Kyle Mills

How did you become a writer?

By accident, really. I was working for a bank in Jackson Hole, spending my days making business loans and my afternoons and weekends rock climbing. For some reason, it occurred to me that I never did anything creative. Why not give it a shot?

My first bright idea was to learn to build furniture. That plan had some drawbacks, the most obvious of which is that I’m not very handy. It was my wife who suggested I write a novel. It seemed like a dumb idea, though, since I majored in finance and had spent my entire college career avoiding English courses like the plague. Having said that, I couldn’t completely shake off the idea. Eventually, it nagged at me long enough that I felt compelled to put pen to paper. Eight months later, I finished Rising Phoenix and about a year after that I managed to get it published.

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

George Orwell was my favorite writer as a kid and was the first person to show me the dark side of the world—the side that makes for interesting thriller novels.

To me, Tom Clancy has always been at the pinnacle of my genre. The natural writing style, the impeccable research, the realism, the edge-of-your-seat plots. He’s the standard that I always try to live up to.

I devoured all things Stephen King when I was young and he still inspires me every time he releases a book. I read The Stand when I was thirteen years old and I can still feel the tunnel scene almost 40 years later.

When and where do you write? 

I’m a nine to fiver, five days a week. Sometimes I play hooky if the weather is particularly good, but then I tend to make the time up on the next rainy weekend.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing the last-minute details on The Survivor—the next book in Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not on a grand scale. I sometimes struggle with devising an overall concept for a novel but, after that, things plod generally forward. I tend to build ideas in very small increments, which makes it easier for me to keep things flowing. One brick at a time…

What’s your advice to new writers?

With the increasing popularity of the indie book market, I’m finding that new authors are becoming less self-critical.

Don’t let yourself say “good enough” and neglect to expend the energy necessary to polish your manuscript. No one’s first draft is any good. And sometimes second and third drafts aren’t either. I’ve gone through as many as five before submitting.

Bio: I’ve published eleven thriller novels under my own banner, as well as two for Robert Ludlum’s Covert-One series. My next book, The Survivor, will be released in October.

Mark Hummel

How did you become a writer?

I have been actively writing since childhood. Literally ever since I had enough intellectual ability to string words together and enough manual dexterity to hold a writing instrument, I’ve been writing stories. As a child I owned a tremendous numbers of small plastic animals. I’d clip out order forms from the backs of magazines and comic books and send away for them. I’d do so with such regularity that I had a practical Noah’s ark of monkeys and rabbits, rhinos and zebras, lions and alligators. A few favorites were permitted to live in an apartment, a Manhattan penthouse as I imagined it, for which I had drawn the floorplan on plain white paper and lined the top drawer of my dresser. This was a space not for clothes but for imagination. With these select animal apartment dwellers I populated stories employing the very worst sort of anthropomorphism, beyond anthropomorphism really, for they lived lives that looked entirely human, as if they were figures in a Disney animation. I share this childhood eccentricity because I can’t separate such stories from the desire to tell them or from the way they helped me inhabit worlds that felt entirely real, and thus, I can’t really separate them from the core impulses that form why I write.

In college I was a Wildlife Biology major for most of my first years. I remember one distinct meeting with a professor. I’d written a paper on predator/prey population dynamics between wolves and moose on Isle Royale in Lake Michigan, a rather unique closed ecosystem that offers rich biological research data. The paper was bleeding red ink as it was passed across the desk, and the professor said, “You know, we don’t really have wolves howling and such in the papers we write in this department, perhaps you’d be smart to go talk to someone over in English.” After I recovered from some rather childish reactions to being chastised, I took his backhanded advice. Once I enrolled in my first fiction writing class—a truly star-crossed bit of luck by falling into a course taught by Don Murray, who was serving as a one semester visiting professor while on leave from the University of New Hampshire—and the natural home I’d known since childhood reopened to me. That semester I produced over 350,000 words. I’ve never stopped since.

Name your writing influences.

I’ve been blessed at critical moments in my life with great teachers. As I mentioned, I had the good fortune of first studying with Donald Murray, a gifted writer and consummate teacher and someone critical to any of us who have taught writing courses for his expertise in that arena. In college I also had the amazing experience of having two great writers mentor me and eventually oversee my master’s thesis: John Edgar Wideman and Robert Roripaugh. But great teachers went way back for me, to 2nd grade and Mrs. Bowan, who encouraged a child’s writing, and to junior high, where Mrs. Garcia was one of those wonderful maverick teachers who held competitions to have students write screenplays and then participate in the process of actually filming a movie selected from those screenplays by their peers, and this is back in the day when such technologies were nothing like they are today.

Such teachers first introduced me to the writers that took over as the mentors that stay with me today—too many to mention most. But I can never talk about writers who have influenced my work without citing two geniuses, the one every writer knows—Flannery O’Connor—and the other, a writer too few know—Andre Dubus (the father, though his son, who may now be better known, is pretty brilliant too). I’m not Catholic, but apparently these daring, bold American Catholic writerly voices speak to me.

When and where do you write?

I’m very old school when it comes to writing process and place and time. I follow the sound and tested advice of other old school writers who remind us that writing comes best when our minds are not cluttered with the detritus of a day. So I write first thing in the morning with morning sun streaming in through a window with a goof view of the natural world. I work from an antique library table that dates back nearly a hundred years and most often write first drafts by longhand. The morning hours are dedicated to producing new material, and then after a break to do something physical, the afternoon hours focus on revision, editing, and marketing.

What are you working on now?

I have recently finished the first draft of a new novel to be titled A Different Breath and have completed the first couple of rounds of revisions. At this stage it’s a novel that is still a bit difficult to label with shorthand, what, in Jackson Hole, we used to call the “chairlift pitch” as opposed to the elevator pitch, but the essentials are these: set in 1926, primarily in the Midwest and inter-mountain West, the story follows a traveling musician of potentially legendary talent, his lover/manager, and the odd addition to his mini-entourage, a priest, through backroom clubs and speakeasies. Obsessive in his love for the woman, this musician will do nearly anything to demonstrate his devotion and maintain her presence as his muse. The story is actually a purposeful reinvention of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which focuses much of its interest, like the Rilke poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes” on the awakening consciousness of the Eurydice character. The book opens, like the poem and the myth with the characters ascending from a kind of underworld, though in my treatment, that exists in an elaborate metaphor.

I like to sit on a book for a while in order to gain some psychological distance on it so that I can better see the wholesale sorts of revisions typically required (and which this one will definitely need). My self-expectation is that while I consider the needs of one piece, I always start on another. So while that book rests a bit and circulates for input from a few trusted readers, I am a hundred pages into a new book, a literary crime novel set where I live on Flathead Lake. I am as interested in using the book as a vehicle to inspect the income divide between rich and poor as I am in investigating the sudden disappearance of a seventeen year old.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I do believe that writer’s block is a very real and significant thing, and yes, I have suffered its ravages. But of course a logical vision of writer’s block is to realize that there is complex, if predictable psychology behind it, for there are real fears behind writing we should all acknowledge, among them: what is more intimate than the act of writing, more self-revealing and self-scrutinizing? Can you find so demanding of work (and if you are writing book –length material, work that can take years to complete) that offers such total uncertainty of reward? Even if we love to write, who wouldn’t rather go drink a beer, take in a movie, enjoy a dinner, join in a game, or read someone else’s book than write (especially when you are likely the only person telling you that you must)? Oh, writer’s block is real enough. What to do about it? Work. It sounds ridiculous, but I am a great believer in ritual and routine when it comes to writing. I have all my little writing eccentricities I live by, right down to the pens I use, but I, like O’Connor said I must, show up to work every day and face the writing tasks before me and insist that I produce something, even if that something gets thrown away later. Writing is a lot about perseverance and overcoming, like most things worth doing.

What’s your advice to new writers?

My first piece of advice is to remember to love the act of writing. You’d be surprised how many new writers are more in love with the idea of being a writer than with writing. It’s easy to love having written, harder to love the long and often difficult (but frequently joyous) act of doing it. Wanting to be a writer is not enough. You learn by doing. Even, for a long time, by doing it poorly. Those failures may be the most important lessons. You stick them out. You learn. You try to get better. You return to the writing desk every day without fail and slowly you will get better. So if you are willing to embrace the long haul, you’d better love the act of committing writing.

Write what you want to write and not what you think someone else desires. You’ll never produce work worth reading if you are not stubbornly passionate about the work you are doing. I’m not suggesting stubbornness that equates to ignorance or blindness or an inability to accept when the work is shit, but I do mean to suggest that you can’t fulfill other’s desires. You must write what they don’t know they yet desire.

Demand truth. With yourself. With others. And most importantly, within your texts. It doesn’t matter how far afield from “reality” you may stray in your desired work, even in science fiction where you have created and populated a universe entirely from your imagination, not only will the laws of physics still apply, but characters, whatever form they take, must think and behave in a manner that is true to the whole of themselves and that is recognizable as feeling authentic, of being truthful, to your readers. If you set your sights on creating truthful, honest texts, you can then, by having been demanding of yourself and of your text, be demanding of your readers as well. They will reciprocate in kind.

Mark Hummel is a novelist, essayist, editor, and writing teacher. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals including The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, Fugue, Talking River Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, and Zone 3. He is the author of the novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow and the story collection Lost and Found and is the editor of the nonfiction magazine bioStories. He lives in Montana’s Flathead Valley. To learn more about his work, visit: www.markhummelbooks.com.

Eric Paul Shaffer

How did you become a writer?

First, I became a reader, and other than writing every day, reading is the most crucial part of being a writer: always be a reader. I learned to read by following my grandmother's finger from word to word as she read my favorite books to me when I was a child. The magic of the moment when I realized that the word she said corresponded with the word printed on the page is still vivid. The combination of words and pictures sunk deep, and some time later, I realized I wanted to provide the same fun and wonder to others, so I began writing.

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

Anybody as old as I am has thousands of influences, but I can list a few. In poetry, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (really the first to electrify me with a poem), William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Diane diPrima, Jim Harrison, Ted Kooser, Dorianne Laux, damn near every one of the Metaphysical Poets, Gary Snyder, and Lew Welch (by far the poet I most admire, mainly for his fierce work and for his ferocious devotion to his craft).

In fiction, influences include Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Lee Child, Robert Parker, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, J.K. Rowling, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and this list includes only those whose works I re-read for the sheer joy of the story and the sentences.

In non-fiction, influences include Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, John Muir, and, of course, the greatest of all, Henry David Thoreau.

When and where do you write?

I write early in the morning--before I do anything else--for an hour starting sometime between 5:00 and 9:00, depending on the day of the week and my work schedule. I wind up my Lux Minute Minder to 60, and I put an hour to work for the work. From where I sit, I have a view of carved green mountains, palms, pines, and papaya trees through windows on three sides, and I use the view to trip over a topic. Once I start, I hear neither wind chimes, barking dogs, or rumbling engines, and though songs from a few birds can break my concentration on occasion, the ticking of my Lux Minute Minder brings me back to the work.

What are you working on now?

Concerning composition, I wish I could be specific. I write frantically from the moment the Minute Minder starts ticking. Usually, I get a poem; sometimes, I get a piece of a story; occasionally, I get a bit of non-fiction. Often, whatever I get requires returning to that piece on subsequent days to complete a draft. About half the time, I write but get nothing useful; that gets tossed. The drafts of the week are reviewed on Saturday, often revised and assembled into something interesting.

Concerning poems, I work on submissions every Saturday. Last year, I published my four hundredth poem, the result of persistence, close reading of magazines, and careful attention to choosing venues for my work.

Concerning poetry manuscripts, I have two manuscripts of poetry circulating, A Million-Dollar Bill and Even Further West (focused especially on experiences in the islands).

Have you ever suffered from writer's block?

Tough question: I've had long patches in my life when I wasn't writing, but I wasn't interested in writing then either. I've also had long patches where I wrote nothing worth keeping. I'm in one now. I don't really think of those as writer's block. On the other hand, I've tried to write about some topics and events with no success; the words flowed fitfully or fine, but yuck, I couldn't focus on the subject at hand. I can't say I've ever sat down for a regular writing session and not written, but I am fairly lucky in that I tend not to expect much, and I'm willing to toss trash when I write some, so I usually get more useful material than I anticipated. I don't fear failure (much), so I'm willing to try nearly anything in writing. Of course, the best part is that I get to dispose of my failures without showing them to readers. My friend James nicknamed me Reckless, and in composition, I try to live up that name.

What's your advice to new writers?

Read. Read. Read. Fear no influences. Read so much that your influences flow together and merge with each other and your words so thoroughly that your voice emerges strong and clear, tinted and tempered with the literary conversation of all of the great writers you've read. Then, read more. If you can manage humility, do. If not, good luck.

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of five books of poetry, including Lāhaina Noon; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; and Portable Planet. More than 400 of his poems have appeared in more than 250 local and national reviews as well as reviews in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales. Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, a 2006 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Award for Lāhaina Noon, and the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry. His first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published in 2009. He teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College. Shaffer will join the poetry faculty at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference in Wyoming from June 25-27, 2015.