Author Emery Lord on Difficult Questions and the Human Connection of Fiction

It was a chilly February morning when I sat down at my desk to meet with Emery Lord. With gray clouds in the sky, I started my first interview – I was looking forward to it, but also nervous about it. The second Emery appeared on my screen, I knew I didn’t have anything to worry about. Emery was so kind, and my nerves melted away as we started talking.

A career in fiction writing seemed out of reach for Emery, but she had been writing from a young age. She started writing with silly, sarcastic, and fun end-of-year newsletters that her parents sent out to their friends – in one, she talked about how her brother won the Nobel Prize at 10! So it makes sense that she eventually landed in writing young adult fiction and that she’s still writing today with five books published. Emery and I talked about being passionate about what you’re writing, the core questions at the center of books, and whether writers are our characters.

Interview by Hailey Semchee. Photography by Heather Colley. 

Can you tell me about yourself? How did you get started writing?

I started writing fiction when I was in my early 20s. Before then, I loved writing in many other mediums, and I loved reading fiction, but I didn't really believe that writing fiction was a career path. And, there wasn’t this sort of robust and easily searchable network of writers. I thought that writers were people who lived in castles in Scotland, which, I guess, a couple do. It just all felt inaccessible to me.

But I was a reader of many things from the time I was very young. I moved a lot as a kid, and books were portable relationships. I could take books with me, and that could feel like some continuity in my life, and some escapism when adjustments were difficult.

So it was a natural progression from that in my early 20s. In college, I majored in strategic communication. This was an amalgam of media journalism and mass communication. I quickly found an interest in English as well and eventually took that as my second major.

What did you write before you found your passion for fiction storytelling?

I always loved writing personal essays. Or even essays in general, so you can see why a double major in English came naturally. I was like, “You mean to tell me I get to read this book for class, it’s considered work. I get to talk about it in class and disagree with other people, including the professor, and then craft an argument about my argument? This is great.”

I really liked that style of writing, but my favorite type of writing when I was younger was when I wrote my family’s Christmas letter every year. One year, when I was about 13, my parents received, from one of their friends, a tri-fold brochure of their children’s many accomplishments. My family had a really tough year, and I was just looking at it like, “Is this a joke?” I could see my mom’s reaction to it also, so as a joke, I went upstairs and wrote this sarcastic brochure of my family’s accomplishments. It was a tough time. It was all sarcastic. Some of it was made up like my brother won a Nobel Prize – he was 10 at the time. 

And my parents are very polite and fun, but never in my wildest dreams did I think they’d want to send it out. It was such a weird thing to do, and they don’t do weird things like that. I just wanted to make them laugh, but they thought it was so funny that they sent it out.

Their extensive list of people who received Christmas cards (because we moved a lot) was like, “you have to keep doing this,” so every year of my tween and teen years, I spent a chunk of November and December coming up with a new way to amuse people and hopefully they had a bad year, not feel so bad about it. Is that still kind of what I’m doing as my career? It might be.

That was a type of writing that I loved doing so much, it was really silly. I soon found out that this type of writing was not my only interest. Advocating was one as well. Political writing. Using the many rhetorical skills that you can learn from being a reader of fiction, to pull on heartstrings. That mattered a lot to me as well.

In college, I loved a lot of the fiction that I read for class, but I also really loved reading Raymond Carver and Amy Hemple and everyone that Gordon Lish edited. So I loved that too because I was reading that and talking to them about it.

I thought that if I ever pursued a career in writing, it would be grim minimalist short stories, which is funny if you’ve read anything I’ve written. It’s very different from what I write!

When I started reading seriously after I graduated college, it was because the economy was bleak. I was broke, I was depressed. It was just a difficult time on so many levels. Writing fiction felt really fun, and it was free. It felt like, in hindsight, there’s some real armchair psychiatry. I was creating a world I could control, right, on the page.

I sat down, thinking I was going to write an adult novel about a woman in her late 20s who returns to her hometown. This place is where she has a really complicated relationship. But as I was trying to flesh out the backstory of why she has such a complicated backstory with her hometown, I realized that story was more compelling to me. And [I wasn’t that far outside of] the Y.A. fiction space. I was 22, so I mean, I had not been a teenager for three years. I knew way more about that than about being in my late 20s –which I hadn’t been yet – so that book ultimately became my second book, which is called The Start of Me & You. So I sort of backed into the whole career through that. Sad events that drove me to escapism.

At 22, I was miserable, and so was everyone else I was friends with, but everyone was putting on such a good front. I felt like I was the only person who was like, not going to Coachella. You know what I mean? Just like, broke and sad. It took me until I was 23 or 24 to be like, “I was having a bad time.” And everyone else was like, “Yeah, so were we.”

How did the love of writing help you in your most difficult times such as the pandemic?

I mean, sometimes it’s such a wonderful fit. I was putting no pressure on myself to produce anything beyond what I needed to for the deadline in early 2020, and yet, my crisis brain, when I couldn’t sleep, I needed the crisis part of my mind to just shut off. So I wrote a lot. Only for me. I still haven’t shown it to anyone. Sometimes it’s a wonderful coping mechanism.

What is your writing process like? Do you write stories for the market, or do you write them for yourself? I know this is a hot topic in the writing industry.

I do not try to write for the market. In some ways, I sort of wish I could, but for me to work up the momentum it’s going to take for me to be deep inside of a project for at least a year, realistically two, and then talk about it more – it could never come from a place of me thinking it would sell well.

I wish I could say that I do [write towards the market], but I will say that I wrote my first two books completely in a silo, just working alone. I didn’t know anyone in the industry, and I also really didn’t think anything would ever happen with them. I wrote them so entirely for myself that it feels weird and vulnerable to have the public.

But, once I've signed the contract for those books, I do think about whether or not something I’m writing feels extraneous to me. That’s not for reasons of how it would sell, it’s for caring a lot about the audience of Y.A. readers. If I’m writing something that I don’t think is adding anything to a conversation, as far as I’m concerned, why am I doing it? For some people, I think it’s enough for it to be entertaining, and “I wrote it” and “Here it is,” and that’s great, and that’s fine. It’s just for me personally to have the motivation that I’m going to require to write something that I love and care about, it has to come from a place of feeling like I haven’t seen something like it done exactly this way.

So for example, I went into the book that I’m currently revising, thinking I wanted to write a friendship breakup novel because I just felt like that was something that’s happened in my life that felt like a piece that was missing. I was looking out at the scope of all these books we have about romantic breakups and wonderful friend groups, and there wasn’t anything that followed the grief of a friend breakup at the time. This was years ago.

After I started it, two books came out about friendship breakups that I love (one by Ashley Woodfolk and one by Amy Spalding), and that hit the spot for me. I didn’t feel so compelled to work through my feelings because I felt seen by those books, and I didn’t feel as much like I needed to delve into it in the same way.

I do have some relationship with what’s happening in the industry because it changes what I’m feeling revved up about. My motivation is coming from some core questions that I can’t stop thinking about, and probably some personal fault of my own that I’m going to pick apart for 300 pages.

When I am writing, even though it is fiction, I’m really trying to be truthful. What I’m trying to be truthful about, frankly, with each book, there’s some core thing I’m sincerely struggling with in my own life.

And, I write Y.A., but I’m not trying to frame whatever that question is as me teaching something. It’s the complete opposite. It feels like me being like, I don’t know the answer to it, and then I wrestle that question for 300 pages. So I guess that what I hope that someone would get from my writing is that they can look at those core, difficult questions that I’m trying to look at in the mirror with no filter right back at myself.

So those questions, to not be vague about it, for example I have a book called When We Collided, it has two narrators. The core question with those two, for me, at the time, for one of the protagonists, “How can I be a support person to the people in my life who are dealing with mental illness?” and from the other protagonist, “as a person with mental illness, can I be lovable, can I be imperfect?” These are really difficult questions that I was sincerely grappling with. 

Those are two different identities of mine, the person with the illness and the person who loves people with the illness. So I hope that anybody who has similar questions in their own life, even if they’re not conscious, even if they’re not that blunt in the person’s mind, I hope that they can connect with me by looking at sort my humanity and how I fit into the world the way I want to to show up for other people. 

I hope that’s what people take. The very human connection is at the core of it.

If anybody feels just a tiny bit less alone in something that they’re grappling with, then I’m happy.

I feel like, whenever we sit down to write, there’s always questions that we want to ask. I feel like I always learn something about myself from my characters.

Oh, I always think I’m inventing complete fiction! Like, I just explained pretty concisely, what the two questions are of When We Collided. I don’t know that I would have been able to say that at the time I was writing it. I always think I’m completely coming up with things from scratch, and then I look back and it was very clear to see what was going on in my life at the time that I was writing these various books.

It’s strange too because the characters are not me. They might share my flaws, but they’re quite different. Their scenarios are different, their family structure, everything, but the feelings are usually quite real.

One of my family members asked me – I was explaining to them about the book [I was writing] – they were like, “So, is the character you? Your main character is you, right?” And I was like, “No? No.”

I also get questions from people who know my partner, like, “Oh, I see so much of him in this!” And I’m like, “No, don’t!”

There’s certainly some degree of truth to all of it. There’ve only been a couple of times when I’ve done it intentionally. They know this because I’ve told them, but when I was trying to teach myself how to write with my first book, that is a very different iteration wound up being The Start of Me & You. I chose, like, a core quality of each of my closest childhood friends.

Even though I changed absolutely everything else about the characters, them having this one guiding quality made me feel like I can understand this character because I understand my friends. I feel like I chose a quality that I admire in each of my friends, and something that I feel that I could really learn from them, and then built characters completely around that trait.

That was a really handy way to learn how to write characters that connect. Of course, I told them that I did it like I hope you like the book. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

And it’s so funny though, I don’t often use anything from my real life specifically for books. On the rare occasion that I have, there’s always someone that’s like, “Well that’s not realistic.” The one time that I put in something that’s like, verbatim – some exchange that I have with my partner that I have that I’m like, “Oh this is pretty rich.” Or maybe it’ll be that I say something that I’m like, “That was pretty funny, I’m probably gonna use that.”

I think that some of my favorite work just feels so specific to the writer, and when that’s the case, of course, it’s because they’re imbuing it with the things that they’re interested in, and the things that they’re hurt by.

It’s all personal. For being a job where I make people up and then make them fight and make them kiss, it’s surprisingly personal.

It is. I feel like a lot of people don’t think about it, people that read books and maybe don’t write them. It’s so hard, and it’s like, so hard to answer the question of like, “are your characters you?” because like, no, but–

–but, also, yes! I was thinking about it a little bit with my current project, and I think I put some of my worst qualities into the love interest. People are like, “Oh are you the protagonist?” And I’m like, oh in this case I see a lot of myself in him. It's some things I could really work on.

He can be a little bit of a know-it-all, a little self-righteous, so is he me? Of course not. But he has a trait that I identify with and that feels a little bit close to the bone in a way that I think is good. Like I said, in doing my writing, I’m trying to look at myself honestly, and that includes in ways that when I said something that I think was funny, and also when I’m like “Oh, let’s spend a whole book picking away at a flaw that’s familiar to me.”

It’s always a flaw that you don’t think you have, and then the more you write it, you’re like, “Oh, wait.”

This is coming pretty easily, isn’t it?

Yeah!

Sometimes I feel like there's one of my books where there’s a relatively minor character who is the character’s teacher, and I’m like, “That’s probably the character I’m most like.”

People are like, “Which protagonist are you most like?” I’m like, I can’t answer that! There’s something in me in all of them. But sometimes it’s not the protagonist, too.

Right! I feel like putting yourself in each of your characters, like all of the side characters, makes it for such a more enjoyable writing – and also from the standpoint of a reader, reading experience. Not that, as a reader, you think about it in terms of the author, but it’s more relatable.

In one of my books, I was writing some pretty heavy subject matter and some personal stuff. Some days it was hard to sit down at my computer and face it.

It was important to me – that’s what keeps me coming back to a project is the challenge of it – and I realized pretty early on in trying to tackle the story, oh this is really heavy. I have to sit down at the computer every day and be like, “Let’s dive into my relationship with the faith of my childhood and how it’s flawed and problematic, but I can’t give this protagonist too much self-awareness about it because I’m 28 and she’s 17.” It was just a lot.

I wrote one of the characters into it, a secondary character, almost to keep me company on the page with his sense of humor. I sort of shaped these people around her, because they were who I needed to be able to get through that story the way I wanted to. It’s such a strange thing in hindsight. I built the cast of characters that I needed, intentionally with a sense of humor, and one with a certain skepticism and toughness, because that’s really what I needed while I was wandering those pages and hacking through the jungle of my issues.

Yeah. And I’m sure that readers took – is that book out?

Yeah, it’s called The Names They Gave Us.

I feel like, not that readers would know that about your book, that it was so personal for you in that way, and that you wrote those characters as a comfort for you, but maybe they found comfort in those characters too.

I hope so. And that’s part of the personal stuff of having to block it out when you’re at a desk. I have to not think about how things are going to be received because it feels so vulnerable. I just have to stay on the page and try my best to be honest.

I relate to that so much. I [wrote something] and then I realized that I was thinking about how everyone else would feel about it and not how I was feeling about it while writing it.

Absolutely. This is something that I had to learn how to use strategies like making a Pinterest page for images that feel like the book feels in my mind when it’s not where I want it to be, and I have to make my playlists.

I do this thing – I’m sure it’s done in other ways and it probably has an official name – but I just call it making word lists. Where, when I’m working on a project, I’ll sometimes in the early brainstorming phase, have a page or two of a bunch of vocabulary words that feel right for what I want the sensory experience of the book to be. And I will sometimes return to those pages. I don’t use all the words from it, I’m not trying to turn a draft into a search and find, but I usually wind up about using two-thirds of them. Not by referencing the list, just by knowing what I want the sort of texture of the world, this is the type of language I want to be using.

Um, and so sometimes returning to that, I can feel like, “Oh, I remember what I wanted this to feel like.” Or giving myself a couple of minutes to look at some images and find something and be like, “no, I still know what I want it to be.” It’s just really hard to push everything out and get back to – It feels like – at least to me, I don’t know about you – like my idea for a project exists in some form that I can feel and it can get sort of clouded over. That’s such an esoteric, like, annoying way to put that. [Laughs.]

I heard someone describe their writing process once as feeling like the finished product – like, what they’re trying to get to – instead of it being, like, a construction, or something, it feels like an archaeology dig, and they’re dusting away at it, and sometimes losing track of like, “Is this even anything? This doesn’t look like anything.” And, it feels like something that you’re slowly revealing, as opposed to something that you’re completely constructing from your imagination.

That makes total sense.

It feels like your idea exists somewhere – for me, it always feels like it’s a different labyrinth, each book. I know where I want to get to the center, and it’s just me getting it wrong a whole bunch of times. David Bowie’s never there as Jareth the Goblin King, but it is still a labyrinth.

Talking about projects online scares me a lot. Not because, like, talking about what I’m working on scares me, but because people now know about it. It’s like, not a done thing. It’s not a sure thing. And I’m like, “Maybe I shouldn’t have, like, talked about this, or tweeted about this.”

I understand. Part of you feels like, “I want you to take in the entire project,” and this is how I feel when my loved ones ask, “Oh, what are you working on now?” Could I give an elevator pitch? Probably. But I’m sort of just like, “I don’t know, it’s stupid.” [Laughs.] It’s really hard for me to articulate what it’s going to be. Even though I know.

Yeah. And it’s hard to let other people in too. If they’re people that know you and love you, I feel like that’s even harder than people who don’t know you.

It’s extremely difficult. I was very private about my writing. Simply because I didn’t think anything career-wise was going to happen with it, nor did I really plan for it for a while there. So I was private about it at first. I’m normally even private about what I’m working on in the draft form because I just want to keep it where it is, and then, I was inside my house for two years, and my partner has never actually read the book that I’m almost done with, and yet knows absolutely everything.

I was talking through something earlier this week, and he was like, “Doesn’t that happen, with Sophie pretty early on in the book?” and I was like, “Yeah, it does.” And I forget who was over that was like, “Oh, so you’ve read it?” and he was like, “Absolutely not, no I have not! She will not let me, I just know everything about it.”

My parents had to hear so much about my books, and I wouldn’t let them read it! I was like, “No, you can’t read this right now.”

Yeah, I did not tell my parents about my writing until I had a book deal on the table from Bloomsbury.

That’s smart.

It was only because they have always been so supportive of me pursuing creative writing, to the point that when I was going to college – a lot of writers say, “My parents want me to do something practical” – my parents did practical things, and I think because of that, they were looking at what I loved and they were like, “Go do creative writing if you want to,” which was an enormous act of love and faith in me.

They were vocally supportive of it. I remember people at my graduation party, they’re friends, being like, “Oh, have you decided your major?” and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to do strategic communications, so I can, you know, focus on journalism and communications.” And my mom would like, pop in from behind, and be like, “She’s probably gonna write a book!” And it was just like, “Mom, where are you getting this? That’s not the thing that’s happening!” So keeping it from them was just, I think if I would have told them that I was pursuing it, it would’ve made the waiting so much harder for me, and it would’ve made the rejection harder for me because they would’ve wanted it so much and not been able to hide it.

That’s how I feel. I’m not saying it’s smart that you hid it from your parents because like, obviously, but I feel that so much!

It’s hard! And the thing is though, the rejection phase sadly doesn’t end. I don’t know about you, and every person’s feelings are very valid, going through the querying experience. It can be completely demoralizing. But at least, the early rejections, for me, I thought I was going to take it hard. I thought I was going to cry, I thought I was going to lose faith in what I’d written, and instead, I felt like – maybe because it was these communications coming from these legitimate agencies, even if they were form rejections, which they were – and I would think to myself, like, “Yeah, I’m doing it. I’m a rejected writer. That puts me in league with all the writers I love the most, which means that before they had the books published of theirs that I love, that I’ve read, they also had the Girl Scout badge that I just got from a rejected writer.”

I felt the same way.

There was something about it that – don’t get me wrong, it didn’t feel good, I certainly shed some tears about it – and they're certainly times where I was like, “What’s the point?” – of course, but there was also something about it that I was like, I’m out here. I’m doing it. And I do wish that I would’ve let more people in on that experience. I think I was proud of myself. I wouldn’t have said it in that way at the time. I was proud of myself for putting myself out there, knowing I was going to get hurt, getting hurt, and getting back up. It’s not over until you stay down.

Who is an influential woman in your life and why? 

My mom is an extremely loving person, and someone who I look up to in her ability to be generous with her time and her skills in all ways. With her emotions. Something that I think applies to writing is those qualities. When that’s your job, it’s good to have been someone who embodies that.