On A Gleam: Interview With Elliot Berkley
Marketing Assistant // Bri Cordon
Does a magical Western itch your bookish tastes?
For our lovely readers at Pub Club Online, I have had the privilege to interview Elliot Berkley, author of Sungleam—a book set in the fictional town of Sundew where outlaws Charlie Bliss and Tyler Russell are on a manhunt after an unknown man who may know more about the fugitive’s mystical condition than most.
Sungleam will be published and available at PubClub’s Launch Party on Saturday, December 7th in the Lion’s Den from 2–4 pm!
Now, let’s get into the good of what this conversation with Elliot is all about!
Bri: To start off with the most basic of basic questions, the first thought I had was ‘I simply have got to know the outside inspiration for the story.’
Elliot: Of course! I kind of have always wanted to try out a Western Fantasy. I feel like that genre just interests me and it is simply fun to try new genres, but then I was working at an art museum over the summer and we opened a western gallery and it was so cool. I was visitor services so I was always walking around the galleries and, um, you know, just like I had to protect art basically. Like, I was scared of people touching the art with, like, Dorito fingers. Like, always in my free time I would like to look at the paintings and like to read about them. So it was just super interesting—like I was kind of immersed in that, like the honoring of art, so I wanted to write a story. I was inspired, I guess!
Bri: Got you, got you! I was also wondering about the fantasy elements in the story. Like, Charlie is this mutant sparrow character and there is a whole community of these mutant-esque beings. How did you come up with that idea?
Elliot: I honestly don’t know! I think I felt like I wanted to do something with a magic system that was kind of, um, more natural. I think because a lot of magic systems in fantasy and books that I’ve read are like super set in stone, super like explained. And I kind of wanted something a little bit more whimsical and less explained. I drew my inspiration from Studio Ghibli and my favorite author, um, Frances Hardinge, because both of their worlds have um magic systems that are kind of just whimsical and they don’t really have to be explained. And I feel like a girl with bird feathers was so cool and just very much felt like wild magic. And I liked that concept in my head.
Bri: It was really good, but that kind of flowed really well into my next question, which is about how you approached world building within Sungleam?
Elliot: It was hard because I like Westerns, but they’re very historical and I didn’t really want to take it from a super-historical perspective just because that would require so much research and a lot of time. So I kind of wanted to leave the setting a little bit vague, um, and like the time period a little bit vague as well. I kind of wanted it to feel almost like a different world in a sense, but like I just I didn’t want to set it in stone.
Bri: Right, right.
Elliot: And I just wanted it to feel like almost a ghost town, um, but in a different way, like instead of being filled with actual ghosts, it’s like filled with old memories and like gloom. It was just a lot of like kind of letting myself come up with weird, whimsical things and not making myself explain them.
Bri: Coming up with weird, whimsical ideas really, really did work. Again, like you did a lot of like showing and it was so good as a read to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could like picture it right in my head.’ But you said you didn’t have a lot of time to do background research. So what was your writing process?
Elliot: It was really a lot of like, I was doing like, I think 200 words a day over the summer because I had time to really sit down. So I usually like to set a plan where one month I’d write the first draft and then the next month I would edit it. And then um like a second round of edits during the school year. But like halfway through writing the first draft, I was like, the storyline is not going to work. So I had to switch a bunch of things and I had to rewrite a bunch of scenes.
Bri: I completely understand, rewrites happen and you kind of, like, have to roll with them.
Elliot: Absolutely! Um, so it kind of went all over the place. Throughout the writing process, I was also doing research at the same time because I was watching like Western movies, and I was watching the Red Dead Redemption playthroughs.
Bri: Oh, no way!
Elliot: Yes! Yes! And I was playing Red Dead Redemption too and of course, my brother, my little brother is obsessed with that game. So really he’s like my watching, walking dictionary for Western, like, yeah.
Elliot: Also I think specifically around the time where I realized that I needed to switch up the storyline because it was going to be way too long um for 80 pages and it just like the pacing wasn’t quite right. I think I experienced a lot of writer’s block because I was like, ‘How do I fix this? Like, what do I do?’ So that was kind of a slow moment and then, I think, like once I started going to school and classes and stuff it was really hard because, like, just balancing schoolwork and friends and like extracurriculars with editing—um it’s definitely like a difficult balance to find. Um, so, yeah, that’s something I have to work on continuously throughout the school years, was finding actual time to write. And I just have to end up making time, like working it into my day or else I stay up until like one by accident writing!
Bri: I feel like so many young writers will relate to this struggle of work-life balance as well. Okay, just so we can keep this going, I think people would want to know, like any advice you may have for those who are thinking of submitting a manuscript for PubClub. Like any advice you want to bring to the audience?
Elliot: Just like, I think that first of all, this is something that I’ve learned a lot in the past year about writing in general, which is that it’s okay to take inspiration and look at other books and movies and narratives and use them as inspiration to move your book along. For a long time I was focusing so hard on being like an original and having to have like every original thought. But every artist has another artist that they look to for inspiration and that’s a really good learning experience to take from narratives that you think are really well written, kind of explore what makes them well written and like apply that to your own projects. Like, I think that that is actually like a really good skill. So, yeah, that’s like a process of letting go of having to always be original.
Bri: Yes, 100%. There seems to be this growing pressure of being original, it can be so daunting.
Bri: Well! Thank you so much for this opportunity to interview you and share your story with all the PubClubbers of the internet!
Elliot: Thank you for the interview, I really appreciate it and I cannot wait to see you at the launch party.
Bri: Ha! Yes! I’ll be there, book in hand!
To snatch up a copy of Sungleam by Elliot Berkley, come to Wilde Press’ launch party December 7th! More details on Pub Club’s Instagram.