How did you become a writer? The same way Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: Gradually then suddenly.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). For lasting influence nothing can match the records my parents played when I was small. “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime, too.” “The sun shall not smite I by day, nor the moon by night.” “Ce que j'ai fait, ce soir-là.” “Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s fly.” “These are the days of lasers in the jungle.” “There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.” I heard short stories, poems, riddles. What made someone a Gold Dust Woman? Why did Mickey Mouse grow up a cow? How do you become a satanic mechanic? Where is Electric Avenue and how do you take it higher once you get there? A few of the big ones since then (from a much longer list): Isaac Babel, James Baldwin, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Charles Dickens, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, Seamus Heaney, Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Highsmith, Pico Iyer, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenkō, Yukio Mishima, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, J.D. Salinger, Lucy Sante, Patti Smith, Zadie Smith, Strunk & White, Tom Wolfe, Tobias Wolff, Virginia Woolf.

When and where do you write? Children keep commandeering my offices, so right now I’m writing on a foldup desk in a walk-in closet with a north facing window. My wife is ten feet away at her own desk.

What are you working on now? My most recent book focused on the party that was Paris in the 1920s. I’m not done with Paris and the next logical step seemed to be to write about the hangover. So now I’m working on something in the 1930s, and it might stretch into WWII.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. Sometimes a day will pass without the word doc getting any bigger, and then I just hope something else I’ve done has helped the work in ways not yet known: a walk, something seen, something overheard. But since most often I feel like I’m fighting just to get a couple of hours of quiet at the desk, once I’m there, I’m there and I’m on. Note also that I only started writing in my thirties, so maybe missed out on some stretches of block because I’d already done my share of wandering and experienced false starts in other arenas before I got going with writing.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I read or heard Michael Chabon saying something along the lines of: Success as a writer, however you define it, depends only on three things: talent, luck, and hard work. And since hard work is the only one of the three you can control that’s where you should focus your energy, and everything else is just noise that you have to ignore. I’m mangling it because I’m not Michael Chabon. But that was the gist of it, and although seemingly simple advice, it’s really tough to follow.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read outside of your genre as much as possible. And on the page try to be generous, above all.

Mark Braude is the author of Kiki Man Ray, The Invisible Emperor, and Making Monte Carlo. His books have been translated (or are being translated) into Czech, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. Kiki Man Ray was one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2022, a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, and was named to the Harper’s Bazaar 100 for 2022.