How did you become a writer? I became a writer in, I think, the way that most people do. I was an avid reader and it just seemed to me like there was no better job than telling stories. From a very early age, I was pretty decisive that that was what I wanted to do. Then my mother encouraged me also to pursue journalism as I went into high school, and I kept doing that in college and a little bit afterwards as well. And all along, I was always writing fiction. I do consider myself first and foremost a fiction writer, but I was published first as a journalist. So those were the paths that I took to those two genres.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I was privileged to have amazing teachers very early on. In high school I had a teacher who was both the creative writing teacher and also the journalism advisor. She was extraordinarily encouraging and has published fiction of her own. Her name is Jan Bowman. In college, I studied with Patricia Powell and Jamaica Kincaid, and then at the Iowa Writers' Workshop I studied with ZZ Packer, Jim McPherson, Elizabeth McCracken, Marilynne Robinson, James Hynes, Frank Conroy, Chris Offutt, and Ethan Canin. I basically took class with almost everyone who was on the faculty there. They had varied styles, and they were incredibly generous. So I'm grateful for that. As a working journalist, I also, for a period of time, worked for James Fallows—after graduating from college, I worked at The Atlantic, where Jim was writing about higher education. I did research for him and also wrote a piece with him and he was a fantastic mentor and gave great advice as well. But, again, in a separate genre. So in both the creative writing world and in the journalistic world, I was lucky to have a lot of people editing me, really. And I think that was how I learned the most.

When and where do you write? I write mostly on my couch or in my bed. I also sometimes write at my desk. And I write whenever the time presents itself. I probably write best in the afternoon or late at night but I do write at all hours and I'm a little bit of a binge writer. So if I am on a writing streak, I might wake up and start writing and basically write until I go to bed. And then I do have streaks where I don't write at all. Because I have a motor disability that limits my typing, I sometimes have been concerned about my ergonomic setup, but when I'm just talking to the computer using voice recognition, that's obviously less of a concern, and I'm able to move around as I would like.

What are you working on now? I'm now working on some short stories and essays that I started while I was working on my novel, but that I hadn't brought to the finish line. I'm having a lot of fun with those; I don't really have a sense of where they're going, which is delightful. It's interesting to return to the space of not knowing what the end product is, or trying to decide what it might be, what is its form. And I have to reteach myself how to do that. I don't know at what point I decide, oh, I'm working on a short story collection, or oh, I'm working on an essay collection, or oh, I'm working on a mixed genre collection with the same themes, or oh, this short story wants to be a novel. So I guess I'm in the period of figuring that out.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I guess I have suffered from writer's block, although I don't know at the time that I called it that. I don't think that I've ever been very good at admitting that I can't do something. I'm probably more likely to do it badly. So probably writer's block, for me, looked like writing a lot of pages that were just really terrible. And that definitely happened. So I think I have a tendency to hurl myself against the closed door rather than walking away from it, and I'm not sure that's the best habit. Sometimes walking away from your work for a little while seems like it could be really helpful.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best writing advice I've ever received is probably from Jamaica Kincaid and Elizabeth McCracken. So Jamaica Kincaid would always tell us to read our work aloud. And she's certainly not the only writer who's said that, but she's the first one who said it to me. She's also the first person who ever made me read my work aloud to her in her office. And she would edit me verbally as I went through each sentence, which was excruciating and also extraordinarily useful. And that, I think, is tied to Elizabeth McCracken's instructions to think about each story teaching you how to read it, which is also something that I think about pretty often.

What’s your advice to new writers? I always feel funny giving advice. I think that, at the beginning of each new project, anyone might feel like a new writer. And I also think that any writer can benefit from just having someone around to cheer them on. There's a lot that's been said about workshop and critique. And I think that those things are really valuable. But when a project is kind of young and tender, I know that I have benefited hugely from having people say, “This is good, keep going!” In the early stages of certain projects, including my first novel, including my second novel, that was the feedback, that was what readers said. That was what helped me to keep going.

V.V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. Since 2017, she has co-hosted the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.