Snowden Wright

How did you become a writer? I became a writer because of that classic reason: irresponsible parenting. It began when I was two years old. On Sundays, my mother required the day off from childcare, the brunt of which she handled every other day of the week. My father handled his duties by placating me with the picture show.

Invariably, I fell asleep within the first five minutes of the movie, so my father had no qualms with taking me to movies he wanted to see, not the ones a child should be allowed to see. I slept through dozens of R-rated crime movies. I slept through them until the one Sunday I didn’t.

And that Sunday my favorite movie became 48 Hrs., starring Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy.

Not only did my early excursions to the picture show give me, at the time, an inappropriate tolerance for sex and violence, they also gave me, years later, an advantageous appreciation for storytelling. They made me the writer I am now. Plot, characterization, dialogue: I first learned them from a buddy-cop thriller from the 1980s that no two-year-old should be allowed to watch.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Elmore Leonard taught me how people talk. Robert Johnson taught me the value of legend. Anne Rice taught me lore. John Irving taught me scope. Die Hard taught me perfection, as did The Great Gatsby, Lonesome Dove, and Song of Solomon. Edward P. Jones taught me how to grapple with moral complexity. Mad Men taught how to find the now in the then. James McBride taught I don’t need to be taught heart, that we all have one and know how to use it. Michael Chabon taught me linguistic brio. Edith Wharton taught me society. The Leftovers taught me to let the mystery be. Children of Men taught me to let the camera roll. Jesse Winchester’s “Step by Step” taught me how come the devil smiles. Lorrie Moore taught me about “you.” Nina Simone taught me about goddamn Mississippi. Gabriel García Márquez taught me not to try to write up to him.

When and where do you write? Although I write in many of the usual times and places—in the morning, with a cup of coffee—my best writing is done on the back roads of Yazoo County, Mississippi, flanked by fields of soybean and corn. My best writing is done ticking off country miles on country roads. Every morning, I write until I hit a problem, with a sentence, a character, or an entire scene, and then I go for a long run, working on the problem in my head until I find a solution.

What are you working on now? The Hurricane Party, a sequel to my novel The Queen City Detective Agency, takes place in the summer of 1991. Clementine Baldwin, a private detective, finds herself on the Florida Panhandle investigating a case. She’s recruited by the FBI to infiltrate a gang of eco-terrorists they believe have kidnapped a senator’s daughter.

Does that sound like a total rip-off the movie Point Break? You bet your ass it does! That worked out pretty well for The Fast and the Furious.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes, but not in the way it’s often understood. For me, writer’s block isn’t some failure of the imagination, an inability to think of what to write or how to write it. For me, writer’s block is a failure of confidence. 

If I’m suffering from writer’s block, I sit down at my desk and, out of worry that whatever I write will not be as good as what I wrote yesterday, cannot manage to write anything. It’s a subset of imposter syndrome. Writer’s block is the feeling I’m an imposter of myself.

What if the next sentence I write isn’t as good as the last sentence? The solution to that, obviously, isn’t to avoid writing the next sentence. The solution is to write the sentence! You can’t make nothing better

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Back in my twenties, while living in New York, my girlfriend asked about my day, and I started to tell her how the guy at the local bodega had gotten my sandwich order wrong. I stopped halfway through the story. “I don’t know why I’m boring you with this,” I said.

“Keep going,” my girlfriend said. “I’m interested.”

After I finished the story, my girlfriend said she’d been riveted, that I’d managed to make even such a mundane episode thrilling. She then paused. “Why don’t you write that way?”

Talk about a knife to the heart! But I took her words to heart. I began to write with readers foremost in mind, considering how best to keep them interested, riveted, thrilled. Think of it as a first-date mentality. If you’re on a first date, you want to put your best self forward, the most intriguing version of you. Why wouldn’t you do the same with a short story or the first chapter of a novel?

In other words, don’t be boring. I got that advice from the person I was dating because I’d enacted that advice.

What’s your advice to new writers? Interrogate your ideologies. You’d be amazed by the rationalizations writers come up with to get out of doing the work to become better writers. I’m no different. As an undergraduate studying creative writing, I was terrible at dialogue, so, naturally, I created an ideology to get around having to improve my skills with it. “A talented writer doesn’t need dialogue!” I pretentiously said in workshop.

I see these rationalizations disguised as ideologies all the time. Bad at plot? “Plot is for hacks!” Terrible at conflict? “The fetishization of conflict arises from a colonizer mentality!” The human mind will go to ironically laborious lengths to avoid labor. If you interrogate your ideologies, you’ll often find you’re subconsciously creating an excuse to avoid putting in the work required to grow as a writer.

Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop and Play Pretty Blues. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, and the New York Daily News, among other publications. A former Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi. His latest novel is The Queen City Detective Agency.

Ali Bryan

How did you become a writer? I took a community college night course when I was pregnant with my first child and while it would take me years to develop my craft, that class showed me that I had a knack for comedic writing. That was twenty years ago and I’ve been writing ever since.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). David Sedaris was one of the first writers to genuinely make me laugh out loud. I picked up Naked at an airport bookstore not knowing anything about Sedaris or the book. I laughed myself sick. Having spent years reading mostly (depressing) literature in high school and university, Sedaris radically changed my views on writing, mainly that it could be smart, outrageous, wise, poignant, and funny. It was probably my first experience reading “literary humour”, and what I now (mostly) write.

When and where do you write? Usually, first thing in the morning in my home office. I’ve been getting up at 5:00am as long as I can remember, but I’ve also trained myself to write where and whenever I find myself. With three sporty kids, that means I’ve cranked out novels in arenas, parking lots, gyms, hotel rooms, airplanes and on the sidelines of about every sport possible.  

What are you working on now? A dual POV dark comedy about a middle-aged terminally ill couple who make the joint decision to use MAID (medical assistance in dying) with the intent of ‘meeting up on the other side.’ It all seems to be going as planned until the wife (who is first to go) ends up in Hell for what she assumes is a mistake.    

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes, but perhaps not in the same way others experience it? On occasion, I experience story blocks. As someone who doesn’t outline, but uses the protagonist to generate the plot, there are times when I make the wrong choice and the story consequently fails to move forward. When this happens, I delete the most recently written scene back to where the book last made sense. It’s an intuitive process that I wholly trust. When the writing is ‘right’ it flows effortlessly. When it’s ‘wrong’ it comes to a crashing halt. The other experience of writer’s block isn’t necessarily that I can’t write or come up with an idea, but that I’m not writing the ‘right’ thing. For me, the ‘right’ thing is that which I’m fully, obsessively engaged in. Sometimes I’ll start a series of different projects until the ‘right’ one demands to be written. If I’m not excited about a work-in-progress, neither will a reader when it becomes a published novel. Again, I rely on intuition, but it’s taken years of craft, trial and error, and experimentation to get to this point.   

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? An editor once told me never to be ‘one of those writers who just writes.’ It was baffling at the time. I’d only written one novel and wasn’t that the goal of all writers: to get to a point where they didn’t have to do anything but write? I was five novels in when I really understood what she meant. Not writing – living, engaging with the world, travelling, working, volunteering – all those things inform, deepen and enrich a writer’s work. Disassociating from the world to ‘just be a writer’ might produce a work of genius in the short term, but over time the work becomes boring, similar, predictable, stale. I’m not begrudging authors who write full-time, but those who write full-time at the expense of really living.  

What’s your advice to new writers? A writing career is never linear (careers in the arts seldom are), and nothing is guaranteed. The industry is fickle and nearly impossible to predict so take the time to really enjoy the moments of success, whether that’s a new book deal, a positive review or a major award, and then detach from it. Do not make the mistake of having your entire identity wrapped up in the idea of “being a writer” (which is ironic because oftentimes that’s what all new writers want – to finally be able to say “I’m a writer”), because the second that goes away – your next book doesn’t sell, or you fail to even get nominated for an award, it feels catastrophic. I’ve seen this happen to writers again and again. It also links back to the advice that the editor gave me above. I’ve been (mostly) able to weather my own non-linear career because writing is just one of many things I do in my life. 

Ali Bryan is a novelist and creative nonfiction writer who explores the what-ifs, the wtfs and the wait-a-minutes of every day. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for both the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing prize, and has been optioned for TV by Sony Pictures. Born in Halifax, she now lives in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on Treaty 7 Territory with her family, and a dog named Lemon.

James Mustich

How did you become a writer? I was a reader first, and the words and works of other writers still provide the primary avenue to my own writing. Having spent four decades as a bookseller, I’ve always found myself surrounded by inspiration, in the happy position of being able to pursue what Edmund Wilson called “the miscellaneous learning of the bookstore, unorganized by any larger purpose, the undisciplined undirected curiosity of the indolent lover of reading.” The very long book I wrote, like the smaller and more literary essays I write now, are really attempts to make something of my reading that both memorializes the experience and extend it into expressions of who I am, or who I would like to be, thus creating a conversation between actuality and aspiration that is, I hope, both invigorating and encouraging.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Early in life, I was blessed with good teachers—Geri Schaechter in grammar school, Fernand Beck throughout high school, Maria DiBattista in college—who were sympathetic to my reading impulses and responsive to the fledgling writing efforts those impulses compelled. Their attentions created a space into which I could send sentences to find their way through youthful diffidence and out the other side.

From the stories of William Saroyan I learned early on the exuberance prose could carry; from the narratives and essays of Norman Mailer I learned a little later that such exuberance could take many forms and traverse several registers, even within the same sentence; from George Eliot I learned that exuberance was well and good, but you needed to think about things as well, and find the words to animate that thinking for your audience as well as yourself (reading Middlemarch remains the most profound literary experience of my life, and I re-read it every few years). More recently, I have found the discursive, curious late films of Agnès Varda a source of stimulation and alertness.

When and where do you write? For decades, I wrote in public places—on trains, in coffee shops, etc.—and found those venues as congenial as they were necessary given the demands of employment. Now I write primarily at my desk looking out over the city of Stamford, CT, as early as I can get to it, but that process is fueled by notes I’ve taken (often in voice memos) on long walks through streets and parks in days prior to composition.

What are you working on now? I am writing personal essays—published regularly here: A Swaying Form—and assembling them into collections for possible, if unlikely, book publication. But writing for the small band of readers online publication affords me is satisfying enough for now.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not really. For twenty years, I wrote prolifically for the book catalog I co-founded and ran from 1986 to 2006, A Common Reader, and the deadlines imposed by its relentless publication—seventeen issues a year!—made blocks an indulgence I couldn’t afford. What I learned from this is to give myself deadlines and observe them as best I can, even if that is often cavalierly. The problem I find more pressing these days is being distracted by a new piece that rears its head before I’ve reached the end of its predecessor.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? It wasn’t advice as much as the naming of a practice that turned a habitual mode of working from a liability into an asset. The technologist and polymath Jaron Lanier was once asked how he managed to get so much done. He described his method as “compressed procrastination,” switching from one activity to another, like cross-training: “You can get away with feeling like you’re being lazy all the time and yet at the end of the day all the things have gotten done.” Which for my own purposes I’ve taken to mean every packet of attention will have its issue as long as you have a kind of persistence of vision that sees across all your activities and allows you to return to each one at the opportune moment. So I am a “compressed procrastination” evangelist (not that anyone is listening!).

What’s your advice to new writers? Write every day, even if it’s a 100-word notebook entry, a letter/email of more than a utilitarian nature, or a paragraph of whatever project you have in progress. It is a source of continual surprise and delight how words add up, and how they manage to do their own work without your intense focus if you get them out of your head onto the page or screen; they’ll call you back when you need them.

In the same vein, go for long walks and capture your thoughts. As mentioned above, I use my phone to take voice memos, thus corralling stray ideas that I then transcribe and capture, a process that often gives a day’s writing a running start.

Read: no matter how much you do it, read more.

James Mustich began his career in bookselling at an independent bookstore in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in the early 1980s. In 1986, he co-founded the acclaimed book catalog, A Common Reader, and was for two decades its guiding force. He subsequently has worked as an editorial and product development executive in the publishing industry, including executive positions at Barnes & Noble, where he was founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Review, and Apple Books.

His book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, fourteen years in the writing, was published in October 2018. The Washington Post called it “the ultimate literary bucket list,” and O, The Oprah Magazine, said, “If there’s a heaven just for readers, this is it.” His current writing will be found at A Swaying Form.