 interview with julie sarkissian can you describe your typical writing day is there a particular time of day when you feel you write best  a typical day for me begins with making coffee then i sit down at the couch if i m in a purely creative stage or my desk if i am trying to work on analytic or editing issue i love working on the couch with my laptop perched on the arm of the couch but i am trying to wean myself off of that i write for a few hours in the morning then break to take a yoga class at my local yoga studio then it s back home for lunch i usually eat leftovers or peanut butter and jelly and a few more hours of writing once or twice a week i work a dinner waitressing shift at the café where i have worked for years which do you enjoy most the first draft or the editing  hands down first draft i love feeling uninhibited not hemmed in creatively i love having language guide me rather than rising action or plot it is a struggle for me to analyze my own work in order to see what necessary details are missing where tension needs to be heightened where i need to pull back and be more subtle i think i have a decent ear and can hear where my language doesn t ring true and i enjoy polishing language but working on structural editing putting all the pieces of a story in just the right order ties my brain in knots i found your prose in dear lucy to be very rich and poetic are you a keen reader of poetry do you think there s value for a prose writer in learning and committing poetry to memory  thank you i love poetry reading it and writing it the first creative writing i ever did was poetry and actually won a big regional writing award for my poetry when i as thirteen during middle school and high school i thought of myself as a poet first my first short stories were extensions of my poetry and it means a lot to me to have my writing called poetic i love many poets ts eliot sylvia plath wallace stevens robert frost i learned a lot from studying the theory of gertrude stein the importance of putting one word next to another even if semantically the significance is hard to understand i am so grateful i got to study these amazing poets in college because certainly much of the meaning of their words would have been lost on me without reading it in the classroom setting my parents are big lovers of poetry and my mother said one of the reasons she fell in love with my dad was because he could recite all his favorite poems i absolutely believe there is value in prose writers reading poetry i believe there is value in all humans reading poetry i am perhaps biased because language is my first love as a writer and a reader and i do believe that the emphasis on word choice is more underscored in poetry than in prose what s your approach to beginning a new writing project do you plan each aspect scrupulously or are you content to jump in and see what happens  i certainly jump in make a big mess and then try to clean up the mess once i tried outlining and planning at the onset of a project and it blocked my creativity i was very disappointed because intellectually i was inspired by the project but i found when i was leading with plot and structure i had no voice so it was rather excruciating trying to get words on the page without an inspiring voice but i still feel that particular book is in me but that it wasn t the right time to work on it i m still waiting for the right voice to introduce herself to me is there anyone to whom you show your work when it s in progress or do you prefer to wait till you have a polished manuscript  there are a few people i will show an early draft of my work to i share a lot with my dad he is a very open optimistic and nurturing person to share my work with i trust him but he is sensitive to my vulnerability and i love sharing things with my mom but she has a masters in linguistics and literature so she can be a bit analytical to show an early draft to though in terms of analyzing plot and structure she is incredibly shrewd nothing gets past her i share things with my fiancé but i m a little more neurotic about that because he is so eager to help that sometimes i can t hear all his advice because i get too defensive i also have a girlfriend who is an avid reader has a brilliant mind and is an actress and she strikes that wonderful balance of being honest but supportive helpful but gentle how did dear lucy get published did you have an agent  i do have a wonderful agent judy heiblum at sterling lord literistic who took on the project many years ago when it was essentially a version of my mfa thesis we edited the book together for about a year and a half then we sold it to simon schuster and edited it for another year and a half the book received notice from great writers like joyce carol oates and ron rash which authors have influenced you in your writing which do you read simply for pleasure  thank you for many years it has been hard for me to separate the anxiety of influence from reading for pleasure i am always conscious of how what i am reading could influence my writing that doesn t make what i read any less meaningful it just means i am conscious of what i am reading in a way that sometimes makes it hard to read with abandon my favorite authors and greatest influences are faulkner toni morrison and flannery o connor gabriel garcia marquez i love the modernists i have always loved joyce carol oates and she was a beloved professor of mine at princeton so her blurb about my book meant so much to me what advice would you offer a new writer who is seeking publication of their novel  my advice would be to get the manuscript in the absolutely best place possibly before seeking out an agent don t jump the gun because you want the external validation of an agent or publisher there is no such thing as perfect but work to get your manuscript as close to what you see as its perfection as possible you pay in spades for all the problems you choose not to address before sending out your work i know this from experience  what do you have in progress at the moment  i am at work on a manuscript the working title is the pirate carnival  which is about a fair on an old pirate ship run by a band of gypsies that travels the united states making money off selling whatever it is that the ego wants more than anything but has always been too afraid to ask for when the carnival docks in a sleepy new england town a young woman must chose between the life she thought she wanted and a life where pleasure passion and beauty are valued above all else it s a bit of a mess right now but i m still in the early purely creative stages so we will see if i can hammer it into workable shape interviews julie sarkissian 