DeepDive Sneak Preview #1: Emily St. John Mandel

DeepDive: If you look back on your younger self when you were just starting out as a writer—if you could give that younger version of yourself some good advice, what would it be?

Emily St. John Mandel: I would tell my younger self to treat it more seriously and act like it's my job. When I first started out as a writer, my job was working in a retail stockroom in Montreal. That's what I was doing and where I was living when I started my first novel. And I was kind of lackadaisical about writing. It was just this vague notion I had for what to do with my life because I'd been writing since I was a kid, as a hobby. And I’d read a lot of books.

I'd gone to school for contemporary dance and graduated from this excellent conservatory program in Toronto. But by the time I graduated at 21, I didn't want to be a dancer anymore. Dancing was an obsession that had grabbed hold of me for all my life to that point, and then I let it go. And I was like: now what? So I thought: Well, maybe I could be a writer. Maybe I could take that more seriously. But it took four years to write my first novel, which is long for me.

And a lot of that came down to just not taking myself seriously as a writer of fiction. There would be periods of time when I was very immersed in it and making a ton of progress. But then there were other times when I would put it down for a month and barely think about it.

It's tricky to talk about because you don't want to sound totally mercenary, as though you're writing a novel in the same way that somebody would, I don't know, sell insurance, you know? But ultimately you're just sitting down at your desk and writing. And I think the more disciplined you can be about that and the more you can treat it as your job, the better off you’ll be. So I would tell my younger self to take it more seriously—to take myself more seriously—and write every day if I could.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment— once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in—what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.