How did you become a writer?

I’ve written for as long as I can remember. I guess it was a sperm-plus-egg thing. My dad, when he wasn’t policing, read constantly, including (surreptitiously) the dictionary. He wrote fine, fine letters and, as we discovered only after he’d died, a handful of short stories. My mom was a closet poet who scribbled when she could. After she died, we found dozens of poems. It was one of the few things my parents had in common: they both considered writing to be furtive and private, something done on the sly. (Not the best basis for a marriage, BTW.)

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

Miss Lahey, in grade three, kept several of us “imaginative” kids busy with writing prompts. “Make a story out of this,” she said, and we did.

As for writers and books, it’s impossible to zero in. I’ve always read avidly and indiscriminately. As a kid, I plowed through everything on the family bookshelves, from Gone with the Wind to The Great White Hope to Jaws. My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest, and I was addicted to the “Drama in Real Life” stories. Maybe that’s why my first novel is about an earthquake and my second an airplane crash. I studied Victorian and Canadian literatures, wrote a thesis on Thomas Hardy, adored Timothy Findley and Margaret Laurence, hoovered up Stephen King and Barbara Pym, Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich, David Adams Richards and Charles Dickens and William Goldman. And on and on. It’s like having this cauldron of soup inside you that’s pureed so fine you can’t say what all is in it.

When and where do you write?

These days I write in my home office, usually first thing, before I can talk myself out of it. That’s largely what I did for my first two novels too, though in those days I travelled more, teaching workshops. I got a lot of writing done in airplanes and hotels. There’s something about travel and its pockets of in-between time. If you can snatch them, they can be weirdly fruitful.

What are you working on now?

I’m chipping away at a third novel. So far it’s resisting me, I think because some aspects are nearer to my own experience than was the case with my other books. It’s like the closer I sneak up on my own life, the more my defenses go up.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. There are times I don’t feel like writing. Those times occur approximately every single day. But I do my best to impose a schedule and stick with it. I side with those writers who say the important thing is to show up. Sit there at the keyboard and just type. Your words will be bad, your sentences will be worse, and your manuscript, when you get to the end of it, will be your life’s greatest embarrassment. That’s okay. You put it away and then come back to it later. Then the real writing starts.

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

That would be from my dad, who said: become a lawyer. I dunno...coming from a lower-income family where “writer” was not viewed as a valid occupation that you could do seriously, out in the open, I didn’t get much writing advice, at least not in my formative years. Maybe I can answer with the best writing advice I neverreceived, which is to go for it. If there are stories in you and voices clamoring, for God’s sake let them out. Being creative is not a waste of time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Fear is your biggest foe; you’ve got to do whatever you can to slay it, or at least tie it up and hurl it into a dungeon. Bury all the questions and doubts that hold you back—stuff like will it be any good and is it worth my while; like does the world need another story, especially my story; like will I suck, and if I do, will I suck worse than any writer has ever sucked? Lock those poisonous thoughts away. Your goal is to write something, from beginning to end. That’s it. Not something good, not something publishable. Just something. So quit thinking about it. Just do it. Finish it. Then see question 5.

Frances Peck wrote fiction and poetry until her early twenties, when she stopped so she could earn a living from words. Now, after a career as an editor, ghostwriter, and teacher of editing and writing, she’s rediscovering the magic of making things up. Her debut novel, The Broken Places (NeWest Press), explores what happens when a major earthquake rocks the Pacific Northwest. Her second novel, Uncontrolled Flight, is due out in fall 2023. She lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Visit her at https://francespeck.com/.