Tom Lin

How did you become a writer?

I’m not sure I have a satisfying answer to this question—I’ve always written stories for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t really think of writing as something I could do until probably high school. So high school, then. But I didn’t publish anything before The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu.

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

For sense of place and momentum: John Steinbeck, whose East of Eden is one of my favorite books. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as well as “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” For beauty of language: José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, Blindness, and The Double. Wallace Stevens’s poems and aphorisms, as well as Mary Ruefle’s luminous genius in both poetics (Dunce) and criticism (Madness, Rack, and Honey). For the intersection of the surreal and the real: Jorge Luis Borges and his mind-bending shorts, as well as László Krasznahorkai’s weird and twisty Satantango and his single-sentence The Last Wolf (which, in my edition at least, comes bound in an inverted pair with Herman, also great). Art is also a huge influence: I love the vibrance and color of James Turrell’s Skyspace installations, the arresting topologies of Richard Serra’s Joe and Torqued Ellipse series, and J. M. W. Turner’s inconstant, delicate Rigi watercolors. I’m lucky enough to have had some truly excellent teachers. Among them are my undergraduate advisor, the late and brilliant Arden Reed, and Jonathan Lethem, who taught the one and only creative writing class I’ve ever taken.

When and where do you write?

When the mood strikes me, I write on my laptop at my desk. I wish the mood would strike me much, much more often. I also have a baby-blue IBM Selectric sitting on a bookshelf—it once occupied a little writing desk, but I had to move it up and out of reach of the cat’s reach—and I use it for no-stakes freewrites of scene or character sketches. I like to write in near-total silence in long, uninterrupted stretches, which means that (though I’d very much like to!) I can’t write in a coffee shop, or really any other fun, interesting place.

What are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on my second novel, which is still in its early stages. I think it’s a really interesting idea and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

All the time. For me, writer’s block gets worse the more you try to push through it. So I try to find a way around it—going on a walk, doing some more research, going for a drive—and trust that my mind will keep working on it even when I’m not literally sitting at my computer trying to make sentences. 

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

Keep going. And the old chestnut, write what you know, but with an addendum: you know a lot of things, more than you’d think. In writing, “what you know” can put on any number of disguises.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read as much as you can: good writing so you can figure out what makes it so good, bad writing so you can learn what to avoid. Fiction and nonfiction and poetry and criticism. Old stuff, new stuff. Everything. A text is magical not because it retains some history of its being written, but because it offers the possibility of its being read. Writers must always be readers first.

Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he is currently in the PhD program at the University of California, Davis. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is his first novel.