The WD Interview: Holly Black

This interview first appeared in the March/April 2023 issue of Writer's Digest. 

Every author has their unique approach to writing: Whether they start with a theme, character, or plot, the page is where their story blooms to life. As a contemporary fantasy author, Holly Black finds joy in writing the kinds of things she loves to read.

“As a person who thought of myself as kind of a weirdo growing up,” she says, “it has been an immense surprise and a great pleasure to find out that the stuff I like is also the stuff other people like. And sometimes the weirder the stuff is that I like and then I put out there, the more people actually do resonate with it.”

She isn’t wrong. In her career so far, she’s published more than 30 fantasy novels for middle-grade, young adults, and adults, spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list with several books, and has been a finalist for an Eisner Award and the Lodestar Award, and the recipient of the Mythopoeic Award, a Nebula, and a Newbery Honor. Among these books are tales of siblings discovering faeries after moving to a decrepit estate (The Spiderwick Chronicles, co-authored with Tony DiTerlizzi), people who can change someone’s emotions, memories, and luck just by touching them (The Curse Workers trilogy), and a woman working for magicians who manipulate shadows to do their every command (Book of Night).

While some of these books stray into that nebulous area of dark fantasy, there’s one thing that ties them all together: “The line between horror and fantasy is that sense of awe and wonder. You can write some truly horrific things, but if that sense of awe and wonder is there, to me, it sits in the fantasy space.”

This is exemplified in her latest release, The Stolen Heir, the first in a duology. It focuses on Suren—called Wren—a faerie living on the outskirts of the human world. When her past comes calling in the form of Oak, reluctant heir to the Elfhame throne, a path is laid out before them that will reveal secrets about who they are … and change the way Wren sees her role in Faerieland forever.

Faerieland has been explored in Black’s Modern Faerie Tales trilogy and The Folk of the Air series. This is where we began our conversation.

There was a little bit of time between when you published the trilogy and then the series, then another break before diving into this duology. What is it about this universe that keeps drawing you back in?

I talk about my fascination with faeries as being not unlike Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” view of faerie fruit. What I really love about it is here is this world that has such incredible beauty, but it’s super dangerous. You absolutely should not be drawn to it in the way you are. It has a kind of ruinous beauty, you know? That is what I really love about it—that tension is built into the way it works. Humans are not going to do well there. [Laughs] And yet, we are drawn to it. It is magic.

As I was reading The Stolen Heir, I kept asking myself, I wonder why she chose Wren’s point of view for this first book instead of Oak’s? Going from Jude’s, his sister’s, perspective in the last series, it might have seemed like the easier choice.

When I sat down and said, “I’m going to do this as a duology,” one of the things that I was interested in was what can I do in a duology that I can’t do in a trilogy and I can’t do in a standalone? One of the things I’ve seen people do that I’m fascinated with is breaking the point of views into two books. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to say, “Here’s Wren’s book and here’s Oak’s book.” It’s the same story, but where hers ends, his begins, rather than they’re narrating a book we already know.

He has a lot of secrets in the first book. So, it had to be her point of view. And as we go into Wren’s book, we learn about her world, we learn about her problems, we learn about her, and we see Oak through her eyes. When we come to his book and we find out what’s going to happen to all the people we already know, it’s something we’re coming to from being away from and have had some time to care about him in a new way. And I think it actually would have been harder to go from his point of view where he knows everybody we know already to her point of view where she doesn’t.

Without spoilers, a lot of this novel seems to be about the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives. Was that something that you came into this book knowing you wanted to write about? Or did the characters kind of make that choice for you?

I think I mostly knew I wanted to write about it. I knew Wren is a very different character than a lot of characters I’ve written. She is a character who is afraid to want stuff and is honestly in some ways a much kinder character, even though I don’t think that’s how she sees herself. She is pulled toward doing good and generous acts. And so, I wanted to write about her journey. It is a journey in which she is confronted with some choices that we have seen before in The Folk of the Air. But she makes different choices than we have seen characters make before. …

I was interested in saying, here’s a parallel story where somebody has these touchstones that we’re going to say, “Oh, wait, here are some places where Jude went this way, and this character goes that way.” Both for good and not, right? [Laughs] And I was also interested in having her figure out who Oak was as part of her journey. In terms of the actual quest, part of it is figuring out, well, what are we doing, and who is he? Is he on my side? Is anybody on my side?

Something else that I noted between this book and The Folk of the Air series is that several of the characters are children of two worlds: Faerieland and the human world. Because of this, it seems like the characters have to eventually decide where they belong. Is this parallel between the series and duology something that you decided to explore before you sat down to write?

I think that’s a thematic piece that I’ve found myself writing about a lot through the course of my career. Like, it’s something I think I come back to again and again, the idea of being caught between two worlds and being caught between two senses of self and having to have to figure out how to integrate them. I think that most stories start out with the idea of a binary choice, right? You can be this or you can be that. And each character has to figure out how not to make that choice. How to figure out how to make those two things match, how to have both.

It seems like it’s also very apt thematically to have this be written for a young adult audience. I tend to view that age as developing this new sense of self outside of what your role has been in your family or what you’ve been like at school, and you’re experimenting and figuring out this is who I want to be and these are the things I’m drawn to.

Well, I do think so much of that age is about seeing “Who am I, who am I going to be? How much am I going to follow the expectations of either my family or my peers or like myself? How much am I going to follow my own idea of who I was and … the stories I have told myself about myself? Can I tell myself a new story? And if I tell myself a new story, is that wonderful and freeing or is it absolutely panic-inducing? Because if I no longer have anything to stand on, will I be swept away?”

There’s so much of that identity that I think we associate so strongly with the teenage experience because it is a moment when you really have such a room to make such big choices. But it’s also something that we do throughout our lives. And I think that’s why like these stories have such power, like we are often reinventing ourselves.

That’s very true. And this book in particular I thought had an incredible emotional arc. I think that as writers, we often talk about how to construct a plot arc, but would you mind speaking a little bit about your strategy to writing an emotional arc like Wren’s?

Especially when you’re writing fantasy and you’re thinking about magic and you’re thinking about how you want to construct the world … well, all books are essentially torture devices, right? [Laughs] A protagonist, they have a terrible fear—they’re going to be facing it. Terrible secret? It’s coming out. Anything that they wish would never happen will happen during the course of this book.

Magic has to be thematically related to the struggles of the character and to the stuff that the character is facing. So … there are certain things that happen in this book that are really about “What am I, who am I, what is our sense of self based on?” And also about what it means to trust people.

One thing you do is you have to think about [is] how do I use the story? The time-limiting thing that we see as the beginning [to the] end to push out of these characters the stuff that they don’t necessarily want to deal with, the stuff that they are going to emotionally have to deal with. How can these things rub up against each other in such a way that they can push the characters to face the things they don’t want to face?

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I know a lot of genre writers in academic settings hear the question, “Are these fantastical elements necessary to tell the story?” As someone who has written a lot of genre fiction for middle-grade, young adults, and adults, would you mind sharing your thoughts on this approach to writing genre fiction?

Well, I think that magic is always a metaphor, right? But I think to write fantasy, it has to also be magic. I think the ways it is understood as metaphor are important. Magic is always saying something that’s allowing you to look at something slanted.

So, for instance, if you want to write about anger, we have all kinds of realistic narratives about anger, but we also have certain expectations of realistic narratives about anger. But now you’re writing about a werewolf, and you cannot just say, I think you should really just calm down. Like, you have to approach anger differently.

However, I think it’s a huge mistake to think of anger in that context as only metaphor, because also this is a werewolf, and you must be telling the story of a werewolf that you truly believe in and that you’re invested in. To me, that is the stuff that fantasy can do. It can talk about stuff in a way that isn’t just slanted. But it’s also slanted, right? It allows us to see the world differently.

We’ve already touched on this a little bit, but when it comes to writing about faeries specifically—thinking about this idea of metaphor and not metaphor—there are always tropes that readers expect about faeries, like that they can’t lie, they love riddles and wordplay, etcetera. When you were structuring your world, how did you determine what rules you wanted to incorporate?

You can look at English folklore, Celtic folklore—there’s fairies in many different cultures. So, you have this wealth of material. Whenever you are pulling from folklore, it’s different than creating a magic system from the ground up. What you get is resonant, right? We all know a little bit of it.

The familiarity that readers have with vampire fiction [means] the writer … doesn’t need to tell people about the world. But the more you move away from our expectations or the more you come up with something that is unique, there’s a certain difficulty of buy-in for the reader. The further you go away from the expectations, you get some something that’s really fun and different, but also you get a harder beginning.

When I was writing about faeries, I was writing the stuff that really resonated me, the stuff that felt true about faeries. I think whenever you’re writing in a tradition—and, in this case, in a tradition of people who have written urban fantasy with faeries—you are adding to a conversation that’s come before you. I think it’s really important to know what that conversation is, and then it’s important for you to say, OK, what am I adding? What is it about the way I look at it that’s different?

It is very interesting, especially when you said about writing what you were really drawn to. To me, part of the fun of world-building is making the imagination tangible for readers. Taking something that you really love and is real to you and making it real to somebody else so they can love it. So, other than your characters, is there anything in particular that you really love bringing to life on the page?

One thing I learned about writing fantasy is that you are describing a lot of stuff! [Laughs] You really have to make this world feel lived in.

I remember years ago doing a reading and it was all realistic fiction writers and me, and the thing I realized is I have to describe things so much more because I have to describe the real world with the same level of weight as the fantasy world or the fantasy world winds up feeling not real anymore. I have to describe a locker with the same level of intensity that I’m going to describe a tree person, right? [Laughs] Because otherwise, the weight’s all wrong. I realized just how much it’s about setting these scenes and really having them feel lived in and real so that you could imagine out of the corner of your eye really seeing magic.

A lot of your books set in Faerieland start with a map to orient the reader in the world. Do you create those maps or was that something that your publisher wanted to include?

I wanted to do a map! But I also wanted to do a map that felt like faerie in the sense that this is not a map that you yourself could calculate distance on. I think that that was important to me with the isles … I wanted it to feel like a faerie story and a fairy tale rather than a high fantasy.

I mentioned it before, but you have written middle-grade, young adult, and adult fiction. To do all three I think is really exciting and quite a feat! Is there a different way that you approach your storytelling when you know the age of the audience is different?

I try to remember what it was like to be those different ages and what my concerns were. For middle-grade, there’s a lot in the smaller domestic sphere—your friends, your family—but the world seems like a place for exploring. Everything feels more significant in the local landscape. Whereas when I think about being a teenager, you’re having adventures, right? You’re meeting people and you are becoming yourself, and you are trying to figure out how to do that. It feels really impossible in a lot of ways. The stakes feel really, really high because you’re doing everything for the first time.

Whereas when I was writing Book of Night, here’s somebody who screwed up, right? Who went out there and just screwed up. And I think that that is very much how I felt. [Laughs] Certainly not to the extent that Charlie did, but I think there is a sense that the possible moves feel smaller. You feel much more stuck in place. There’s a great fear of being stuck in place and about what that means and how many moves you have left.

Your books feel very relatable. I do wonder if that approach plays a big role in that—you’re coming to it from your own emotional space and setting up your characters that way. Which is a really beautiful way to think about your connection with your characters!

It’s a terrible way to plot, though! [Laughs] That’s how I plot: I’m feeling a feeling, and I’d really like to write a book about this feeling.

You’ve co-authored several books; does that play a role in how you plot together, coming from an emotional space? Is that something that a co-author can help you structure, or do you find it more challenging to work with someone?

I think every time that you collaborate, it’s a new experience, and you collaborate differently with each person. That is the excitement of it too. I definitely have never stuck to an outline. You can see behind me over here, I put these outlining things up on the wall, like I knew what I was doing. I love it. I’m just really bad at it. So, I feel like I’m somebody who has to write it wrong before I write it right.

One of the exciting things about [co-authoring] is, for instance, writing the Magisterium series with Cassandra Clare, she does extensive outlines, and then she sticks to it for the most part. And when I was working with her, she was much more like, “OK, we’re going to work this out, and then we’re going to do this.” And I was like, “OK, this seems exciting! This is fresh and new.” There are parts where she is going to deviate and where I was there being like, “Hello, what if we just do this?” But you know, I think the fun of collaboration is the fun of being able to do something you would not otherwise do.

Do you have any words of advice for our readers?

I think when I started writing, I liked reading about writing, and I had a lot of rules that I thought I had to follow. “Show don’t tell” is an excellent rule that is also a terrible rule, you know? I started thinking about what I like in a story. Think about your own reader pleasure rather than the things you either think you should do as a writer or that you think makes you look clever. If you write what you love to read, the rest will fall into place.