How did you become a writer?
I was never the kid who had boxes of unfinished novels under the bed. I was an only-child-bookworm, and then I was an editorial assistant writing book reviews on my lunch hour, and then I was a new mom writing essays during naptime, and then I started wishing I could write a book, and then I stumbled across a true story I had to tell. So I did. I don't know how to make stuff up. I write narrative nonfiction because the stories already exist.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I love the writers who tell true stories that read like fiction or poetry: Bruce Chatwin, Isabel Wilkerson, Tony Horwitz, Helen Macdonald. I love the ones who invent worlds I want to inhabit--Philip Pullman, Erin Morgenstern, Neil Gaiman--and the ones who brilliantly reimagine the historical past, like Hilary Mantel and Dorothy Dunnett. I like to be transported, to read with all five senses, to time-travel, to forget where I am. I try to write what I like to read.

When and where do you write? 
I aspire to rhythm and routine, but mostly I write when no one needs me, wherever I can be on my own: kitchen table, cafe, park bench, library. (I'm grateful to have finished my new book before the pandemic took hold.)

What are you working on now? 
Finding a new story to tell.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 
Writer's block, no. Story block, yes. Finding a new true story in the archives that resonates with who I am and also resonates in the wider world takes time and patience and I am not patient.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Leave out the boring bits.

What’s your advice to new writers?
Read endlessly. Keep a journal. Get the clay on the wheel, don't try to make a vase first. Speak your own work aloud, and listen to it. Then show it to the people you trust, and listen to them.

Janice Nimura received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of her work on The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women--and Women to Medicine, published this week. Her previous book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, was a New York Times Notable book in 2015. She lives in New York and escapes to the woods whenever possible.