Don Winslow

How did you become a writer?

Basically by writing. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve been doing it - or trying to – since I was six. (My neighbor, Joey Palumbo, paid me a quarter to write a play, and it was a long time before I got paid that much again.) I started seriously trying to write crime novels much later. I’d heard Joseph Wambaugh say that when he was starting, he decided to write ten pages a day, no matter what. I didn’t think I could do ten, but I could do five. So I wrote five pages a day on my first crime novel, no matter where I was or what I was doing. After a while (okay, quite a while) I had a book. The first fourteen publishers I sent it to disagreed. The fifteenth thought it was a book (it was nominated for an Edgar) and I’ve been writing since.

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

There’s not time or space for me to list all those. Shakespeare was a huge influence when I was a kid. In my genre, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Lawrence Block, Joe Wambaugh, T. Jefferson Parker, Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Ken Bruen, Ian Rankin, John Harvey...it goes on and on, and I’m always afraid I’ll leave someone out. Tolstoy inspires me, so does George Eliot. I don’t ever want to ‘close the list’ on my inspirations – I want to find new things every day.

When and where do you write?

Depends on where we’re living. If I’m at home in California, I write in my office. If we’re in Rhode Island, I write on my mother’s porch. The ‘when’ is pretty much the same – I start work at 5 or 5:30 AM depending on the time of year (earlier in the summer) and work all day. In winter, I take a break around 10 and do a few miles. In summer, I knock off late afternoon and hit the waves until dark. It’s a good life.

What are you working on now?

I’m always working on a couple of books, but I’m usually pretty close-mouthed about what they are. I think you can talk about writing or you can write, but it’s pretty hard to do both. At least for me.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, but only because I refuse to believe in it. I’ll whistle past that particular graveyard, thanks. My hunch is that writer’s block is really an attempt to write perfectly on the first draft, which is hard to do. I just write badly until the good stuff comes. The other possibility is that I’m trying to write a scene that doesn’t really belong, or I’m trying to write it from the wrong character’s point of view. So I try switching it up. But if I take four or five stabs at a scene or a chapter, and it’s still not working, I have to decide that the scene or chapter simply doesn’t belong and I move on. It might be, too, that I don’t know enough about the characters or the story to write it yet. A lot of times, I’ll just skip it and go back later.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write. That sounds glib, and I don’t mean it to. But at the end of the day, it comes down to sitting – usually alone – in front of some kind of writing instrument and getting it down. There’s just no replacement for ‘time on the mat’. The other thing I’d advise young writers is not to put too much stock in ‘peer review’. If you’re going to seek advice, get it from people who know more than you do, and, even then, do it sparingly. It’s too easy to get nibbled to death by ducks.

Don Winslow is an American author most recognized for his crime and mystery novels. Many of his books are set in California. He has published a series of five novels that have a private investigator named Neal Carey as their main character.

Jake Needham

How did you become a writer?

It was an accident. Seriously, it actually was an accident. I had practiced law for a couple of decades, doing mostly international corporate work, and I found myself involved in a complicated and rather hostile corporate acquisition. When the smoke eventually cleared, I ended up personally buying out of the deal a major interest in a little Hollywood production company that mostly made cable TV movies. Looking back, I can only conclude I was either in a highly inebriated state or temporarily possessed by a fit of unrestrained hubris. Either way, once I had gone and done it, I did my level best to make the company profitable. My principle strategy was to focus the company more tightly on what I thought it could do best, and I even dashed off an outline of the kind of movies I wanted the company to try to sell to its production partners. A copy of that outline got sent by mistake to one of the cable TV networks we worked with and one day the network called up and asked me to make it for them. Make what? I asked. The movie you wrote that treatment for, they said. We really liked it.

And that, girls and boys, is how I became a writer…

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

I've always figured one day I would sit down think up an uplifting answer to toss out when I’m asked this question, one that makes me appear thoughtful, reflective, and terribly, terribly intellectual. Sadly, I’ve never gotten around to it. I guess the simple truth is that every author I’ve ever read has influenced me to some degree. I see ways others have told stories that I like and wish I could manage to do similar work myself, and I see ways they’ve told stories that I hate and swear to avoid forever.

A number of reviewers compared my early books to Elmore Leonard -– ‘If Elmore Leonard had written a book about Bangkok, this would be it!’ — and some interviewers are still jumping to the conclusion that I was once bitten by a Leonard bug and am trying to go down that road with my own books. That’s just not the case. All the Leonard titles I’ve read have been too disjointed in their narratives and tried too hard for cleverness in their characters to engage me for very long. Great dialogue, of course, but weak narratives. And weak narratives ultimately make you care very little about the characters no matter how snappy their dialogue may be. So, no, not Elmore Leonard. And, honestly, not anyone else in particular either.

When and where do you write?

I have libraries in both our Bangkok and US homes and my family accepts that those are my private retreats where I can work without being disturbed. The two rooms were designed to be very similar in order to minimize any sense of dislocation. Both are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and both have a carefully-positioned Eames chair where I listen to music, enjoy the view out the windows, and work on a laptop with my feet up. Okay, so owning two original Eames chairs is probably a definition of serious self-indulgence. I admit it. Guilty.

What are you working on now?

I finished the final edits on my fourth Jack Shepherd novel last month and now it’s out of my hands and with the proofreaders. It will be published in January, 2014, as THE KING OF MACAU. Since the day after I let that one go I’ve been working oh the third Inspector Samuel Tay novel. It’s called THE DEAD AMERICAN and is scheduled for summer 2014.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No such thing as writer’s block. You ever hear of doctor’s block or architect’s block? Look, writing is a job. John Gregory Dunne said that writing is manual labor of the mind. It’s like laying pipe. You show up every day, dig a few feet further, and put down some more pipe. You do your job. Wasting perfectly good writing time whining about so-called writer’s block is something professional writers don’t do.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Sit down, put your fingers on the keyboard of your choice, and do it. I’m sick to death of people talking about the writing process, examining the writing process, and analyzing the writing process. That's just malarkey. You DO writing. That's all there is to it.

Jake Needham is an American screen and television writer who began writing novels when he realized he didn’t really like movies and television very much. He has since published six popular novels set in the cities of contemporary Asia and his seventh, THE KING OF MACAU, will be published in January, 2014. The Bangkok Post said, “Jake Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed rice.” 

Mr. Needham has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand for over twenty-five years. He is a lawyer by education and has held a number of significant positions in both the public and private sectors where he took part in a lengthy list of international operations he has absolutely no intention of telling you about. He, his wife, and their two sons now divide their time between homes in Thailand and the United States. 

The print editions of Jake’s novels have been distributed only in Europe, Asia, and the UK, where they have all been bestsellers. E-book editions of his novels are now available worldwide. You can learn more about Jake Needham and his books at his official website: www.JakeNeedham.com.

Richard Slotkin

How did you become a writer?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I learned to read. In school, what absorbed me was writing, whether class papers or articles for the school newspaper. I chose college teaching as a profession because it would allow me to write. But writing always meant two different things: non-fiction, in my case academic writing; and literary fiction. I suppose one doesn’t really “become a writer” till the work is published – and you know that you can not only put words on paper, but that they “work” for an audience. So I first became an academic writer (starting in 1966) and then – when academic publication boosted my confidence – a fiction writer (in 1980).

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

Teachers: Miss Rockmore in Freshman English at Brooklyn College, who took my writing seriously as writing as opposed to responding just to the ideas. Writers were my best teachers. Mark Twain, Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Hemingway, Conrad, Paul Horgan – in a strange way, John Ford

When and where do you write?

If I’m committed to a project, I prefer to write in the morning, break for lunch – then perhaps go over what I’ve written in the afternoon. If I’m between projects I’m usually still writing, sketching ideas, taking notes – on a more random schedule.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished a novel, THE BROOKLYN BOYS, about a Jewish war veteran and union organizer (in 1931) trying to get the gangsters out of the garment unions.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not as such. I’m always at least playing with possible projects, and I can always sit down and write an article or lecture for a particular occasion. But I’m often between projects, when there’s no book project I can fully commit to.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I’m assuming “fiction writers” here. You have to have confidence in the validity of what you have to say, and in your ability to get it said. You have to give yourself license to speak freely on your subject – not worry about critics, but see yourself as the authority on the subject at hand. Of course you’re the authority – who knows better than you what it is you’re trying to say? After that, it’s putting in the time to get the work done.

Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Wesleyan University, where he began teaching in 1966. He developed and for more than twenty years directed the American Studies Program, for which he received the 1995 Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association. He also helped develop Wesleyan’s Film Studies Program.

He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1942, and educated in the public schools and Brooklyn College before getting his Ph.D. in American Civilization at Brown University (1967).

He is best known for an award-winning trilogy of scholarly books on the myth of the frontier in American cultural history. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973) was a Finalist for the 1974 National Book Award in History, and received the 1973 Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985) received the literary award of the Little Big Horn Associates, and has become a standard reference in the field of American Studies. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (1992) was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (2005) combined military and social history to show how war transformed the nation’s understanding of race, ethnicity and social justice. In 2009 he published No Quarter: The Battle of the Petersburg Crater, 1864, a study of the political and military forces that shaped the war’s largest racial massacre. His latest book is Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution (2012), which deals with the political and strategic crisis that transformed the conduct and objectives of the Union and the Confederacy.

He has also written three historical novels. Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (2000) received the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction (2001) and the Salon.com Book Award (2000). A chapter was reprinted in the Library of America’s Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy (2009). The Return of Henry Starr (1988), is a historical Western about an American social bandit. The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War (1980) was the first work of fiction offered by the History Book Club. His other works include So Dreadfull a Judgment, a collection of primary documents concerning King Philip's War (1675-77), published in 1978. Articles and reviews have appeared in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Berkshire Review, Journal of Popular Culture, Prospects 9, American Historical Review, Journal of the West, Western Historical Quarterly, William and Mary Quarterly, Radical History Review and Representations. His article "Nostalgia and Progress: Theodore Roosevelt's Myth of the Frontier," in American Quarterly received the 1981 Don D. Walker Prize as the best article on Western American literature.

Slotkin has been awarded fellowships from the NEH and Rockefeller Foundation. In 1987 he received a Distinguished Achievement Citation from Brown University; and in 1986 was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, and in 2012 received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Western Literature Association. He has twice received Wesleyan’s Binswanger “Excellence in Teaching” Award (1997 and 2007).

He often serves as a consultant and on-screen interviewee for media projects on violence, racism, popular culture, the Civil War and the West. Recent projects include “America: The Story of Us,” History Channel (2009-10); Custer’s Last Stand: American Experience (2010); “Clint Eastwood” (American Masters, 2000), “Colt: Legend and Legacy” (PBS/1998), "Big Guns Talk" (TNT, 1997), and “Gunfighter Nation” on Bill Moyers & Co., PBS (2013).