How did you become a writer?

In college, my professor Dan Hoyt gave me a stack of some old copies of Hobart (the lit rag) and it was just amazing, funny, and fresh. I started writing short, weird stuff in that vein, and not long after that the Austin-based anthology Unstuck picked up one of my pieces. It turned out that they also published writers like J. Robert Lennon, Carmen Maria Machado, and Amelia Gray; I hunted down what I could from these greats online and in the university library, and it gave me a sense of what younger, contemporary writers were doing. Nothing grows an artist faster than a scene, even an imaginary one. 

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

I feel like I’m always turning toward Ishiguro, Charles Portis, Joy Williams, and Rachel Kushner. Nabokov and Morrison, too, as common as those two gods must be as answers to this question. Valeria Luiselli is another who, even though she’s not much older than me, has been something of a personal lodestar. And I’ve had some great writing teachers: Peter Ho Davies, Dan Hoyt (This Book Is Not for You is a real treasure, a Kansas classic), Katy Karlin, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Nick Delbanco (the debonaire legend), and Elizabeth Dodd. My literature and religious studies teachers have given me a lot, too (shout out to Lisa Tatonetti, Karin Westman, Stephanie Paulsell, Matt Potts, and Luis Girón-Negrón, a genius with a beautiful singing voice).

When and where do you write? 

It used to be at the Memphis mainstay coffee shop, a scrappy, hippie joint called Otherlands (more shout outs, to Mike, Rachel, John, and Steven, for all the coffee) in the morning before heading to the diner/bar where I used to work, pre-pandemic. One slow night at the bar I managed to outline most of my current novel project on guest check pads—thank god my boss wasn’t around. Nowadays it’s still the morning, on our couch. I get too grouchy to write much at night, but sometimes I turn this prickliness toward editing and it helps, actually. One last shout out to the Memphis bar the Lamplighter, where I’ve worked through a few drafts. Looking forward to returning to its beautiful world of cigarette ash, piss beer, and dusty lampshades someday.

What are you working on now? 

Don’t want to say too much about it, but I’m working on a novel with vampires, scammers, and punk bands. (Like every novel premise, it sounds like idiotic, I know. You’ll have to trust me!) I play music here in Memphis as Beauty School and collaborate with a bunch of other musicians, too, so I’ve been writing/recording a lot of songs nowadays, too. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

My blockage usually comes in the form of bizarre fixation on a phrase or sentence that I just can’t get past. The basic cycle goes a little something like this: obsession with a minute detail, existential crisis and despair, then usually some sleep followed by laughing at myself for my idiocy. Think I should find a therapist? Meditating really helps me hop out of these loops, it turns out.

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

My MFA friend (a freaky smart dude named James Kusher) would make these simple moodboards on printer paper. They’d have little grayscale printouts of paintings, schematics of ships, photographs of settings. It wasn’t advice, exactly, but I copied him and now I make all my writing students do it. (My wife, the brilliant essayist Alice Bolin, has started employing these, too.) I’ve found them incredibly helpful early in a project, allowing you to leave some room for dreamy mystery while still letting you explore things. You’re into Eva Hesse? De La Soul? Hummingbirds? Cram all your passions/obsessions into your project and let them talk to each other, find their freak harmonies and sympathetic vibrations.

What’s your advice to new writers?

This might help: think about narrative gravity, the big MacGuffins that pull readers through a book or story. I used to despise plot on principle (I didn’t think it was fascist, really, just kind of dumb), and of course, a lot of the best books truly shine on the paragraph level. But I think that sometimes the architecture for longer projects gets overlooked (at least in my education). This doesn’t have to be a thriller plot, just a kind of unanswered question or empathetic trickery to keep people in your world. Some examples: in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance or Agnes Varda’s great film Vagabond, it’s simply the vulnerability of a lone child on a journey that keeps you moving through the episodes. For a book like Andrew Martin’s excellent Early Work, it’s a love triangle, and for Lydia Kiesling’s Golden State, it’s the narrator’s precarious situation with her baby and her husband in immigration limbo. This might seem stupidly simple, I know, but I think plot God View and microscopic sentence work can really charge each other, and it’s taken me too long to figure out how to make it work for me.

Also, reading plays to sharpen scenes has helped me tremendously. In plays, talk is part of the action, and I think keeping that in mind can be key in making dialogue feel kinetic. To the same end, get a job in food service. Waiting tables introduces you to every kind of character and provides infinite dialogue fodder. I once waited on a woman who daily suits up in scuba gear and cleans the hippo tanks at the zoo. TWO of my old regulars were Navy vets: one worked in cryptography, the other spent years as a “ping jockey” in a submarine as long as a football field. I mean, where else are you going to get that kind of material?

Daniel Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. His stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. His novel Via Negativa was published in August by Knopf. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.