Yael Goldstein-Love

How did you become a writer? This suddenly seems like a very timely answer because of the movie but, no joke, Barbies. For years my mom wouldn't get me a Barbie on feminist principle, but when she finally caved she caved big and let me get dozens. Immediately they became the live-action cast of my first works of fiction. I'd spin the stories out over months -- they were always about religious persecution for reasons I will not get into here -- and because I was deeply, weirdly committed to these dramas I was never made to clean up my room, which would have gotten in the way of story development. As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that most mothers probably wouldn't have allowed a seven-year-old's story development to trump having floors you could actually navigate and so it might be worth adding to the "how" that my mother is a (fantastic) novelist, which means I grew up in a household that took play and make-believe very, very seriously. I think giving due respect to play and make-believe might be the #1 requirement for becoming a fiction writer. Well, that and a high tolerance for rejection.

Name your writing influences. I'm not sure that there's a single book I've read that hasn't in some way influenced the writer I am. Or that there's a single book I will read that won't influence the writer I become. Is this too cheesy to say? I think it probably is, but I'm going to say it anyway because it seems so obviously true.

The ones that come to mind as having quite a lot of influence, especially for my most recent book -- Madeleine L'Engle and Octavia Butler showed me early on in my reading life that you could bend the laws of nature just a bit in order to reveal things about reality that would otherwise remain hidden. George Eliot and Henry James taught me that novels can tell you more about what it's like to be a human than actually going about the project of living day-to-day as a human ever could (at least for me). Victor Lavalle is a tremendous more recent influence for the way he never seems to worry about what genre he's writing in; he just lets his brilliance unfold in whatever form it takes. Also, I can't stop myself from adding in The Portable Curmudgeon. That little book of perfectly cynical quips on every topic made me want so badly to also wield words with precision to tame the confusing world around me. 

When and where do you write? I'm a single mother of a six-year-old, I'm getting my doctorate in clinical psychology, and I see a caseload of psychotherapy clients so I write whenever and wherever I can. If I have an hour between clients, I'm going to use it to write. If my son is occupied rearranging his Pokémon collection, you'd better believe I'm going to use those ten minutes to write. I used to be precious about my writing time. I wouldn't even open a document unless I knew I had several hours cleared to sink into creative work. I'd have been horrified back then to see the way I write now, but it really does turn out to be possible -- and actually even kind of fun -- to write in this catch-as-catch-can way.

What are you working on now? A new novel that is still in that period of play when it is impossible to describe what it actually is to anyone else, but the feel of it is slowly taking more and more definite shape in your mind. I love and hate this stage very much.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm suffering it now? I think whenever I begin a new novel I'm worried about the pace at which it's coming together, and worried that it never will, and I start trying to force it (always a bad idea for me), and go into some despair that I'll ever write a book again. But for some reason I never label that "writer's block." I label it "I'm out of ideas" or "I am actually, it turns out, not a very good writer." Same for when I get stuck in the middle of writing a draft. 

I'm not entirely sure that I know what "writer's block" means now that I think about it. Is it analogous to depression or anxiety -- a symptom that could indicate an infinite number of things going wrong, as varied as the humans struggling with it? Or is it something more specific? I'm going with the former. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? If you're not enjoying writing it, they won't enjoy reading it. I think about this every time I'm trying to plod through a scene or plotline. I'm not saying good writing is always fun -- it's often not -- but if you're not feeling the spark as you're writing, if it's feeling boring to write what you're writing, chances are high that this is not the correct way to write it. Find another way, one that breathes life into the process.

What’s your advice to new writers? Play, enjoy, keep going. It's so easy in our achievement-obsessed culture to get hung up on external goals for our writing -- I want to be published, I want to become a bestseller, I want to win prizes. These are all fine fantasies, and they might even happen, but if they fuel your writing you're going to be miserable. The only way to really sustain yourself in this work is to regard it as meaningful for reasons that have nothing to do with external validation. Try to remind yourself constantly what those are for you.

Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Possibilities (Random House, 2023) and Overture/The Passion of Tasha Darsky (Doubleday, 2007).