Caroline Wolff

Caroline Wolff is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. She lives in downtown Manhattan.

Wolff's new novel is The Wayside.

My Q&A with the author:

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

She wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest. Teenage Caroline was drawn to anything darkly beautiful. (For context, the summer I was 15 I listened to Elliott Smith every night before bed and cried, just to evoke an intense emotional response and so have more fodder to draw from in my writing.) When I was creating the moody atmosphere of The Wayside, I also drew on a few of the books I loved as a teenager, like the campus vibe of The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis and the gothic overtones of Night Film by Marisha Pessl. And she would definitely approve of Jake’s taste in music.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

It’s harder for me to write endings. I tend to fly through the first chunk of my drafts, because I’m just so energized by introducing these voices, and then I reach a sticking point about halfway through. I usually maintain a little bit of stuckness right up until the end. I need to write more logically, rather than intuitively. I found it especially tricky to write the ending of a thriller, since the genre has certain conventions that need to be honored, including an ending that provides some kind of “answer” to the question we’ve been pursuing for the past 300 or so pages. So I ended up changing the ending of The Wayside at least twice, because the first iteration was just a little too far-fetched.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

The short answer is no. This is the first time I’ve written characters that weren’t thinly- veiled reflections of my own personality, and I actually found it liberating to inhabit these unfamiliar voices. That said, of course some parts of yourself or your world come through in your writing. In order to do justice to Jake’s struggle with his mental health, for example, I had to draw on my own experience with depression as a young adult. Superficially, I relate to Luna aesthetically. We have a similar wardrobe and a penchant for Japanese skincare products.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music is a major inspiration for me. It can really help me enter into the mood of the world I’m creating, or even the mindset of the characters. For The Wayside, I was listening to a lot of Chelsea Wolfe (specifically her album Pain is Beauty, with the song “Feral Love” on repeat), Bauhaus (“All We Ever Wanted is Everything” gets a shoutout in the novel), and SASAMI’s album Squeeze.

Visit Caroline Wolff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue