Holly Gramazio

How did you become a writer? Well, a lot of kids write stories – I guess I became a writer by just not stopping. Until recently my work was mostly in games, but that always involved a lot of writing too, whether that was rules, or scripts for video games, or curatorial text for exhibitions, or whatever else. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). It's definitely different for different projects. I guess when I encounter a particular problem or question I tend to dig into writers who do that particular thing well. So for The Husbands, I was looking at three main areas:

• First, for how to pull off a nonrealist thing in a basically realist setting, I looked at work like Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl, plus movies and TV like Groundhog Day, Russian Doll, Palm Springs

• Second, for tone, I kept going back to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn for its lightness and jokes and intensity of feeling and how it talks about day-to-day life, and how wonderfully it picks its moments and anecdotes, and to Christopher Isherwood and his groundedness in observation and how people exist in their bodies. 

• Third, for structure I ended up treating the book almost as a travelogue, since it's very episodic, with new characters turning up throughout and occasionally coming back down the line. So I looked at Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Langston Hughes' I Wonder as I Wander, the game 80 Days by Inkle and Meghna Jayanth.

More generally, for books on writing I really like George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, John McPhee's Draft No. 4, Lydia Davis' Essays One. I do really like to read books on writing, even when they don't have any specifically helpful advice for whatever I'm working on at the time. They help me feel excited about books and writing and sentences. They make "go and sit on your own and write something" feel less lonely and more fun. 

When and where do you write? I tend to write best if I get to it pretty soon after waking up in the morning, ideally before looking at the internet. 

What are you working on now? I'm knocking away at a couple of things. I'm hoping one of them will turn into my second novel but at the moment neither of them have quite reached that point of convincingly taking off. I reckon maybe in another week or two.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I'm a big procrastinator, so I definitely have long periods of not getting anything much written, or having a deadline and sensing it creep closer and closer but not doing anything about it. But it's always more because I'm wasting time, rather than pure "staring at a blank page" writers block. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence, so that it's easy to get started again when you come back to it.

What’s your advice to new writers? If you're torn between ideas, you might be able to figure out what to work on by answering the question: Which project would you be saddest about if you discovered that someone else had beaten you to it?  

Holly Gramazio is a writer, game designer and curator from Adelaide, currently based in London. She founded the experimental games festival Now Play This, and wrote the script for the award-winning indie videogame Dicey Dungeons. Her novel The Husbands, a comedy about a woman whose attic starts generating an infinite supply of husbands, was released in April 2024.

Carol Mithers

How did you become a writer? I’ve always been a writer, even when I didn’t know that was the name to give it. As a kid, what I saw and felt seemed incomplete until I described it to myself. I narrated my walk to school in my head. (“Above her, the sky was a deep blue...”) As I got older, I wrote short stories and a lot of poetry. I thought I wanted a career as an actress, though, probably because being someone else on stage was the only time I didn’t feel acutely self-conscious. But I wasn’t that good or successful at it, and by 21 I’d sold poems to Seventeen magazine and a couple of op-eds to the Los Angeles Times. Clearly, it was what I was meant to do, but how? I was an LA girl, knew no writers and had taken exactly two poetry courses in college. Grad school seemed one path, which I absolutely did not want to take. Instead, I got a job at the LA Free Press, which was devolving into a porn rag, and through a colleague there started writing for a B-level rock & roll magazine. At 24, I took those clips and a few from the LA Times and moved to New York City. One contact – a friend of the girlfriend of a friend of a friend – led to an editorial job at a woman’s magazine. I met actual writers, actual agents, learned about the business, which eventually enabled me to write full-time as a freelancer. Going to New York changed everything for me.

Who were your writing influences? My high school creative writing teacher was the first person to tell me that I had it as a writer, something that I soon discovered came with creepy lechery. Not an unusual experience for a young woman, but it was very confusing at 16. Most of my influences were in print. I used to spend a lot of time at the Culver City Public Library and went through 20 or 30 years of the O. Henry Prize story collections. During my poetry days, I read a lot of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Later, Adrienne Rich. It’s become a cliché to mention Joan Didion, but for nonfiction, her work was revelatory. It remains a contradiction that the vast majority of what I read is fiction but the vast majority of what I write is not.

When and where do you write? I have a home office at the very back of my house; it faces trees and my neighbors’ yards, which is nice except for the afternoons when the gardeners come with leaf blowers. I mostly work standard hours. During the many years I made a living writing articles for commercial magazines, I had regular assignments with word counts and deadlines I had to meet. It had nothing to do with inspiration. Six or seven days a week, I got up, exercised (which gets my brain going), showered and produced what I had to produce until dinner time. The schedule varied some while my daughter was young but it’s still my habit. (Sometimes I think about work while walking the dog or right before bed and make notes on my phone.) A schedule makes it easier to be focused and get things done.

What are you working on now? I spent the last three years writing a book about a heroic LA woman working with people and pets in poverty, and in a larger sense about the successes and failures of the current animal welfare movement. Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Petscomes out in August, and my job now is to make sure it gets read. But I also think about what might come next.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not really. Because for years, writing was how I paid the bills, I had to do it. Even if I had an assignment I thought was really stupid. I had plenty of crappy days, but I discovered that if I kept at it, something would emerge. Terrible, maybe, but a start. I’ve struggled with finding the right way to structure all three of my books, but I’d call that a professional weakness, not a block.

What was the best writing advice you ever received? The college professor who taught one of my two poetry classes read a bunch of my stuff and told me that I needed to make a list of words I wouldn’t use again until I’d used the alternatives 100 times. I wrote pretty confessionally and although I didn’t understand his comment for a long time, he was saying that I needed to treat my work more seriously, as work, not as an emotional release. Maybe most people who write are driven to do so out of some personal need. But your need is the start, not the end. You have to step back and judge what you’ve done dispassionately, maybe even coldly.

What is your advice to new writers? Besides “read everything”? And network and seek mentors as much as you can bear? And consciously work to shape the arc of your career? I think it’s a good idea to leave anything you think is “finished” for a day or three or a week, then read it again. It’s usually not quite done at all. I’m a believer in reading all work out loud, which reveals awkwardness of phrasing, unnecessary repetition, funky dialogue. Good writing has a rhythm that you can feel.

Find out what way of getting into a story works best for you. Once I more or less know the first and last lines, I don’t feel lost. My upcoming book took longer than it should have to write because I couldn’t find the first line, and so couldn’t find my way in.

Most practically, understand the gap between wanting to write and making a living. If you make this your vocation, do it with eyes open. The economics have grown incredibly brutal. Colleges have eliminated the tenured positions that made it possible to be a fiction writer or poet. Magazines and newspapers constantly fold and staffs shrink. Free-lance rates are a joke. If you don’t have a trust fund, high-income spouse or access to affordable care, you need a strategy for long-term survival. That might include having very different paid employment. (The other advantage of that, which I see in retrospect, is you can write what you want, not just what someone is willing to pay for. It’s possible to lose sight of your own vision that way.) It’s one thing to struggle when you’re 22, but you will not want to be living on the edge of financial disaster when you’re 40 or 50.

Carol Mithers is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author of the forthcoming Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets. Her previous book, Mighty Be Our Powers, written with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, has been translated into fourteen languages. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, LA Weekly, O the Oprah Magazine, Capital & Main, Talk Poverty, and many other publications.

Jess Bowers

How did you become a writer? At my Montessori preschool, they had a playset called "the farm" which was a plastic barn with lots of animals and accessories, and then there was a shoebox full of laminated words. The idea was, you'd pose the animals doing something interesting, then use the words to create a sentence narrating whatever was going on. I was so obsessed with the farm, the teachers would try to coax me away from it, which isn't how Montessori is meant to go--the child's supposed to decide when they're done with a task, not the adult. I think it made me see words as toys, just like the little plastic pigs and hay bales. I'd go home and narrate whatever I was playing there, too, like a TV voiceover. Writing, reading, and making up stories has just always been my favorite way to spend time. It's how I make sense of the world.

Name your writing influences. I had the great fortune to study with the late R.H.W. Dillard at Hollins University during my master's program. He was a consummate cinephile who had a hilarious knack for blending high and low culture. His favorite director was Federico Fellini, but he'd also co-written the script forFrankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965), often hailed as one of the worst films of all time. We did an independent study of Edgar Allan Poe where we read everything he'd ever written, and it turned into a concurrent crash course on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's funny, when I think about our conversations, I don't remember talking about my writing much. But I learned what my writing could become from the books and movies he showed me.

When and where do you write? I really envy writers who can work on the move, in public, or whenever they have a spare moment. I jot stuff down when it comes to me, but I can't do any serious work on the fly. To make real headway on a story, my focus issues require a large block of uninterrupted time, ideally in the morning, and absolutely at my own desk in my home office, where I can listen to music and no one will bother me.

What are you working on now? My debut collection, Horse Show, is all about how we've treated horses throughout television, film, and photographic history. While I was writing it, I came upon a lot of strange history involving fish, dogs, lions, giraffes, and other animals that I'm spinning into new short stories. I'm fascinated by the human impulse to domesticate our fellow creatures, and all the ways that relationship can go wrong. It's a very deep well for me. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes. For me, it's directly related to stress. If I'm stressed out, I'm not even getting in the chair, and if I don't get in the chair, there's no chance I'm getting unstuck! I try to go easy on myself at these times--read something really wild, or book some sessions in a sensory deprivation tank to let my mind wander.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The sci-fi author Sarah Pinsker once posted a list of which activities filled her creative cup and therefore counted as writing, and which activities didn't. I've found it really freeing to think about writing in that way, and not in terms of the number of words or pages I produce. Writing doesn't just happen on the page. It never did, but I am bad at remembering that. So gardening, riding horses, watching weird old movies, and puttering around in my aquariums is all writing for me now, all part of the process. It's a nice way to give yourself grace, as a working artist. Takes the pressure off. And ironically, results in more words, more pages.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read (and reread!) anything and everything you can get your hands on. It's the only shortcut to mastery! 

Jess Bowers is the author of Horse Show, a collection of short fiction out now from Santa Fe Writers Project. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she works as an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Maryville University, hangs out in museums, and watches far too much TV. Find her on Twitter/X @prettyminotaur, on Instagram @bowersjess, or at www.jessbowers.org.