a new place, leaving a relationship, making a major career shift, or something else. But on those rare occasions when you feel something in your bones, you can’t ignore it.

Also, I hope this book inspires people to move! Take a dance class, hit the dance floor at a wedding, or just shake it in your living room. Whatever feels good.

Create a writing schedule for yourself and stick to it. I write first thing in the mornings, before I even have a chance to reconsider, and before anyone could possibly need anything from me. Building that time into my routine has been a game changer, as has giving myself a word count minimum while drafting. This pushes me to get to the end of a project rather than dwelling too much on details early on that may end up getting chopped anyway.