Brooke Borel

How did you become a writer?

I've always loved writing and have written stories and poems since I was a kid, but I didn't follow a typical writer's path to my current career (if there is such a thing). I never worked at a school paper, I didn't take many lit classes in college, and I didn't publish my first article until I was 28. Instead, my focus was science. I studied biomedical engineering as an undergraduate--which required coursework from biology to electric circuit theory to physics--and after I graduated I considered a career either as an engineer or a patent lawyer (yes, really). But neither felt right. I went back to school and finished a graduate program that involved the history of science and science studies, and I fell in love with the act of writing about science. I lucked into a brief internship at the science magazine Cosmos when I was traveling in Australia in 2008, and started freelancing right after. As for the rest, history and all that. 

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

Oh wow, this is a hard one. There are too many to list here. There is my second grade teacher Mrs. LaGrone, who had us write and bind our own books and then donate them to the school library. And my graduate thesis advisor at NYU Andy Jewett, who was always really encouraging about my writing, was an excellent reader and editor, and was the first to suggest I'd be a good journalist (he's now at Harvard). And all of my editors at Popular Science have been so great over the years I've written there, especially Martha Harbison (now at Audubon), Susannah Locke (now at Vox), and Jenny Bogo.

As for books, I've always appreciated Roy Peter Clark's writing advice, and I try to read the Elements of Style every year or two. That reminds me, I'm overdue on that one...

When and where do you write?

I work from home in a tiny office with a window. It looks out onto a busy street in Brooklyn, so sometimes it gets distracting, but it's also nice to see people walking around and going about their days. I write on and off pretty much all day, in between research and interviews, but I usually get my best burst of writing energy in the early to late evening. 

What are you working on now?

I just wrapped up a book about bed bugs, which will be out this spring from the University of Chicago Press. It's called: Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World. I'm working on a handful of stories for various science magazines and websites that cover everything from agriculture to invasive species to cricket farming. And I just started a new book project--also for Chicago--that will be a fact-checking guide for journalism students, freelancers, and anyone else who wants to learn how to fact-check nonfiction writing.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Of course, but I usually just step away from the computer and either take my dog for a walk or go for a swim at the YMCA. Getting away from it for a little while usually helps. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Just keep at it. The only way to get better is to practice and to share your work with smart writers and editors who will push you to do better. Oh, and stay curious about everything. The best stories come from asking a lot of questions and wanting to learn more, more, more.

Jessica Lahey

How did you become a writer?

I'm not sure where the distinction between being "a person who writes" and being a "writer" lies, but I have always written. I was not a big journal keeper or diarist, but I've always loved writing nonfiction. I love telling a true story, whether mine or someone else's, and am so grateful that I get to do it for a living as a teacher and a practitioner of the craft. 

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

I got serious about writing in high school. I was lucky enough to have two phenomenal teachers, Don Cannon and K.C. Potts. I specifically remember getting a paper back from K.C. in my junior year of high school. He'd written a note about a tiny moments in that paper, a description of clicking my cycling shoes into my pedals. He said it was beautiful, and that was it. I was hooked on the rush of rendering a sensory moment in words. Don and K.C. taught me so more than English and writing; they taught me about the real depth of language, the power language has to stitch ideas together and convey more than one meaning at a time. It's not coincidental that I became a teacher. I love writing, but I also love showing my students how to create the magic themselves. I have tried to model my own teaching after Don's and K.C.'s example, and still rely on them for advice on both my teaching and my writing.

When and where do you write?

When I was teaching full-time (English, Latin and writing), it was catch as catch can. Between classes, during lunch, during my prep periods, and in the moments between helping my kids with their homework and making dinner. Now that I'm teaching very part-time, I have established a much more productive schedule. I'm primarily a morning writer. I am clearest first thing, after coffee, and get my best work done before lunch, either at the dining room table, at my desk in the back room of our house, or at the little coffee table in our kitchen. I'm pretty hyper, so I have to get up a lot and move in between ideas, pages, or sections. When I have a serious deadline to meet, it helps for me to get out of my house, away from the temptations of laundry and gardening. I go to Dartmouth's Baker Library a lot, and wrote much of The Gift of Failure at the King Arthur Flour cafe in Norwich, Vermont. A little background noise is good for me; I'm pretty good at tuning it out. 

What are you working on now?

I write education pieces for the Atlantic and have a column called "The Parent-Teacher Conference" at the New York Times, so there's always something in progress for those two publications. I also do regular commentaries for Vermont Public Radio, and I love the radio work. I am also finishing up a YA novel that I'd started before selling The Gift of Failure and while it's much harder for me to write fiction, I love writing this book. It's a story that was born out of a friend's memory loss, and the parts that were hardest for me to write had to do with the experience of having no memory and dealing with the aftermath of a head injury. However, the day after I handed in my draft of The Gift of Failure, my husband and I went for a trail ride in the New Hampshire woods and I was thrown from a horse, on to my head. I had no memory of who I was, where we were, how to get home, what my book was about, or even where I'd been that morning. Suddenly, I had an insight into my main character. I don't recommend this kind of "method writing," but my own head injury offered its own silver linings, I suppose. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. I've suffered from anxiety and worry when challenging edits come in, but I usually can go for a walk or go out and weed a flower bed and the answer presents itself. Once, when I was having trouble framing a piece I really wanted to write, I went for a long cross-country ski, and the piece just presented itself to me. I came home and simply wrote down the stuff that percolated up. I've come to understand that gardening, writing, running, skiing, walking, laundry, vacuuming, are actually a really important part of my process. For me, writing is about being quiet or doing something with my body so my brain can unhinge and do its thing, sifting through ideas and letting them settle into place.

What’s your advice to new writers?

At the risk of being cliché, read, write, and read. My friend and New York Times editor K.J. Dell'Antonia likes to talk about giving your best writing hours to your most important project, so I try to do that. I read a lot to get ideas about the subjects I write about (education and parenting), but I just love to learn stuff. I will read just about any nonfiction book - about mapmaking and history and extreme sports, and food foraging...I love to read about stuff I don't know much about. That, in turn, feeds the idea mill. Ideas for my own writing come from odd places, and I just have to read a lot and pay attention when those connections and ideas show up.

Bio: I studied comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and then law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I got my first teaching gig at Duke University during my time at UNC, and fell in love that very first day. I finished law school, but knew I would end up teaching. I wrote my first book and, like most first books, it was a valuable lesson in writing if not a publishable work. After that book went nowhere, I started writing about education, first at my own blog and then for the Core Knowledge Foundation for my first really wonderful editor, Robert Pondiscio  For the first time, I began to understand that editors are not there to make me feel bad about my writing, but to improve it. I published my first article at the New York Times Motherlode blog, and later, at the Atlantic. That article, "Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail," went viral and helped me land my agent, Laurie Abkemeier (I'd chased her for years!) and led to an auction for my book, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed. That book will be released by HarperCollins in August of 2015. I live in the wilds of New Hampshire with my husband, a physician and writer, and my two boys, 15 and 10.

David Kushner

How did you become a writer?

My freshman writing teacher in college encouraged me to pursue it. So I switched my major from Business to English Lit. I liked how it didn’t require me to memorize anything for a grade. Writing came more easily to me than other things, and I enjoyed it. I started writing for the school paper, mainly to get free concert tickets and CDs. Then I discovered Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, and decided to move to New York after college and try to make it as a writer. It took me a while to break into magazines, but, after working for an early online startup, I got my break with Spin magazine. The Internet was just taking off, and, because of my experience in the field, I was sort of an expert by default. I began writing a monthly digital culture column for Spin then finally got an assignment for Rolling Stone, which eventually led to my first book, Masters of Doom. 

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

Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, MAD magazine, the Atari 2600, The Executioner’s Song, David Foster Wallace, T.C. Boyle, Vonnegut, Kafka, Orwell, Cormac McCarthy, my parents, film and TV.

When and where do you write?

Ideally my desk during the day. But if need be any time or place (preferably with electricity and WiFi).

What are you working on now?

Magazine stories, a screenplay, a book.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. I consider time spent staring blankly at my screen to be part of the process. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read, write, and be persistent.

David Kushner is the author of Masters of Doom, Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, Levittown, Jacked, and The Bones of Marianna. A contributing editor of Rolling Stone, he has written for publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and Playboy. The winner of the New York Press Club award for Best Feature Reporting, Kushner has been included in The Best American Crime Reporting, The Best Music Writing, and The Columbia Journalism Review's Best Business Writing anthologies. His ebook, The Bones of Marianna, was chosen by Amazon as a Best Digital Single of 2013. He has taught as an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, and is the former digital culture essayist for National Public Radio Weekend Edition Sunday. In the mid-90s, we was a prouder and writer for the pioneering music site, SonicNet. Several of his books and articles are being developed for feature film and television. Web: www.davidkushner.com,Twitter: @davidkushner.