Lawrence Block

How did you become a writer?

During my third year in high school, I began finding satisfaction, and some low-level recognition, in my writing assignments for English class. It occurred to me for the first time that I could make writing my profession, and from that moment on I never seriously considered anything else. I made a couple of small sales, and a job at a literary agency gave me an inside track, and I just kept on writing and publishing.

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

The Twentieth Century American realists—James T. Farrell, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, etc.

When and where do you write?

For quite a few years I tended to go away to write—to an artist colony like Ragdale or the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, or to the isolation of a hotel room or apartment in some other town. These days I work in what my wife wishes were our dining room. I work in the morning, and not for terribly long.

What are you working on now?

A memoir of a fictional character, Matthew Scudder.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve had times when I haven’t felt like writing, and times when I’ve had to stop work on particular books, or abandon them altogether. I wouldn’t call these incidents writer’s block, which is different in much the same way that a really bad mood is different from clinical depression. My late friend Jerrold Mundis was an expert on coping with writer’s block, and his book Break Writer’s Block Now! (https://amzn.to/3Rn2gQN) is an indispensable tool for any blocked writer. The strategies he developed are effective for anybody who’s having trouble getting words on the page or screen.

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

Henry Morrison, my agent back in the day, read a book I’d written and told me to put my second chapter first.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write to please yourself. And don’t expect too much.

Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.  His work over the past half century has earned him multiple Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, the U.K. Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, and recognition in Germany, France, Taiwan, and Japan. His recent works include Dead Girl Blues, A Time to Scatter Stones, Keller’s Fedora, and the forthcoming  The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown. In addition to novels and short fiction, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. Block wrote a fiction column in Writer’s Digest for fourteen years, and has published several books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and the updated and expanded Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel—and, most recently, A Writer Prepares, a memoir of his beginnings as a writer. He has lately found a new career as an anthologist (Collectibles, At Home in the Dark, In Sunlight or in Shadow) and recently spent a semester as writer-in-residence at South Carolina’s Newberry College. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

Kate Folk

How did you become a writer?

I think I’ve always been a writer. I’ve always loved stories and felt that the boundaries between reality and imagination are permeable. When I was a kid I wrote a sixty-page “novel” about a cheetah named Damara who escapes from the zoo. It was pretty overwrought. In college and after, I was unsure about pursuing writing as a career, which seemed ridiculous—who was I to think I could do that? I was always looking for someone to give me permission to write, so when I’d get negative or mixed feedback on something I’d written, I would be devastated, and want to give up. I got an MFA from the University of San Francisco, and after graduating, I spent years writing short stories and submitting them to journals. The process of submitting, getting lots of rejections and occasional acceptances, helped to solidify my identity as a writer. I had to get to the point where the main goal wasn’t publishing or other external validation, but the work of writing itself, the daily habit of it, the writer’s life. Though of course validation is always nice, too.

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

The first books I loved were the Babysitters Club series. I was addicted to those books when I first learned to read. I had read all 130-something of them by the end of first grade. Then I got into reading R.L. Stine’s Fear Street Books, and Lois Duncan’s supernatural thrillers. I read Don Delillo’s White Noise for a class in high school, which blew my mind at the time, and probably set me on my current trajectory. Later, the work of Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, James Baldwin, Kafka and Nabokov have all been major influences, as well as contemporary writers of weird and speculative fiction, like Amelia Gray, Kelly Link, and George Saunders. TV and movies have also made a big impact. I spent my childhood watching a lot of TV—too much, probably. The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and The X-Files were the shows that most shaped my worldview and artistic sensibility.

When and where do you write?

It depends on what else I have going on at the time—teaching jobs, other gigs and commitments—but on a day I have free to write, I’ll start with my morning routine of exercise, meditation, and journaling. I journal 1,000 words each day. Then I’ll shower and eat breakfast and start writing. It’s a little ridiculous how elaborate my morning routine has become, but it all lays the groundwork for writing fiction. The front rooms of my apartment face a noisy street, so I do a lot of writing in bed, because my bedroom is tucked in back, quiet and dim. I also time myself when I write, with a timer app on my laptop. I do a loose version of the Pomodoro Technique, especially at the start of a writing session. It can feel daunting to begin, but if I tell myself I’m just writing for 30 minutes at a time, it feels approachable. I’ll write 30 minutes, take a break for a few minutes, write another 30. Once I’m inside the story, I don’t think about the time anymore, but it can take some coaxing to get into that state.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a novel about obsession. That’s all I can say at the moment.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I would call it more an inner resistance to getting started, like my writerly muscles have gotten cold and cramped up. It can be easy to talk myself out of writing. Over the years I’ve gotten better at doing it anyway, even if it’s just for thirty minutes. The routine I described above helps me get over the resistance, because I’m following a well-worn path, a groove in my mind. I used to listen to a few Philip Glass albums on repeat when I wrote, which was another way of training myself, like a dog.

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

My MFA professor, Lewis Buzbee, used to tell us, “don’t confuse impatience with ambition” when it came to publishing, which I think is wise, and not something I’ve always heeded, to my own detriment. I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and I love how he describes revision as a process of making tiny adjustments, based on intuition—rather than thinking at the level of plot, to think on the level of the sentence, and let the work guide me, sentence by sentence, into becoming what it should be, like slowly adjusting a ship’s course. There is so much wisdom in that book, but that part sticks out to me now, as I’m revising a novel.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try a bunch of different things—subject matter, style, structure—until you figure out what you are most compelled to write. Many writers, including me, have struggled until they found the stories they were most suited to tell, and most interested in committing to, day after day. Keep trying until you tap into something that feels alive on the page.

Kate Folk is the author of Out There, a story collection (Random House '22). She has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Concern, and Zyzzyva. Recently, she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.

Bonnie Kistler

How did you become a writer?

I’ve been making up stories since childhood and always aspired to be a writer. I majored in English lit in college and wrote my first full-length novel during my sophomore year. With all the optimism of the ignorant, I sent it off to a big-time New York publisher – who rejected it almost by return mail. Daunted, I decided on a different career path and went to law school. But during my many years of practicing law, I never lost the writing itch. I wrote another novel, and another, and the third time was finally the charm. Here’s a nice irony: my publisher today is the same one who rejected my sophomoric effort all those years ago. 

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

My specialty in college was the nineteenth-century English novel – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, the Brontës. I love the rich tapestries of those big books, the huge casts of characters, the many subplots. But fiction today demands a tighter pace, and that’s what I learned from film and TV – how to distill an idea to its essentials, how to accelerate the action, how to build suspense, etc.

When and where do you write?

 I write in my home office on the top floor of our house. I could have a nice view of the mountains from there, but I deliberately turn my desk to a blank wall so I can’t be distracted. I never listen to music while I write, and I can’t focus if I’m even just aware of other people in the house. An isolation chamber would make a good office for me.

I write whenever the urge hits me – but only when the urge hits me. I don’t hew to a schedule or clock word count. Whenever I try to force my writing, it reads that way – forced. Instead, I let the stories wander around my mind for a while, and when the words come spitting out, that’s when I sit down and write.

I know this is contrary to the practice of most writers, who subscribe to the view that it’s best to simply get something on the page and revise later. But that workmanlike approach doesn’t work for me.  

What are you working on now?

My current project is another psychological thriller, but I should call this one a capital P Psychological thriller, because it’s about mind games and dementia and gaslighting. Very dark, even though it’s set in Florida.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t believe in writer’s block. If I can’t write, it’s because I’m not ready to write. The ideas need to ferment a little longer. The book will come when it’s ready to come.

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

“Bonnie, make time,” my agent once said when I told her my frenetic law practice left no time for writing. Her words were what convinced me that it was finally time to leave the law and write full-time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I have two bits of advice for young people who wish to become writers:

A. Become something else first. Your writing will be that much richer for having lived in the wider world and encountered different kinds of people. 

B. To be a good writer, first be a good reader. Read, then deconstruct what you’ve read. Think about what worked for you and how the author accomplished it. Think about what didn’t work for you and how you might avoid the same traps.

Bonnie Kistler is a former Philadelphia trial lawyer and the author of House on Fire and The Cage. Her next novel, Her, Too, will be released in February 2023. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, with Honors in English literature, and she received her law degree from the University of the Pennsylvania Law School. She now lives in Florida and the Blue Ridge Mountains.