GoKawiilEmma Straub is a New York Times–bestselling novelist, a picture-book author, and the co-owner of the Brooklyn indie bookstore Books Are Magic, a childhood dream she actually went out and built in real life with her husband. Emma, in short, gets things done.
Her latest novel, American Fantasy, follows a newly divorced 50-year-old who finds herself on a boy band fan cruise, where hilarity and profundity ensue. It landed on “most anticipated” novels lists from the likes of the Times, People and Time, and had me sucked in from page one. (True confession: In the late ’90s, I was a writer for a teen magazine called Twist — I was on the frontlines of NSYNC mania.)
Emma joined me on How Success Happens to talk about ideas that can actually sustain a career, the messy reality of running a small business, and why when it comes to creative endeavors, finishing matters more than starting. Listen to our full conversation here and read on for tips to help your dreams take off in three, two, one!
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Three Key Insights
1. How to Know When an Idea Is “Something”
Emma gets ideas all the time and dutifully plops most of them in notebooks, her Notes app, or files that never see the light of day. But every so often, “maybe three or four times” in her life, an idea arrives so complete that she knows “it could carry the weight of a whole novel” instead of stalling out at page 50. With American Fantasy, the boy-band-cruise premise landed in her brain with enough emotional and narrative heft that she thought, “Hot damn. Yes.” For her, the real test isn’t whether an idea is clever; it’s whether it can sustain 300 pages and months (or years) of work.
Takeaway: Don’t chase every clever thought—wait for the idea you know you can live with long enough to build a real product, project, or business around it.
2. Treat Your Passion Like a Job (Not a Vibe)
Growing up around her father, legendary writer Peter Straub, and his friend and collaborator Stephen King, Emma absorbed one core lesson: “Writing is a job. It’s a real job that you do every day.” She watched would-be writers in their twenties act out the stereotype—staying up too late, drinking too much—while missing the actual work, and her reaction was, “That’s not what it is…You gotta get to work. It is the coal mine.” Even as life got fuller with kids, bookstores, and book tours, she kept a quota mindset, shifting from 30–40 pages a week in her twenties to a realistic 10 pages now.
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