Elinora Lord interview

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

A little introduction:

I am a lesbian writer of stage, screen, fiction and radio from Suffolk, UK, who has been working as a full-time professional writer for eighteen years.

When did your love of books begin?

As many people’s did I suppose, as a child. I don’t remember not loving books. My mum read to me every night as I fell asleep, and I read book after book, day after day, as a child.

I remember, in winter, I would tuck myself up, under my bed with a torch, or I’d make a blanket tent with the old clothes airer and lay inside it reading, or, in summer, I’d run to the back of the garden and climb up the old apple tree to my favourite reading branch, or, on lazier days I’d lay on a towel beneath it and read through squinted eyes and the dapple of sunlight through the yellow and green leaves.

Enid Blyton books were the first books I fell in love with, and The Children of Cherry Tree Farm was the first chapter book I ever read and finished - I remember reading it while sitting cross-legged in the square of sunshine coming through the back door in the house I was born in.

Then I remember falling wildly in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House Books.

My favourite quote about reading, which I find to be so true, is from the film, You’ve Got Mail, where book shop owner Kathleen Kelly played by the wonderful Meg Ryan, gushes enthusiastically to Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and says; “When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.” a line written of course by the incredible Nora Ephron. But oh, how true that line is.

When did you start to have the wish to become an author?

I remember when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I was sitting in the sitting room, surrounded by my family, and I began crying inconsolably, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Looking back on it I must have looked a bit bonkers, but I remember my mum asking me what was the matter, and I replied, “I just want to be a writer so much”.

Which might sound silly, but I wanted it so badly that I thought it might burst out of me. The only problem was, that although I knew how to write, there was no one who could tell me how to get to where I wanted to be. I wanted to write literary fiction novels. But, because writing is such a volatile industry, what works for one person might not work for someone else, so even if someone had told me how to do it, it probably wouldn’t have worked. Instead, I had to figure it out on my own, and I had no earthly idea what I was doing.

The truth is, I’d wanted to be a writer since I first found out what a writer was, and before that, I’d been writing anyway. I still have my huge thick notepads full of four, five, six, seven, eight etc year old stories that I’d written. 

Throughout school, with the teachers incessant, “find a real job” attitudes, I never wavered. I was a writer. I always had been, and I always would be.

I left home when I was eighteen and rented an 18th-century fisherman's cottage built into a cliff on the edge of the sea in a tiny town on the east coast of England.

The house had no central heating, no hot water, and, being right on the North Sea, it was bloody freezing, so cold that I lived in one room during the winter. It was just me, my cat, Oats, and my computer, where I would sit for hours, and hours and hours, writing story after story and sending them off in the hopes someone would say, “she’s got a voice, let’s publish her!”, and eventually, after months of living on only baked potatoes from a sack in my kitchen, someone accepted my work, and from then on it grew to where I am today.

How have you found the process for becoming an author?

In a word, Difficult! It’s a lot harder than just knowing you are a writer and announcing yourself as one, it’s actually writing, the difficulty of which is often chronically overlooked and perpetually ignored.

Writing takes hours. I work solidly as a writer for 8-10 hours a day, and I make sure in that time I write at least 1,500 words of fiction, but I suppose, for me, the process has been relatively straightforward, I knew from a very early age what I wanted to do, I just had to work out how to get there and which hoops to jump through to do it (that was the difficult part!)

What would you say to those wanting to become an author?

You will be rejected thousands, upon thousands of times, but it’s not personal. If you take rejections personally, you’ll never get anywhere. As editor-in-chief of a literary journal, I can tell you that journals receive so many pieces of work and have to turn down thousands of brilliant pieces every day, if you get rejected, stick with it and send it out again and again until it does get accepted.  I send 1,000 (at least) submissions of fiction and poetry out every single week, out of those between 0-100 are accepted. Writing is one of the hardest jobs out there, and what makes it even harder is that no two writers have the same journey, so it’s impossible for someone to say, “this is how you do it”, you have to forge your own path, you have to actually write something, Then, when you’ve written the book, there are the endless rounds of cuts and edits, and then the task of finding an agent, a publisher, more edits, etc, and that’s if you find a publisher at all! 9 times out of 10 you won’t, and the same goes for agents. You might be absolutely fantastic, but there are millions of other people just as good, and only a handful of agents and publishers.

It takes a huge amount of hard work, belief in yourself, and a huge amount of determination, but, if you want it enough, you can do it, and you will do it, and when you do, you will find yourself surrounded by the most wonderful people, the most incredible community, and you yourself will feel as though you are made of magic.

Tell us about your book/books:

My poetry collection, The Girl Who Knew the Moon, and my short story collection, Among the Bohemians, have just been released, as well as my collected poems on narcissistic abuse, which has just been released under the title, Everything is Broken.

But the most exciting of all is my latest novel, Everland, a middle-grade literary fiction novel. It tells the story of Clementine Lucie Walthrope, a 12-year-old evacuee orphaned during WWII who is sent to Everland, a school, started by her uncle, the headmaster, an ageing writer she has never met who runs a school for the Children of Prodigialis, children who were born with a particularly odd gift or power that sets them apart from society. The story features many LGBT+ themes and sees Clementine entering the realms of Imagination to save the school and bring back the mind of her uncle.

What do you love about the writing/reading community?

Oh, gosh, where do I start? The writing community is such a joy to be a part of, to see writers first starting out, to established writers achieving their lifelong goals and everything in between, and everyone cheering each other on, it’s wonderful!

I think because writing is such an extraordinary career choice, we all know how hard it is, and therefore the strength and fierceness of joy that comes from seeing others succeed is much more than any other community I’ve ever been a part of.

It is in essence, a whole load of extraordinary people creating extraordinary things in a world that, let’s face it, isn’t often friendly to “creative types”, and I think that’s quite magnificent and wonderful.

If you could say anything to your readers what would it be?

First and foremost, THANK YOU! If nobody read my work I’d have nothing, and if nobody felt strongly enough to pay for my work I’d be starving, so thank you. I consider you all friends, and you have all helped to make a dream become reality, and for that, I will be forever grateful.

Where can people connect with you?

Via my website: www.elinoralord.com, via email: elinoralord@gmail.com or on Twitter: @elinora_lord

I always love to hear from those who have read my work or seen my films or plays, so please do follow me on Twitter and send a quick message!