Paz Pardo

How did you become a writer? I started out in theater, first as an actor and a director—but the stories that I was getting to work on always felt just a little off from the ones I wanted to tell (or drastically off; after getting cast as three rape victims in three months I could see myself building a career consisting of looking scared onstage that would come to a screeching halt as soon as I stopped passing for sixteen). Writing was a way of taking control over what kind of art I was dedicating my life to; instead of auditioning for whatever was available or trying to sell myself as the best option for directing A Christmas Carol, I was creating the stories I needed to tell from scratch. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I grew up on sci-fi—if you're into that and read my novel The Shamshine Blind, you can hopefully see my love for William Gibson and C.J. Cherryh on the page. Through their prose I found my way to the classic hard-boilers, Dashell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. N.K. Jemisin's ability to world-build not just through description but also the metaphors she uses in narration and puts into the character's mouths is a huge influence. 

The latest thing I'm working on isn't speculative, and draws more from influences like Lily King and Jenny Offill. I'm also excited to play with mixing genre and literary work in a different way than I did with The Shamshine Blind; in my first novel, the beats of the noir genre structure the book. In my next one, I'm planning out a mise-en-abyme where a mystery story plays out inside a realist plot. I'm thinking of the way that Margaret Atwood threads a science fiction serial throughout The Blind Assassin, or the way that Kevin Wilson's narrator works out her anti-Nancy-Drew novel in Now Is Not the Time to Panic.

I credit Elizabeth McCracken's long-standing crusade against "sentient, anguished helium balloons" with vastly deepening my work. Bret Anthony Johnston told me in grad school that I should stop writing like I was getting away with something. That's stuck with me. 

When and where do you write? In an ideal world, I write every morning at a desk in the office space I share with my husband at home. I discovered that mornings are my best writing time when I was in my early twenties, and that has stayed constant. Being in the office keeps me from deciding to do the dishes and helps me feel focused. 

In the real world, with a toddler in the house, I write wherever and whenever I can, whether that's the dining room table, the kitchen counter, or on my phone at the playground. My brain still fires best before 1 pm, but the dream of daily uninterrupted writing hours is on hold for the time being. 

What are you working on now? A new novel. During the pandemic, a mystery writer moves with her family to a small town in the Argentine Andes that conspiracy theorists claim was the secret hiding place of Hitler after he faked his suicide. When she starts writing a mystery loosely based on these outlandish claims, she discovers the town's actual history as a Nazi hiding place. As she grapples with the implications of the fact that her life choices have led her to raise her son in a place that stocked the boards of its most prestigious schools with war criminals, her life begins to unravel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yep! Right now, in fact, I've got a nasty case of it. I've tried to learn to think of it as part of the process—usually the block means I need to rethink something, or that something else in my life is taking up the back-burner brain space where I'd be unconsciously writing otherwise. But it's still frustrating as hell whenever it hits, whether it lasts a day or six months. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I'm a firm believer in Isabel Allende's "Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up too." That, combined with "Write every day for at least two minutes" (a version of which Bret Anthony Johnson blessed me with in grad school) has kept me sane—and kept me writing, writer’s block be damned.

What’s your advice to new writers? Find your people! It's so important to have people you trust, whose work you love, who will buck you up in the bad times and cheer for you in the good—but who will also offer honest feedback in a way that helps you revise what you've written. It's the only way I've gotten where I am. 

Paz Pardo is the author of The Shamshine Blind, which Kim Stanley Robinson called “a deadpan hilarious allegory for our times” and the San Francisco Chronicle described as “appealingly strange.” Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, LitHub, The Brooklyn Review, and Howlround Theater Commons. Her plays have been performed across the US, Argentina, and Colombia. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, her BA from Stanford University, and is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More at https://www.pazsays.com/.