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Brave New Words
Sandra Novack-Gottshall ’98 forges life as a successful fiction writer.
By Kate Helm ‘05
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S
andra Novack-Gottshall ’98 doesn’t want to write—she needs
to. She compares her devotion to writing to that of a friend for
her son who is going through the “terrible two” stage.
“Once something is yours, and you love it, and it’s in your
bones and blood and heart and head, you can’t just give it up when
things become rough,” she says. “I wouldn’t stop focusing on writing
or fiction any more than she’d give up her son. It doesn’t work
like that.”
Indeed, the fiction industry can be unpredictable. Random
House published her first novel, Precious, last year. Despite the
struggling economy and shake-ups at the publishing house, Precious
was hailed as a top ten debut novel of the year. With a collection
of short stories set to be published next year and work
underway on a new novel, Resurrection Fern, Novack-Gottshall
is quick to point out that accolades are not necessarily a reliable
forecast of future success.
“I’m harder on myself than anyone else is or ever could be,
and whatever successes I have never seem to be good enough,”
she says. “Not everything in a writer’s life comes down to one
book or even two, but rather the entirety of the career. Writers
are built over lifetimes, not a single book or event. Again,
you go back to basics after everything is said and done: you
get up, you write.”
Although she writes predominantly in the morning,
inspiration keeps her on-call, often striking in the middle of
the night. She also gets new ideas from her reading; other
writers are the best mentors, she says. A self-described
recluse, she believes that tendency is an integral part of
her life as a fiction writer. In order to breathe life into another
world, she has to disengage from her own reality.
“[Writing] takes time, physical time, during which
you are away from other people and other things,” she
explains. “With a short story, you might go a week or more before
your mother calls and asks why she hasn’t heard from you. When
writing a novel, you might go months ignoring friends, more or
less, and cutting your social engagements down to practically nonexistent
status. And then there is the psychological aspect of it: the
deeper you are into a novel, the more ‘there’ rather than ‘here’ you
are. Writers get called anti-social a lot, but really I think it’s necessary
to the craft.”
The trade-off for those sacrifices comes in the cathartic release
of thoughts and emotions the page provides. Novack-Gottshall
18 MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE SUMMER 2010