Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire in roughly five weeks in 1973, pouring herself into it while grieving the death of her young daughter. The novel grew out of a short story she had drafted a few years earlier and then reworked into something much larger.
A Short Story That Grew Up
The book started small. Rice first wrote a roughly 30-page short story in 1968 or 1969, told from the interviewer's point of view. In 1973 she came back to it, handed the story over to the vampire Louis, and let it expand into a full novel of more than 300 pages. The shift in perspective did much of the work. In the early sketch the interviewer held the frame, but once Louis began answering his own questions the material opened up and kept growing. She researched vampires during the day and wrote at night, and the draft came together in about five weeks.
The finished book didn't sell overnight. Rice found an agent at the Squaw Valley Writers' Conference in 1974, and the manuscript went to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf that October. Interview with the Vampire reached shelves in 1976 and launched a career that would run for decades.
Writing Through Grief
The speed came out of pain. Rice's daughter Michele had been diagnosed with acute granulocytic leukemia in 1970, and she died in 1972, not long before her sixth birthday. Rice sank into a deep depression afterward, and the writing became one of the ways she found her way through it. She said later that the story was about her daughter even during the weeks she didn't consciously realize it.
I pitched myself into writing and made up a story about vampires. I didn't know it at the time but it was all about my daughter, the loss of her and the need to go on living when faith is shattered.
Anne Rice, quoted in The Independent
Reviewers and commentators have long linked Michele to Claudia, the child vampire who is frozen at a little girl's age and can never grow up. Rice folded the loss into the novel without setting out to, and a child who cannot age gave the grief a shape she could write toward.
For more on how she worked, see the full Anne Rice writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Mine what you already have. Rice's breakthrough began as an abandoned short story. Old drafts aren't dead.
- Let a hard season fuel the work. She wrote straight into her grief instead of waiting to feel better first.
- Change the narrator, change the book. Handing the story to Louis unlocked a whole novel.
- Go fast when the material is hot. Five committed weeks beat five hesitant years.