Editing Ourselves: A Conversation with Yoav Blum
- galpod
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
In the circles I run, Yoav Blum needs no introduction. My friends have read all five of his novels. Getting the new Yoav Blum is a no-brainer. He writes a certain brand of sci-fi thriller-mysteries that are grounded in a Tel-Avivian reality that is familiar—almost cosy—to anyone who has lived in urban, secular Israel. His books usually explore a philosophical question through action-packed plots and fascinating premises. Just to whet your appetite, Dear Reader, the premise in The Unswitchable is that a new technology—in the form of bracelets—allows people to switch bodies with each other, except for Dan Arbel, the only person in the world who cannot switch. Dan Arbel, of course, gets entangled in a murder mystery within the first page.
The Unswitchable and In the Blink of an Eye, Yoav’s latest murder-mystery, are coming out in English translation this month. When I interviewed him ahead of this exciting release, I was struck by how low-key he is for a page-turner writer. He spoke thoughtfully, carefully considering his answers. He told me that The Unswitchable came from his gut feeling that body and mind are completely separable. He also said that today he doesn’t think that anymore. The boundaries are blurrier, the relationship between mind and body, he said, is more nuanced than he thought back then. He talked about realising that physical experiences like pain or injury are ultimately mental processes: “What changes you isn’t the wound itself, but how you experience it,” he said.
In Yoav’s latest novel, In the Blink of an Eye, the inventor of a time machine, Professor Yonatan Brand, is found dead in a locked room. The non-linear structure of the book mirrors time travel, but also the way we rearrange our experiences to make sense of who we are now. Yoav said he wanted to give the reader a choice about how to read the book: chronologically (despite what Brand’s friend, Doron, says, the numbers attached to each time-machine operation are indeed page numbers), or the way he’s telling it, which is out of order.
At some point in the conversation, I admitted that I had written the questions as if October 7th never happened because I didn’t know whether he wanted to talk about it. That’s where the conversation turned. Yoav said he hasn’t really been writing since October 7th, that his relationship to his writing changed somehow. He is working on a new book, but he’s not ready to discuss it publicly yet. He said he needs to work through it with an editor first. We went off record for a while, discussing how trauma reshaped what we can talk about with others and when.
What I can tell you is that we talked about writing as a way to process things we think about. Yoav said he needs an editor to “ask the hard questions” and make him rethink what he had written. For him, editing is part of the processing. The editor and the writer excavate the shape of the story first, and the story emerges dusty from the ground before it can be polished by line editing and proofreading.
When I was a baby writer, I saw editing as obsessing over form rather than substance. I learned a lot, not least the skill of editing—and working with editors and readers’ feedback. The more I write, the more I see editing as part of the writing process. Not polishing an already finished story, but digging deeper to excavate what the story could be. And we do something similar all the time with the stories we tell ourselves.
We all tell stories about who we are. When I asked Yoav about self-definitions, he called them prejudices we hold about ourselves. Growth, he said, is letting go of these prejudices—editing our self-stories to match what we've actually become.
Sometimes the change is sharp and dramatic, traumatic even, like October 7th has been for many people. Most of the time, though, it’s slow and gradual, barely perceptible. And because it’s easy to ignore and change is scary, we wake up one morning, realising that our kids are all grown up and looking at universities, or our spouse isn’t happy, or the political situation has shifted. Like the changing of the light at sunrise and sunset, the change is so slow you can’t say exactly when it happened.
But change is the one sure thing in life. Yoav started The Unswitchable with a gut instinct that body and soul are completely separable. Years later, he acknowledges that the boundaries are more blurred than he thought. That's the thing about editing ourselves: the revision happens whether we choose it or not. Life experience rewrites us. October 7th forced a brutal edit on a lot of us. The question isn't whether we'll revise our stories—context will do that for us. The question is whether we'll acknowledge the revision honestly, or keep clinging to the old draft.
About Yoav:
Yoav Blum is an author who masterfully blends high-concept speculative and science fiction with gripping mystery, thriller, and philosophical depth. His novels delve into the extraordinary – from the overwhelming experience of hearing the thoughts of everyone around you, to the mind-bending possibilities of time travel, the intricate mechanics of body switching, and the hidden art of orchestrating coincidences.
Please note that if you buy Yoav's book(s) on Amazon through the affiliate links in this post, I'll get a small kickback from Amazon.
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