Frances Peck

How did you become a writer?

I’ve written for as long as I can remember. I guess it was a sperm-plus-egg thing. My dad, when he wasn’t policing, read constantly, including (surreptitiously) the dictionary. He wrote fine, fine letters and, as we discovered only after he’d died, a handful of short stories. My mom was a closet poet who scribbled when she could. After she died, we found dozens of poems. It was one of the few things my parents had in common: they both considered writing to be furtive and private, something done on the sly. (Not the best basis for a marriage, BTW.)

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Miss Lahey, in grade three, kept several of us “imaginative” kids busy with writing prompts. “Make a story out of this,” she said, and we did.

As for writers and books, it’s impossible to zero in. I’ve always read avidly and indiscriminately. As a kid, I plowed through everything on the family bookshelves, from Gone with the Wind to The Great White Hope to Jaws. My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest, and I was addicted to the “Drama in Real Life” stories. Maybe that’s why my first novel is about an earthquake and my second an airplane crash. I studied Victorian and Canadian literatures, wrote a thesis on Thomas Hardy, adored Timothy Findley and Margaret Laurence, hoovered up Stephen King and Barbara Pym, Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich, David Adams Richards and Charles Dickens and William Goldman. And on and on. It’s like having this cauldron of soup inside you that’s pureed so fine you can’t say what all is in it.

When and where do you write?

These days I write in my home office, usually first thing, before I can talk myself out of it. That’s largely what I did for my first two novels too, though in those days I travelled more, teaching workshops. I got a lot of writing done in airplanes and hotels. There’s something about travel and its pockets of in-between time. If you can snatch them, they can be weirdly fruitful.

What are you working on now?

I’m chipping away at a third novel. So far it’s resisting me, I think because some aspects are nearer to my own experience than was the case with my other books. It’s like the closer I sneak up on my own life, the more my defenses go up.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. There are times I don’t feel like writing. Those times occur approximately every single day. But I do my best to impose a schedule and stick with it. I side with those writers who say the important thing is to show up. Sit there at the keyboard and just type. Your words will be bad, your sentences will be worse, and your manuscript, when you get to the end of it, will be your life’s greatest embarrassment. That’s okay. You put it away and then come back to it later. Then the real writing starts.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

That would be from my dad, who said: become a lawyer. I dunno...coming from a lower-income family where “writer” was not viewed as a valid occupation that you could do seriously, out in the open, I didn’t get much writing advice, at least not in my formative years. Maybe I can answer with the best writing advice I neverreceived, which is to go for it. If there are stories in you and voices clamoring, for God’s sake let them out. Being creative is not a waste of time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Fear is your biggest foe; you’ve got to do whatever you can to slay it, or at least tie it up and hurl it into a dungeon. Bury all the questions and doubts that hold you back—stuff like will it be any good and is it worth my while; like does the world need another story, especially my story; like will I suck, and if I do, will I suck worse than any writer has ever sucked? Lock those poisonous thoughts away. Your goal is to write something, from beginning to end. That’s it. Not something good, not something publishable. Just something. So quit thinking about it. Just do it. Finish it. Then see question 5.

Frances Peck wrote fiction and poetry until her early twenties, when she stopped so she could earn a living from words. Now, after a career as an editor, ghostwriter, and teacher of editing and writing, she’s rediscovering the magic of making things up. Her debut novel, The Broken Places (NeWest Press), explores what happens when a major earthquake rocks the Pacific Northwest. Her second novel, Uncontrolled Flight, is due out in fall 2023. She lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Visit her at https://francespeck.com/.

Eddie Muller

How did you become a writer?

My father, who never went to college, was a sportswriter. So writing always seemed to me a viable career option. Even as a young kid I was a storyteller, making my own comic books and writing elaborate stories and reports for school assignments. I never imagined doing anything else, really. It’s how I’ve earned my living for the past forty years.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Obviously, my father. Sportswriters were an early influence. My dad’s reportage was included in several collections of “The Year’s Best Sports Stories,” which I’d read cover-to-cover. In my teens I discovered crime and mystery fiction, and Raymond Chandler was a big influence. Many of my colleagues will say the same thing. In school they’d made us read the classics, like David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn. But it wasn’t until I read Chandler that prose connected with me in a visceral way. Because it was a vivid and romanticized depiction of a world we could recognize within our own reality. Later I’d come to prefer Hammett’s simple elegance, but they were both influential. I was really taken with Leonard Gardner’s Fat City (1969), which I read shortly after it came out. I was too young to comprehend it, but I loved the writing. I re-read it regularly. It’s the book that made me want to be a novelist. So the fact that Leonard wrote the Foreword for the paperback edition of my novel The Distance—that’s the most gratifying thing in my life as a writer.

When and where do you write?

I write mostly in the morning, and rewrite whenever I can. But I am really writing constantly. It’s like breathing. There was once a time when I waited for inspiration to strike … Ha! What a luxury. It’s not the when and where that’s unusual for me, it’s the how. I write differently depending on what I’m writing. If I’m writing scripts for my TCM introductions I do that on my laptop; likewise with any non-fiction work. Writing fiction, on the other hand, I tend to draft things in longhand. I’ll handwrite a chapter and it’ll be an indecipherable mess and then I’ll type it into the laptop and rewrite. 

What are you working on now?

I just finished my first children’s book, which was fun. It’s noir for kids, and I agreed to do it if the publisher agreed to black-and-white artwork. Seemed like a great way to get kids familiar with a black-and-white world so they won’t be put off by classic films that aren’t in color. I also did a cocktail book inspired by film noir. Both of these came to me suddenly, because of the success of Noir Alley on TCM. I’m not sure anybody else is putting out a kid’s book and a cocktail book at the same time, under the same name. I’m also working on a comic book series, a screenplay, and the third Billy Nichols mystery (I regret that I’ve been saying that for too many years!)—in addition to the scripts I write for Noir Alley. There’s very little down time around here, but I’ve learned to be productive without stressing out. I make my deadlines.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, not anymore. I feel fortunate. I’m sure there are many disparate reasons for writer’s block, but from my experience, and what I’ve seen in others, insecurity can play a big part in that paralysis. You’re questioning yourself too much, letting self-doubt be an impediment. I developed a degree of discipline early on because I’ve always made a living writing on deadline. I’ve been able to transfer that discipline to “creative” writing, which is where “writer’s block” is more common. It’s a writer’s job to produce the work, not judge it while it’s in progress.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Many years ago, Bill Barich, a wonderful essayist and author of a great book called Laughing in the Hills, read a draft of my first novel and gave me the best writing advice I ever got: “Don’t be afraid to be obvious.” He could see me writing—with the words dancing and circling around the point instead of my finding the precise words to make the point and move on. It was a simple thing, but it freed up my writing. It made me realize that too many writers—especially those grappling with blockage—think about the writing, the words and the sentences, instead of the narrative flow. If you’re struggling to find the perfect words—just make your point, as clearly and concisely as possible. You many find better words later, but it’s more vital to move forward and not obsess.

The other priceless advice was bestowed by an agent, Sandra Dykstra, who told an audience of wanna-be writers, “The world is not asking for your work.”  It sounds harsh, but it’s an essential truth that helps a writer not spiral into depression when they face rejection.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Enjoy the process. Especially when writing fiction, it’s as close to time-travel as we can get. You’re able to disappear into the place that you’re creating and when it’s going well you lose all sense of linear time. It’s the highest state a writer can achieve. And I’ll offer the same advice I give about everything—do it with passion and enthusiasm. Otherwise, why bother? These days I’d also add—think of the reader. Internet blogging has developed a generation of typists who think their “readers” have an infinite amount of time. They don’t. Be concise. Be clear. Be cogent. To me, that applies to 75-character tweets as well as 700-page novels. The internet has led to less and less editing of people’s work—which is not a good thing. But it creates more opportunity for writers who can get to the point in an artful fashion.

Eddie Muller, host of TCM’s Noir Alley franchise, is a contemporary renaissance man. He writes novels, biographies, movie histories, plays, short stories, and films. He also programs film festivals, curates museums, designs books, and provides commentary for television, radio, and DVDs. He produces and hosts NOIR CITY: The San Francisco Film Noir Festival, the largest noir retrospective in the world, which now has satellite festivals in six other U.S. cities.

As founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, he has been instrumental in preserving America’s noir heritage, which to date has included restoring and preserving (with the UCLA Film & Television Archive) more than 30 nearly lost classics, such as Too Late for Tears (1949), Woman on the Run (1950), and The Bitter Stems (1956). Muller has also presented and lectured on film noir at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

His debut novel, The Distance, earned the Best First Novel “Shamus” Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Muller is a two-time Edgar Award nominee from the Mystery Writers of America and has earned three Anthony Award nominations. Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, which he co-wrote with the actor, was a national bestseller in 2007. His classic volume Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir  was recently published in a revised and expanded edition (Running Press, 2021). He has twice been named a San Francisco Literary Laureate.

Felicia Berliner

How did you become a writer?
My mom taught me to read when I was in pre-school, and that early start on reading stories also made me want to write them. I had a pretty typical (white girl-gendered) reading list growing up: from Nancy Drew and Louisa May Alcott to Agatha Christie, with a heavy swerve into Pearl S. Buck. I also read Sholom Aleichem and I.B. Singer and I.L. Peretz, which persuaded me that Jewish literature was literature (even if, at that time, it seemed to be lacking a woman’s perspective). My high school English teacher told me to read The Sound and the Fury, and that changed my life. While I didn’t understand what Faulkner was doing—totally missed the plot—I experienced deep, nearly overwhelming feelings, like a cup of emotion not quite spilling over but about to. I wanted to do that, too: tell a story to make people feel.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
The Torah is my primary writing influence, and there’s a listening for Torah in all the rest of my reading, which gives context to my love of Faulkner and Toni Morrison. But the novels I adore as a reader are not the best diet for me as a writer. I need the precise, gorgeous prose of Maggie Nelson in my head when I work, along with her permission to write a woman’s desire. I cycle through Nelson’s books The Argonauts and Bluets every year. Marlon James is another writing influence. A Brief History of Seven Killings hit me like a contemporary Ulysses, but better, more symphonic, a weave of rhythms and language that really made me listen. I’m also interested in a kind of Jewish magical realism—a literary love-child of Gabriel García Márquez and Bernard Malamud. And I did find Jewish women’s voices, Grace Paley and Clarice Lispector.

I’ll add one more influence on craft: the brilliant writer and literary citizen, Alexander Chee. I’d started writing my novel in present tense but had misgivings about that rather unconventional choice. Then I read Chee’s beautiful first novel, Edinburgh, which flexes the most plastic and mobile present tense, and I forged ahead. 

When and where do you write?
The idea of writing in the morning is so appealing! But the truth is that I write a lot more at night, after my job and/or parenting are done for the day. I write on weekends and whenever I can grab the time. “Vacations” = writing time. I write mostly in my home office/bedroom.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a new novel that I started during National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo had struck me as crazy and stupid. How could anyone write a novel in a month? And November, of all months; Thanksgiving owns November. At least pick a month with 31 days or no national holidays! I finally realized that anything I objected to that strenuously deserved a try…

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
My form of writer’s block is not knowing how to finish things. If you’ve written a lot but nothing’s ever “ready” to submit for publication—that’s a block. People in my writing group had to tell me, “Don’t bring this here again!” so that I would stop revising and writing new sections and revising again, and start trying to find an agent for my debut novel, Shmutz. I’d still like to write more Shmutz.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
bell hooks said we don’t heal in isolation, that “healing is an act of communion.” Though I write alone, my creative process pulls in community—the generous souls in my writing group, the people I text before or after I write, the artwork and music I keep close for inspiration. 

I’ll also go back to Marlon James, a living reminder that rejection—even repeated, seemingly unending rejection—is not a reliable indicator of the value of our work, and definitely not a reason to stop writing.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I can pass along some advice from a New Yorker profile about a tech innovator, Moxie Marlinspike (gets award for best name), who says “the only secret is to begin.” He’s surely not the first person to say that, and various spiritual practices have also pointed me in that direction. But I’ll credit him for now. I have a lot of compassion for the ways that fear can be paralyzing. Also, working for pay (i.e., work other than making art) and caregiving can at times be depleting. But the illusion that life will eventually mellow out and the muse will descend and you’ll write in the sunrise of ideal circumstances…nope. If there’s no human bleeding or puking in front of you, can you steal fifteen minutes to write something?  Go in the bathroom with a notebook, if that’s the only option, and lock the door.

Felicia Berliner is a writer in New York City. She has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was awarded a Teaching Fellowship. Shmutz is her debut novel, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in July 2022. Her nonfiction has appeared in LitHub and other publications. She also coaches writers, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, and other change-makers, with certification from the NeuroLeadership Institute as a Results Based Coach.  There’s more at www.feliciaberliner.com.