author feature: Claire Coffey

Claire Coffey is the second place winner from our 2025 Manuscript Challenge!

AUTHOR BIO

Claire Coffey (she/ her) is an award-winning actress, art director, and fantasy writer based in the midwest. She can be found playing Dungeons & Dragons, writing fanfic, at pilates class, drinking an overpriced cocktail, auditioning for yet another show, wrangling Adobe software, lacing up a corset, or reading something unspeakable on her kindle. She lives in a century-old house with her husband, their three cats, assorted house spiders, and a ghost or two.

What first drew you to fantasy as a genre?

Fantasy turns the dial up to eleven on everything. Stakes, drama, imagination. It resonates because that’s what humans have been doing since forever: your personal growth, or your romance, or whatever it is, FEELS like an epic quest, so what if we told a story where it really is? It’s mythologizing. It’s a way to make the emotional literal. Which is a ton of fun, creatively, but is also a unique opportunity to process reality by heightening and transforming it.

Even when I was very young, a book was rarely interesting to me if it wasn’t fantastical, and my parents always encouraged me to embrace that. They actually started dating after taking a fantasy fiction class together in college, so maybe it’s genetic!

Tell us about your creative process! Are you a plotter? Pantser? Something in between? What is your ideal writing environment?

My writing process for longer works is chaos. I’m an execution person before I’m an ideas person, so I have a much easier time with the micro than the macro, but I’m not capable of long-term pantsing, I’ll end up spinning my wheels and wasting time on meaningless detail. So as a result, my “process” is a hostage situation between my need to work out a solid outline and my brain’s kicking and screaming desire to Not Do That and go write single-scene fanfiction instead. This is why I’ve never finished a complete manuscript, lol.

My ideal writing environment is my home office on a rainy day, with absolutely no obligations looming and a relevant youtube ambiance video playing in the background.

What parts of writing bring you the most joy?

Writing, to me, is a puzzle. Cracking that rhythm of language, imagery, storytelling, and characterization, line by line, is SO satisfying. I’m also a visual artist and a performer, so the specific tools available in prose vs in other mediums are really refreshing to get to play with.

What authors inspire you most, and why?

Naomi Novik, Leigh Bardugo, and Cat Valente are all masters of inventive, femme-forward fantasy that’s high-concept but still fairly contemporary and commercially accessible in its sensibilities. I return to my favorites of theirs when I need to remind my brain what I’m supposed to be doing with words. As an actress, I also draw a ton of inspiration from playwriting and theater in general. Novel writing can feel sort of abstract, but on stage, you feel an audience’s energy wax and wane in real time, so a script has no choice but to be ruthlessly economical, and you learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t.

Do you have writing favorites when it comes to trope, characters, magic system, etc?

Oh gosh, so many. All of my work has a strong romantic bent. I’m a romantasy girlie so of course I’m a sucker for all the usual culprits: Only One Bed, Who Hurt You, jealousy trope, mental/ soul bonds, Wound Tending, Sexy Sparring, Enemies to Lovers, etc. I am team Villain Boyfriends forever and always, and also team petty vain arrogant wizard boyfriends (please know I’m using ‘boyfriend’ gender-neutrally).

In my heroes and heroines I write a lot of religious and professional angst, artistic natures, and mysterious magical abilities. Magic is a really potent metaphor for so many dimensions of power and personality, and I try to do something special and specific with it every time. I like “gothic” settings, traditional sword-and-sorcery vibes, and faux-historical fantasy worlds alike, but my work always has a fair amount of darkness in it, because that’s what feels honest and exciting to me.

What’s one piece of writing advice that has stuck with you?

It doesn’t have to be “good”, it just has to be interesting. 

What are your goals as a writer? Where would you like to see yourself in 5 years?

I would like to finally finish and edit a completed manuscript, lol. Of course I’d like to be published one day, but i’d settle for getting to a querying stage first. I’d also just like to devote more time to writing! It’s been on the backburner for a few years while I built other careers, but it’s still a major love of mine.

Where can people go to support you and follow your writing journey?

[spongebob ‘I didn’t think I’d get this far’ meme] You can follow me on instagram at @loudandclaire!