Ashley E. Sweeney

How did you become a writer? I’ve been immersed in the world of words since I first began to read at age 5. Never without a book (with photographs to prove it!), I worked on junior high, high school, and college newspapers, yearbooks, and literary magazines. After graduating from college, and a year-stint as a VISTA volunteer, I worked as a small-town journalist and free-lance magazine writer before turning to education. All this while, I dreamed of the day I could write full time. Taking an early retirement, I then set out to learn the craft of novel writing, and published my first novel, Eliza Waite, at age 59.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My father, author Gerald F. Sweeney, is my greatest inspiration. After his retirement from the mad-cap New York advertising world, he has written eight novels, two plays, and a comprehensive music anthology of American music. At 96, he is still writing.

Other influences include high school teacher Robert Arthur and college professors Robert Taylor and Samuel Coale. Other writers, specifically Irish writers and contemporary women writers, also influence my work.

When and where do you write? At a small desk overlooking Skagit Bay in northwest Washington, I write every weekday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., although I think about my characters 24/7. I often say novel writing is like being in an intense relationship as I’m constantly thinking about my characters: What fuels them? What do they want? Or, more importantly, What do they need? I delve into their psyches, research their dress, lingo, tastes, mores, etc., and build their worlds. All these things I can do walking, gardening, folding laundry, falling off to sleep. I’m never without them.

What are you working on now? I’m deep into my fifth novel, set in 1930s Tucson at an elite prep school for girls. It’s my first stab at multiple points of view, which is challenging. Tentatively called The Desert School for Girls, I’ll be seeking representation for the novel in early 2026. Also, I’m just home from a month in France, and you can bet a French novel will soon be in the works!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Never!

What's the best writing advice you've ever received? Rewrite! I do four drafts of each novel, the first to get the story on paper; the second to beta readers for feedback; the third to fill holes/add dialogue and color; and the fourth to hone with a proverbial fine-toothed comb. Of course, the editing process follows, so the manuscript goes through many sets of eyes before it’s published.

What’s your advice to new writers? Don’t hurry the writing process. You want your best work out in the world. Attend conferences, workshops, master classes, and retreats to learn craft and hone manuscripts. And don’t give up. My debut novel received 47 rejections before being picked up, and it went on to win the Nancy Pearl Book Award.

A native New Yorker, Ashley E. Sweeney is the 2017 winner of the Nancy Pearl Book Award for her debut novel, Eliza Waite, and 20 more literary awards for her novels The Irish Girl, Hardland, and Answer Creek: A Novel of the Donner Party. She is at work on her fifth novel. Sweeney lives, writes, gardens, creates fiber art, and cooks in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson.

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.