Elijah Kinch Spector

How did you become a writer?

I come from a long line of writers, so it always felt like a foregone conclusion. This may or may not have been a good thing. Would I have felt the constant urge to write if I hadn't been raised in that environment? Would I still have my deep, compulsive, need for approval and recognition from others? Who knows! But I was a sensitive only child, surrounded by artists and weirdos while I pined for adulthood, so here I am.

More concretely, I majored in Creative Writing, and then spent the next decade trying to break in. I wrote many attempted novels of many types. I made a spreadsheet with an unhinged amount of information on the 40 or so agents I wanted to query. I lay on the floor staring into space and moaning that I'd never get published. One doesn’t have to be published to be a writer, but that's what I fixated on and, in my case, that fixation forced me to improve.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Always a tough question, because of course the answer is, you know, everything.

That said, in college I took a course on writing in the first person from novelist Ed Park that still affects my writing every day, even as most of my education fades from memory. One of the books we read in that class was Charles Portis’ True Grit, which opened my eyes to how even the smallest choices in wording and incident can greatly inform a character.

Additionally, a major influence on me from out of left field is Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. In the Quartet’s later books, Durrell’s own… odious views come into clearer focus, but his lush prose, heavy with the history of the setting, remains marvelous—if also orientalist. I write fantasy, but a lot of the tone and texture of my worldbuilding came from Durrell.

When and where do you write?

I don't take well to routine, unfortunately, so I'm never good at having a particular time or place where I write. I have a beautiful little desk my spouse made for me, but it ends up being where I do most other work. I love to bring a notebook and pen to cafes, parks, and bars, or to scribble out a few pages on a lunch break from my day job; but I also love the feeling of banging away on an old typewriter for hours at a time, when I can manage it.

What are you working on now?

I'm currently in the beautiful little grace period between finishing the first draft of my second novel and getting edits back. So, right this second, I'm working on nothing, and it's glorious. But very soon I'll be deep in revisions on my first try at a sequel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Absolutely, although I wonder if "writer's block" is one term applied to a thousand different things. For me, getting stuck on what should happen next plot-wise is totally different from not knowing what will make a new character interesting, and both problems have different remedies. But changing my location and/or writing tools almost always helps.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Don't listen to anyone who says you need to write for at least X hours a day—or even to write every day—in order to be a writer.

What’s your advice to new writers?

If your epigraph isn’t in public domain, you might have to pay for the rights to use it! I learned this the hard way, but it was worth the money.

Elijah Kinch Spector is a writer, dandy, and rootless cosmopolitan from the Bay Area who now lives in Brooklyn. His debut novel, Kalyna the Soothsayer, is available from Erewhon Books.