On Writing: “Kill Your Darlings, and Then Kill Their Siblings, Too.”
An interview with yours truly on manifesting creativity and honing it into your sharpest craft.
Darklings! (Shut up, David.)
It’s firework season (my sympathies to dogs across the country), and I can’t think of anything hotter and more metaphorically sparkly than being interviewed by my bestie, Eliza Clark, for her tarot-inspired newsletter, Witch’s Mark. I've loved the interviews I have done with Eli here for LITD, including our video interview for Further Ado and picking her gorgeous, brilliant brain about the art of collective bargaining and going on strike. Last week though, I became the interviewee when Eli and I sat down for a very special, in-depth conversation on the craft of writing: how to harness your inner muse when the muse doesn’t want to get out of bed; how to be the most savage editor for your own work so that it can thrive; surviving humongous creative disappointment and the art that’s born from failure; plus, horror stories from my years as a young actress and how they taught me to advocate for myself and my artistic voice, and so much more.
As you may know, Eli Clark is one of my closest friends. If for some reason this interview between us isn't enough to prove it to you, may I present these photos of us on vacation together RIGHT NOW, AS YOU READ THIS, FROLICKING IN A WARM POOL TOGETHER IN MATCHING BATHING SUITS LIKE TWO EXQUISITE LAND MERMAIDS.
![Three photos. From left to right: 1. Amber Tamblyn and Eliza Clark pose together in the pool for a selfie. They both look into the camera with slight, coy smiles. 2. Amber Tamblyn and Eliza Clark pose in the pool together for a selfie. Eliza has her arms around Amber. They both look at the camera with their mouths open, making surprised/excited faces. 3. Amber Tamblyn takes a selfie of her and Eliza Clark in the pool. Eliza is behind Amber making a kissy face with pursed lips. Amber is laughing.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F44a96179-3d79-402e-96bf-622eaa2848fb_480x640.jpeg)
![Three photos. From left to right: 1. Amber Tamblyn and Eliza Clark pose together in the pool for a selfie. They both look into the camera with slight, coy smiles. 2. Amber Tamblyn and Eliza Clark pose in the pool together for a selfie. Eliza has her arms around Amber. They both look at the camera with their mouths open, making surprised/excited faces. 3. Amber Tamblyn takes a selfie of her and Eliza Clark in the pool. Eliza is behind Amber making a kissy face with pursed lips. Amber is laughing.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F566ff6de-86e1-4d15-b9c6-c382e2fa57a7_480x640.jpeg)
![Three photos. From left to right: 1. Amber Tamblyn and Eliza Clark pose together in the pool for a selfie. They both look into the camera with slight, coy smiles. 2. Amber Tamblyn and Eliza Clark pose in the pool together for a selfie. Eliza has her arms around Amber. They both look at the camera with their mouths open, making surprised/excited faces. 3. Amber Tamblyn takes a selfie of her and Eliza Clark in the pool. Eliza is behind Amber making a kissy face with pursed lips. Amber is laughing.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1da3cce3-453e-4826-928d-9625c0f33cf6_480x640.jpeg)
Before we get to the interview at Witch’s Mark, I wanted to let you know we’ll be taking the month of July off here at LITD just to unwind our minds and prepare for all the exciting stuff we have in store for you in the latter half of summer and beyond. Paid subscribers will still receive some goodies from me throughout the month, and Good Riddance (our weekly chat series for all subscribers) will continue to take place every Saturday. (If you haven’t joined us for this yet, please drop in! It has become one of my favorite parts of the LITD community!) If you have any questions or need to reach us in the meantime, you can always email us at LITDsubstack@gmail.com.
And lastly, please enjoy these throwback links from our newsletter archives which feel especially relevant right now, whether about politics of the body, love for summer pools, or the best dip recipes ever:
Ode to the Summer Swimming Pool
To All the Dips I’ve Loved Before
Note: The following is an excerpt of an interview titled “Ace of Cups,” originally published by Eliza Clark on Witch’s Mark. To read the full interview, click here.
ACE OF CUPS
A conversation with Amber Tamblyn on writing, being a child actress, killing your darlings, Brittany Murphy, business daddies, Xanax, mentorship, the election, and our shared eternal quest for external validation.
Amber Tamblyn: Ask me any questions you want. I’m just gonna read while you…
(Amber holds up the most recent copy of The New Yorker where her poem “This Living” is featured in a two-page spread.)
Eliza Clark: So fucking cool.
Amber: It's so crazy.
Eliza: Have you felt like the most accomplished writer in the history of the world all week?
Amber: I actually had a full on therapy session today about the never-ending work of needing validation, y’know, being a child actor needing validation. You know what this is like.
Eliza: I do.
Amber: I’ve been in therapy since I was probably 9 years old on and off, more on than off. My previous therapist, Evan, who changed my life, told me that I just needed to make peace with it. This is my life’s work. There's no one on this earth that's like “I'm so great, I have no issues. There's nothing that keeps coming back to me to haunt me or drive me crazy, or make me feel bad about myself.” He told me, “Once you make peace with that, it's like having old scar tissue that once in a while hurts when you, you know, move in the wrong way, or the weather is too humid, or too cold.” So anyway, I think about that need for external validation more now as my life's work. Sometimes it flares up, sometimes it feels like a particularly strong muscle. And so, of course, a wonderful moment like this poem coming out really triggered a lot of needing to be validated, needing to hear that it was good, or that I was worthy of being in these pages. I don't know if it’s imposter syndrome, cause I know I'm not an imposter—
Eliza: I feel that. When you're a child actor, it's hard to know if something is good unless somebody tells you that it is. It sort of isn’t real unless somebody tells you it is. That's the particular sticky wicket of being a professional child.
Amber: Yeah. So it's been a great week. It has also been kind of an eye opening week in terms of how I've been spending my time, what I've been putting my energy into. My own newsletter is all virtual. For the most part, it's all online, on a computer. I forgot the power of the tangible when it comes to art. It's also why I love your Tarot cards, which are right here on my little meditation pillow. It’s just been a very nice, necessary reminder of my need to make space for art and the work of making art. There are two projects that are the most important to me right now, that I am wanting to make space for, and then putting all these things in the way of. One is my next book which I'm crazy excited about, and the other is a new script for a feature film that I'm gonna direct. Also, we're in an election year.
Eliza: We are?
Amber: Yeah.
Eliza: Who's running?
Amber: No one interesting.
Eliza: Oh, great!
Amber: Anyway! Seeing my work in the physical in that way, in such a big, important way was just a reminder of: oh, you have to show up for yourself to do that. This is not a given. It's not a gift. It's not gonna magically appear. You have to go make that kind of work.
Eliza: That’s a perfect segue into the Ace of Cups, which is all about ideas and the beginning of a project, when you’re falling in love with a project (or a person!). I have a million questions for you. But I guess my first question is: Do you know where your ideas come from?
Amber: My ideas come usually from a single line of really good poetry that's in my head. It will present itself in a way that sounds like it's the beginning of a poem, and sometimes it is… for instance, in that poem that's in the New Yorker: The first line is “it's going to be a lunar eclipse." But that's not where that poem started. The poem started from a line in my head, which ended up being the second line of the poem, which is “It's going to start as an argument over what’s buried inside the tomb and end in silence over what's discovered beneath it.” I thought of that at some point, and then was like, Wow, that'd be an interesting short story, or maybe I could make a book out of it, or maybe it's a short film. I didn't know what it was, but it was a line that I came up with, and it just then organically based on, you know, what I was feeling at that time, turned into a poem that stayed a poem. For me, it always stems from poetry.
Eliza: You are an actor, a writer, a director. As a writer you write films, television, poetry, novels, essays… how do you figure out what form something's gonna take? And have you ever been writing something as one thing and then realize it's something else?
Amber: Yes, actually the book I'm working on now is my next novel after Any Man, but it started as a different genre of writing at first. And it started with just a title. I started thinking about it back in 2021 when I was doing this extraordinary tv show with an extremely HOT, SMART show creator— you may have heard of it it was called Y: The Last Man.
Eliza: I haven't heard of the show, but I did hear the showrunner was hot and smart, so--
Amber: So I was working on this idea there, in the form of a different genre of writing altogether that wasn’t a novel. But then a lot happened and changed— our show was canceled, my writing mentor Jack Hirschman died suddenly, and a whole bunch of other traumatic events. And I put that project away, and started working on something that felt more of the moment, where I was mentally and emotionally, and that turned into Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition. A few years later, I pulled out that old project with the great title, and realized, the title belonged to something else completely; my next novel.
I actually saw Stephanie Daley in theatres (shoutout to Village East Cinema) and I remember it really impacted me. I was recommending it to people after Roe v Wade was overturned.
I watched Normal Adolescent Behavior last year and I'm so sorry about your traumatic experience, because I thought it was a really honest look at both teenage relationships and polyamorous relationships. The characters and emotions felt real and relatable, and I wish more movies tackled teenage romance that way instead of just relying on silly tropes.
Both movies deserved so much more attention.
I really enjoyed reading that interview, enjoy your time off!
I enjoyed reading your interview, To have it with a long-time and good friend put it above the usual water mark, and made it much more indepth, honest and real. I was fascinated when I heard you say "...In an attempt to name it— the actual process of something coming alive on the page, in the moment it is happening—I could only ever describe it as a ghost-like presence that was, sort of, walking alongside me, or joining me. " For me, it feels like the opposite: like I'm the ghost walking beside my characters. I write Historical Fiction (old genre title)/ Creative Nonfiction (new genre title) about my ancestors. A friend suggested it was more like Narrative Nonfiction, but that seems to me to be more of a Memoir. I put emotions, daily activities, words to my ancestors, to flesh them out in ways that would never happen if I wrote strictly Nonfiction. Because my ancestors couldn't write, or if they could, all we have of them are signatures on documents. If we are to ever know who they might have been, we have to make up stuff. Mind you, it's historically and culturally accurate stuff for their time, but still it's made up. Creative. As I write, it is I who feel like the ghost, walkikng beside them, seeing what they see, their feelings and replies, their actions. I am the ghost.
I do wish your directorial debut in Paint It Black hadn't met such an untimely end, in that you were so ahead of your time. I'm sorry it was sold, so that it cannot rise from its sleep to be debuted today, in the era in which it perhaps more belongs. The outlook would be so much different! I will look for it on Lifetime, trying to keep in mind how it's changed from what you envisioned.. I'm very sorry about that. Perhaps it's time to bring Maude and her victims to life on the screen?