James Mustich

How did you become a writer? I was a reader first, and the words and works of other writers still provide the primary avenue to my own writing. Having spent four decades as a bookseller, I’ve always found myself surrounded by inspiration, in the happy position of being able to pursue what Edmund Wilson called “the miscellaneous learning of the bookstore, unorganized by any larger purpose, the undisciplined undirected curiosity of the indolent lover of reading.” The very long book I wrote, like the smaller and more literary essays I write now, are really attempts to make something of my reading that both memorializes the experience and extend it into expressions of who I am, or who I would like to be, thus creating a conversation between actuality and aspiration that is, I hope, both invigorating and encouraging.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Early in life, I was blessed with good teachers—Geri Schaechter in grammar school, Fernand Beck throughout high school, Maria DiBattista in college—who were sympathetic to my reading impulses and responsive to the fledgling writing efforts those impulses compelled. Their attentions created a space into which I could send sentences to find their way through youthful diffidence and out the other side.

From the stories of William Saroyan I learned early on the exuberance prose could carry; from the narratives and essays of Norman Mailer I learned a little later that such exuberance could take many forms and traverse several registers, even within the same sentence; from George Eliot I learned that exuberance was well and good, but you needed to think about things as well, and find the words to animate that thinking for your audience as well as yourself (reading Middlemarch remains the most profound literary experience of my life, and I re-read it every few years). More recently, I have found the discursive, curious late films of Agnès Varda a source of stimulation and alertness.

When and where do you write? For decades, I wrote in public places—on trains, in coffee shops, etc.—and found those venues as congenial as they were necessary given the demands of employment. Now I write primarily at my desk looking out over the city of Stamford, CT, as early as I can get to it, but that process is fueled by notes I’ve taken (often in voice memos) on long walks through streets and parks in days prior to composition.

What are you working on now? I am writing personal essays—published regularly here: A Swaying Form—and assembling them into collections for possible, if unlikely, book publication. But writing for the small band of readers online publication affords me is satisfying enough for now.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not really. For twenty years, I wrote prolifically for the book catalog I co-founded and ran from 1986 to 2006, A Common Reader, and the deadlines imposed by its relentless publication—seventeen issues a year!—made blocks an indulgence I couldn’t afford. What I learned from this is to give myself deadlines and observe them as best I can, even if that is often cavalierly. The problem I find more pressing these days is being distracted by a new piece that rears its head before I’ve reached the end of its predecessor.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? It wasn’t advice as much as the naming of a practice that turned a habitual mode of working from a liability into an asset. The technologist and polymath Jaron Lanier was once asked how he managed to get so much done. He described his method as “compressed procrastination,” switching from one activity to another, like cross-training: “You can get away with feeling like you’re being lazy all the time and yet at the end of the day all the things have gotten done.” Which for my own purposes I’ve taken to mean every packet of attention will have its issue as long as you have a kind of persistence of vision that sees across all your activities and allows you to return to each one at the opportune moment. So I am a “compressed procrastination” evangelist (not that anyone is listening!).

What’s your advice to new writers? Write every day, even if it’s a 100-word notebook entry, a letter/email of more than a utilitarian nature, or a paragraph of whatever project you have in progress. It is a source of continual surprise and delight how words add up, and how they manage to do their own work without your intense focus if you get them out of your head onto the page or screen; they’ll call you back when you need them.

In the same vein, go for long walks and capture your thoughts. As mentioned above, I use my phone to take voice memos, thus corralling stray ideas that I then transcribe and capture, a process that often gives a day’s writing a running start.

Read: no matter how much you do it, read more.

James Mustich began his career in bookselling at an independent bookstore in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in the early 1980s. In 1986, he co-founded the acclaimed book catalog, A Common Reader, and was for two decades its guiding force. He subsequently has worked as an editorial and product development executive in the publishing industry, including executive positions at Barnes & Noble, where he was founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Review, and Apple Books.

His book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, fourteen years in the writing, was published in October 2018. The Washington Post called it “the ultimate literary bucket list,” and O, The Oprah Magazine, said, “If there’s a heaven just for readers, this is it.” His current writing will be found at A Swaying Form.