How did you become a writer?

My first job out of college was teaching French at a private school. I then won a fellowship to the Johns Hopkins writing seminars, where I received an MA in fiction. I then became an international banker. And there you have it. Just kidding. It took me years to figure out that I am not any good at writing fiction. When I was about 30 years old, my wife won a lot of money on a tv game show, which enabled me to quit the bank and pursue a writing career. I wrote short stories, screenplays, and journalism. The only thing I could sell was the journalism, so I became a journalist. My big break was a freelance article in Harper’s about my years as a banker, leveraging one career into another.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stegner, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe.

When and where do you write? 

In my business, which is writing journalism and history, the research/reporting to writing ratio is probably 60-40. When am writing I work in my study at home in Austin, Texas, usually starting around 8 am and finishing around 4-5. More than that and I start to get dopey and the writing suffers. When I am writing, I write 7 days a week, including holidays.

What are you working on now? 

I am about to embark on a promotional campaign for my new book, Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War, which involves a lot of travel as well as in-person interviews and a lot of online stuff that didn’t exist a few years ago. I will be very busy with all of that through December. Then I will work on an idea for my next book. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

As a deadline journalist for 30 years, I did not have luxury of writer’s block. Deadlines are deadlines. So, no, I haven’t ever been blocked. That isn’t to say that I find writing easy. Writing poorly is easy. Writing well is quite difficult.

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

I have gotten a lot of good advice from many editors. Editors really taught me how to write by correcting me when I made mistakes. The Time Magazine system (where I worked for 12 years) was a wonderful teacher. Your stories, which were destined for a general readership, had to be extremely clear. Your ledes had to be provocative, and they had to point directly at the heart of the nut graf. Transitions were everything, and the kicker had to spin forward. Great stuff. I use it every time I write an article or a chapter in a book. But I can’t remember a single piece of advice, though. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

These days? Marry a dermatologist or a partner at a good law firm. I hate to sound cynical, but it’s very hard to make a living these days as a nonfiction writer. The internet is this wonderful, boundless place to place your writing, but the pay for online stuff is ridiculously low. Tons of decent jobs in journalism—the sort where I made my career—have disappeared. But if you can somehow address this little problem, I would say the most important thing is to discover what you want to write about. And I mean beyond your own little world. I started out wanting badly to write but having no idea what I wanted to write about. That sounds silly, but I don’t think I am that unusual. Working as a staff writer for magazines cured that problem very quickly. Eventually I figured out that I wanted to be a historian. But I was in my 50s when that little realization came along. 

S.C. “Sam” Gwynne is the author of two acclaimed books on American history: Empire of the Summer Moon, which spent 82 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, which was published in September 2014. It was also a New York Times Bestseller and was named a finalist for both the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pen Literary Award for Biography. His book, The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, was published in September 2016, and was named to a number of “top ten” sports book list. His new book is Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War (Scribner; October 2019). https://scgwynne.com