An Interview with Holly Black

I sat down with American fantasy author Holly Black to talk about her books, faeries, her long career, and more.

Holly Black, the American YA fantasy author, isn’t easy to pin down. Even a press badge didn’t help much. In the end—after four days at Worldcon (an international science-fiction and fantasy convention held this year in Scotland)—I managed to track her down and set up an interview. Black became a household name thanks to The Spiderwick Chronicles, written in collaboration with Tony DiTerlizzi. The series’ success even led to a solid feature-length film adaptation.

Black is smiling and warm, but clearly exhausted after several packed days at the convention—and after a signing event with what felt like an endless line of fans. I’d already scouted out a quiet, comfortable corner in the vast venue where we could sit with coffee and talk unhurriedly. Still, I know my time is limited, and I’m determined to make the most of it. After a few polite words, we wrap our hands around our cups and begin.

How did you become a writer? What came before the first book you published?

I think, like a lot of writers, I was a devoted reader. I read all kinds of things, but the book that probably did more than anything else to launch my career was an illustrated book by Brian Froud and Alan Lee—Fairies—which belonged to my mom. She was an artist, so she bought it for herself. Which meant I saw it when I was very young. And if any of your readers don’t know the book, or don’t know the creators: Brian Froud did the concept art for The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Alan Lee did the concept art for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So imagine the two of them in the 1970s, in a tiny English village, making the most beautiful, magical—and frightening—book about faeries. That became my idea of what faeries were, and the folklore in that book inspired me to go looking for more.

How old were you?

Probably ten, eleven, or twelve. I was young enough that it was genuinely scary—but it was also just magical.

That’s amazing. I’d never connected that book to your work. So from there—how did you actually start writing?

I always wrote as a child. I think when you read a lot, you often end up trying to write stories—and I wrote constantly. In eighth grade I wrote a truly terrible novel that was basically a mash-up of the things I loved at the time—The Lord of the Rings and Interview with the Vampire—where I tried to combine them into a story about a quest to kill a dragon and rescue some vampires. It was really bad. But I think writing is writing, so I kept going, and eventually I started the story that would become my first book, Tithe. It took me five years to write. I didn’t know how to write a book, so I just kept revising it, which I don’t recommend. Please don’t do what I did. Write a book—finish it. If it doesn’t work, write another book. But I didn’t do that. I rewrote the same book until it became five different books. In the end, I actually managed to reach the end and make something that felt like a book-shaped object—and that was my debut novel.

How did you get from there to publishing your first book? And how did you get an agent?

I entered YA at a time when the field was very different from what it is now. You didn’t necessarily need an agent. The genre was still very small—probably the smallest slice of children’s publishing.

Back then, after Tithe came out but before The Spiderwick Chronicles, I went to a children’s literature conference. There were so many people trying to find agents or editors, and everyone said you had to network. I was standing in line for the restroom when a woman ahead of me asked, “What do you write?” I said, “Oh—young adult,” and she literally turned around and started talking to someone else. YA was a genre nobody wanted. It was so small that everyone aimed younger: early teens, or picture books for kids. Around that time, Joe Monti was at the conference as the children’s book buyer for Barnes & Noble. That one person may have been responsible for moving YA out of the children’s department in the U.S. Before that, you had to wade through a lot of judgment to get to YA books; then suddenly those books were shelved alongside adult titles. That’s where teens discovered them—and more and more adults discovered YA, too. And once a few big books hit, the genre took off in a way it simply hadn’t before.

In the world of faeries, time feels almost frozen—but our technological world keeps changing. How did you deal with that collision?

I started writing Tithe sometime in the mid-1990s. Between my first and second novels—Tithe and Valiant—cell phones, and the way we use them, changed completely. There were pagers in Tithe. Teens today would probably think, “I don’t even know what that is,” and they certainly wouldn’t understand what it meant socially. But suddenly you had to deal with the fact that people generally had a cell phone. At first, a lot of writers worried: “But that means the hero can call for help. They can do all these things that used to be impossible.” Now, of course, it’s just part of how stories work. But at the time, writers were afraid we wouldn’t be able to write mysteries anymore. So those two books sit on opposite sides of that shift—before cell phones and after.

So what do you think—are faeries today allergic to cell phones, or do they use them?

Well, faeries don’t like cold iron—but I don’t think there’s that much cold iron in a phone, so…

How did you go from Modern Faerie Tales to The Spiderwick Chronicles—books for very different audiences?

I sold Tithe, but then I started working on The Spiderwick Chronicles because my friend Tony DiTerlizzi and I wanted to make this field guide to faeries. We were both deeply influenced by faeries—but that wasn’t all we had in common. Both our mothers were artists. We both grew up with Arthur Rackham. We both loved the Pre-Raphaelites. We shared a lot of the same artistic inspirations, even though I handled the writing and he handled the illustration (though he writes too).

One day I told him, “I’ll help you build this project. I’ll write the entries about the faeries.” I’d done all this research, after all. We set off, and he introduced me to his editor—who turned out to be the same editor I’d worked with on Tithe. That’s how we started building Spiderwick. So in publishing terms, the gap between them wasn’t very large: my debut came out in fall 2002, and in spring and summer 2003 the first two Spiderwick books were published.

So did The Practical Guide to the World of Faeries and Goblins come before the Spiderwick series itself?

It came after. Our editor said, “I think you should do a few small books to introduce the guide,” and we thought, “Okay, sure…” For us, the guide was the main project, not the books—but by the time the guide came out, the series had become very successful. I think people felt like, “Oh, and you also made a guide about faeries and goblins—how nice.” And we had to explain, “No—the guide is the project!”

We’re in the third decade of the 21st century, and people are still fascinated by faeries and stories about them. Why do you think that is?

First of all, faeries might look like us, but they aren’t us. When you think about a lot of the other supernatural creatures we tell stories about—werewolves, vampires—werewolves are us, sometimes. Vampires were us. They know what it is to be human because they once were human. Faeries have never been like us. They may resemble us, but they’re alien creatures with completely different moral ideas and a completely different way of seeing the world. I find that fascinating. It’s also fascinating that faeries can be an ecosystem. They’re not just pretty little sprites. There are nixies and pixies and goblins and griffins and kelpies and hobgoblins and lobgoblins—I could go on forever. Each one has its own nature, its own impulses, its own way of moving through the world.

When I think about my faeries, I think about Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” where there’s something you’re irresistibly drawn to: you want the goblin fruit even though it’s going to ruin your life. You know that if you taste it, all other food will turn to dust and ash in your mouth—yet you still can’t help taking a bite. That’s my idea of faeries. But there’s also the idea of faeries as nature spirits; the idea of faeries as a doorway into a more vivid world; and the idea of faeries as a gateway to the underworld. Faeries can stand for so many different things that, to me, they’re simply overflowing with stories.

You were one of the first authors to bring LGBTQ representation into YA. Did you have trouble publishing Modern Faerie Tales?

I was very lucky. My editor was gay, and I think he acquired a lot of the first wave of LGBTQ books. He also edited Rainbow Boys. I was lucky he saw the book through to the end. He never had anything to say about Corny (a gay character in the book). There’s no doubt the book drew some criticism. It’s hard to remember now, but in 2002 there were ways people talked about that book—and about Modern Faerie Tales in general—that made it clear they were deeply uncomfortable with Corny and with his presence in the story.

Were you worried about how it would be received? It certainly wasn’t as common then as it is now.

Not really. For a while there was this strange “Common Sense” style rating approach where, if your book had gay characters, it would automatically get categorized as appropriate for older teens—no matter what actually happened in the book. Just having gay characters raised the recommended age. It was hard to understand how weird some people were about it. But I don’t know—I wasn’t worried. I tried to represent my life in New Jersey and the people I knew, and I just hoped my books would find readers who’d love them.

Were you thinking about representation when you wrote the gay characters in Modern Faerie Tales?

One of my early critique partners, Steve Berman—who’s been with me through all my books—is a gay author. Honestly, I think I just wrote my social circle: the people I knew. Corny was a composite of a lot of people from that time. He arrived the way he arrived. I knew some of what I wanted to do with his story. But it was so long ago that mostly I remember wanting Steve to be happy with it. I don’t think, when I wrote Tithe, that I was thinking about readers. I was thinking, “How do you make a great book?” It never occurred to me to think commercially, because I didn’t understand that world at all. I just wanted to write—and, in my innocence, I believed that if I wrote a really good book, people would buy it, and it would make its way out into the world. My goal was to write something good enough.

Was your goal to become a full-time writer?

It wasn’t really a goal. I grew up with the sense that if you wanted to be a writer, you got another job. I was a production editor for medical journals, like Journal of Pain and Journal of Hand Surgery. Then I was in library school when Tithe came out. I had a friend who was a children’s librarian, and she was the only person who seemed to truly love her job—so I thought being a librarian would be a great job for a writer. I thought it would be a really good fit for my new career. In the end, I never finished library school, because I went on a promotional tour for Spiderwick, and that changed what I thought was possible. But when I was starting out, it genuinely didn’t occur to me that being a full-time writer was an option.

Maybe today it’s not as possible as it used to be?

Publishing is always a strange career. It has big highs and big lows. I also think there are more paths into a career now than there used to be—but there are different challenges, too.

In your books, faeries also seem fairly fluid when it comes to sexuality. Was that influenced by Anne Rice’s vampire novels?

I think they’re creatures of fluidity. It’s not easy to label them or confine them to one shape. So yes—it makes sense to me that they’d be fluid in a lot of ways. Do faeries have a concept of “straight” or “gay”? I assumed that, in a way, they exist on a spectrum. So there are probably faeries who are drawn to certain genders more than others. And there are also plenty who sit somewhere in the middle and love all the time.

I’ve heard publishers have strict rules about what you can include in YA. For example, the heroine in Tithe smokes. Didn’t that cause problems?

Yes—but I don’t think the rules are quite that strict, and I think they’re always evolving. I really believe that Kaye being able to smoke for part of the book reflects exactly where we were culturally at the time.

Cultures change, and what we consider acceptable changes. It’s like how—now—it’s almost unthinkable that simply including a character in a book could be something people would hesitate over, right? But again, I was just representing the people I grew up with and the people I knew. And in my opinion it’s probably good that we don’t see smoking the way we used to. Tithe is, at this point, what I’d call historical fantasy: it reflects its moment in time.

How do you feel about other writers who write about faeries, but portray them differently—or in ways similar to yours?

My books were very much in dialogue with the books that came before them. I read Charles de Lint’s Jack of Kinrowan—I’m a huge fan. Of course, the Bordertown books, too. I didn’t discover Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks until later, but it’s such a fantastic book. The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope is another wonderful faerie novel. When you enter a genre, you’re always in conversation with what came before—and what you’re trying to do is say: “What do I have to add? What’s my way of seeing the world differently?” I hoped I had something to contribute to that conversation.

I think everyone who comes in now—or who’s come in since then—adds to the conversation in their own way, and they’re going to write their own faeries, drawing on different kinds of folklore. I welcome everyone who enters the faerie field. We’re always the smaller corner compared to vampires, werewolves, and shapeshifters. I’m excited for anyone who helps readers see faeries as ancient, dangerous, and mythic creatures—something other than the Victorian idea of tiny winged children perched on flowers.

So: thank you to everyone writing faerie books—and changing how people imagine them.

To close, do you have advice for new writers on how to build a stable career?

I think it’s important to remember that careers are long. As writers, we can get very focused on our debut books. We can get very focused on “how my first book did,” and let that place us somewhere in the industry. But in the end, I think it’s important to remember that your career will have ups and downs—and your job is simply to create the books you truly love, and that your readers will love. For more about the author, visit Holly Black’s official website.