Eleanor Brown

How did you become a writer?

I’ve always been a writer. For as long as I can remember, writing is how I worked through my emotions, how I recorded my daydreams, and acted out my frustrations.

Over the years, I’ve tried my hand at every kind of writing – short stories and poems, essays and songs, journalism and novellas. A lot of those have been spectacular failures, but I’m a fan of Samuel Beckett’s advice: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." So each time I had a piece of writing go disastrously wrong, I would do my best to learn from it, and then go on and make entirely new, better mistakes.

Because I knew writing on its own isn’t a great way to make a living, I have spent my life doing all sorts of other things – coordinating weddings, teaching 7th grade, working at a bank – and it turns out that is the best sort of preparation you can have to be a writer. That life exposed me to all sorts of people with all sorts of stories, and I mine those experiences all the time for fiction.

As far as becoming an author, my first published works were essays and short stories, but I really wanted to write a novel, so I kept at it, writing terrible novels and failing better until I failed my way to bestsellerdom with The Weird Sisters.

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

For teachers and mentors, I would follow Steve Almond, Dani Shapiro, and Liz Gilbert to the ends of the earth.

I’m a pretty indiscriminate and voracious reader, so my influences include everything from Stephen King to Kurt Vonnegut to Maeve Binchy.

Books I return to over and over again: Gone With the Wind, Stephen King’s The Stand, Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline, Evening Class by Maeve Binchy. But right now I’m judging the Barnes & Noble Discover Awards, so I’m reading an incredible variety of books I might never have picked up on my own, and I’m reminded of how much wonderful writing is being produced all the time.

When and where do you write?

I usually write during regular work hours at home, in my office, but I have learned not to be precious about where or when I write. If the only time I have to write on a given day is in the doctor’s waiting room, that’s when I write.

My personal favorite was when I was waiting to pick someone up at the airport, so I set up an impromptu standing desk at the back of the car and wrote 1000 words in the cell phone waiting lot until her flight arrived.

What are you working on now?

I am finishing edits on The Light of Paris, which will be published in summer of 2016, and I just started the next novel. It’s so new that I am afraid to even talk about it yet. There is this magical period when my work belongs only to me, and I try to preserve that for as long as I can. Once you let the world in, it destroys that creative honeymoon. I believe in Stephen King’s advice to “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

In various forms, yes. More often than total writer’s block, I’ve had creativity block, where I’m putting words on the page, but I’m not writing anything good. That was usually a function of writing the wrong thing. I think writers need to learn to finish things – the world is full of the brilliant beginnings of stories – but sometimes you need to take a break and figure out what you’re doing.

A few years ago, when I was really struggling creatively, I couldn’t make my 1000-word-a-day goal. A friend of mine suggested I make that goal 500 words a day. As I recall, I simply looked at her in misery.

“Can you do five words a day?” she asked.

And so that became my goal. Of course I wrote more than five words, but setting the bar that low eased the pressure long enough for me to find my way again.

What’s your advice to new writers?

1. Read.

2. Write.

3. Finish what you start.

4. Critique groups are hazardous to your creativity.

5. Write for yourself and worry about audience later.

6. Read some more.

7. Write some more.

8. Finish what you start.

Eleanor Brown (www.eleanor-brown.com) is the New York Times and international bestselling author of The Weird Sisters. Her second novel, The Light of Paris, will be published in summer 2016 by Putnam Books. She teaches writing at The Writers’ Table (www.thewriterstable.net).

Hilary Liftin

How did you become a writer?

I always wrote, starting when I was eight years old, but I never thought I would or could make a career of it. Instead I worked in book publishing, where I loved helping books find their way into the world and being surrounded by book people. I had written a couple of memoir-y books (DEAR EXILE and CANDY AND ME), but I was done talking about myself. It was only when I started collaborating with people on their books--ghostwriting primarily celebrity memoirs--that I unexpectedly found a kind of writing that I could see myself doing day after day, year after year. Telling very personal stories with people whose lives are more dramatic than my own turned out to be a perfect fit. I love the intimacy, the organization, the fast timeline. It was writing celebrity memoir that led me to my current book, my first novel, MOVIE STAR BY LIZZIE PEPPER. And so what had been a hobby became my career, and now I have no hobbies.

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

The idea of who or what has influenced my writing is so sprawling I hardly know where to begin and how to home in on any particular source. I have needed and had many supporters:  the high school teachers, who affirmed my efforts in a way that nothing else I'd ever done received affirmation; the random college administrator who sent me a handwritten letter about the only fiction piece I ever published in college (which was barely fictional); my first boss, the publisher Sam Lawrence who treated his authors like celebrities; the two writer friends who sat down with me before I wrote a word of MOVIE STAR BY LIZZIE PEPPER to help me break the story; my husband, who supports my writing in a million ways even when he has his own to do. 

Then there are books themselves--but where to begin? Because all my work to date has been memoir of one kind or another, that seems like the best place to focus. I've been inspired by Frank Conroy: STOP-TIME;  Jeannette Wells: THE GLASS CASTLE; Danny Sugarman: WONDERLAND AVENUE; Lena Dunham: NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL; and so many more. I love strong, original, fearless voices that remind me how unique and relatable each of our stories is. 

When and where do you write? 

I do best in the morning, the earlier the better, but I can write a full 8 - 6 day. I finish at dinnertime--if I get anything done after dinner it's email and filing. On days I don't exercise, I am vastly more productive (a good way to convince myself I shouldn't exercise). I always write at a cafe which is walking distance from my house. This particular cafe is amazingly generous with iced green tea refills, and neighborhood friends are often either coming in for lunch or to write at tables alongside me. I definitely need other people around and excuses to stop and talk.

What are you working on now? 

I've just started thinking about the proposal for my next novel. This is absolutely the hardest part. My first novel has just been published and I'm still so wrapped up in that book that the idea of envisioning an entirely new story with all new characters and an original arc is a daunting prospect, to say the least. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I'm not sure I believe in writer's block. I would just call it procrastination. Or being stuck. The practice of writing celebrity memoir, where there is always a tight deadline and my material is handed to me, has trained me to plow through. It's much more difficult to do that with fiction, but I'd rather write in a wrong direction than end a day with nothing at all. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

I have two pieces of advice for new writers. The first is to outline. I know that there are many novelists who create characters and let them carve their own paths, but I think it's very important to know from the start why you are writing the book, what story you want to tell, and the major milestones along the way. That doesn't mean it can't all change. But having a strong direction from the start will keep you moving forward and give the reader the sense that s/he is in expert hands. The second advice I have is to write it fast without worrying about the art of it. Crafting sentences, choosing images, tightening ideas--all of that is the fun part. Especially when the length and structure of a novel is new to you, my strategy is to hurry to the end, then go back and revise at leisure. 

Hilary Liftin is a collaborator specializing in celebrity memoir. Since 2006 she has worked on fifteen books, ten of which hit the New York Times bestseller list. Hilary has also written three books under her own name. The first, DEAR EXILE, is letters that she exchanged with her co-author, Kate Montgomery, when Kate was in the Peace Corps in Kenya and Hilary was in New York. CANDY AND ME: A Love Story is Hilary’s memoir told through different kinds of candy. Before becoming a full-time writer in 2006, Hilary worked in the publishing industry for ten years. MOVIE STAR by Lizzie Pepper is her first novel.

Julie Schumacher

How did you become a writer?

I can think of several different narrative threads that would answer that question, including:

a) I had a roll-top desk in an empty closet when I was growing up, and when I sat at that desk with the pull-chain light-bulb burning straight overhead, I felt mysterious and literary;

b) Writing things down always seemed to me the best remedy for not being able to explain, face to face, what I thought or how I felt;

c)  Kind people encouraged me.

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

Teachers, teachers. I didn't do terribly well in school when I was young, in part because I was often daydreaming and staring out windows, wondering about other people's more interesting lives; but beginning in high school I had several teachers -- marvelous, eccentric, powerful women -- who paid attention to and took seriously the poems and musings that I put down on paper. I started to fall in love with words, and to understand what they were capable of, and how endless were the ways in which they could be rearranged, combined, deployed. 

I don't think I'd met a flesh-and-blood writer until I was in college, and then one day when I was 19 or 20, Eudora Welty sat down in the chair beside me in a creative writing classroom in Ohio, and it was as if Zeus and Athena had taken their places at the seminar table. I so loved Welty's brand of story-telling, steeped in family and setting and dialogue and painful humor. For similar reasons (though they're very different sorts of writers) I was drawn to Donald Barthelme and Evan Connell and Grace Paley and Jane Austen and Tobias Wolff and Tolstoy and Garcia Marquez and Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore: character and wit. That's what I read for, and that's what I aim for in my writing.

When and where do you write?

Post-coffee, I try to write for several hours in the morning, before the students or email or the day manage to fasten their respective hooks in me. But I'm not as disciplined as I would like to be, and I am always amazed to hear about writers who stay at their desks for hours each day, and write every day without fail. How do they do it? Do they not have dentist appointments, car problems, friends in crisis, or children?

As for where I write: that varies. The magic of a particular spot can wear off, and then I go in search of the next new place: a library, a coffee shop, the kitchen table. I generally write by hand, in a composition notebook, so I am very portable.

What are you working on now?

A novel as well as a collection of stories -- but that's as descriptive as I want to be at this point. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

That term strikes me as oddly mystical -- the counterpart, I guess, of the muse. Some days I feel like I'm writing well (but I don't sense the presence of a muse), and some days the writing goes very badly (but that doesn't feel like a "block" to me -- it just feels like bad prose). I like Chuck Close's motto: "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." I've had plenty of workdays that involved tearing up the previous day's efforts, or even the previous month's or year's pages. But I try to tell myself that's part of the process. If writing books were easy, everyone would have a shelf-load of volumes to his or her credit.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Fitting the writing into your life is part of the battle. And don't forget to enjoy it. Writing is often a challenge and a struggle, but it should offer up rewards and surprises every now and then, too. 

Julie Schumacher is the author of Dear Committee Members (Doubleday, 2014) and seven other books, including the PEN/Hemingway finalist, The Body Is Water. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times, and in the Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards collections. She teaches at the University of Minnesota.