V.E Schwab: Fear, Magic, Monsters and Her Own 'Deep Lore'
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Where did V.E. Schwab grow up and how did her early life shape her love of stories?
My goal has always been to convince you that magic is here in our world and that it's a noticing issue, not that magic is something you can only account for through stories.
G'day, I'm Luke Bateman and this is In The Good Books. Today, we're stepping into the many worlds of V.E. Schwab, an author who has built her career on doors, shadows, monsters, magic and the dangerous hunger to be remembered. Her stories are stylish, atmospheric and deeply human and we are absolutely blessed to have you here with us, Victoria. Welcome to In The Good Books.
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I can't wait.
I want to begin first with more about you because as most authors, you know, people love their books and they know their name, but they don't know the person who writes. So take me back to a young Victoria. Where did you grow up and where did you first fall in love with reading and stories?
So I'm a bit of a locational misfit. I was born in California, but my dad's job meant that we kind of changed location back and forth. He was a software engineer. And so I was raised between in almost exact increments between California and Nashville, Tennessee. And if you run into me when I was 10 years old, no interest in writing, I wanted to be a World Cup soccer player. That was the only thing on my mind. That's what I was raised for in California. I was Div 1. It was everything to me. And then moved to Nashville, Tennessee right before high school to get sent to an all-girls Southern prep school and had never dealt with the Southern heat and humidity before. Yeah. I couldn't do it. It ended my football, my soccer career.
Oh, you're
kidding. I couldn't handle it. I kept having, like, asthma attacks, right? Wow.
So
I pivoted, though. I was still into sport. And I pivoted to fencing. Epee fencing.
That is a big pivot.
If you had asked me at 16, I still wouldn't have been a writer. I still would have. But I would have been on my way to being, like, an Olympic fencer for Epee.
Okay.
I had written like poetry and things, but I was always a really active kid. And so it wasn't until I got to college and I realized that the only reason I hadn't tried to write something lengthier than like a short story or poem, I was really afraid of failing. And so I really have an adversarial relationship with fear. Like I had a fear of heights, so I went skydiving, right? I had a fear of needles, so I started getting tattoos, fear of change, so I cut off all my hair. So when I realized I had a fear... of failing to write a novel, I sat down and started writing a novel.
And
that book was terrible. No plot whatsoever. It made Alice in Wonderland seem irrational. But I had figured out that I could take my voice from poetry and it would give me a sense of novelty in my prose. I'm really, really interested in semantic rhythm and cadence and flow and kind of like what kind of spell are we casting on the reader story is a communal hallucination i'm just trying to dictate the experience so yeah anyway so you would have seen me at very different points but i went to school for astrophysics i was not supposed to be a writer and yet here we are
here we are
here we are
were you a reader you know did you read growing up with stories were stories a thing for you
I did, but it wasn't like a lot of authors have a very classic origin story that they were raised in libraries and that this was... And I wasn't. I was an only child, though. So I was kind of like on my own a lot. So I was creating a lot of fictional worlds. And then I had... I just... I think a thing has to happen to make you a reader wherein you have to have the experience of looking at words on a page and finding the moment in your life when they stop being words on a page and start being a film in your head.
Yes.
And for many, many years as a precocious only child, I was very, very capable of reading and processing the words on the page, but I didn't get the magic. I didn't understand the like, what are people talking about? And then I did, I did. And once I figured it out, I was unstoppable, but for the wrong reason, which is okay.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Where did V.E. Schwab grow up and how did her early life shape her love of stories?
0:00–8:22
2
How does Schwab describe her adversarial relationship with fear and its role in becoming a writer?
8:22–16:59
3
What is the pre‑birth prophecy Schwab learned about at 18 and how does it influence her view of writing?
16:59–25:47
4
How does Schwab define magic as a ‘noticing issue’ and why does she want readers to see magic in the real world?
25:47–34:49
5
Why did Schwab run a marathon despite hating running, and what does ‘type‑two fun’ mean to her?
34:49–44:44
6
What is Schwab’s writing process for major novels like *The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue* and how does she use poetry and cadence?
44:44–52:39
7
Why are vampires Schwab’s favorite monsters and how do they embody the intersection of romance and horror?
52:39–54:51
8
What can listeners expect from the upcoming novel *Victorious* and how did Schwab know its ending from the start?
54:51–57:11