Tom Zoellner
/How did you become a writer?
I started as a reporter and worked for a decade at a series of local daily newspapers. The pay was low, but the exposure to all levels of American society was high. I learned how to sit and listen, how to ask questions that elicit answers, how to not take no for an answer, how to write fast and not fear a blinking cursor.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I remain awed and humbled by a school of midcentury regionalism; writers like George Rippey Stewart, Zora Neale Hurston, John Gunther, Mary Austin, Wallace Stegner, Richard Rhodes, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the anonymous authors of the 1940s WPA Guides. They knew how to synthesize a pile of facts into supple narratives. Places have as much personality as people.
When and where do you write?
In a spare bedroom in my house, on a desk purchased from a Kmart in West Lebanon, New Hampshire when I was in graduate school. I aim for 1,000 words a day, per the advice of Carolyn See, typically in the mornings. It's a formula that works.
What are you working on now?
A collection of essays about my home state of Arizona. Regionalism again.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
No -- that's an invention. Ignore it. Just start writing, not worrying about quality, and your path will become clear.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Other than the aforementioned 1,000 words a day, every day, and the forsaking of quality in favor of production, it would be an image from Stephen King's "On Writing," in which he compares the act to paleontology -- the exhumation of a dinosaur bone in the subconscious that was always there. You didn't so much create it as unearth it. All you need to do is show up and start digging to find the writing that you've already done. This provides enormous relief, and disproves writer's block.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Understand you'll have to make it an annex of your life rather than the center. We all have to cobble together a living. Don't listen to those who say that teaching is a distraction -- that's a fiction on the level of writer's block. If you set the alarm two hours earlier than you otherwise might, and stay faithful to the thousand-word benchmark, your success at producing a manuscript within six months is as guaranteed as a law of physics. Then it becomes a matter of perseverance. Rejection is normal. Keep submitting. And also understand that the real rewards do not come from publication, money or honors. The best compensation is in the pure act of discovery.
Tom Zoellner teaches at Chapman University and Dartmouth College, and serves as the politics editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of eight nonfiction books, including Island on Fire, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 2020.
