📝 Emily St. John Mandel’s Writing Routine

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Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian author and essayist, best-known for her novels, Station Eleven, which was adapted into a HBO mini-series, and The Glass Hotel.

In 2015, Emily St. John Mandel was still working as a part-time administrative assistant to the Cancer Research Lab at the Rockefeller University. It was almost a year after her breakthrough novel, Station Eleven, was published and she had won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

It never occurred to the Canadian writer that she’d need to leave her day job. That is, until she was trying to juggle doing her job remotely while on a book tour.

“It was an interesting environment, working with scientists doing breast cancer research—my colleagues were brilliant, my boss was great—but it was getting a little ridiculous trying to be an administrative assistant remotely during my book tour,” she recalled in an interview with Willow Springs Magazine. “I realized I had to quit when I found myself in a hotel room in London at mid- night on a Sunday, booking plane tickets for my boss.”

Born and raised in Merville, British Columbia, Mandel left high school at the age of 18 to study contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. After graduating from the program two years later, Mandel came to the realisation that she didn’t want to do this anymore. “It just felt like more of a chore than a joy,” she told Jane Gayduk.

So she relocated to New York and started writing. After two years and countless rejections from publishers, Mandel published her first novel, Last Night in Montreal, in 2009. By the time her debut was published, she had already started working on her follow-up, The Singer’s Gun, published a year later.

Mandel continued to grind away at her writing while juggling various day jobs. She published The Lola Quartet in 2012, and then struck gold with Station Eleven in 2014. The book was an instant hit with critics, appearing on several best-of-year lists, and was also a commercial success, having sold well over 1.5 million copies by now.

Although she’s now far removed from dancing, Mandel has revealed in past interviews that the discipline she gained from her previous background has helped her with writing.

“I think if you’re a dancer first, you might go on to become a more disciplined attorney or anything else you do in your life,” she told Adam Byko. “But it definitely helps with writing. So much of writing is just forcing yourself to sit at your desk and write a novel.”

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