How did you become a writer?

I started out as a reader. My parents were big readers too, so I had the advantage of growing up in a house full of books. When I started writing, it was because I wanted to be able to recreate the magic I found in books, and maybe even find a way to give other people what the books I loved had given me. 

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

So many: W. G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov, Katherine Dunn, Italo Calvino, Mary Gaitskill, Donna Tartt, Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Mary Robison, Kelly Link, Sylvia Plath, Kobo Abe, Virginia Woolf, Helen Oyeyemi, Aimee Bender, Shirley Jackson, Renatta Adler, Maggie Nelson, Donald Antrim, Steven Millhauser, Donald Barthelme, Tom McCarthy, Jenny Offill. This is the problem with reading too much. 

When and where do you write?

I write in the mornings, in bed; for me this achieves the perfect balance of mental clarity and physical comfort required to forget myself. 

What are you working on now?

A second novel, reportedly.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Technically, I suppose. But I don't really see it as writer's block—I see it as a cycle. Some days I wake up and I'm ready to work, I have tons of ideas and energy. Other days I wake up and I can only blink at the blank page. But you know what? That's okay. On the bad days, I try for a while (in case it's just sleepiness or stubbornness) and then, if it's not working, I give up and read a book, or go for a run, or have a snack. It is my policy not to give myself a hard time about this. For me at least, no good writing ever comes from forcing it. 

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

The best writing advice I've ever received directly was from one of my graduate school professors, who advised me to write a novel, and then when I said I'd try, raised an eyebrow at me and said, "Try?" That eyebrow raise was very good writing advice. That eyebrow raise said: stop waffling and self-doubting and worrying and go do it already.

What’s your advice to new writers?

In first drafts, whether stories or novels or poems, start by simply getting to the end. Even if you get there by jumping over plot holes, and writing bad sentences, and punctuating your prose with "SOMETHING ELSE HERE," just get there. Once you've written through to the end once, you can see the shape of the thing, and then you can change it. Maybe a lot. Don't worry—no one else has to see your bad draft full of SOMETHING ELSEs. Just use it as scaffolding: a temporary support system that will allow you to start building in earnest on the next go-around.

Emily Temple was raised by Buddhists in Central New York. She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, and now lives in Brooklyn, where she is the Managing Editor at Literary Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published in 2020.