Brandon R. Brown

How did you become a writer?

I've always been interested in writing, starting in elementary school. While pursuing scientific training, I maintained this interest by taking extra workshop-style courses, even in graduate school. 

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

In terms of being a reader, I may have learned the most the work of Grace Paley, in terms of how she listens to her characters and tells a story. I've had a great run of luck with instructors, but in chronological order I would list Max Apple, Glenn Blake, Tracy Daugherty, Ehud Havazelet, and Marjorie Sandor as having the greatest impact on my writing as an adult. I'd also like to credit John McNicholas for really helping me understand how to properly use quotations in non-fiction. He emphasized using quotation where the speaker said it best (or most distinctively) and not using quotation where you, the writer, can say it better. So now I'll often just mix in a quoted phrase or half a sentence instead of a full, long quote. 

When and where do you write?

I love to work early in the day. My ideal day of work would have editing from 5-6 a.m. and writing / re-writing from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. It's very rare to create the ideal day, given that I'm a science prof by day, so I wedge writing time into the early mornings and weekend mornings. 

I work as far from our two cats as I can get, usually in a little unwarranted space next to our garage, where I'm sealed off from the little beasts.

What are you working on now?

I'm very interesting in the topic of "time," but this project is in its infancy.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don't think so. Perhaps project block. I'm not a fiction writer, so I don't push myself in that imaginative way. I more often have to search around for a non-fiction project that will pull me into obsessive mode, where I need to be. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

A. Find a regular way to disconnect from the internet, and make yourself write every day. My little writing space is actually out of range of our wireless router, which is perfect.

B. Take editing more seriously than writing. Return again and again to your drafts. I think the editing side of a writer's personality must be equal parts merciless on detail and forgiving on risk.

Brandon R. Brown is a Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. His biophysics work on the electric sense of sharks, as covered by NPR and the BBC, has appeared in Nature, The Physical Review, and other research journals. His writing for general audiences has appeared in New Scientist, SEED, the Huffington Post, and other outlets. His first book is a biography, Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War (Oxford, 2015).

Delilah Dawson

How did you become a writer?

I grew up thinking writers, like doctors and nuns, felt a calling deep in their souls. I never felt that calling, and writing a novel seemed impossible, so I didn't consider myself a writer--even though I wrote poetry and tons of ad copy. When I was 32, my youngest child stopped sleeping, and so did I. My brain... broke. I started hallucinating. When I asked my psychologist husband for help, he set up a schedule to ensure more sleep and suggested I find something creative to do just for me, like write a book. The part of my brain that firmly believed I couldn't write a book was too broken to fight it. I wrote my first book in 2009, queried it, shelved it, wrote another book, and found a literary agent by March 2010. My third book sold at auction in a three book deal and became Wicked as They Come. Once I'd written one book and knew it was possible, it became a compulsion. Before I became a novelist, I felt like there was something I was meant to do in life and I simply hadn't found it yet. Now I have.

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

Stephen King's On Writing is the number one book that has influenced my writing. Before reading it I assumed that his first drafts were flawless. Once I understood that even the greats require revision, polishing, and outside help, I felt more confident in my own skills. Dr. Karen Lanning taught me how to write a research paper in 11th grade, and Diana Gabaldon's Outlander taught me that Romance wasn't just fluff. There's something to learn from every book, even if all you learn is why you threw it against the wall.

When and where do you write?

I'm lucky now-- both of my kids are in school. I do my best writing in the morning with a cup of coffee, but I make it a point not to let my writing routine become precious. As long as I have earbuds and my current book playlist, I can write almost anywhere. I especially love writing in airports.

What are you working on now?

Right now, I'm focused on launch day for HIT, which involves thanking people and interacting with new readers online. Once the excitement has subsided, I need to work on a horror story for an anthology and the sequel to Wake of Vultures, tentatively titled Horde of Crows.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

When I was younger and paralyzed by the fear of messing up, yes. I feel like writer's block is a great way to frame any excuse we use for not writing, just as "the Muse" is a scapegoat for our own brain's laziness. Writers under contract don't have the leisure to wait for a Muse to show up--if you want to pay the bills, you have to write. In a way, there's a beauty to that--if the writing doesn't have to be perfect and flawless and inspired, you can sit down anywhere, anytime, and write anything, then just fix it later. So I always suggest that the best way to get around writer's block is to accept that all first drafts are word vomit, then sit down, open the doc, and write it anyway.

What’s your advice to new writers?

To embrace imperfection and playfulness and write what makes you feel passionate without worrying about genre, qualifications, or talent. Writing, to me, is not this stiff and stilted exercise in constant one-upmanship. It's telling your story as only you can, providing entertainment and escape and connection. And finish your book-- one crappy first draft is worth more than a thousand perfect first pages.

Delilah S. Dawson is the author of HIT, Servants of the Storm, the Blud series, and short stories in the Carniepunk, Violent Ends, and Three Slices anthologies. Her next book is Wake of Vultures, written as Lila Bowen and out this October. She lives in Georgia with her husband and children and can be found online at www.whimsydark.com.

Victoria Strauss

How did you become a writer?

I enjoyed writing stories when I was young (and illustrating them too, with really embarrassing results), but it never occurred to me to think of writing as more than a hobby. I didn't discover my writing vocation until I was 17, and started writing a novel more or less on impulse (I wanted an excuse to take a year off between high school and college). I never expected to finish it--but I did, and by the time I was done I knew that writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I sent out a lot of queries (to publishers--this was back when most publishers accepted submissions directly from writers, and agents weren’t as powerful as they are now), and got a lot of rejections. Eventually, my manuscript landed on the desk of an editor who was planning to start a literary agency. She offered to represent me, and after several years and a lot more rejections, sold it to a wonderful publisher.

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

This is always a very tough question for me, since there have been so many, at different times in my life--from the authors I read as a child (T.S. White, Elizabeth Goudge, E. Nesbit, and all of Andrew Lang's fairy books) to the writers I discovered as a teenager (Thomas Hardy, Mary Renault, Jean Genet, and a whole range of SF/fantasy writers, from Harlan Ellison to Anne McCaffrey) to the very eclectic reading I do as an adult, which right now is a mix of SF/fantasy, mystery, and mainstream. My favorite recent reads are Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance.

I can also tell you what has not been an influence: the creative writing course that I was foolish enough to take in college, taught by a minimally-published professor who told me that if I were serious about a writing career, I’d stop writing speculative fiction. Fortunately, I trusted my gut, which told me he was wrong. Even so, it was a demoralizing experience.

When and where do you write?

I write in the afternoons, and often into the evenings. I have an office, but it’s full of non-writing-related stuff, such as bills that need to be paid and correspondence that needs to be answered, and I find it distracting; I can do nonfiction writing anywhere, but for fiction, I need calm and quiet (I’m not one of those writers who has a playlist). So I have my laptop set up on the dining room table, where unfinished tasks don’t reproach me, and I can look out at my garden and watch the birds at the bird feeders.

I’m a highly distractible writer, and will seize any excuse to procrastinate, so I use a program called Freedom that blocks the Internet for whatever period of time I choose. It helps keep me on track; otherwise, it’s too easy for me to use a tough scene or a bit of necessary research as an excuse to jump online.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a couple of different projects. One is a YA in a fantasy setting based on Renaissance Venice, about a girl who has been brought up on her father’s estate without any exposure to the outside world, and what happens when a thief climbs over the walls and accidentally exposes a secret that her father has kept hidden. The other is for the adult market, about an important religious-magical ritual that goes wrong due to human error, and the spiral of disastrous consequences caused by the religious and secular leadership’s attempt to conceal it.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes.

Many people believe—and argue passionately—that there’s no writer’s block, only lazy writers. What they’re usually talking about—and what many writers are also talking about when they say they’re blocked—is the normal process of getting stuck on a scene or a character or a plot turn, and being temporarily unable to move forward until they figure out what’s gone wrong, or deal with whatever distracting part of their life is pushing them off track. We all get stuck from time to time. I get stuck a lot.

Block is something different—at least, it was for me. It wasn’t getting hung up on a bad character choice or an inconsistent plot direction, and having to work out how to fix it. It wasn’t about the words on the page at all. It was about the words in my head.

I’ve always had words in my head--descriptive sentences that arrive out of nowhere, snippets of dialog in my characters’ voices. I also play a constant mental game of making up phrases or paragraphs about things I see and feel, trying to find the exact right words to capture a mood or an object or a landscape. But when I was blocked, all those words—along with the desire to find them--went away. It wasn’t as if I became aphasic. But the words that normally swarm around in my head, that define the world for me, that I love shaping and playing with, simply were not there. 

I was aware of the change, of course. Also of the fact that I wasn’t writing any fiction and couldn’t even come up with any ideas for writing fiction. But I didn’t connect this shift in my mental landscape with writer’s block until two years later, after I’d started, very hesitantly, to write fiction again. In the way it felt to return to writing, I realized that my dry spell wasn’t just the laziness and self-indulgence I’d been beating myself up about, or mild PTSD from a previous horrible publishing experience, but some deeper malfunction in the part of me where my fiction is sourced. A door inside me had closed for a while. I only understood that when it began to open again.

I’m honestly not sure where the malfunction came from, or why it happened. I’d gone through tough times before, and never been blocked. I also don’t know why it resolved. Now the words fill my head again--but I also know I can lose them. Every time I sit down to write, there’s always that little bit of dread that it will happen again.

What’s your advice to new writers?

There’s only one rule of writing: there are no rules. Beware of anyone who tells you that there are. If you’re a planner, for instance, don’t feel you have to follow the advice of those who claim that the only authentic way of writing is by the seat of your pants. If you’re a natural pantser, don’t force yourself to outline. Seek out writing advice, but don’t follow it blindly; experiment. Discover for yourself what’s best for your writing. There’s no “right” way of doing things—only what’s right for you.

Also: be an educated writer. Learn about the publishing/self-publishing industry—and do it before you start trying to get published. Attempting to learn as you go or on the fly is the best way to get entrapped by scams, or sidelined by bad advice. In the quest for publication, knowledge is your greatest ally and your best defense.

Victoria Strauss is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, including the Way of Arata duology (The Burning Land and The Awakened City), and a pair of historical novels for teens, Passion Blue and Color Song. She has written hundreds of book reviews for magazines and ezines, including SF Site, and her articles on writing have appeared in Writer's Digest and elsewhere. In 2006, she served as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards.

Victoria is co-founder, with Ann Crispin, of Writer Beware, a publishing industry watchdog group that provides information and warnings about the many scams and schemes that threaten writers. She maintains the popular Writer Beware website (www.writerbeware.com) and blog (www.accrispin.blogspot.com), for which she was a 2012 winner of an Independent Book Blogger Award. She was honored with the SFWA Service Award in 2009.

Visit her at her website: www.victoriastrauss.com.