Interview with Danielle Steel

Prolific writer Danielle Steel's life sometimes sounds like the plot of one of her glittering novels: half the year in Paris, a stylish house on the hill in San Francisco, and a yearly summer vacation with five of her children on a boat in the Mediterranean. But it's not all Château d'Yquem and couture clothing. Many of Steel's popular works veer far from frivolous subjects, tackling tough issues such as bipolar disorder, terrorism, and the Holocaust. Goodreads chats with the world-record-holding author for best-sellers about her latest novel, Happy Birthday, how persistence wins the prize, and why ghostwriters are simply shocking.

Goodreads: Your newest novel, Happy Birthday, tells the story of three characters who are all facing unpleasant birthdays: 30, 50, and 60. Did one of your own birthdays inspire the book?

Danielle Steel: Yes! I had a birthday I didn't like and woke up in the morning horrified by it. I lay there, feeling very sorry for myself, and then thought, "Well, relax. Nobody knows your real age." Then I kind of staggered into the kitchen feeling sorry for myself and turned on the radio, and of course it announced that it was my birthday and my age, and of course I almost had a heart attack. And then it was in the newspaper and on TV and everywhere else. I kind of used that to inspire the characters.

So many people don't like landmark birthdays, so I used three different landmark birthdays and all the reasons why people don't like them. It was meant to be kind of a fun book, one of the themes being what I called "Why Not." Instead of being limited by their usual lives, people decide to be more open-minded and do things that they normally wouldn't do. They decide not to be limited by age, whether it's 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 and to try new things in life. The truth is that there are so many things that we can do, and it's not just about having money. It's about daring and not just staying in your same rut all the time, which many of us have a tendency to do, including me.

GR: Happy Birthday has a little bit of everything: restaurants, a Martha Stewart-esque character, even a hostage attack. Was it the anniversary of 9/11 that inspired you to touch on this last theme?

DS: No, those things just come out of the air. In fact, I did a book 15, 18 years ago where there was an attack on the Empire State Building at the time, and a friend who often reads my books before they're published said, You've really gone too far with that one—it could never happen. My editor calls it channeling. A lot of times I've written things that just come out of the air for me, and they turn out to be real at some later date.

GR: You have a large, lively, and accomplished family. How do they inform your novels? Do you ever base any of your characters on them?

DS: I never write real characters. I learned that in my first book. The agent I had at the time strongly discouraged it and told me that if you use real characters, you'll always be limited by those people, and you're much better off doing fictional ones. And I always stuck to that, and it gives you much, much more freedom. The other way you think, "Jamie wouldn't do that." And also, you can offend people, and I just don't like writing about real people. They're inspired by what I've learned of real people and they're composites of characters, but they're totally fictional.

GR: You've written 118 books, had 21 of your novels adapted for television, and have been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having at least one of your books on the New York Times best-seller list for 390 weeks. That's a lot of books and a lot of stories. Did you always think you were going to be a writer?

DS: It kind of picked me. My training was in design. I graduated from college very early, so I was 19 (I went to NYU and Parsons school of design), and I wound up working for a PR firm in New York, and one of our clients was the Ladies Home Journal. The editor was this incredibly nice man, and I did a little freelance writing for them, and he said, You should write a book. I was naive and very young, so I thought I should write a book! I tried and I did, and it [Going Home] sold remarkably quickly.

Then I thought I'll do this again, but then I wrote five others that nobody ever wanted. I have no idea what made me pursue this. I think just stubbornness. I had no thought of becoming famous, and I had made practically no money on the one I sold. But I just always had another story that I wanted to tell, and while those ones were not selling I just kept writing more. And finally the seventh one sold again. I had five unpublished in between my first and the next published book.

I always use it as an example for young writers because persistence is the most important thing. Had I given up anytime between number one and number seven, I would never have had the career I have today. I really think it's important to keep at it and keep with it. And people are very unkind about unpublished authors. You know, the minute you say you're a writer, they say, "Have you been published?" and if you haven't, they think that doesn't make you a writer. But you're a writer if you're writing. And it may take longer than you want to get published. But keep at it. I think persistence wins the prize in almost anything.

GR: Your first books were categorized in the romance genre. How did you end up there? And now you cover a vast array of genres—historical fiction, suspense—many of which touch on difficult topics. Tell us about your evolution as a writer.

DS: In the beginning I wrote paperback originals. And in those days they were categorized as romance. But long, long ago I said to my publisher and my agent, "I don't want to write paperbacks forever. I want to write hardcovers. What do I have to do?" So we talked about it, and I worked hard and got out of being stuck in that genre. I write contemporary fiction. I'll write everything from wars to cancer, and about a fifth of my books are historical and they're very thoroughly researched. I work with a wonderful researcher who's worked with me for my whole writing career.

Essentially I write about human relationships, not just romantic ones but familial ones. And friendships and all sorts of stuff. The problems of the human condition are kind of the same in every era.

GR: Goodreads Author Andrea Buginsky asks, "Do you have a favorite among your books?"

DS: My favorite is always the one I'm working on or the one I just finished. It's not as complicated a book as some of the ones I've written, but I love Happy Birthday. It's a fun book, but it's got substance. And I got to research the restaurant business, which was fun. Probably my favorite is the one I wrote about my son, His Bright Light. [Nick Traina struggled with bipolar disorder and committed suicide.]

Among my novels, I never read them again once I'm totally finished with them.

GR: You never read your books again?

DS: I do probably six major rewrites after I finish them. I edit them for two and a half years. After I'm done, after it goes off for the last time, I'm done.

GR: Goodreads member Meme would like to know, "Do your stories come strictly from imagination or are some from personal experience, like friends or family, with a few embellishments?"

DS: Sometimes some incident will inspire me, and some things are completely out of nowhere and I have no idea where they come from. Sammie [her daughter] inspired me years ago. She was studying how the Japanese were put in the internment camps during WWII in school, and when she came home to dinner—I think she was ten—she said, "You should write a book about that, Mom." And I said, "Yeah, yeah."

Then an hour later I thought that's kind of cool. So I did, and I love that book, too. It's called Silent Honor. And that was a wonderful book to research, and I interviewed a lot of people for that book. Another book I loved a lot was Echoes, which was historical. There were themes that I wanted to touch on. One of them was the Kindertransport, which was the train that the British organized that went through Europe for about ten months before the war. They were trying to save kids, Jewish kids, before the war was declared in Europe. The experiences of those people were just unbelievable.

GR: Goodreads Author Patti Roberts would like to know if you work with a ghostwriter.

DS: It's a shocking question. I've been asked by my fans, "Who writes your books? Does someone help you?" And I said something to my editor not long ago, "It's so insulting that people would even say that." She said, "Yeah, but you are one of the few authors left who doesn't use somebody." There is a very, very famous best-selling author who has apparently eight writers. He writes the outlines, gives them chapters to write, and doesn't write his own books—I was so shocked. And there is not just one. I don't know if the public knows that or not. Maybe I'm the last idiot on the planet, up until 4:30 in the morning typing my own work. It's just incredible. Then you are not a writer; you are some sort of scriptwriter. Nobody writes my stuff. I find it a shocking concept. It's different if a celebrity wants to write their memoirs, and they have no writing ability. OK, then they use a ghostwriter. Otherwise it's like becoming a tennis pro and having a stunt double. What's the point of that?

GR: Tell us a bit about your writing process.

DS: I work for about six months to a year on an outline and do it by hand mostly. Eventually I type up what I've got, send it to my editor, get comments, and alter it, send it back, get comments, alter it again. And I eventually sit down to write the book, and when I do that I pretty much lock myself up for about a month and do only that for about 20 hours a day. And it goes back and forth like a tennis ball between me and my editor for about two years while I rewrite it. I'm usually working on four or five books at once.

GR: What are you reading now, and who are some of your favorite authors?

DS: I read much too little, because when I'm writing I don't read anybody. There is always the risk that you'll pick someone up without meaning to. And so I never read anybody while I'm writing, and that's ten months a year. I only get to read in the summers. For fiction I only read French because it's my first language. I read Marc Levy, who is the popular easy-read in France. And I read a lot of religious stuff. And my children make fun of me, but I love Joel Osteen. He's an inspirational writer. And I'm rereading one of his books right now. One is called Become a Better You. I find it really cheers me up. [Laughs.]

GR: What's next?

DS: The next one out is coming in the fall called Hotel Vendôme. It's about a man who puts together a terrific luxury boutique, very, very high-end hotel in New York, and is a single father and his little girl grows up in the hotel. And all the exciting stuff that happens in and around that hotel.

GR: Like a grown-up Eloise?

DS: I was naughty enough to name her Eloise, but with an "H" [Heloise].