Emily Layden: On Clearing the Noise of Publication, Getting off the Grid, Music as a Parallel to Writing, and Her Novel, ‘Once More From The Top’
“The publication process just gets quite noisy, doesn't it?” Emily Layden wrote in our first email exchange, back in the summer of 2021. All Girls, Emily’s debut novel, was hot off the press, and my very own debut was about to hit the shelves. We were connected via a mutual friend and writer extraordinaire, Leigh Lucas, and I was so grateful to be in contact with another debut author. I was about to enter the noise that Emily Layden spoke about, all the pre-publication press that fully consumes a writer-turned-author in effort to promote the work.
Emily continued, “...And now that I'm on the other side of it (mostly) I think I've made myself quite small and relatively...unavailable, a lot of the time, in effort to try to make things feel quiet again.”
I loved how she put that, to make things feel quiet. It reminds me of one of my daughter’s favorite counting books where the narration goes, “TEN makes a celebration LOUD LOUD LOUD, and ONE is wonderful after a crowd.”
The protagonist in Emily Layden’s latest novel, Once More From The Top, is anything but quiet. In fact, Dylan Read is the talk of Music City. Dylan Read is a pop star, which honestly is not much far off from being a writer these days, in how a creative’s persona and status can often become more prominent than their work. The novel begins with a shocking discovery about the body of her missing childhood best friend, which shocks Dylan to her core and forces her to reconcile with her present success and her past self. Once More From The Top gives readers a window to investigate hyper-fame and its effects on the new generation and a testament to how friendships can drive our existence.
Brittany Ackerman: Right off the bat, what I love about your work is how propulsive it is. Like in All Girls, Once More From The Top also begins with urgency and propulsion right into the story. We’re with Dylan right way, finding out this unsettling news and having to carry it with us while we go directly into a press junket!
Both books are great examples of strong openings. I’m wondering how and where you start when you set out to write a story. Was the opening scene of OMFTT always the opening, or did it find its way there later on? What do you consider when you begin?
Emily Layden: It’s funny: On the one hand, I have such serious imposter syndrome around my ability to write plot that I’m consistently shocked to hear my work described as “propulsive”; on the other, I am so afraid of being accused of writing aimlessly that I’m constantly thinking about engine. (As an undergrad, I wrote a lot of short stories that were really just character sketches—and everybody in workshop noticed.) And there’s this: I was raised by a journalist, and I think that despite my best efforts his lessons got under my skin. With both OMFTT and All Girls, I think I thought I was writing really Sofia Coppola-esque atmospheric beginnings, but ultimately what I got were kind of fancied-up versions of the classic newspaper lede: the who, what, when, where, and why (or why now) of the story. They teach it for a reason!
BA: Part of your writing process with this book also took you to Nashville, TN. You even thank the entire city in your Acknowledgements, which is so lovely! Could you talk about that trip and maybe what was your plan in coming to Music City for research? What surprised you on this journey and maybe what is something that made you reroute a particular idea or concept?
EL: I don’t know if other writers feel this way, but for me it’s so hard to justify the expense of a research trip—to be clear to anyone not in the industry, we pay for these things out-of-pocket, and despite what David Rose thinks, the government does not pay us back. Nonetheless I went, and I am so glad I did—I visited recording studios, spoke to producers and sound engineers, saw tons of live music and witnessed the sheer amount of talent in the city; most of all I just got a sense of the texture of this city that would be so formative for my protagonist…but maybe the true surprise was that it reframed my anxiety. The trip validated the project for me; I felt like I was investing in my work. I came home and had a draft to my agent two months later.
BA: In another life, you were a high school English teacher. You noted that this was something you had to step aside from once you signed on to write the adaptation of All Girls, but I wonder if there’s anything you miss about teaching, or what was your favorite aspect about teaching English? Teachers get so much flack, so I’d love to hype us up a little bit!!
EL: Teachers really do get so much flack, but so do teenage girls—and I think they are what I miss most about that part of my career. It’s a privilege to spend all day talking about books and words—as one does when they’re teaching English—but it’s also a joy to witness the boundless empathy and wisdom of young women. My students were thoughtful, kind, and brave, and I think they deserve so much more credit than society ever gives them.
BA: On the flipside, what has writing for the screen been like? Was there a learning curve or did any aspect come naturally for you? Have you had any guidance along the way?
EL: There’s no doubt that OMFTT was helped by my experience in film and tv. First of all, writing a novel is a lonely experience—and screenwriting is inherently so collaborative. Even if you’re solo-writing a script, you have producers and executives who read and give notes on every draft. (And you’ll write a lot of drafts.) I love that balance: I like the quiet and monofocus of writing a novel, but I think there are few things more fun than brainstorming around a plot point with a group of collaborators whose ideas you genuinely respect and whose brains you find absolutely marvelous.
And second (that was a very long “first of all”): Structure is SO important in screenwriting. I think that’s why OMFTT has such an intense structure. I had (and was working on developing) this new set of skills that I don’t think I had when I was writing All Girls.
BA: We are both pretty fascinated and obsessed with girlhood, I’d say, and I think a lot of people love reading about female adolescence because it’s such a prominent, all-encompassing, defining time in a young person’s life. OMFTT in particular pulled at my heartstrings because of how closely I still hold some of my childhood friendships and memories and how often I revert back to my teenage self and write from that point of view or that time period.
What is it about female friendships that pulls you in? And did you draw from any novels in particular as you were writing this time around, or with All Girls, as well?
EL: There’s all this hand-wringing that happens when you write something for an adult audience that centers teenagers—suddenly it’s like, is this a YA novel? Who is this book for? But I think the reality is that we’re all carrying those years with us—maybe not in a “Glory Days” way, and maybe not in the way of a trauma plot, either…but that time imprints. These are really formative relationships, for better or worse—and I guess I just want to keep resisting this urge to put a certain experience on a shelf because someone somewhere thinks I’m supposed to have outgrown it like I have my dolls.
BA: Something I greatly admire about you, Emily, is that you are pretty off-grid. Yes, you have an Instagram account and promote your work, etc. But you don’t seem to be as deeply involved in it in an unhealthy sense. You also live in Upstate New York, and I wonder if living off the beaten path a little bit has helped you separate yourself from all the noise?
How do you navigate social media? What tips or advice do you have to help other writers in keeping our relationship with the Internet healthy? Is it possible?
EL: You don’t know how much this question means to me, because even though I do intensely limit my social media presence, I constantly worry that I am Doing It Wrong. I feel like I don’t speak the language, like the version of me that exists online is inherently inauthentic because the truest version of myself wouldn’t live online at all! The whole thing feels like a trap! And I guess that’s something I wish we talked about more: that maybe some of us are participating even though we wish we didn’t have to, or even though we don’t want to, because it’s become part of our job.
With both my social media presence and my decision to live upstate, I fear that I am trying to have my cake and eat it, too. Would it be better for my career to live in New York or L.A.? Maybe. Is it better for my anxiety to live where I do? Absolutely. Do I worry that I am making irrevocable professional sacrifices for the sake of my mental health? Sure do. But maybe the more generous read on all of this is that every one of us is weaving the tightrope of our life as we go, and this is the balancing act I’m striving for: keeping my nervous system soothed while somehow nonetheless fueling my ambition.
BA: Because the book centers around music and the music industry, I’d love to know how you feel being a musician parallels being a writer? Or how music mirrors writing?
EL: You’ve created a nice symmetry here, because we’re back where we began with my feelings of imposter syndrome. I am not a musician, and I was so worried I would get that part (and it’s the whole part!) of the story wrong. I did so much research. But at the end of the day I had to tell myself that I, too, am an artist. I know how a creative mind works. Most of the time, we fear we might have no idea what we’re doing.
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Emily Layden is a screenwriter and the author of the novels Once More From The Top and All Girls. A graduate of Stanford University, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Runner’s World, and Town & Country.
