Linda Soules Interview

• Q. Can you tell us a little about yourself and what inspired you to become a writer?

  Ans. I started the So You Want To Be A... series after twenty-five years as a legal and financial professional. The truth is, I have always written. From the moment I could barely hold a pencil, I was drafting short stories, taping pages together, and producing a steady volume of imagined worlds that no one but me ever read. As I grew older and learned scholarly writing, much of that creative flow was beaten out of me, and I became a master of essays and analytical drafting. Law school refined the discipline further; legal writing taught me precision and structure, but did not leave much room for the creative current that came so naturally before. For years I wrote on multiple subjects — for children, for adults, and for my own psychological growth — but it never occurred to me to pursue publication. Those works were for my own clarity, not for an audience, though I hope to revisit them someday. The pivot to children's nonfiction was less a sudden creative awakening than a slow realization that there were books I wished existed for kids in my life: books that took young readers seriously, engaged with what professional work actually involves, and did not assume kids needed to be protected from the substance of their own curiosity. The genre also turned out to be uniquely suited to what I can bring to it. Twenty-five years inside a professional career taught me what a working life actually feels like — the long preparation, the daily craft, the moments of meaning, the inevitable disappointments. I write about other professions with a researcher's discipline learned from securities law and investment management, but I write about working life itself from having lived it. So I started writing those books. Twenty-seven titles later, I am still writing them.

• Q. What genre(s) do you primarily write in, and what draws you to that particular genre?

  Ans. I am currently focused on children's nonfiction, specifically career — or passion — exploration for ages 8-14. The genre is much more interesting than its reputation suggests. Most career books for kids are either glossy and inspirational ("you can be anything!") or bone-dry and technical (here are seventeen pages on what a dental hygienist's salary is). I am drawn to the space in between: the reality of the work, the satisfying complexity of professional craft, the long preparation, the surprises and disappointments. What I think makes my approach distinctive is that I am writing as someone who has actually been the working adult kids are reading about. I have a clear sense of what it really takes — and what it really feels like — to build a serious career, and I seek to bring that to every book. Kids in this age range are sophisticated readers who can handle real content. They mostly need adults willing to share the experience honestly with them and encourage them to find meaningful avenues for exploring their ideas and dreams.

• Q. What is your favorite book, and what about it resonates with you the most?

  Ans. This is the question that always defeats me. Asking a writer to name a single favorite book is like asking a parent to pick a favorite child. If I have to commit, an easy one would be A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which I have re-read at every stage of my life and which has somehow been a different book each time. It is one of those rare novels that quietly insist childhood is serious business and that the small specific details of a young person's interior life deserve attention. That conviction has shaped how I write for kids more than I usually realize. If you saw my actual bookshelf, though, you would see a sprawling and somewhat eclectic collection — psychology, law, spirituality, philosophy, and (my guilty pleasure) psychological thrillers. I go through phases of delving deeply into mythology, business books, and the classics, and I am frequently inspired by autobiographies. I also spend a lot of time building and perusing my kids' bookshelves, which has given me an enduring appreciation for how children's writing evolves across ages. My favorite children's book is I'll Love You Forever by Robert Munsch — a book I cannot get through without crying, no matter how many times I read it.

• Q. Who is your favorite author, and how have they influenced your writing?

  Ans. Mary Roach, easily, for the nonfiction work. She writes about science the way a fascinated, slightly mischievous friend would — with deep research, real respect for her subjects, and a willingness to follow her curiosity into the strange corners of any topic. Her books (Stiff, Packing for Mars, Gulp) trust readers to handle complexity if the writing is good enough to carry them through it. That is the trust I try to extend to my own readers, even though my audience is younger and my topics more constrained. She showed me that nonfiction does not have to choose between rigor and warmth.

• Q. How do you balance writing with other aspects of your life, such as work, family, or hobbies?

  Ans. I am not entirely sure I do. Work-life balance has always been a juggling act. In recent months, my husband would probably tell you that the books and I are in some kind of long-term cohabitation arrangement, and that he has accepted this. My kids keep me on my toes, and I have often done my writing — alongside my day job — in the late-night hours after they have gone to bed. The reality is that writing is one of the things I do for fun, alongside tennis, salsa dancing, running, songwriting, hiking, theme park visits, and anything in the water. Calling it work would be misleading. Calling it a hobby would also be misleading. It is somewhere in between — the kind of activity that does not feel optional. My family comes first, but they are deeply involved and, in many ways, the inspiration that fuels me.

• Q. How do you show appreciation and love to your followers and readers? Do you actively engage with them on social media or through other means?

  Ans. I am still figuring this out. Twenty-five years as an attorney trained me to be precise rather than performative, and social media rewards the opposite. I recently set up LindaSoules.com, where I respond to messages and questions directly, and I read every reader review that comes in. These are genuinely meaningful to me, even when they include thoughtful criticism, which I carry forward and strive to incorporate. Some of the relationships I most value are with the working professionals — firefighters, marine biologists, surgeons, paleontologists — who have read the books and validated them as accurate, and with the educators and parents who have written to say a particular title sparked a conversation that mattered. That feedback is what motivates me to keep going and gives the work a sense of purpose. I am grateful for it.

• Q. What do you enjoy most about being an author, and what keeps you motivated to continue writing?

  Ans. For this series specifically, I have loved the research. Every book starts with weeks of reading about a profession I previously knew almost nothing about, and that learning is its own reward. By the time I have written a book about marine biology or stunt performance or roller coaster engineering, I have effectively given myself a small graduate course in the field. My legal training shaped how I do this work — securities law specifically requires meticulous fact-checking and the ability to translate dense technical material into clear, accurate language. Those habits transfer well to writing about professions in which I am not personally trained. The motivation to keep going comes from the sense that the catalog is not yet finished — there are professions I have not written about yet, and I want to. Also, kids keep telling me they want more, which is a hard signal to ignore.

• Q. Have you ever faced writer's block, and if so, how do you overcome it?

  Ans. Yes, though usually in the form of feeling obligated to write about a particular topic when my focus has drifted elsewhere. This series actually started as a break from much more inward, adult self-searching work, and from writing within my own professional areas of expertise. The beauty of children's career exploration is that I can follow my curiosity in any direction. There is always more to learn, and if I can find fascination in fields I never even considered as a kid, I trust that other readers can too. Nonfiction also does not lend itself to blocks the way fiction does, because there is always more research to do. When I do not know what to write, I read. The book I am stuck on always turns out to need a few more days of input before it can produce any output. A friend once described this as "the well needs to fill before the bucket can come up full," which is exactly right.

• Q. Can you share any interesting or funny anecdotes from your writing journey?

  Ans. The one I keep returning to is the moment I realized my twelve-year-old son had become an unpaid technical consultant on the video gaming book. I was writing about game mechanics and asked him to read a draft. He read it carefully and then said, with the patient tone of someone explaining something to a very slow adult, "Mom, this is mostly right, but you said 'level' when you mean 'stage.'" He was correct, and the manuscript was duly amended. My daughter has been similarly indispensable on the medical titles. She has chosen medicine as her path and educates me regularly on everything I get slightly wrong about clinical practice, as well as on the worlds of acting and singing. And my son's expertise will inevitably be conscripted again when I launch into coding, hacking (the good kind!), and speed cubing. Neither has yet asked for co-author credit, but I am bracing.

• Q. What advice would you give to aspiring authors who are just starting their writing journey?

  Ans. Pick the thing you would want to read that does not exist yet, and write that. Most published advice for new writers focuses on craft, which matters. But the single most useful question I ever asked myself was simpler: what is the book I keep looking for that nobody has written? For me, the somewhat surprising answer was a substantive career exploration series for kids that did not condescend. For someone else it might be something completely different. The question reveals where your specific contribution is, which turns out to be the most important thing to find before worrying about anything else.

• Q. Do you have any upcoming projects or works in progress that you'd like to share with your readers?

  Ans. Three new titles are nearly ready for publication: So You Want To Be A Deep Sea Diver, So You Want To Be A Treasure Hunter (Archaeologist), and So You Want To Be A Vaccine Developer (Immunologist). Each is a profession I had not written about before and that I now find fascinating. Deep sea diving combines extreme conditions with scientific precision in ways I had not expected. Archaeology is patient and methodical in ways that surprised me. And immunology turned out to be one of the most consequential fields a kid could decide to enter. There are several more in the pipeline beyond those, but I am trying to release them a few at a time rather than all at once.

• Q. Finally, what are your goals and aspirations as a writer? Where do you see yourself and your writing career in the future?

  Ans. The realistic goal is to keep writing the catalog until it is reasonably complete. There are professions kids should be able to understand that nobody has written substantively about for ages 8-14, and I would like the So You Want To Be A... series to be the resource that fills those gaps. The aspirational goal is for the books to live on classroom shelves and library shelves for a long time — the books that helped a generation of kids understand what professional work actually involves and use that learning to take strides in building satisfying careers for themselves. That is a long arc, and I am not in a hurry. The work itself is the point. Once this series feels complete, my writing will continue — perhaps in a completely different genre, or returning to some of the earlier projects I set aside. Writing for children has been fulfilling enough that I may explore the fiction side of it as well, or work in spaces with a Social-Emotional Learning focus. I have no shortage of ideas!

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