How did you become a writer?

During my third year in high school, I began finding satisfaction, and some low-level recognition, in my writing assignments for English class. It occurred to me for the first time that I could make writing my profession, and from that moment on I never seriously considered anything else. I made a couple of small sales, and a job at a literary agency gave me an inside track, and I just kept on writing and publishing.

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

The Twentieth Century American realists—James T. Farrell, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, etc.

When and where do you write?

For quite a few years I tended to go away to write—to an artist colony like Ragdale or the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, or to the isolation of a hotel room or apartment in some other town. These days I work in what my wife wishes were our dining room. I work in the morning, and not for terribly long.

What are you working on now?

A memoir of a fictional character, Matthew Scudder.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve had times when I haven’t felt like writing, and times when I’ve had to stop work on particular books, or abandon them altogether. I wouldn’t call these incidents writer’s block, which is different in much the same way that a really bad mood is different from clinical depression. My late friend Jerrold Mundis was an expert on coping with writer’s block, and his book Break Writer’s Block Now! (https://amzn.to/3Rn2gQN) is an indispensable tool for any blocked writer. The strategies he developed are effective for anybody who’s having trouble getting words on the page or screen.

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

Henry Morrison, my agent back in the day, read a book I’d written and told me to put my second chapter first.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write to please yourself. And don’t expect too much.

Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.  His work over the past half century has earned him multiple Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, the U.K. Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, and recognition in Germany, France, Taiwan, and Japan. His recent works include Dead Girl Blues, A Time to Scatter Stones, Keller’s Fedora, and the forthcoming  The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown. In addition to novels and short fiction, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. Block wrote a fiction column in Writer’s Digest for fourteen years, and has published several books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and the updated and expanded Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel—and, most recently, A Writer Prepares, a memoir of his beginnings as a writer. He has lately found a new career as an anthologist (Collectibles, At Home in the Dark, In Sunlight or in Shadow) and recently spent a semester as writer-in-residence at South Carolina’s Newberry College. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.