We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erin Cotter a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Erin with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
I grew up in Buffalo, New York, a city best known for its long, grueling winters. Sometimes it’s hard work just to get out of bed and out of the house! My dad is a Buffalo native and I grew up watching him constantly stay busy. He had a full time job, multiple part time jobs, and would spend his weekends fixing things around the house or doing favors for his friends and siblings. This might sound like I’m praising hustle culture, but I’m not. He was also someone who made it to almost all of my cross country races and school concerts and loved having a bunch of people over for a cookout on a beautiful weekend day. He worked hard, but he also knew when to stop working. He also had a very pragmatic approach to failure. If something went wrong, it wasn’t the end of the world, and you could always try again.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a writer who recently made the switch to writing full time. I write queer historical adventure romances which involves tons of research on top of the very long writing and revising process. If you had asked me what I wanted to do when I was a teenager, this is the life I would’ve described, and I feel so lucky and grateful that I’m able to live it! In my twenties I put the dream of being a writer aside because it felt impractical, so I went to graduate school and got a PhD in English thinking I’d be a professor instead. But I couldn’t quite shake it, and I found myself writing stories on the side when I should’ve been working on my dissertation. My second book, A Traitorous Heart, was just released by Simon & Schuster. In it readers can expect forbidden love, royal intrigue, and secret societies! There’s a lot of bisexual pining and angst from Jac, our protagonist. She’s been forced to match-make her best friend and ex-lover, the princess of France, with the brazen (and bisexual!) young King of Navarre. I loved writing Jac’s love interests so much. We have Margot, a lesbian princess who loves boldly and without restraint, and Henry, a golden retriever of a man who would do anything to make Jac his, but only in the most respectful way possible.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Three things vital in my writing journey are self-confidence, hard-work, and being open to feedback. Creative professions can be very isolating and vulnerable. When I first started writing again, I hid it from people. It felt silly and cringe to admit to very serious literature professors and fellow graduate students that I spent an entire writing session daydreaming about people falling in love. But I learned that if I wasn’t confident about the work I was doing, if I kept treating it as an unserious hobby, no one else would treat my work seriously either.
Hard work and writing just sort of goes together without question. I think some people read a book and think “I can do this, I could write one” and I have no doubt that they can–but it’s going too be harder than they think. Like a beautiful house, a book has subfloors and wiring and all sorts of things in it you can’t see on the page, but they’re there make the story tick. Learning how to create a story that engages people was a years-long process for me.
Tied to hard work is a willingness to accept feedback. Writing is vulnerable, and it was (and honestly, sometimes still is!) hard for me to divorce my own sense of self-worth from the words I create. But one of the best ways to improve to ask people what is and isn’t working in what you’re creating.
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
My parents moved down the black from a library when I was six years old. Having access to all those books (in the times before e-books and audiobooks) was instrumental to me. I honestly don’t know if I would be the person I am without living near the library! More than that, my parents also encouraged me to reader as much as I wanted to without censoring or talking down on the books I was interested in. Letting me develop my own passions and questions from what I read was such a gift. In this ages of book bans (and the blatant lies about book bans!) I’m so grateful I was able to read freely as a kid. It’s one of the reason I write for teenagers still. The books I write are ones I would’ve killed for as a teen.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.erincotterwrites.com
- Instagram: @erinseaotter
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