Isaac Fellman
/How did you become a writer?
Well, like a lot of writers, I'm mentally ill. To become a writer, you need drive and you need practice, and the drive to escape something -- whether it's inside your brain or outside -- is a great way to make sure you get the practice. But pure escapism will only get you so far. You'll burn out that way, and run out of ideas, and you won't learn to build a practice. At a certain point, we have to learn to care for ourselves in ways other than writing, so that writing can be a sustainable lifelong practice. It's like how a singer needs to learn not to force their voice through their throat, but instead to use their whole body to support the sound. We become writers by learning to support it.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I didn't seek out teachers when I was young. The problem was that I was confident in what I wanted to do, but not skilled enough to bring it across. When people didn't get it and suggested that I write differently, I would just go off and practice, certain that I could make them understand if I just got good enough at writing my way. This is a very slow and lonely way to do it. But that was the person I was in my twenties and early thirties -- patient, but painfully rigid in my thinking.
That said, I definitely had writers who influenced me, my favorites being Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, who were also memorably patient but rigid in their thinking. Both of them have a brilliant sense of rhythm; they compose in the wildest time signatures, which to me is the hardest thing to learn. Ursula Le Guin came a little later, a writer who really shines in the rhythm of how the chapters themselves are juxtaposed, as well as on a sentence level. And then I learned from Fyodor Dostoevsky and Helen DeWitt that there aren't any rules about perspective or sentence-level usage, or what's "important' in a scene, so long as you can impose its rightness and importance on the reader. The influences on how I think about character are mostly fanfic writers, but that's an aspect of my reading and writing that I prefer to keep private.
When and where do you write?
I don't have the discipline to write before work; I write in the evening after dinner, almost always at home on the couch. It's easier to write when you're comfortable, although writing at my desk is sometimes fun if I want to feel like the guy from Sunset Boulevard. I write most days. I take a day or two off per week.
What are you working on now?
A gay historical novel about a 19th-century naval tragedy. I wanted to work in a gay literary tradition; I've done more lesbian work and bi work and trans work, but a lot of my queer influences are gay men.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
All the time. It's another word for exhaustion and burnout. You can force your way past it, but you'll pay for that later. Take the day. Just like you don't save any time by darting in and out of traffic, you don't save any time by throwing yourself against your problems, as opposed to sitting with them in the background.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Write the book you actually want to write, not the book you feel you should write.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Don't forget that your heroes are just people, and not a different kind of person from you, either. All the masterpieces of literature were written by people who struggled with their jobs, their relationships, and the unreliability of their bodies and minds. All of those people were tired and distracted. You can be like them. Since you share their very common problems, you already are like them.
Isaac Fellman is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The Breath of the Sun and the upcoming novella The Two Doctors Górski. His newest book is Dead Collections, about an archivist who is a vampire. Isaac is an archivist, but not a vampire.
