Elizabeth Hay

How did you become a writer? It happened when I was fifteen. An English teacher asked us to open our books to a poem by D. H. Lawrence, to read the poem, then to close our books. Now open your workbooks, she said, and write down whatever comes into your heads. Since we’d been given no warning, there was no time to get nervous. I plunged in and wrote easily, off the back of Lawrence’s poem, astonished that I had images and thoughts in my head and that they had a way of coming out. From that moment, I was hooked.

Name your writing influences. English teachers, certainly. The one I’ve just mentioned, who was responsible for the turning point in my life, even if I don’t remember her name, and she wasn’t, in fact, a very good teacher. In my final year of high school, Mr. McLean was calm, astute, encouraging, and didn’t play favorites. He steadied me and I gained confidence in his class. I still rely on poetry—often to start my day and put me on a creative path. Louise Glück, Frost, Tranströmer, Margaret Avison, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Ondaatje. Prose writers: Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Coetzee, Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín. If I get stuck, I open one of their books and a page of their writing takes my mind off my impasse, and my thoughts start to flow again.

When and where do you write? Mostly I write in my second-floor study either at my desk or in a sturdy rocking chair, using notebooks and a pen or pencil, as well as a computer. If computer, I print out what I’ve written so I can revise on paper. Mornings are best; early mornings before anyone else is up are best of all.

What are you working on now? My most recent novel was hard enough to finish that I have no desire to start another right now, so I’ve turned to short personal stories.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Almost never and often. Almost never in that I’m usually working on something, but often because I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels. I have stretches of time—I’m in one now—where I’m not writing a lot, but that’s less a case of writer’s block than of some necessary fallow time to mull things over. Or so I tell myself.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best advice was a remark that stung me at the time. I was in my early thirties, struggling to write stories. I showed my husband a few pages about a fight we’d had and he said, “I wish you would enjoy the people you write about. No matter how fucked up they are, enjoy them. All you do is criticize.” I came to see the plain truth of this after I started to write novels. To create living characters, you need to see them from many different angles. To appreciate rather than judge them. Otherwise, they remain one-dimensional and under your thumb.

What’s your advice to new writers? Keep a working notebook. Not a daily journal of what you’ve done, but a working notebook in which you make a habit of jotting down details about things you notice and hear and think about. This is your raw material. If you don’t write down the details, you will forget them.

Elizabeth Hay is the Giller Prize-winning author of six novels, including Late Nights on Air, A Student of Weather, and His Whole Life. Her most recent novel is Snow Road Station (Knopf Canada, 2023). A former radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City, and makes her home in Ottawa, Canada.