Nova Jacobs: Find a Method That Works for You
Nova Jacobs has an MFA from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and is a recipient of the Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Jeremy. She is the author of The Stars Turned Inside Out and The Last Equation of Isaac Severy. Follow her on Instagram.
Nova Jacobs
In this interview, Nova discusses allowing for surprises in the writing process with her new mystery novel, The Stars Turned Inside Out, her advice for other writers, and more!
Name: Nova Jacobs
Literary agent: Lisa Bankoff, Bankoff Collaborative
Book title: The Stars Turned Inside Out
Publisher: Atria
Release date: March 19, 2024
Genre/category: Mystery, Crime, Thriller
Previous titles: The Last Equation of Isaac Severy
Elevator pitch: When the body of a young physicist is found in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the lab quietly hires a private investigator to look into his baffling death.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I’m not one to have lists of ideas that I kick around. A story tends to hit me all at once and take me over. Around the time of finishing my first novel, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, my fascination shifted from mathematics to particle physics—or back to physics, I should say, which has been a longstanding interest. I’d watched the 2013 documentary CERN, by the filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, in which the camera sits for long moments on various laboratory tableaux. Toward the end of the film, we track an engineer cycling through the Large Hadron Collider tunnel. There’s no dialogue, no narration, just this ambient mechanical hum and the sound of tires on concrete. Even before I made a research trip to the lab, I could imagine my next novel unfolding from that hypnotic scene.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Oh god, I do take my time. If we’re counting from initial spark to publication day, roughly six years. I let myself linger in the exploration phase (reading, interviews, reconnaissance trips) without too much urgency. I find the best material often comes out of that early discovery process. When one is writing about a discipline one doesn’t practice (particle physics) and set in a country in which one doesn’t live (Switzerland), there are certain details that just can’t be invented. While the initial concept and thrust of the book never changed, if I were to look back at my first draft, I’d no doubt be amazed at the transformation.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
If there were, they now feel insignificant. Mostly, I feel wildly lucky to have had a smooth publishing process and some of the same great people I worked with the first time, including my editor, Kaitlin Olson. Any friction, I think, came from my own head during the editing phase: tormenting myself over word choice and sentence construction, and generally second-guessing myself. Sometimes the lesson is to quiet that anxious voice and trust your own choices. Sometimes, it’s to read the manuscript out loud to yourself just one more time.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Most of the surprises came about by design. I like to give myself the armature of an outline, but mainly I’m looking for an ideal balance between control and freedom, intention and surprise. I sketch out the major plot points, set pieces, and a general sense of the ending, but within that framework I allow plenty of room for my characters to move around or dart away toward a complication I’d never anticipated. If a writer isn’t astonishing herself along the way, it’s difficult to imagine the reader will be astonished.
Of course, in leaving your outline open to course correction, entire chapters might have to be excised or characters cruelly disappeared. The biggest surprises often come in the form of something I’ve unwittingly planted for myself, not realizing how useful it will be later. One’s subconscious is an endless gift-giver! In fact, that phenomenon alone—the uncanny sense that someone apart from me is piloting the ship—that continually astounds me.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope they will be entertained, but my deepest wish is that they will feel that thing I feel, that all readers feel when we deeply connect with a story. The peculiar magic that happens when you conjure something from nothing and it becomes real for another person, cracking their world open just a bit wider … there’s nothing better.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
As mentioned above, I’m not particularly swift at churning out pages. While I do get frustrated at my own pace, I try not to sink into self-recrimination. The advice I give myself, anyway, is don’t get too caught up in the idea of what being a writer means, adhering to a certain system, hitting a rigid word count per day, etc. Find a method that works for you, that gets you to your desk—or bed, coffeehouse, garret—and propels you into that next scene. It’s all allowed. Also, protect your writing time. I’m thinking of that warning from one of Agatha Christie’s early mentors: “Life knocks the art out of a good many people.” Writers are the ones who choose writing again and again.
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