ABOUT ME

My name is Carla Laureano, and I’ve been a writer for as long as I could hold a pen, completing my first short story at six and my first novel at sixteen. Over the next twenty years, I learned how books should—and shouldn’t be written—through the painful period of trial and error I like to call my writing apprenticeship, until I finally published my first novel at the age of thirty-five. I then published fourteen works of fiction over the next eight years—ten with royalty-paying publishers and four as an indie.

It wasn’t until I began helping fellow author friends put together proposals, plot new stories, and edit their finished work that I realized those long decades of effort had given me both a unique perspective on how books were made and a special insight into what made a story memorable. Over the next several years, I delved into all the theories I could find on story structure, myth, and psychology—not just to make my own work better, but to help fellow authors solve their story problems faster and more easily than ever before.

In 2022, I launched my new venture, Sophisticated Fiction, to help both aspiring and established authors take their work to a new level of elegance and sophistication. That doesn’t mean we should all aspire to write like Jane Austen—if you’ve read any of my own work, you’ll know that I favor spare and clean over flowery—but rather that fiction can be shaped, carved, and faceted until it’s no longer a vague lump of story but brilliant, sophisticated gems of prose that cut to the heart of an idea and leave the reader with an experience they’re anxious to repeat.

My goal in founding Sophisticated Fiction is to help writers of all levels and publishing paths bring their visions of story to life, whether through one-on-one coaching, editing, and critique, or through our ever-growing repository of writing, editing, and publishing material. Dig in, browse around, and if I can be of any assistance in your own writing and publishing journey, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!