Vera Kurian

How did you become a writer?
I think by becoming an avid reader first. Around fourth grade or so I started writing a long story that combined horror elements with Greek mythology, then it was a My Side of the Mountain knockoff except with a girl, then on to the inevitable vampire novel when I was in high school. I was offered the unusual privilege of attending writing workshops for free my last two years of high school (I went to a special arts school) where I then worked on some short stories and a young adult novel which is unfortunately lost to the digital archive that is floppy disks. I wrote a lot in college—this was before literary magazines were really online—and started to cluelessly send out submissions. Things took a bit of a break when I went to graduate school because of how intense the pace was, but I went back to writing short stories in 2013, after I came back to Washington DC after graduate school. I always said that I never wanted to write a novel, because frankly short stories are easier to write and easier to get published, but one day I wrote a story that someone said I should turn into a novel, which I did. That was the first novel I unsuccessfully queried. Never Saw Me Coming is probably the sixth novel I’ve written, but the first to get an agent and get a book deal. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I grew up reading Stephen King and think in many ways I’ve developed into an old-fashioned storyteller like him: character and setting driven, where the crazy stuff is in the setup, not the execution. I am always in deep admiration of writers who can do the lyrical prose I can’t, writers like William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. I like authors who can handle big, unapologetically expansive novels, like Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell. I would kill to have lunch with Elena Ferrante. There are a lot of writing teachers I could shout out (the encouraging ones, the ones who were excited when I walked into literary workshops with space opera) and shout down (the ones who doubted me), but I had one teacher in particular who I want to highlight. Regrettably I can’t remember her name, but she was my typing teacher in eighth grade and during her class period she let me work on a novella (a Western clearly inspired by Young Guns II) and defended me against an English teacher who accused me of plagiarism without any evidence. The English teacher “questioned the authenticity” of a creative project I had turned in because she “hadn’t seen anything like it before” from me. The typing teacher talked to her and said, she’s writing a wholeass novel. (Okay, she probably didn’t word it that way). 

When and where do you write?
Mostly at my kitchen table. Pre-COVID I would sometimes work at coffeeshops because I like the ambient noise (when I’m not listening to chillhop, or the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings, I’m listening to coffeeshop sounds on Spotify). As for when, there’s a brief period after work, after dinner, but before the gym where I write. A few hours on the weekend. I am hugely a believer that you can work full time and still be a writer, and it doesn’t require waking up at 5am or making some enormous, painful sacrifice. I still see my friends, play with my dog, work out, and watch shocking amounts of terrible TV. You just need to be efficient with your time.  

What are you working on now?
Secret project. It’s a mystery, and a more complicated one than Never Saw Me Coming. I did a lot of the foundation-laying for this book during the downtime of the publishing cycle of my debut novel. Now there is so much going on with the book coming out that I don’t have a ton of time to devote to the new book—at least for now. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
I’m not a believer in writer’s block. I’m either actively writing or passively writing. I tend to write really fast, but when I’m not writing, it looks like I’m not working at all, but I am. It looks like I’m binging old seasons of Survivor and Love Island and writing long blog reviews of horror novels, but what I’m actually doing is percolating. By the time I sit down to write something, I’ve already worked out 80 percent of it in my head, both characters and plot. I’m “writing” when I’m walking my dog or lifting weights or driving somewhere because I’m mulling things over. I like to think that I’m feeding my unconscious the stimuli, then letting it stew for a while. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Two things. The first was told to me by a college writing professor, who said that the most successful writers from his doctoral program were not necessarily the most talented, but the ones who had some combination of talent and persistence. To be a writer you need to have some talent. To be a traditionally published author, at some point the skillset shifts from just being someone who can write a book to a whole other set of things: someone who endures despite all the rejections, someone who has the business savvy to figure out how to get an agent and how the industry works, someone who can market a book, write copy, be charming in interviews. You can be good at writing and be bad at all the other stuff, but ideally you would be good at everything. The second thing is more nuts-and-bolts: I took a workshop with novelist Daniel Torday, and he said when revising a book to only work on one thing per revision. (So go through the book entirely only looking at one problem at a time, rather than a vague sense of “fix everything” at the same time.) This is particularly useful when working on multiple POV novels. 

What’s your advice to new writers?
Read promiscuously. Read both literary and genre fiction. Read more than you write. Spend less time daydreaming about publication and more time reading and writing. 

Vera Kurian is a writer and scientist based in Washington DC. Her debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, is forthcoming from Park Row Books (US) and Harvill Secker, Vintage (UK) in September. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Day One, and The Pinch. She has lived in Washington DC for most of her adult life. She has a PhD in Social Psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology, and quantitative methods.