Author Interview: Christopher Cosmos

Christopher Cosmos was raised in the Midwest and attended the University of Michigan as the recipient of a Chick Evans Scholarship. He’s an author and Black List-screenwriter whose debut novel, ONCE WE WERE HERE, is set to be published by Arcade and Simon & Schuster on October 28th, 2020.

I’m a firm discovery writer. It’s not that I don’t outline in some sense, though, because I do; I keep idea logs and I walk around and think about most ideas that I write and that I keep in my logs for years before I actually sit down to write them, so that time is sort of an informal outlining time and experience. I don’t write anything down, though. I began my career as a screenwriter, and there’s a very famous screenwriter named Robert Towne who said something along the lines of, “A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest just exists to give those moments their impact and resonance.” That’s something that I believe in, too, in a macro storytelling sense, and it’s something that I think about a lot. I know what those four or five moments are before I sit down to write, even if I haven’t formally written them down, and then the discovery for me exists in the connective tissue between those moments. 

Have you attended any conferences or writing retreats? What was the experience like and do you have any to recommend?

I don’t have a writing degree or MFA, so I’m not particularly knowledgeable about what they entail and what you put into them and what you get out of them. I imagine it’s an incredibly helpful and productive experience for many writers. It wasn’t the path I chose, and I know other writers who have MFA’s who are very successful and those that don’t and who are also very successful, too. 

Do you participate in any online or in-person critique or writing groups?

I do not.

What book(s) are you reading right now?