Daniel Loedel

How did you become a writer?

I have always been in love with storytelling. As a kid, I would spend long car rides with my mom telling her tales from my invented fantasy world; sometimes I'd even ask for silence during a walk or meal so I could "play my game"--meaning, tell stories to myself in my head. In middle school that obsession with stories got transferred to an obsession with movies, and in high school and college it got transferred to novels, where it's been since. But I believe it's the same instinct I had as a child in my mom's car, just nourished and transformed over time.

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

The impossible question. Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Fyodor Dostoevsky are probably my three biggest influences, though if you read my book you'd probably be befuddled by that. I think the goal is to read widely enough that your influences become like ingredients in a soup you can no longer distinguish. But I name those three since they are the writers who most shaped my broader perspective on writing, set the goal posts for it in a way. If my influences are a soup, the three of them are the bowl.

When and where do you write?

My writing routine used to be pretty rigid and organized around the morning: I'd wake up at 5 and write till I had to go to work. Now it's a bit looser, both because of the pandemic and because being a book editor (as opposed to an editorial assistant) requires me sometimes to focus on authors' manuscripts in those hours instead. Now I'm basically just writing whenever I get lucky enough to discover I have a couple hours to myself. Usually this writing is done on my couch with a coffee and my bookshelf behind my head. It's not very glamorous, but it's very comfortable.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another historical, vaguely supernatural novel set in South America. But I have more than one novel in my proverbial "drawer" that has been abandoned, and there's always a chance this one finds itself there.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

In a certain sense, I suffer from it all the time. If writer's block means not having ideas of what to write, then no--I always have ideas for stories. But if writer's block means being unable to write them, because I don't know how or because I know what I'm writing isn't working--that I have all the time. I hit walls of that sort every couple months. And I just keep knocking my head against them until I break through--or go around to a different story.

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

It wasn't advice per se, but it's the statement that I most rely on these days to believe in myself as a writer. The first novel I wrote failed to find a publisher. It devastated me and also embarrassed me, since I worked in the same industry as many of the people who turned the book down. But then several years later I sold another manuscript to the publisher of my dreams, and when my agent and I celebrated, she told me, "You're a weed. Nothing can kill you." On days when the writing is hard, or the writing world is, I just think to myself, I'm a weed. My writing will survive.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try to write a book you believe that only you can write. Yes, the publishing industry makes a big deal of having comparative titles for books. But I'm an editor at a publishing house, and I can assure you that what is a bigger deal to me when reading a manuscript is the question of whether it's special. Have I read anything like it before? The only way the answer to that will be no is if you find a way to write a book that with your specific psyche and experience only you could write. No one else.

Daniel Loedel is a Senior Editor at Bloomsbury. Previously he was an editor at Simon and Schuster for eight years. The authors he has worked with have won or been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize and many other accolades. Prior to becoming a book editor and moving to Brooklyn, he lived in Buenos Aires. Hades, Argentina, his first novel, was inspired by his half-sister, who was disappeared in Argentina in 1978 by the military dictatorship.