Everything You Need to Know About V.E. Schwab’s Bookography
Victoria “V.E.” Schwab is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books, including the acclaimed Shades of Magic series, the Villains series, the Cassidy Blake series and the international bestseller The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
If you’re new to ‘Maude’s Book Club’, then you don’t know that V.E. Schwab is one of Maude Garrett’s favourite authors. Garrett has said that Schwab will always be a day one “insta-buy” because of how talented of a writer she is. In a previous book chat, the community absolutely adored reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue with Garrett because of her love of the author.
Garrett was thrilled she would be able to sit down and have a conversation with V.E. Schwab. Our book club members were able to submit questions for Schwab about any of the books she has written. Schwab and Garrett hit it off instantly and they had an in-depth discussion about her process, the characters she has written and how powerful books can be.
Maude Garrett Interviews V.E. Schwab
MAUDE: You are my number one because of your versatility. I think the way you write and how you create different universes with different characters are usually morally grey, which is everyone's fave. But, I guess out of all those things, which of the books do you feel like you poured the most of you authentically into it?
V.E. SCHWAB: I think it's hard to answer that because the books I write are time capsules of the period I'm writing them. So, Vicious was written when I was 25 and Vengeful when I was 30. Darker Shades of Magic at 27. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue took 10 years. So I think it's one of those things where the obvious answer is Addie because it took so many years. But honestly, I pour everything of the age that I am and everything that I'm feeling, and everything that I wanna convey into the book. When it’s done it becomes this time capsule of who I was at that time.
Villains duology
M: What was it about 25 where you are just like, we glorify superpowers, but let's put a very realistic lens over what it would be like?
VE: Honestly, Vicious (my fourth novel) is born out of a very specific period for me because I was about to quit publishing. My first one for adults. I had a toxic relationship with my first publisher, and Vicious came out of two things. One, academic interest in how we choose who we root for. Where I make you root for bad people and the the thesis is that we don't judge people based on what they do. We judge them based on why they do it. That's the fundamental difference between Victor and Eli is not what they do, but why?
M: I also love that little nugget where you are dealing with characters that start with V and E. Was that a little nod too?
VE: I was publishing as Victoria at the time. And then we like got through edits on this book. My editor goes, “Okay, we wanna use your initials.” So we were gonna use VE, and I was like, “Great.” She said, "I never asked you what the E stands for.” I replied with, “Oh, it's Elizabeth.” There was a very long pause. She goes, “Your name's Victoria Elizabeth? It's very regal. You named your main characters, Victor and Eli, just the male versions of your name.” Then, we were both like, “Well sh**, it's too late to change any of this now.” They were just two halves of my personality.
M: So you relate to both Victor and Eli?
VE: Victor is much more me. Victor, up until I wrote Henry Strauss in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Victor was my first-ever autobiographical character. Super villainy aside, in terms of performative nature and kind of like social mimicry. I'm an introverted only child who leaned into social mimicry hard when I was growing up, and so in a lot of ways that sense of isolation.
A Darker Shade of Magic
M: You know, all is not what it seems. Something quite innocent, like a phone box or like a coat, you know, has so many more dimensions than you think. But what was it like introducing it? A darker shade of magic, but a different type of magic with the anari, and Tara.
VE: So most of my magical systems and Vicious is a magical system. It's playing with science. So I guess it often gets shoved in science fiction because it's playing with medical science. But my magical systems, whatever they are, I try to make them grounded and natural and nature-based. It's really like a love letter to Avatar: The Last Airbender and Metal Alchemist. I wanted to take my magical system and make it grounded.
M: I do think that it's a real testament, and you're right, like when we kind of explored fantasy when we were younger, it was often written by the same type of man.
VE: I should also think that sometimes with fantasy, it's telling me who's writing it. If you design a fantasy that looks exactly the same power dynamics that our world already has, what that says is you already see yourself at the centre of the story. So my stories tend to be aggressively more queer. They tend to be aggressively less white. They tend to like to take characters who are often fringe characters in those traditional white male, straight narratives, and they take them out of the periphery and they give them centre stage. My fantasy is that you got to love whom you wanna love. So instead of the power dynamic being on your identity or your sexual orientation, it is literal power in who has more magic.
M: Would you say that character and plot supersedes the world-building side for you?
VE: No, I mean they're all in conversation. I think at the end of the day, character is King and the reason character is King is if you don't care about the people that a story is happening to you don't care about the story. Like if you look at why we come back to subsequent novels in a series, we don't ever come back for the plot. We come back because we miss the people. We come back because we wanna see more of the people. You come back because you're like, I miss my friends.
M: Some of the members have jotted down questions, about all the different books. So here's one from Lisa who says, “Is the Shades of Magic series being made into a movie or a television series?
VE: It's being made into a movie. Everything is on hold right now because of the strike. But, I just wrote the adaptation myself. And turned it into the studio. So, I have to say, I'm really, really excited. We're proud. Sony is our studio and I have an amazing team.
M: Vaidin has asked a question, “What inspired Kell's Coat of Possibilities?”
VE: Oh, I love what somebody asked that! So it's two things. It's in one part what Howl’s Moving Castle is like. I just love Howell. And Kell is largely in many ways inspired by Howell. Specifically like the Miyazaki version. I love both the book and the film, but the Miyazaki version. I have a hard time talking about Harry Potter these days because it was so fundamental to me, and, as a member of the queer community, it's complicated. Yes, it's kind of ruined. But, the room of requirement in Harry Potter, this idea of a space within space of a place that has whatever you need. But even sometimes before you know what it is that you need.
M: You say that you're a cinematic writer, so you'll storyboard whether it's a graphic novel or a fully-fledged novel, but you create a beat sheet with every scene. So that explains why your pacing's phenomenal.
VE: I outline. The more books I've written, the more rigidly I do this. I truly outline every single beat. And I do it because I'm an anxious person. I need to know that there's enough story, but also it's just the way my brain works. I will outline. I mean, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue had 300 outline beats. I do that for every scene they have like a sentence of what needs to happen physically in this scene. As I dive into each scene, I'll just start unfolding it into a larger and larger outline until I have essentially every dialogue and I know what I want the outro to be.
M: It solves a problem that a lot of authors do have, where it's like they've got the whole story and the characters on the plot, but they don't know how to finish it in like a nice, succinct way.
VE: I'm like evangelistic about the fact that I believe that the ending makes the book because I think that it's the taste left in your mouth at the end of the meal. And similarly, the way that you need to care about the characters, to care about the story. I truly believe if you don't love the ending, you'll downgrade the whole book, even if it was amazing up until the last chapter.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
M: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, sat with you for nearly a decade. You had the idea and it was inspired by several different things, including the inverted Peter Pan, your dealings with dementia, and then including the fasten bargain. So I want to talk about where it all began. Even though you love focusing on the end of it all. Take it back to the beginning because this is a book that you felt like you had the idea always brewing, but it was the one that you had to write before, time was up.
VE: It was the one I had to write before I died, and I didn't. I sat on it. It took me about five years to understand the plot and my characters. Then at that point, I should have started writing it, and I didn't. Year after year, I just found reasons not to start. Until I realized at about 29, Henry's age that, I was scared. I was just too scared. I wasn't that I couldn't do it. It's just that the thing in my mind had grown too big, right? And too beautiful. And then the thing about an idea is that it's all potential and you can't mess it up, but you can mess up the concept by putting it down on paper.
Then I had to have a really hard conversation with myself around 29, where I was like, you have two choices. Either you write the book and embrace the fact that it can't be perfect or you don't write it, and you die without writing it. I had to decide whether I could live with the imperfection. So when I was 29 or 30, I finally was like, I would rather have an imperfect reality than a perfect idea.
Threads of Power
M: Can you give us any news on the Threads of Power series?
VE: Yeah! It comes out this September. It's the first book and you'll see everyone who survived the contrary of light.
M: Thank you so much for joining me, talking about all these books, diving into these characters, and blowing my mind several times. What's the next big thing that we are shining the spotlight on?
VE: Appreciate that. Right now I'm doing a Shades of Magic read-a-long over on YouTube where I am walking readers through the entire trilogy and giving behind-the-scenes looks on it. And giving away the annotated copies of each book as I finish the individual read along.
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MBC had the privilege of sitting down with author V.E. Schwab to discuss Invisible Life of Addie Larue, Vicious Duology, and Darker Shade of Magic!
Are you a fan of V.E. Schwab? Have you read the Shades of Magic series? Let us know in the comments below! Do you have any other recommendations?
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