Lara Elena Donnelly is the author of the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated trilogy, The Amberlough Dossier, as well as short fiction and poetry appearing in venues including Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny. She has taught in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the Catapult classes in New York and the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers.
In the summer, she wears The Cobra & the Canary. In the winter, Nudiflorum. And some others in between, to keep things interesting. As of this writing, she lives on the grounds of the old Hamilton Estate, with a screenwriter and a small mask-and-mantle tabby pretentiously named after a bitter Italian aperitif.
We chat with Lara about her latest book release, Base Notes, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Lara! When did you first discover your love for writing?
In Ms. Pettiford’s class in 5th grade—she would read us passages from Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick and show us the illustrations, and then ask us to write stories inspired by those passages and images. I wrote an absolutely epic story about a girl shrunk to the size of her Polly Pockets, living in a sandcastle decorated using a lot of colors from the paint chips Ms. Pettiford encouraged us to reference in our descriptive language.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
First book: I’m not sure I actually remember reading it, but the first book I remember trying to read, holding in my hands and really fighting to understand the words, was one of those cardboard-page picture books for early readers. It was Hansel and Gretel, I think, with very dark illustrations of the forest.
Book that made me want to become an author: There wasn’t one. In fact, there was a distinct lack of books that made me want to become an author. I was standing in the teen section of my local library one summer during high school and there were no books I wanted to read. I had read all of the books that seemed interesting. So I thought, well: I’ll just go home and write one.
Book that lives rent free in my head: Paul Fussell’s Class is a book I never stop thinking about. Once you read it, it becomes impossible not to think about it in pretty much every situation. He’s so insightful and witty and brutal in his summation of class and its various manifestations and attributes that reading the book actually changed the way I looked at the world and thought about my own writing.
Your new novel, Base Notes, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Dirty, funny, visceral, pretentious, and tragic.
What can readers expect?
Big words and bad attitudes, frankly. The narrator here is disdainful and not at all about handholding. If you like unlikable characters with overgrown vocabularies—if you were a fan of Kind Hearts and Coronets or John Lanchester’s Debt to Pleasure–hopefully this will hit a sweet spot.
Readers can also expect it to get fairly gruesome. It has a slow start—I always take a while to set up my dominos—but once it gets going the latter half turns a little Sweeney Todd. People die very violently and the pile of bodies gets pretty big. And that’s not even the rough part; things get particularly nasty only after the victims are dead.
Maybe we can say readers should expect a sort of high-low experience: words out of a thesaurus, deeds out of a bestiary.
Where did the inspiration for Base Notes come from?
I needed to write a short story for an anthology themed around the color orange, and I had just read “My quest to find the great American perfume,” by Jude Doyle, which touches on the American penchant for the scent of orange blossoms, which often reads as very clean. The premise of the article is basically American perfumes haven’t achieved the heights of classic European fragrance because Americans don’t want to smell bodily, and all the best base notes are very much that—sweaty, earthy, fecal, musky.
The short story that came out of that, “The Dirty American,” turned into the novel Base Notes.
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
Honestly the challenges with this book really revolved around the publishing industry, more than the book itself. It had its tough moments and its stops and starts, in the writing, but the biggest ups and downs were mostly business related.
It was an option for a previous publisher, and looked likely to sell, and then didn’t. Then I ended up changing literary agents in the middle of writing the book. I also got a new day job while changing agents and drafting! There was a lot of professional churn happening while Base Notes was being born. Overcoming those challenges was mostly a matter of getting through them and getting on with things, which is not really my strong suit. I’m an anxious dweller.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
There’s a really emotionally and physically brutal, knock-down, drag-out fight scene toward the end of the book that was so painful but so satisfying to write and to revise. In revisions, whenever I was coming up on it, I’d start to get a feeling of dread. Every time I finished re-reading it, I would say aloud, “God, that scene is so brutal. But so good.” The blocking is tight and the blows hurt to read. The action is the kind of desperate, dirty fighting people actually do: its ungainly and awkward and playing for keeps. Nobody looks like a badass: one character is wearing a barber’s cape! I think it’s my favorite scene in the whole book, honestly. For certain values of favorite.
There’s also an extended brunch scene that I didn’t exactly enjoy writing but was definitely an interesting experience; I knew it was pivotal to the story somehow, and that the character relationships and possibly the plot were going to hinge on it. As a result I kept trying to cram too many pivotal moments into this poor, beleaguered brunch. A good lesson, though, because in the end not actually that much needed to happen; it was enough to just start something, to set a couple of wheels in motion.
The brunch scene also felt key because what is a novel about the broke urban millennial experience without brunch? Incredibly unrepresentative, is what.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The best advice I ever received might have been Holly Black teaching about time limiting device versus emotional arc—how lots of stories are structured to balance the plot-oriented action that describes the scope of the story with the emotional arc of the characters. When there is a lull in one, the other picks up, and vice versa. Or sometimes, both threads share a pivotal moment. She drew line graphs! I think about these two facets of storytelling a lot when I’m outlining, or trying to figure out why a story I love works so well.
Also iconic was a bon mot from certified genius Jeffrey Ford, who said the secret to becoming a great writer was “apply ass to chair.” Truer words never spoken. No matter how much thinking and dreaming and research you do, eventually you do have to write the thing.
The worst writing advice I ever received didn’t exactly come from a single source, but seems endemic in science fiction and fantasy writing advice. I’m talking about the idea of worldbuilding as an iceberg. The idea that you need to know much more about your world than ever makes it onto the page, based in the idea that your depth of knowledge will lend an air of authority to the detail you do provide. I used to espouse this to my own students and mentees, but no more! It’s patently untrue, leads to a lot of extra work, and doesn’t make your story any better.
Now I tend to say worldbuilding is much more about understanding how people consciously and unconsciously interact with the systems that make up their environment. You don’t have to understand the history and sociology that led to the creation of those systems—nobody even knows all of that for their own environment, let alone a fictional one. You just have to understand the shapes of systems well enough to use them as an armature for the details of your fictional world.
I used to critique worldbuilding by asking writers “why?” whenever I came across a piece of worldbuilding that didn’t make sense, or took me out of the story: why do they do it this way? Why is it like this? But in reality, I didn’t want answers; I wanted not to be asking the question. I don’t stand around interrogating why I dine with my left hand in my lap; hold the door for an elderly person; buy organic, humane-certified eggs in biodegradable cardboard containers even though they’re more expensive. I do these things because of societal norms, the expectations of etiquette, and personal ethics developed in reaction to systemic problems. Even if you don’t know me, or know the fictional character in a story, witnessing these interactions with the world teaches you how the world works.
What’s next for you?
This isn’t one hundred percent for sure, because nothing in publishing is, but I’m working on a contemporary fabulist retelling of the Scottish ballad Tam Lin, about queer millennials working for a multinational consulting firm based in New York City. It’s a pushback against the idea that slutty bisexuals are bad rep, a love letter to the mutability and endurance of queer love and friendship, and a good old-fashioned rant about wealth inequality. Plus someone is sacrificed to a ritzy underground spa in Tribeca. You know, normal millennial stuff.
Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?
I have not actually read it yet, but I’m excited for Lote by Shola von Reinhold. The bright young people of interbellum London have a special place in my heart, and this book sounds lush, impeccably researched, intelligent, and deliciously critical.
I’m also intrigued by the description of Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen, because if you haven’t twigged it yet I am a sucker for vintage glamor.
Lastly, I was brought up on Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales, so I am pretty excited for her first work of adult fiction, Book of Night. I grew up with Holly’s books and now we’re meeting again as adults; like a set up for a romance novel!
You can find Lara on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads, along with at her website.
