Holly Gramazio

How did you become a writer? Well, a lot of kids write stories – I guess I became a writer by just not stopping. Until recently my work was mostly in games, but that always involved a lot of writing too, whether that was rules, or scripts for video games, or curatorial text for exhibitions, or whatever else. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). It's definitely different for different projects. I guess when I encounter a particular problem or question I tend to dig into writers who do that particular thing well. So for The Husbands, I was looking at three main areas:

• First, for how to pull off a nonrealist thing in a basically realist setting, I looked at work like Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl, plus movies and TV like Groundhog Day, Russian Doll, Palm Springs

• Second, for tone, I kept going back to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn for its lightness and jokes and intensity of feeling and how it talks about day-to-day life, and how wonderfully it picks its moments and anecdotes, and to Christopher Isherwood and his groundedness in observation and how people exist in their bodies. 

• Third, for structure I ended up treating the book almost as a travelogue, since it's very episodic, with new characters turning up throughout and occasionally coming back down the line. So I looked at Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Langston Hughes' I Wonder as I Wander, the game 80 Days by Inkle and Meghna Jayanth.

More generally, for books on writing I really like George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, John McPhee's Draft No. 4, Lydia Davis' Essays One. I do really like to read books on writing, even when they don't have any specifically helpful advice for whatever I'm working on at the time. They help me feel excited about books and writing and sentences. They make "go and sit on your own and write something" feel less lonely and more fun. 

When and where do you write? I tend to write best if I get to it pretty soon after waking up in the morning, ideally before looking at the internet. 

What are you working on now? I'm knocking away at a couple of things. I'm hoping one of them will turn into my second novel but at the moment neither of them have quite reached that point of convincingly taking off. I reckon maybe in another week or two.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I'm a big procrastinator, so I definitely have long periods of not getting anything much written, or having a deadline and sensing it creep closer and closer but not doing anything about it. But it's always more because I'm wasting time, rather than pure "staring at a blank page" writers block. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence, so that it's easy to get started again when you come back to it.

What’s your advice to new writers? If you're torn between ideas, you might be able to figure out what to work on by answering the question: Which project would you be saddest about if you discovered that someone else had beaten you to it?  

Holly Gramazio is a writer, game designer and curator from Adelaide, currently based in London. She founded the experimental games festival Now Play This, and wrote the script for the award-winning indie videogame Dicey Dungeons. Her novel The Husbands, a comedy about a woman whose attic starts generating an infinite supply of husbands, was released in April 2024.