Life’s Work: An Interview with Danielle Steel

Working on an old Olympia typewriter that she’s had since the start of her career, Steel has written 170 novels (as well as nonfiction and children’s books). Her debut— Going Home —was published when the first of her nine children was a toddler, and she completed many of the rest while her kids were at school or sleeping, often juggling multiple drafts of different books at once. Her latest is Flying Angels . The best-selling author attributes her popularity to being able to write honestly about “the things that hurt us or scare us” while always giving her characters “safe harbor” and her readers “a sense of hope.” Brigitte Lacombe HBR: Why and how do you produce at such a crazy pace? Steel: I used to not do as many books because I was bringing up nine children, which is time-consuming. But at a certain point, people were saying, “Can’t you write more? Can’t you write faster?” My publisher asked me to go from four to six books a year, and I thought, There’s a challenge. I’ve always worked on several books at once anyway—like an artist working on different canvases, putting them aside, then coming back. Then they asked me if I would go to seven, and I find that I enjoy it. After so many books, how do you come up with new ideas? Most of the time they fall out of the sky. Sometimes I read a story in the newspaper or hear about someone’s experience, and it sparks. And then I play around with it for a day or two and make notes. If I don’t like the way it feels in those preliminary scribbles, I don’t pursue it. But if it looks like it’s beginning to work, I go with it. I start thinking of the different twists and characters, and it snowballs. Eventually I handwrite an outline. That can be a six-month process, which is very important because I get to know the people, and the plot starts rolling. Then I do a typewritten outline that I send to my editor: Does she thinks it’s cuckoo or boring or good? Sometimes she loves the idea, or two or three things concern her, and she’ll share those. When she sends it back, I start. How does the process go from there? I write each first draft from beginning to end. If it’s stuck, I unstick it; otherwise it will stay stuck. I don’t work on some chapters of one book and then switch to another, because I would get confused. Once I accidentally put a character from one book in another, and when I was rereading, I thought, Oh my God, what is this person doing here? So I write a full draft, but I put it away while my editor goes over it and go to another book. I do about five drafts of each. The process is good. It’s like marinating and seasoning the books. When I come back, I see things that I want to add or things I think are unnecessary. It gives me perspective. How do you manage all those deadlines? I’m not one of those writers who do two or three hours in the morning and then lead their lives. When I’m working on a book, I really stay with it. I have a lot of energy, and I don’t sleep a lot. I have no hobbies. I don’t do gardening or macramé. I’ve never taken piano lessons. I’m very, very disciplined. I work about a 20-hour day. I take about five days off at Christmas, if my publisher allows, and a week in the summer. Part of it is that my house emptied out. When your kids are young, you’re running to ballet class and soccer practice and the orthodontist, and there aren’t enough hours. But when that’s gone, it’s like, What do I do now? My marriage ended around the same time the kids left, so I just worked more and more. I don’t have anything else to do! But even when you were in the thick of parenting, you were still publishing quite often. Four a year, which was more manageable. When they were very little, I wrote only when they were asleep. Once they were in school, I would write while they were there, stop and do all the running around with them, and then write again when they went to bed, so I would get about four hours’ sleep. Occasionally one would have a nightmare or an earache, and my sleep would go out the window. One of my sons had a gorilla under his bed for several years, which really interfered. But I just had a need to write. It’s a part of my soul. When did you realize it could be your profession? Like most things in life, it happened by accident. I always wanted to be a fashion designer. I was very artistic. I went to French school and spent a lot of my life in Europe, and my dream was to go to Parsons School of Design, which I did; it was a joint program with New York University. But then I got sidetracked. Parsons was very intense: It weeds out the people who aren’t made for the stress of the fashion business. I was 15 when I landed there, and one of their things was to have somebody from Seventh Avenue come and criticize your work. It was terrible. I was left absolutely crushed. So I ended up working in a boutique ad and PR agency, and one of our accounts was Ladies’ Home Journal. I freelanced for them, and the publisher told me, “You write very well. You should write a book.” I was 19 years old, married with a new baby, and I thought, Oh, OK. Youth is so bold: You think you can do anything. I tried it, and I enjoyed it. My husband had a friend whose father-in-law was an important agent, and I gave him my book. He took forever to get back to me and finally, very sweetly, said, “This isn’t your talent. You should enjoy your baby, learn to cook, blah, blah.” (I’ve never done that, by the way, as my children will testify; I cook, but it’s a terrible experience for everyone.) Then I found a second agent—a woman—who was very interested and sold the book to Simon & Schuster. By that point I’d already written another book. Then I wrote five more, but those didn’t sell to anybody, so don’t ask me why I kept writing. I just got hooked. Why did you stick with it through that dry patch? I’m terminally stubborn. I still had a job. I worked at that ad agency for five years and then I taught creative writing, so the books were a sideline. Finally, after about 11 years, I decided to give it a shot and see if I could make it on my writing. And I did. But it didn’t happen overnight. You just believed you could find an audience for your books? I actually never thought, Gee, what do they want? I just had stories in my head that I wanted to tell, so I kept writing more, and then I took off. Did you have any mentors? That man who told me to forget about writing was actually Alex Haley’s agent, and Alex, who wrote Roots, became my mentor. We met at a luncheon, and he read my first book and said, “You’re going to be famous one day.” He was a wonderful support system, a good friend and a father figure to me. I’m a terrible night owl, because I get so much more done at night, and he was too. He used to call me at 3 in the morning: “Are you working?” “Yes, I’m working.” “OK, that’s good.” Then he’d hang up. What about agent relationships? How did you develop those? I was with my first agent for a number of years, writing paperback originals, but my dream was to write hardcovers for men and women. She was very discouraging. But I wanted more. Then I met Mort Janklow, who has been my agent for 30-some years now. What’s the key to great partnerships between writers and their agents and publishers? With publishers, they have to want to kill themselves to make your book a success. Agents have to see something in you—the potential for growth—and be very energetic and extremely loyal. Publishing is much more difficult today than it was before, because there are so few big houses left, which means that if for any reason you’re not happy, there aren’t many places to go. Mort has always fought for me. Surely, though, you approach the industry from a position of strength. Even at my level, the publishers hold all the cards, call all the shots. Some are nice, and some aren’t, and if they don’t want to play, or don’t want to be good to you, it’s their game. I’ve always been told I would have done much better if I were a diva, if I had tantrums and scared them to death. But I’ve never been that person. Do you think it would be different if you were a man? There’s no question that people have done things to me professionally that they would never have pulled on a man. I think I’m often made to feel intimidated for a purpose. But you’ve also had support from men like Alex and Mort. Yes, and that support was important because I didn’t have it from anybody else. My parents were European and brought me up in a certain way: Women didn’t work. My first husband, who was 20 years older, did not like the fact that I was writing. He thought it was very inappropriate. But so long as I didn’t bother anybody with it, it was fine. My job was this dark secret—something Mom does at night when everybody sleeps. We never talked about it, and I was always tiptoeing around trying not to inconvenience anybody. I’ve always written under my maiden name, so it was a kind of second identity. But it became very awkward when I suddenly had this massive career and was famous. That was never my goal. It really snuck up on me. I wasn’t expecting it at all. Why do you think your work is so popular? I’ve had a very full life and experienced a lot—divorce, losing a son—and I write from the heart about stuff that happens to all of us. I’m open and honest about emotions and the things that hurt us or scare us or make us happy. People relate to that. The other thing is, I feel a real responsibility to give people a sense of hope and encourage them to hang on. Yes, bad things happen to my characters, but I bring them home to a safe harbor. I call it victory at a price. You don’t get out unmarked, but hopefully you can make the best of what happens. Through those personal traumas, especially your son’s suicide, how did you cope? Was it difficult to work? Or did work help you get through? Needless to say, the worst thing that ever happened to me was the death of my son, and in the three weeks after, I’d never written as much in my life. I decided to write about him, because at that time, nearly 20 years ago, there was a huge stigma. He was bipolar and an amazing kid, as many bipolar people are. But if I was at a dinner party and said in conversation, “I have a mentally ill son,” dropping a bomb on the table would have had less effect. It was such a taboo. To me, it was no different than if he’d had diabetes. We spent his entire life managing medications and treatments and trying to find solutions for him. His death left a gaping hole in our lives and in my heart. So I wrote a book about him, and it became—I think it still is—required reading in medical school psychiatry departments, because it was a very honest account of what it’s like to have a bipolar kid. Back then, they thought it couldn’t be diagnosed until patients were in their twenties. Today they diagnose them at age three, and you have a much better shot at helping. So that year I wrote intensively, and it did help. But it’s hard to predict. I had another trauma that blocked rather than fueled me. And during the pandemic confinement here in France, I found it infinitely harder to write. It was like dragging a dead rhinoceros around. I sat there some days and produced two pages in 18 hours. It was ghastly. I never realized how much I’m like a bird making a nest when I’m writing. I’ll throw in a little thing that I saw that day on the street or in a restaurant, a sunset emerging, a child being silly. But we weren’t supposed to leave our houses, except to walk a dog. I was alone in my apartment for 77 days. There was no external input for the machine. With so many best sellers, are you always chasing another? In a word: yes. There are many yardsticks. First, can you get it published? Then, how much did you get paid, and how many people read it, and are you on the best seller list? I’m an anxious person by nature, so I’m always afraid that my next book will be the one everyone hates. And then I’m so thrilled when it isn’t. I mean, I don’t go into hysterics if it doesn’t hit number one. But I think, Why didn’t that do better? Should I have done something differently? I really try hard with every book. I’m very driven to compete with myself. I guess I chase excellence. I have to ask about the typewriter. I’m sitting six inches away from it, looking at it now. I’m just very low-tech. I do everything wrong on a computer; I get it all jammed up. The keys are too close together: They don’t clomp, clomp, clomp when I’m writing, and it’s so easy to hit the wrong button and erase something. It would give me heart failure. Also, I’m just used to the typewriter. When I was relatively poor, at the beginning of my career, I bought it for $20 at a junk shop. It’s a very fancy German machine: an Olympia, beautifully made, with a heavy, well-spaced keyboard. I’ve written all my books on it, and I just love it. I type the first draft once, and then it is a sea of hand notes, asterisks, arrows. My editor is very patient. You do have an online presence, though. I do a blog once a week, because I want to have some personal contact with the fans. The publisher takes bits of it and puts it on Facebook, and my assistant chases me around and says, “I need your Twitter,” which is like writing a haiku. My daughters bugged me to do Instagram. I thought it was taking pictures of your lunch, which for me is an egg or half a sandwich or a banana. There are papers all over my desk, I’m wearing my cashmere nightgown, my hair isn’t combed. I could not see putting that on Instagram. But I was badgered into it. So somebody in my house occasionally takes pictures of my dogs or me, and my daughter curates, and I write the text. One daughter now has this booming business selling tie-dye T-shirts and sweatshirts, so she sends me mountains of shirts to model. I put the pictures up, and then she says, “You owe me $300 for the 10 shirts.” And I say, “Zara, you have to pay the model—the model doesn’t pay you.” And she says, “But you’ve got the shirts.” So I told her I cannot afford to keep getting them. Anyway, although I’m very private, these things do establish a bond with readers. They feel closer to you, which is nice. Do you see yourself ever slowing down? When I die. I mean, I’ve done two things in my life. One, I brought up a bunch of children. Two, I write. I’m way prouder of my kids than I am of my career, but I like my career a lot too.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Danielle Steel

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