Victoria (V.E.) Schwab is a #1 New York Times best-selling fantasy author of more than 20 books. In this interview with a Minnesota high school student, she shares her thoughts on how to handle the trials of creativity in a time when creative pursuits, especially by women, are diminished.
V.E. Schwab photo by Jenna Maurice
It is practically in the adolescent development rulebook for teenagers to have idols. For me, V.E. Schwab is one of those idols. I fell in love with her writing in middle school, when I read City of Ghosts. Schwab has a talent for making it feel as though the words you are reading were written just for you — like an intimate bedtime story. When I had the opportunity to interview her for the Minnesota Women’s Press, when Schwab was visiting Minneapolis, I wanted to hear what advice she had for aspiring female creatives (like myself).
Schwab is candid. At 37, she has had a successful career since selling her debut novel to Disney during college. . She told me that, like it or not, she has become a brand and it can be a struggle to adjust to the weight of social expectations that go along with that brand.
She was honest about the self-doubt that she faces, despite the success. “My self criticism gets really loud, really fast,” says Schwab. “My perfectionism is so steep that Addie LaRue almost didn’t get written because …I got to a fork in the road and I had to decide between [wanting to execute] a perfect idea and [executing what I considered] an imperfect reality.”
Perfectionism and being your own worst critic is tricky to navigate, she admits.. “‘If it can’t be perfect, it’s not worth doing at all’ is the worst mantra that you can have in anything — in sports, in arts. It’s not going to carry you. So I have to make peace. I have to remind myself that it’s not about writing the best book possible” — meaning, it is not about perfection, but about creating a piece of work you are proud of that executes a concept you were inspired to share.
We talked about dealing with criticism as well. She indicated that feedback is not supposed to be about your emotional response to it — positive or negative — but whose voices you value.
She explains that by weighing feedback equally from a wider audience, rather than close peers, criticism loses some of its power.
Schwab points out the variety of subjectivity in creative fields. Art will always be loved by some and not liked by others. To make something that is universally loved is not possible, and misses the point of creation in the first place. “Once you’ve had the privilege of receiving messages from people for whom your book was everything, it is very easy to let go of the people for whom it wasn’t.”
Schwab had to find the balance between “making art just to make art” and making art sustainable. She denounces the idea that if you engage in both business and art, you are less of an artist. She also rejects the nobility of the starving artist, and the prerequisite of depression or being a mad genius that she says are not necessary for creating good art. “The starving artist is a fun little concept we use in fiction, and it’s hell in reality,” she says.
Schwab says planning is immensely important to her writing process. She creates intricate outlines before writing a novel. These intensive planning periods take about a year per novel). She says it helps her work through all the kinks in a work before starting in earnest to write.
What I learned from our conversation is that, rather than trying plot holes when you’re already knee deep in the creative process, it helps her to work through all the hard stuff first. After that, you can fully commit to the flow of sentences, brush strokes, and chords.
The difficulty of creativity, Schwab adds, stems from our own minds. A key to working through anything, she suggests, is to cut tasks up into small chunks. “[Writing] is so consuming, it can be hard to realize that it’s actually just about putting words on paper. [My advice is to] make the work as small as possible. I sit down and think, ‘I’m writing this scene, I’m writing this page, I’m writing this chapter.’ Do whatever you need to do to make the work doable.”
Amelia Busse is a junior at Jefferson High School in Bloomington.
Excerpt
V.E. Schwab’s upcoming book, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (on sale by Tor Books June 10, 2025) has been described as “Equal parts satisfying and unsettling … it’s really about hunger and rage and grief and our soul-deep need for connection.” The novel features three young women — from Santo Domingo de la Calzada in 1532, London in 1837, and Boston in 2019 — “their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots. One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild. And all of them grow teeth.”
From page 282: “Standing there, halfway down the steps, the hope goes right out of Alice’s sails, because it’s obvious that this is another dead end. It’s a coffee shop — she can smell the beans roasting from the street — and she wants to sit down on the stop and cry, but she can’t even do that now without creating a scene. She should probably just turn around and walk the two miles back to campus, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Her legs are stuck, not the way they were back in the graveyard, but leaden, as if they’ve simply lost the will to listen to her. Maybe it’s the fact she’s come this far, and she has no other leads, or that this place feels familiar in a simple, human way, a nod to the girl she was before, the one who constantly found refuge in café corners, fingers curled around a mug of tea, or the fact she can still hear the music, spilling softly through the door.”
Details: veschwab.com
