V. E. Schwab on Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil and the Key to Her Success

You know, it's interesting. I actually wasn't a big reader when I was a kid. I was a sports kid. I was constantly moving and never sat still. I didn't really get the hype until I finally read something that made me forget I was reading for the first time. The words on paper disappeared and they became a movie that played in my head. And because of my personality type, I immediately wanted to make other people feel that way. I wanted the power to make people forget who they were for a while. 

But even though I had that urge, I didn't actually write a novel for another eight years. I wrote poetry all through my teens. I think bad poetry is a great precursor to almost every other art form. And then I tried short fiction, I tried non-fiction, I tried basically everything except novel writing, because I was convinced I couldn't do it. Essentially, I was very daunted. 

When I was 19, I realized that I was afraid of failing to write a novel. And I have an extremely antagonistic relationship with fear. When I realize I have a fear, I have to face it, it's like I get angry about it. So, I had a fear of heights, and I jumped out of an airplane. I had a fear of needles, and I have a ton of tattoos. Realizing I had a fear of failing to write a novel is the thing that made me put my butt in chair and start writing a novel. I succeeded, but it was terrible. It was all vibes, no plot, but in the bad way. 

But it did teach me that I could technically do the thing, so I immediately sat down and tried again. I wrote my second novel, The Near Witch, when I was a senior in college. It became my first published book, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, is the 25th published book. 

It's continuously changing. I think the thing that we have to remember as readers is that authors are creating stories that then become permanent, but we continue to change as people. In that way, my novels are a time capsule of who I was when I was writing them, and that’s true for my craft, as well. My process is continually evolving. 

I will say that over the last 10 years or so, it's codified a bit as I get to know my own mental landscape. I'm a deeply neurotic and anxious individual. So, a lot of my creative process is about empowering myself and encouraging myself to not quit. I'm somebody for whom a bad writing day can become a bad mental health day. Everything feels very precarious. That's probably because writing takes up a huge role in my life, and I need more balance. 

A lot of my tactics and techniques are built around what I personally need, and they might be totally different for somebody else. That's my caveat: nothing I'm saying is prescriptive advice. But what I've discovered is that I need to know a certain amount to feel confident to write the story. If I don't know a certain amount, I will begin to doubt that there is enough there, and then I will convince myself not to write it. 

Over the last five to eight years, the amount that I've needed to know has gone from roughly 50% of the book to every single beat for every single character in every single scene. That might sound like it takes the magic out, but this is part of my process and that is the magic for me. I spend six months to a year making a skeleton for my book, outlining it, planning it, plotting it, figuring out every single structural element that I want to be in it. And then when I sit down to actually write the book, I know there is a story there. 

Part of the reason my process evolved is because my novels tend to have large structural elements. As a writer, you learn that the story has two forms. There’s the narrative order and the chronological order. The narrative order is the order in which the reader experiences the book, and the chronological order is the order in which the characters experience the story. I build the narrative order. That's my beat sheet, where I figure out everything, and then I take it apart and then put it into chronological order for all my characters. That's how I write it, knowing that I'm gonna fit it back into its narrative order when I'm done. It sounds unhinged. Like in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, I think had somewhere between 300-350 scene cards. 

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil was right about the same, maybe actually a few more, because Sabine’s story is so long. I'm literally twenty-four hours out from finishing Victorious, which is the third and final Villains book. The final battle sequence had like twenty-three scene cards, because those books are structured in this kind of comic book without pictures really punchy style. So everything about my stories change, but the way that I build them for myself behind the scenes doesn't. And it’s all so that I will not quit or hold down the delete key over the course of the process.

I don't have a work-life balance. Let's put it that way. I have a work-work balance. I have to have a really structured life. I'm a bit all or nothing, so I find that if I don't have accountability on a daily basis, then a day can become a week can become a month, where I haven't done a thing that's important to me. I have a habit tracker, wherein I chart things which are important to me over the course of every single day. 

I'm very big into fitness, which is an interesting counterpoint to writing, but I find it a really important one. Because writing is not only a really sit-still job, it's also an incredibly intellectual and internal pursuit. It's important for me to have a way that I can value my worth for that day outside of how the writing went. If all I have is writing and then I have a really terrible writing day, it can kind of ruin me. But if I have a shit writing day and then I have a really great run, I'm on top of the world. It burns a lot of my nervous energy off, and I require the endorphins. 

I have other structural things, too. I know that I have to stop writing by a specific time in order to sleep that night, and that’s usually seven hours before bed. Sometimes I'm really good at it. The thing I've learned over the last few months is that my brain is a really unreliable narrator when it comes to how I'm doing. So I kind of need a lot of those external checks and balances to kind of give myself proof that I'm doing okay. Everything that I do works for me and would probably like unhinge most people.

Ideas are so interesting to me because we often talk about them as if they're a single entity. I like to think of ideas more as a meal. A meal can be three ingredients. It can be 30 ingredients. For me, ideas are the ingredients I've collected for a meal. I look at something like Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, and it's informed by The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. It's set in the same world, and I wanted to explore the flip side immortality. Addie LaRue is a story about immortality and hope, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a story about immortality and hunger. 

I wanted to create a dark parallel. But I also wanted to explore the inherent queerness of vampires. I wanted to explore complex morality, especially in a lesbian space, because so often and for so long, it felt like I couldn't write a queer villain or a lesbian villain without it being construed as a conflation of queerness and villainy, which is so reductive and simplistic. I am somebody who loves writing antagonists and writing villains. It felt really frustrating, because I felt like I never got to be the main character in any of the stories I was telling. I wanted to explore toxicity in relationships. And I really wanted to explore falling out of love. All of these things become ingredients. 

Another random ingredient is I grew up an only child, and for some reason, my parents instilled in me this fear of one night stands. Because you're either letting a stranger into your bed or you're going into a stranger's bed, and either way is a little dodgy. No judgment, very sex positive here, but there's an inherent risk involved. So I thought it would be really funny if Alice, our modern day protagonist, essentially has a great one night stand and then wakes up dead. That was one of the original ingredients at the heart of this story. 

As somebody who came out in their late 20s, you also feel like you missed your entire youth. You feel like there's a grieving period for the person you never got to be. These three women became iterations of my own coming out journey and stages. All of those things come together into a novel that I was scared of and avoided but that I so desperately wanted to write.

Surviving it. Sabine’s storyline was the most cathartic for me. Voice-wise, she's probably the most me, and I knew she was going to be the villain. That's not a spoiler. I really looked forward to writing her. That was the third of the book where I just felt I was having fun. And I think part of that is the same way I got excited writing Victor Vale, which, I'm not a terribly emotional person. Or I should say that I don't feel positive things really loudly. I feel loudly. And I think Victor and Sabine are very similar. Writing them felt less like having to put on another person, and more like drilling down to a lot of myself. So even though there's a poetry to Sabine, I still felt like it was poetic the way I am, which is just a little raw, just a little visceral. 

I found Charlotte to probably be the hardest one to write, because she's the most emotional. She's the most empathetic. One lives in her head, that's Alice. One lives in her heart, that's Charlotte. And one lives in her hunger, that's Sabine. And so, Sabine was the most fun.

The thing about my work is I really hope that it gets under your skin a little bit. That can be positive, like, I love this book and I want to reread it forever. But I'm also just as happy with, I read this book six months ago and I can't stop thinking about it. I want it to linger. I want it to be something that you hold onto. Because I think the mark of a good book or a great book, is that it changes our chemistry a little bit. I want you to be a slightly different version of yourself when you're done reading it. That's the kind of story I want to tell. 

It's escapism on some levels. It's a catharsis on some levels. Hopefully, there's at least two scenes in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil that make you cry. There's only one scene that made me cry while writing it. So, I hope that it's emotional, but I also hope that it's cathartic. This is a book where you don't have to love all three of these women, but I hope that you care deeply about one of them.

I think that I'm still here. I'm a very spite-driven person, and I had a really rocky first five or six years. Part of it was I started young. I had some really toxic experiences. Early on, I had a series canceled. I had to make apologies in-house to an entire publisher because, I quote, “hurt their feelings" after they canceled my series by announcing that they canceled my series. I just had a lot of things not go very smoothly early on. There were several times I really could have quit and I didn't. 

I let spite be a little fire in my heart, and I really think that it's underrated. Hope is great. But sometimes in this industry, or whatever industry you're in, especially if it's one where it's a bit cutthroat, it's totally okay to do things to prove your haters wrong. 

I was told again and again very early in my career I would never be commercially successful because I didn't write the right kinds of books. I spent a lot of my first 10 years in publishing trying to assimilate in different ways, trying to take up less space, trying to blend in, trying to win readers who didn't like to read women. 

Somewhere over the last five years, I just got really tired of that. In a lot of ways, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is my reckoning with myself, as well as publishing. I decided I’m not going to try and win on their terms anymore. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue gave me permission to do that because of its success. It gave me the creative liberty to try something. I went to Tor in the wake of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue with a pitch that was immortal vibes standalone set in Addie’s world with a cameo: “It's gonna be so different, and you're gonna have such a hard time selling it.”

Tor never flinched. They were on board from day one; they've just been the biggest champions. But because I have not had that experience for my whole career, I know how rare it is. And I don't take it for granted.