David Vann

How did you become a writer?

Before I could write, I told stories about squirrels which my mother wrote down. She always encouraged reading and writing. And my father told lies constantly, about the size of fish and his fidelity in marriage and everything in between. The first stories I wrote were collections of our hunting and fishing tales, illustrated and with titles such as North To Alaska, given to my family each year at Christmas. I come from a family with five suicides and a murder, many divorces, mental illness on both sides, and beautiful landscapes, so it was wonderful material

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

I was very lucky at Stanford as an undergrad to study with Michelle Carter, who was a great young teacher, and with Grace Paley, who was visiting for a quarter, and Adrienne Rich. But the huge influence on me was John L’Heureux, who was a mentor to me for over twenty years. He was unreasonably generous and patient, and an inspiration in his great writing. Desires, an early story collection of his, was my favorite, but I also loved A Woman Run Mad and many others and read all of his books. I was also influenced by other former students of John L’Heureux, including Tobias Wolff, Harriet Doerr, Ron Hansen, etc. John had me read Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Carver, Porter, Hemingway, Allison, Gibbons, etc. O’Connor and Garcia Marquez had the biggest influence on me, but the book he recommended that stuck with me most was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. From there, I read other landscape writers, such as Elizabeth Bishop and Annie Proulx, leading to my favorite novel, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I love literal landscapes extended into figurative ones, and I love stylists such as McCarthy, Proulx, and Robinson. I also had a Great Works course for a year at Stanford with Leslie Cahoon, who introduced me to Euripides, Vergil, Chaucer, etc. Because of that one course, I studied Latin, Old English, Middle English, write novels which are essentially Greek tragedies, have just written a novel about Medea, am translating Beowulf, titled Legend of a Suicide based on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, etc., so Leslie Cahoon had an enormous influence over my academic and writing life. I also went to an MFA at Cornell, where Stephanie Vaughn and Robert Morgan were generous to me, and came back to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow.

When and where do you write?

I write every morning, seven days a week, and the momentum of writing every day is tremendously important to me, because I have no outline or plan and view writing as a transformation by the unconscious. I don’t know what will happen on the page each day, but there’s a shocking amount of pattern and structure that emerges, and I think this can happen only through a daily practice. It’s also a replacement for religion for me, so I need the daily practice for emotional and psychological reasons, to not feel that my life is about nothing.

Where I write doesn’t matter, as long as I have a room to myself. It can be a hotel room anywhere in the world, or on my boat in Turkey, or at home in New Zealand in bed, as long as it’s for two hours by myself every morning, without distraction (no human movement or voices, and I wear earplugs). I travel for about half of each year, with book launches and interviews and festivals in about twenty countries, so I’m happy that I can write anywhere.

What are you working on now?

I have a new novel, Goat Mountain, coming out now (September, 2013). This is the book that burns away the last of my family material, returning to the setting of the first short story I ever wrote, more than twenty-five years ago. It’s my best book, and a strange one. An eleven-year-old boy on a deer-hunting trip in 1978 in northern California with his father, grandfather and father’s best friend, and things go wrong immediately. The boy’s father lets him sight in on a poacher through the scope of his rifle, as my father let me do in real life, and the boy pulls the trigger. This causes problems for the men. But what’s strange is how the poacher becomes a Jesus figure, a buck the Holy Ghost, and the grandfather a kind of God. I’m an atheist, so what was the Holy Trinity doing showing up in my novel? I’ve been thinking lately that it’s my Cherokee heritage showing up, because what bigger problem did Native Americans have than Jesus, showing up as a poacher on the land? I’m very excited about this novel, and I’m still trying to understand it.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. I think writer’s block happens only if you’re not a writer or not working on the right material. It’s a thing that doesn’t really exist.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write every morning for two hours. It can’t hurt. Find a job that doesn’t happen in the mornings. Refuse to go to breakfast or lunch with anyone. Don’t write in cafes or other public places. Don’t try to “be” a writer, just write. Enroll in a writing program, where you’ll get solid advice. Don’t ask anyone else for advice, especially your family or friends or anyone in a café or online. Don’t read or write blogs, since they have no subtext and therefore suck. Realize that anything without subtext, without a second story, sucks. Put your family on the sacrificial stone and swing the axe. Don’t plan to make any money from writing, and realize it’s unfair and you may not get published for decades. Realize it may be a mercy and a justice to everyone that you don’t get published. Most likely your writing isn’t worth reading. One in twenty of my students is worth reading, and they all made the cut to get into a graduate writing program. The best thing you can do is read a lot of good books and study language. A ten-week intensive Latin course at UC Berkeley was the single best thing I ever did for my writing. Old English has been helpful, too, and a course in linguistics. I’ve read Blood Meridian six times, because re-reading is helpful. What you write will be a by-product of what you ingest. No writer is ever original or can help being original.

Published in 19 languages, David Vann’s internationally-bestselling books (Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, Dirt, Last Day On Earth, A Mile Down, and his new novel, Goat Mountain,  have won 14 prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and appeared on 70 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, McSweeney’s, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, and many others. A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L’Heureux fellow, he is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England. www.davidvann.com.

Avery Chenoweth

How did you become a writer?

Before I ever wrote a line, I was a story-teller, and those very first stories were about the dreams I was having then in Kindergarten--so vivid and textured they seemed real. Some were nightmares, and I learned to control them--to go into the dream, run them back, and start them forward again but to a different ending. Years later, I would tell kids Twilight Zone episodes in school, and students and teachers would listen. A teacher in 8th grade finally put a pen in my hand and told me to write it down. In spite of the years, education, and professional work since then, that primal experience of seeing dreams and guiding them continues to be my path into writing.

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

We had some marvelous influences in our neighborhood when I was growing up, like the one night I climbed out on the garage roof on a summer night, and in my pajamas and sneakers went sneaking along until I came to the source of a crazy party going on, and watched all the 60s swinging hipsters out by the pool, having a great time drinking and dancing. Many years later I learned it was the pub party for Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel, and got to know him well. So it was a social inspiration that connected with the books in my room and made the writing life a reality. In time I got to meet John McPhee and others--which made it seem a great career to pursue. As for the inspiration on the shelf, what lit me up was always the mood of the prose, the intimacy of place and character that gave me sweeping daydreams, so powerful I could hardly read more than a page or two an hour. Salinger and Fitzgerald gave me complete hallucinations, their prose was so evocative. At Hopkins, as a graduate student, I was fortunate to study with John Barth, who proved to be an inspiring writer, mentor, and friend.

When and where do you write?

At newspapers, I learned to write when and wherever it had to be done, and on deadline, but on my own, I prefer an early morning with coffee and darkness and even fog in the valley, if nature would only cooperate. Something alluring and not quite right in the world, and transporting--that takes me out of this leather chair to a place whose reality appears alive in front of me--those are great mornings.

What are you working on now?

My obsession now is a pair of connected novels about an old family here in Charlottesville. I believe I’m working on the one that is closest to being finished, though I’ve been wrong before.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Writer’s block has been an issue at times, and when it is, I realize that I’m writing about a situation, not a story, and that’s the cause of the block. As soon as the dream-scape opens again, the block vanishes, and the story is racing on.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write a story as if you’re talking to a friend in a bar about something that has to be told, quickly, before the check comes. That tends to fire the imagination to the point of finishing the arc--and, for novels, always finish the first draft before re-working the beginning. Stick to what’s urgent--and always write to the one or two people who would get it, not to the “readers” or the “market.” Just keep it simple, like telling your mother a story about why you’re home late from school--cause you had to stop and explore a deserted house and what you found inside that made you so late coming home.

Avery Chenoweth is the author of four books, including the newly released novel, Radical Doubt, a darkly-comic literary thriller that is available on Amazon Kindle. His novel-in-stories, Wingtips, was short-listed for the Library of Virginia Prize, and his two non-fiction books, Empires in the Forest: Jamestown and the Beginning of America, and Albemarle: a Story of Landscape and American Identity together won almost two dozen national awards, including a 2007 Ippy Gold Medal for regional-nonfiction, for Empires. He has written for Harper’s, The Washington Post, and People magazine, and got his masters degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and UVA.

Christian Wolmar

How did you become a writer?

I always wanted to be a journalist and taught myself to type at 13 to work on the school newspaper. The books came relatively late when, through various circumstances, I got offered two book contracts and have now written ten, mostly on railway history.

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

I have had a few very encouraging news editors in my time at various newspapers, but really the drive to write and make a living out of it has come from me.

When and where do you write?

I write anywhere and almost constantly. I do not have a schedule and have a small laptop that is excellent for trains and planes. The key to being a successful journalist is being able to write quickly and having a speciality, and I am fortunate to have both those qualities. Writing fast and accurately gets easier as you get older. It also pays not to be precious – I can write in a busy newsroom, or at home with kids running around the place. Books obviously take longer and require more intense concentration, but nevertheless, getting the words down on paper is the key. The editing and the later embellishments are the easy bits. It is the first draft that is so hard.

What are you working on now?

I am proofing the galleys for To the Edge of the World, the history of the Transsiberian railway, which is being published in the UK in time for xmas, and also putting in corrections for my previous book, The Great Railroad Revolution for the American paperback edition. I am also working hard on my campaign to be Mayor of London.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. You can’t afford to as a journalist. There are definite times when the words flow more easily. I suffer greatly from deadlinitis. In other words, I desperately need a deadline to work to. Interestingly, even for my books I have developed a kind of internal clock of just how much I need to do to ensure I get there on time, even if it is 6 months ahead. I never write out schedules, but instinctively know when things need to be down by. A lot of this comes with experience.

What’s your advice to new writers?

First answer the question, "have you got anything to say?" If not, stop there! If yes, then develop expertise and speciality – write non-fiction first, learn to tell stories and be a reporter – much good fiction is based on the old journalistic skills of reporting and analyzing. Be humble and write for local papers, trade papers, anywhere that will take your work. But don’t just blog; you need the discipline of writing for people who will criticize your copy and require professional standards.

Follow me on Twitter @christianwolmar and see more than 1,000 articles and blogs on my website archive www.christianwolmar.co.uk For my mayoral campaign, the Twitter account is @wolmarforlondon and the website www.wolmarforlondon.co.uk.