Mark Childress

How did you become a writer?

When I was in the second grade our classroom had an aquarium. One morning we came in to find that a swordfish had jumped out of the tank and died on the floor. The teacher was putting together a little mimeographed "newspaper" with stories written by us students. My three-sentence narrative of the death of the swordfish was printed, along with my name. I was thrilled to see it, hooked for life. It made me feel immortal.

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

I was influenced a lot by the books I loved to read as a child and especially as a teenager - I was besotted with Latin American writing of the 60s and 70s, and with Dickens and Capote and with certain obscure short-story writers. I had many terrific English teachers who introduced me to writers I still love. English teachers are especially wonderful people, in my experience. Then I went to college to learn to be a writer. I had a famous writer, Barry Hannah, as a teacher, but mainly he taught me how not to be a writer because he was in an alcoholic haze at the time. So that was a powerful influence too and I promised myself I would never write drunk. Luckily I had a graduate student as a teacher called Kitty Johnson. She took my stories seriously and made me feel like a real writer for having written them. She was one of the first people to tell me I had talent as a writer.

When and where do you write?

I have a large and cluttered desk which is really a huge sheet of Formica-covered particle board laid across two filing cabinets. I look out on my little yard here in Key West where I like to grow orchids, which always need a bit of tending when you are stuck for the next sentence. I start out after coffee and email and go as long as I can through the day. I almost never work past four o'clock.

What are you working on now?

At the moment I am writing a piece for the Wall Street Journal about Alabama football, and I am also writing the libretto of an opera that will be produced in 2014 but can't quite be announced yet.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes, every day since I started writing. Sometimes it only lasts a few seconds, in which case it is called "writing." Sometimes it lasts days or weeks, when it becomes "writer's block." The key is to always have something else to work on if you run out of juice on the main project. Usually letting it get cold and going back is the only solution - you have to divorce yourself from the person who wrote it before you can find the mistakes by yourself. If you have a good editor, you are blessed.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read read read read read read. Write write write write write. All else is madness or pose.

Mark Childress is the author of seven novels: A World Made of Fire, V for Victor, Tender, Crazy in Alabama, Gone for Good, One Mississippi, and Georgia Bottoms, and three books for children. He wrote the screenplay for the Columbia Pictures film of "Crazy in Alabama," a main selection of the Venice and San Sebastian film festivals.

Colin Nissan

How did you become a writer?

I worked as a full time advertising copywriter for many years, and still do as a freelancer. After I quit my job to freelance, I immediately began trying my hand at non-ad writing. I started submitting to McSweeney's, got one through and was hooked. It was incredibly liberating to write about whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Those years in advertising were really great prep for the submission process, however. First, I learned to develop a thick skin through the rounds and rounds of ideas that are critiqued and killed by creative directors and clients. Second, I built the stamina to keep coming up with new ideas even when I think there are none left.

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

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up devouring books. I think I was always looking for a bigger laugh and turned to TV for that - Cheers, Taxi, Happy Days, etc., I was a bit of a sitcom junkie. I'm not exactly sure how this informed my writing, but I know it was a huge influence on what I thought was funny. But after college, I started reading humor essayists like Jack Handey, Steve Martin, Jon Stewart and Ian Frazier. They had a major impact on me, as did David Sedaris and Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. It was a huge revelation that the written page could make me laugh out loud. I wanted to try doing what they did.

When and where do you write?

I live in Brooklyn and have a circuit of coffee shops that I frequent. I like writing in places like that and bouncing around when it starts to feel stale. The only problem with that is the more I bounce around, the higher my obligatory scone intake.

What are you working on now?

I'm always working on ideas for McSweeney's and Shouts and Murmurs to keep a semi-constant stream of submissions in the pipeline. I'm also working on a screenplay and book idea. I recently learned something about myself, which has proven pretty important: as much as I like to juggle lots of different creative ventures at once, it rarely leads to the best outcome. I'm at my best when I laser in and focus on one thing (or maybe two) at a time.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Absolutely. There's such a stark contrast between those times when I sit down to write and struggle to even form sentences, and those inexplicable times when my fingers can't keep up with my thoughts. I think I need to be better about abandoning the former sometimes and doing other things instead, but I usually try to slug through it. Sometimes I'm successful, but usually not.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I would say, focus. Even if you have the eight-pronged bio that so many of us feel we need these days, my advice is to pick an idea, an essay, a short film, a comic, whatever it is, and put everything you have into it for whatever period of time you choose. I think a lot of people, myself included, are getting caught in half-ass mode right now.

Colin Nissan is a humor writer living in Brooklyn, NY. He is a regular contributor to McSweeney's Internet Tendency and has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Wired Magazine, and Vice. He can be found on Twitter @cnissan.

Brian Beker

How did you become a writer?

My parents came to America after World War II filled with secrets. I was the worst kind of kid they could have had. Too curious, always pecking away at them with questions. It must have been like having a six-year-old demanding to see their papers all the time. But, man, I wanted those stories, and since I couldn’t get them they became more valuable to me than anything in the world. The whole time I wrote everything down. By the time I was 12 I ran out of places to hide the composition books I kept journals in, before I knew they were even called journals. 

The other part of becoming a writer happened on a summer job out of high school reporting for a weekly in New York. I covered so many rent strikes, rate hikes, stuck elevators and flooded basements that the paper quit using my byline half the time so no one would figure out their staff consisted of one skinny teenager in thick glasses. My editor enjoyed using a blue pencil the way you would a shiv on a squealer. He slashed at my copy and gutted it before he sailed the sheets back over his desk at me. “Clean it up and make it interesting,” he’d say. Then he’d make me pay for the writing lesson by going to the deli and getting him a can of Rheingold.

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

My high school English teacher, Mike Ingrisani was the biggest influence of all. I still think of him every day. Harriet the Spy. My editors at [MORE] Magazine, the journalism review that was shut down over a rigged-Pulitzer scandal, who showed me what selling out looked like. Fred Friendly at Columbia. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, The Gulag Archipelago, Bukowski’s Post Office, Selby’s Requiem for a Dream. 100 years of Solitude. Casablanca. The Adventures of Tintin. Le Carré. Eric Ambler. Mandolinist Andy Statman, competition pilot Clint McHenry. More recently, Robert Littell’s The Stalin Epigram. 

Where and when do you write?

Almost every day, and at different times of the day. In the past six months I’ve driven across the country twice and now down into Mexico with my dog Roo. I write wherever we wind up. Scrivener software is a part of that. It creates a virtual desktop and organizational structure that makes it easier to contend with not having a real desk. I used to carry an Olivetti portable at the bottom of my backpack. This is better.

What are you working on now?

The Dog in the Clouds, a memoir about a dog I saw in the Kathmandu clouds two years before he was born on the Colorado prairie. He helped me heal from a decade of serious injury, paralysis from a spinal tumor, a hard hit on the head, war, and other things yet lousier. He taught me a lesson that I didn’t learn until after he gave me his life, a lesson that helped get my life back when I finally understood it.

After that, I want to see how much of my parents’ story I can get out of intelligence archives that are now open. Between the two of them they ran the gamut from seeing the first shot of the war fired into Danzig to a bizarre ménage à trois in New York with a KGB agent in an atomic spy case that changed all of our lives forever.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, but more than my share of revisor’s block, which is just as deadly. It might be worse, like letting someone die because you couldn’t quite manage a tourniquet.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Clean it up and make it interesting. This involves rewriting until you feel like you need a bone marrow transplant. Also, save yourself some trouble and regard anyone who tells you they write better drunk as a phony. 

Bio: I grew up in New York and went to Columbia College and Journalism School. I directed Lines of Fire, a documentary about revolution and heroin trafficking in Burma that was just added to the NY Museum of Modern Art’s film collection. After being injured in a jeep wreck in the Himalaya and then paralyzed by a spinal cord tumor, I drifted away from writing to work in aviation, but have now returned to writing full time. I just published a Kindle book about my dog Roo, Notes from a Dog Rescue in Progress. I blog at www.thedogintheclouds.com.