Adelle Waldman
/How did you become a writer? By the time I graduated college, I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but this felt to me like wanting to be a rock star. That is, it wasn’t something I could will into happening—it was more like winning the lottery. I knew it would take a lot of luck and hard work and talent, which I had no way of knowing if I had. I also realized that I didn’t know enough to write a novel, not the kind of novel I wanted to write, at any rate. I wanted life experience. So, after college, I moved to New York and got a waitressing job, which I had thought was Bohemian and appropriate for an aspiring novelist. After a while, I got the idea to try for a journalism job—I figured I’d work on my writing at the sentence level while getting a chance to learn more about different corners of the world, both of which I thought would ultimately help me to write fiction. This was the late 1990s, and I was fortunate enough to get a paid internship at a financial trade publication. This ultimately led to a full-time job as a reporter, then a promotion to managing editor. After a few years I was able to parlay that experience into a job as a business reporter for a newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut. I loved the work and was able to read fiction at night. In the end, I didn’t write my first novel until I was twenty-nine. It didn’t get published, which was extremely disappointing to me at the time, but the experience taught me that I could write a novel and that I enjoyed doing it. Soon after, I began writing another novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.—and that did get published, when I was thirty-six.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I am very deeply indebted to 19th Century fiction. I learned so much from the brilliant psychological and moral analysis of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Stendhal, Flaubert and Tolstoy. For me, the discovery of this vein of literature, with its emphasis on understanding and depicting human nature (with its belief that there indeed exists something called human nature)—so distinct from Modernism’s concern with form or the fiction of the later twentieth century, so interested in exploring various kinds of domestic unhappiness—was life-changing. Until I discovered these writers, I felt like I had no system for understanding people or even my own psychology—I was casting about, confused by my own experiences and emotions, frequently unhappy but unable to learn much from my unhappiness. When, finally, I read Middlemarch, I felt like I’d found the beginning. It was my introduction to a very rigorous, fair and empirical mode of understanding and analyze human behavior and motivation; it was unlike almost anything I’d encountered in more contemporary fiction, which seemed to me to be comparatively surface-y. To this day, Eliot remains my favorite author, but so many of the best nineteenth century novelists—and even a few earlier ones, like Samuel Richardson—are also excellent psychologists. Reading these books gave me tools for thinking about my own life, which went hand in hand with tools for thinking about characters and characterization, i.e. for writing fiction. My love of these novels is related to why I never got an MFA in fiction writing. I felt that the books I loved were not fashionable at MFA programs, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t fit in, that the experience would make me feel more and not less alone. I preferred to read on my own, and when I finally began to write, I relied on the kindness and patience of a few close friends who read early drafts.
When and where do you write? I write at home while my daughter is at school. When I have a deadline or am at a point in a novel where I am very absorbed, I also write after she goes to bed and on the weekends and basically any time I am not in mom mode.
What are you working on now? In addition to fiction, I enjoy writing criticism. I am now working on a piece about the twentieth century novel. I have what I hope will become the beginning of an idea for a next novel, but I’m not yet in a position to begin.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Maybe? I’m not sure. I don’t love the term, at least not for myself. It may be apt for others, but it doesn’t quite capture my own experience. That is, there have been long periods of time when I didn’t write fiction, and when I was unhappy about not writing fiction and wanted to be writing fiction, but I never felt the problem was some sort of psychological block. The problem, it seemed to me, was that I didn’t have an idea for something I wanted to write—and was capable of writing. For example, for most of my twenties, I just didn’t know enough about life to write anything that wasn’t on some level received. While this made me unhappy—it felt silly to want to be a novelist while writing almost no fiction throughout my twenties—my basic supposition that when I had a novel in me, I’d write it, turned out to be correct. That is, when I finally amassed enough material and perspective and came up with an idea, a way in/basic plot, I was able to write The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. After it was published, I went five years without writing fiction. I felt that I simply didn’t have anything more to say about the romantic and psychological problems of middle-class intellectual types. Once I found a new subject, I was able to write the book that became Help Wanted.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? To step back from a novel when I think it’s finished and then go back and re-read. When I finished writing my first novel—the one that didn’t get published—I was so pleased that I had finally written a “real” novel (500 pages! an actual plot!) that I confused my own pleasure in that achievement with the quality of the novel I had written. I thought I was exuberant because the novel was excellent. I didn’t yet know that no matter how rigorously honest I try to be with myself, I am not always capable of really seeing what’s on the page. When the work is fresh, and my emotions are high, I tend to see what I want to be on the page, what I wish to be on the page, all the deep feeling and meticulous thinking that was in my head that I wanted to express—when in fact only the barest hint of that is actually present in black-and-white, in the words I have written. I have learned that I need to allow time to pass, in order to get into a more dispassionate state, in which I am not so close to it, and am able to see what I’ve written more clearly—what effects I’ve gone for but haven’t achieved, which ones I’ve hit too hard, et cetera. Only then can I begin the long, arduous process of making it better, trying to bridge the gap between what is there and what I want to be there.
What’s your advice to new writers? To read widely and humbly—to go into novels looking not just for what is wrong with them, what we imagine we could have done better, but for what it is good about them, what works. We can learn so much from the methods of other writers—which doesn’t mean we have to blindly emulate those writers or ignore the things we dislike, but just that we shouldn’t let our higher-level criticisms prevent us from really analyzing and trying to understand what others do well. To me, at least, there is as much to be learned from that sort of approach as there is from focusing exclusively on critique, no matter how valid and deeply felt that critique may be overall. On a practical and professional level, my advice would be to take advantage of the Internet and of books about publishing to learn as much as possible about the industry and its norms. To this day, I cringe when I think of the overly casual query letters I sent in regard to my first novel. I didn’t take seriously enough what I read on the many web sites devoted to advising aspiring writers how to find and communicate with agents. I thought I was different, and as a result I presented myself in ways that now seem embarrassing.
Adelle Waldman is the author of the novels, Help Wanted, coming from W.W. Norton in March of 2024, and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was published by Henry Holt in 2013 and was named one of that year’s best books by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian, and others. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter.
