Diane Cook

How did you become a writer?

I don’t remember if I ever wrote stories in my youth outside of the books they’d make you write and illustrate in elementary school (which I still have and loved doing) but I just was a writerly person. It just was something I wanted to do. I minored in creative writing in college. But after college I moved to radio producing. It just seemed really impractical to try to make a career out of writing. Or it just didn’t seem like something I could ever figure out how to do. But in that job I met many writers who’d made a career out of writing and after a few years of working with them I felt like I had to give myself a chance to succeed or fail at it, rather than simply decide not to try. So I went back to graduate school and tried really hard to find my voice as a writer and figure out how to make it a bigger part of my life.

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

A few are The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Orlando by Virginia Woolf

When and where do you write? 

I used to write at a shared desk office in my neighborhood. But I haven’t been back since March. I write when my daughter is at pre-school. But I have a new baby and there’s no preschool right now so I’m not sure when and where I’m going to be writing when I go back to work. Before I had children I would try to go away to write, to landscapes that inspired what I was writing, or just to the woods. I write a lot about the natural world, and being close to it helps me work.

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a screenplay right now. I haven’t figured out what my next book project is.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’ve suffered from “I can’t get myself to sit down and work” or “I can’t figure out what this thing is or should be” or “I’m not sure I can do this” but that’s not writer’s block. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block as people imagine it. I can always write something, as long as I let myself play, take risks, and let myself write something I throw away later. It’s more the inability to really access the characters or story or space you need to access. And that is a creative block, or whatever you want to call it. It’s too facile to call it writer’s block. It’s about inspiration and all artists and probably even all scientists and all engineers and anyone who makes things are stricken with it from time to time. So yes, I’ve been against a wall, frustrated, wouldn’t look at my draft for a while. But I get out of it simply by writing. And if it feels lonely I can just remember that it is a creative problem, a creator’s problem and so everyone experiences it from time to time.

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

Write what you want to write, not what you think you should. And if you’re worried that a story has been written before, don’t let that stop you because it has never been written by you. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

There’s no rush. No one is waiting for this thing you’re working on, so relax. Enjoy the process, take risks, let yourself write things you’ll delete later, play, write yourself into places of discovery, ask questions.

Diane Cook is the author of the novel, The New Wilderness, longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection, Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and her stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life, and was the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.