How did you become a writer? I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wrote. But I have this deep attachment to eating food and living indoors, so I made some money as a lawyer before I turned to writing full time. I worked on my first novel, Dessert First, after my then-teen daughter found a scene on the printer and got really angry at me, that I was wasting time as an attorney, when I could actually write.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.) Too many to name. I mostly write young adult novels, and my influences include A.S. King, whose Please Ignore Vera Dietz expanded (well, broke) my orderly mind: It has chapter in flow charts from Vera’s dad, narrated by her dead friend Charlie, and from the point of view of a pagoda-shaped building in town. I realized you can do almost anything—if you have the chops to pull it off, and if it’s right for the story. I was fortunate to go back to school in my 50s to get an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I had the most amazing mentor-advisors there—Martha Brockenbrough, Linda Urban, Tim Wynne-Jones, Shelly Tanaka, David McInnis Gill.

I also used to do stand-up comedy in the ’80s in San Francisco, and seeing two comics there that I was never going to touch pushed me to writing instead: Robin Williams was so much better at improv than I’d ever be, and this (then mostly unknown guy) Dana Carvey was so much better at physical comedy (the church lady, Sears and Roebuck boy) that I had to figure something else to do.

When and where do you write? Augh. If I was one of those super-productive types, I’d say all morning, but even without me launching into that, there’s enough lying on the Internet these days. I write in fits and starts, and try to make sure I get at least 300 new words every day. The morning is best, but I find that even if I’m exhausted at the end of the day and have just been thrown around for 90 minutes in Aikido class by 30-somethings, I can still do 300 words in the evening, before bed, if I haven’t gotten to it by then.

What are you working on now? It’s so fun. I’m writing a YA urban fantasy about a girl from a family of mythical creatures going to a human high school for the first time. I was really drawn to the cyberpunk novels of the 80s and 90s and Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovaks novels (Altered Carbon) because of how visceral and present the story world is, and I’m trying for something like that, with a girl from the Shadowscene, where there are real creatures from myths and legends, with their own political power struggles. And it’s fun to look at a U.S. high school from a complete outsider’s perspective, who’s really more worried about whether her family will survive what happens in the Shadowscene that week.

Have you ever suffered from writers’ block? I wouldn’t really know. I’m such a slow writer, it would be pretty much indistinguishable from normal productivity. My debut novel, Dessert First, was a story of a girl dealing with her younger brother’s cancer, and I had to stop working on it for a couple of years when my brother got diagnosed with cancer, until he was clearly in remission. It was just too close. But during that break, I worked on a different novel, and the story world for that hopeless muddle led to the one I’m writing now.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When in doubt, give your point of view character a scene goal and have that goal end in disaster. Fictional dialogue is a compression and intensification of real speech. Make sure there’s tension in a scene, and before you drop in any nuggets of backstory make sure the front story hooks the reader and there’s some suspense to keep them reading.

What’s your advice to new writers? Write. You have a huge advantage, in that you don’t know what’s especially difficult. You can take risks in the first draft that some of the rest of us would be nervous about. New writers are like those people who create successful startups: Because you don’t know how hard it really is, you can use the momentum of your enthusiasm to create astonishing progress. But then go back and fix it, and get some input, and make it even better before you send it out into the world. And then also concentrate on craft, because after you’ve got a manuscript that you’ve gotten feedback on, you have actual problems to solve that you can apply all that craft wisdom to.

Dean Gloster is a former Supreme Court clerk, former standup comic, and the author of Dessert First. He has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As @deangloster, he has 145,000 followers on what he now describes as “that unfortunately rightward listing sad flaming hulk formerly known as Twitter.” He’s also at www.deangloster.com.