Lisa See

How did you become a writer?

I didn’t want to be a writer. My mom’s a writer and my mother’s father was a writer. I wanted to do something different. But then I became a writer! I feel like I’ve been in a lifelong apprenticeship. I learned a lot about writing from my mother that most people take years and years to learn or may never learn. Writing was literally in my blood. I always say it was a good thing they weren’t plumbers. But after years of resistance, I woke up one day, and it was like a light bulb went off. I mean it was just like, “Oh, I could be a writer…” At the time, I was living in Greece, and I didn’t want to get married, and didn’t want to have children, and I only wanted to live out of a suitcase, and I thought, how can I do that? I’ll be a writer!” It really had to do with how can I have real freedom with my time? My goal was how can I have a life where my time is my own? Where I don’t have to be in an office, where I could travel, where I could choose my own hours? I was really trying to find what that could be because it was really important to me, and it still is. Especially when my sons were younger, I could work from home. When they had the Halloween special thing at school, I wouldn’t have to miss it. And that was just very important to me.

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

I adored my paternal grandmother. She probably was the greatest influence on my life. She loved to travel. She wasn’t very conventional. (She married a Chinese man when it was still against the law.) My mom, Carolyn See, who is a writer, has been a huge influence on my life as a woman and a writer. I can honestly say I wouldn’t he the writer I am if not for her. Bob Dylan has also been an influence, not that I know him or anything. I love how he can tell an entire story in just a few minutes, and I love how he plays with words. Lastly, I’d have to say Wallace Stegner. I used a line from Angle of Repose as the epigraph for my first book, On Gold Mountain: “Fooling around in the papers my grandparents, especially my grandmother, left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don’t comprehend. I’d like to live in their clothes a while.” I didn’t realize when I used those lines that the sentiment would continue to influence me and my writing to this day.

When and where do you write?

I have an office in my house. When I’m writing, I work first thing in the morning. I write a thousand words a day. Sometimes I can do that in two hours. Sometimes it takes eight or ten hours. On those days, we have cheese and crackers for dinner.

What are you working on now?

I've just finished a new novel. It's called China Dolls, and it's about Chinese American performers in the 1930s and 1940s here in this country. These were people who billed themselves as the Chinese Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the Chinese Houdini, the Chinese Frank Sinatra. My story is about three young women who meet in San Francisco at the Forbidden City nightclub. High jinks ensue!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, thank god!!! That doesn’t mean that some days I don’t feel like writing or that I don’t know that what I’m writing sucks and will eventually be cut. Even when it’s going badly, I feel it’s really important to just keep writing that 1,000 words a day.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Always look at writing as a job. That means, you get up and you go to work. I don’t wait for that moment of inspiration. By now, I do a lot of things—I write, I do a lot of speaking, and I do other fun—rather, what I consider to be fun—projects. But the most important thing is writing, so that always comes first. When I get up, the first thing I do is write. My rule is 1000 words a day—just four pages—that isn’t very much. Life is short, so be passionate about everything you do.

Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, and Dreams of Joy. She has also written a mystery series that takes place in China, as well as On Gold Mountain, which is about her Chinese-American family. Her next novel, China Dolls, will be released by Random House in June 2014. Ms. See serves as a Los Angeles City Commissioner on the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Monument Authority. She was honored as National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women in 2001 and was the recipient of the Chinese American Museum’s History Makers Award in Fall 2003. To learn more, please visit her web site at www.LisaSee.com.

Lisa Kovanda

How did you become a writer?

Some of my earliest childhood memories involve writing. My grandmother was a master storyteller. I remember sitting at her kitchen table and with her help, writing short stories complete with illustrations even before I could really write the words myself. Grandma covered cardboard with fabric scraps to make covers for them, and sewed the “books” together by hand. I had an entire bookshelf filled with my stories before I was out of grade school. I went into science and health care in college, but even then, I was a voracious reader, and loved to write. After my children were grown, I became interested in writing for publication.

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

Obviously, my grandmother, Elsie Kovanda Baucke, was the largest influence in my writing life. She loved stories of the pioneers, so I cut my teeth on Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, John Neihardt, and Mari Sandoz. In my adult life, I credit Dr. Dan Holtz, a college Nebraska Literature professor for encouraging me to pursue creative writing. I have also been blessed to have UCLA screenwriting professor emeritus, Lew Hunter as a mentor. My influences are broad. Having an insatiable reading appetite is essential to being a well-rounded writer.

When and where do you write?

I've always been a night-owl, and I find I do my best writing from about 8 pm until 3 am. But, since that doesn't always work with my day-job schedule, I have learned to write anywhere and anytime. Especially if there is a deadline looming. I prefer to write with my laptop in my cushy recliner, with the footrest up.

What are you working on now?

I have a total of nine active projects on my development board, but the project on the top is a combined movie script/novel that deals with the last execution in the state of Nebraska, from the perspective of a seminary student who was in love with one of the victims. It's called “Walk Me Home,” and I'm in the revision stage on both the script and novel. Russ Kildare, the main character, has a powerful story, and I'm excited to share it with the rest of the world.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I've suffered from “procrastination syndrome,” but never writer's block. I have an idea book filled with future story ideas, and nine projects with either completed drafts or at least outlines on my production board. Having a solid outline and fully-developed character sketches before I start writing a story helps me answer the “now what?” question easily when I'm writing the first draft.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write, write, write! Balance that with plenty of diverse reading, a healthy dose of television and movies, especially if you are writing for screen, and get involved in writing groups to give you feedback.

I'm the president of the Nebraska Writers Guild, and a member of a fantastic feedback group called the Local Muse. Giving and receiving feedback is an essential part of my growth as a writer. There's also a level of accountability when procrastination syndrome threatens to creep in and stall what I'm working on.

Lisa was adopted and raised by a family in Nebraska City, Nebraska. She is the 2011-2015 President of the Nebraska Writers Guild, Municipal Liaison for the Nebraska: Lincoln, and Nebraska: Elsewhere regions for National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, an active member of the Nebraska Writers Workshop, Local Muse, and a charter member of the Nebraska Film Association.

Education: Peru State College, Biology/Chemistry, Peru, NE, 1990; Southeast Community College, LPN, Lincoln, NE, 1982; College of Saint Mary, Registered Nursing, Omaha, NE, 1989.

Training: Lew Hunter's Screenwriting Colony, Superior, Nebraska, Screenwriting, 2011. A two-week intensive program, conducted by UCLA Screenwriting professor emeritus, Lew Hunter, based on the UCLA screenwriting curriculum.

Awards: Omaha Film Festival, Best Feature Screenplay (Nominated), 2013. “Til Death Do Us Part” Slamdance Screenwriting Awards, Best Feature Script (Nominated), 2012. Top 25 Feature Script for “Til Death Do Us Part”; Oregon Film Festival , Best Oregon Screenplay (Nominated), 2012. Bronze, for “Til Death Do Us Part”: Austin Film Festival, Best Feature Screenplay (Nominated), 2013. Second Round selection for “Modified Flight Plan” (with Brian Thomas); Bess Streeter Aldrich Short Fiction, Best Short Story (Won), 2010. Won for “Curls of Gold,” part of “Tales From Table Rock.”

Her published works include “Reckless Abandon,” “The Hunt,” and “Cedar in Seattle,” all novellas, and “Modified Flight Plan,” with Brian Thomas.

Produced screen projects include, “Remission,” a feature currently in post-production with Midnight Frights Films, and “Last Breath,” also in post-production, a short film that is part of the upcoming “Shivers Down Your Spine,” series with Dead Lantern Pictures.

Jerry Stahl

How did you become a writer?

I had no skills, was a horrible guitar player, and (we're talking my late teens/early twenties here) wanted to find something I could do naked and fucked-up at four in the morning and possibly make a dime. I know, it's a high bar. In fact, along with the fiction I'd  been writing (badly) for years, I eventually started doing journalism, starting at a Santa Cruz free paper when I was twenty. My first piece was a review of a bar called Mona's Gorilla Lounge, which I was a year too young to legally enter. The pay was eight dollars an article. Oddly, four decades later, journalism now pays about the same as it did then – minus about eight dollars.

From California I went back to NY, wrote for the Village Voice, among other places, and cobbled together a living penning porn & journalism to pay for the expensive habit of writing fiction. (I used to write the fake sex letters at Penthouse, not to brag – a great apprenticeship for a fiction-writer.) At 21, I won a Pushcart Prize for a story that ran in the Transatlantic Review – but what makes this interesting is that the story got rejected by Hustler first. For better or worse, my work has always had a streak of schizophrenia running through it. It’s been all zigs and zags ever since the beginning.

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

When I was 16 or so, my father decided the best way to deal with his life was by sitting in the garage with the motor in his Oldsmobile running. So, taking pity on me, my sister’s boyfriend gave me a bunch of books and albums he thought would get me through. Nathanael West, Terry Southern and Hunter Thompson. Dylan and John Lee Hooker and Lenny Bruce. Samuel Beckett, Burroughs, Celine, Dick Gregory, etc. Somehow, these guys gave me everything I needed: they were wild, angry, dangerous – but most of all, they were all funny as hell. I remember thinking, as I read them, I didn’t even know you were allowed to say this stuff. To this day, that’s the kind of material I love – artists who say the unsayable. About the world, about themselves, about…everything. At around that same age, I saw Lindsay Anderson’s movie If, and it was such a big kind of “fuck you” to everything that represented authority, it hit me in a way nothing else had. It was like striking a match in my head.

The first real life author I ever met was Bruce Jay Friedman, author of two of my favorite novels, Stern and A Mother’s Kisses. Early on, I got to do an interview with BJF for a literary magazine, in which he said something I never forgot: “When you write a sentence that makes you squirm, keep going.” Needless to say, I’ve been squirming ever since. I also had the good fortune to study with the Wolff Brothers – Tobias and Geoffrey, who both wrote memoirs that had a profound effect on my writing – and the whole idea of self-exposure in one’s writing. They’re very different writers – but both fearless. Which impressed me down to my toes.

The biggest influence, personally, was Hubert Selby. Selby was probably my first literary hero. In fact, the first book I ever shoplifted was Last Exit To Brooklyn. I met Selby when I was struggling to get off heroin, an ordeal he’d been through himself, as he put it, “strapped down in a West Hollywood holding cell.” In any event, when I finally managed to kick, I remember telling him how worried I was – it sounds so ludicrous now – I was afraid that, without drugs, I would “lose my edge.” To this day I can hear his cackle when he laughed in my face. “Listen, you idiot, until  you’re off of everything, you don’t even know how crazy you are.”

For better or worse, he was right. Selby wrote Requiem For A Dream and The Room stone cold straight – and they’re two of the darkest, most disturbing books ever written in English. Staying clean presented a lot of problems, but lack of edge on the page was not one of them. Just the opposite. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, you can scare people – most of all yourself.

What are you working on now?

I just started a new novel. Two came out in 2013, so I wanted to take a breath and do some other stuff. I generally like to work on a few different projects at once. So I’m also working with Larry Charles on adapting an earlier novel, Pain Killers, into a cable TV show. Pain Killers is about a washed up private detective who has to track down Joseph Mengele, the mad doctor of Auschwitz, who (in the novel) is living in the San Fernando Valley, and not happy about it. I guess you’d call it a buddy comedy – where one of the buddies is Dr. Mengele. Ultimately all the screen-work and journalism take a backseat to fiction. Only writing novels can really get rid of the voices in my head.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, but sometimes I wish I did. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Destroy your life; then put it back together. You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.

Jerry Stahl has written for a variety of publications, including Esquire, The Believer, and Details, (where he wrote the Culture column for three years.) He has also written extensively for screen and television, most recently the HBO film Hemingway & Gellhorn and the IFC series “Maron.” He is the author of eight books, including the memoir Permanent Midnight, made into a movie with Ben Stiller, and the novel I, Fatty (optioned by Johnny Depp). His latest novels are Bad Sex On Speed and Happy Mutant Baby Pills. His late-life fatherhood column, “OG DAD,” runs periodically on TheRumpus.net. Website: jerrystahl.co. Twitter: @somejerrystahl