Cassandra Clark

How did you become a writer?

Ever since I realised that the squiggles on a page told a story I've written stories myself. I used to write on a little writing pad with Magnum Opus on the front. I was nine or so at the time. No Latin at that age, unlike Queen Elizabeth Tudor so where did I get that from? My family were extremely unbookish.  I went on to write plays in my teens and twenties and only later, out of financial necessity, wrote contemporary romance. Alan Boon saved my life and that of my two little daughters, god rest him. I was immensely lucky when I started because all my first work was accepted, plays, novels, tv scripts and so on. Only later has it become harder simply because publishing has changed so much and there are so many new writers willing to provide those cans of beans every publisher needs to survive.

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

My influences have neither rhyme nor reason. If something is written with style and care for the beauty of words I'll read it though I doubt whether it seeps in. At present I'm rereading Ivy Compton-Burnett, a neglected English writer from the early 2oth century, but I love the poetic, fractured prose of Annie Proulx, the wit and breadth of sadly missed JG Farrell, the plays of Becket and Shakespeare, the energy of the Revenge tragedies, the poetry of Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas, the novels of Hemingway, Burroughs, Kerouac, Barbara Pym, Barthelme, EL Doctorow - eclectic and so many more I could name. No pattern beyond that thread of startling words.

When and where do you write? 

When I start a new book in my medieval thriller/detective series I start on a Monday morning at eight o'clock, preferably in January when it's bucketting down with rain. I do my actual writing at a battered old Louis XVIth desk on an equally battered old apple mac. I then transfer what I've written to a pc because my agent can't open any other kind of file. I print out what I've written after 12,000 words or so and slash it down to very little. Once that's done I write through to the end, writing about six or so hours every day until it's done. I then let it lie for a week or two until I've almost forgotten it, then I edit, edit and edit. I love all parts of writing but I'm not somebody who can sit in a cafe and scribble a few lines now and then. It's all or nothing with me. Best is when it's so vivid I dream the next day's dialogue. Bliss.

What are you working on now? 

I've just finished number seven in the series. At present it's called The Scandal of the Skulls. There was a most horrific parliament in London in 1388 when every one of King Richard's closest freinds and allies were beheaded or forced into exile (where they quickly met violent deaths). Richard was nineteen at the time. It still rouses my anger when I think how helpless he was and what grief he must have felt. Hildegard, of course, is fictional, but she moves in this world of betrayal and violent death.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I'm not sure I believe in writers' block. I think it's maybe mistaken for the long period of mulling that every writer needs before they should even think of hitting the keyboard. You can't rush it. The mind has to work things out at a subconscious level and the best thing is to let it get on with it. Gazing out of windows on a moving train gets characters clamouring to be heard, I find.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Is advice ever taken? I would say read, read, read. Keep a note book. I walk around the location where my books are set and imagine it as it was. Because my books are historical I look at old maps and paintings and listen to music of the time. I read chronicles and letters. Everything helps to build detail and you can never know too much. After that I suggest cutting, cut for speed and clarity. Cut your precious research! I see and hear my characters as if they're people in a film. I wrote The Parliament of Spies as if it was a film script. Action is the thing. Oh, and never give in. Never give in.

Bio: Childhood spent in the East Riding of Yorkshire, won a tv playwrighting competition when I was twelve, escaped to London and streets paved with gold at seventeen, decided to go to University of London to read philosophy, married, had two daughters, ran a dress design business and wrote plays before the family got up in the morning, divorced, started writing contemporary romance and street theatre, wrote a couple of libretti for chamber operas, did a masters in Fiction writing, had a break to care for ill parents, moved back to London and started the Hildegard of Meaux medieval mystery series. Book 7 I hope will be out next year. I can be followed @nunsleuth.co.uk and my website is Cassandra Clark - Author.

Ben Dolnick

How did you become a writer?

I would say it started when I was eight or nine, first writing stories for school (on a giant Apple IIE attached to a dot matrix printer, incidentally). I discovered that I felt a greater freedom when I was writing than I did just about any other time -- I could do what I wanted to on the page (which happened to be largely tell stories about Nazis and dinosaurs) in a way that felt enormously pleasurable to me. Then when I was thirteen or fourteen my parents gave me Slaughterhouse-Five for my birthday, and I discovered that you could harness the pleasurable freedom of writing to an actual character, a voice, a set of concerns. At that point I was pretty much done for. 

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

The writers who have meant the most to me, at various times, are: Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Penelope Fitzgerald, William Maxwell, Denis Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth. I've also had some great teachers in my day -- a high school English teacher named John Burghardt (who happens to be a great writer) stands out in particular. But mostly it's been books for me. 

When and where do you write?

I do my best writing in the morning, usually from the time I get back from the park with my dog until lunch time. That's when it's quietest, and I don't have any appointments, and my mind is more or less clear. Then in the afternoon I tend to do less focus-requiring stuff -- short pieces, or copy-editing, or research, or whatever happens to be needed.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a novel about which I won't say too much except that it involves ghosts and insanity and the 1800's. I'm at that point where I've been working on it so long, and still have so long to go, that it feels like the only thing I've ever done or ever will do.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not in the sense of being unable to get anything down on the page, I don't think. I've certainly suffered from months- or years-long periods of not being able to really find the wind in my writerly sails, though. This for me just means casting unhappily about, not knowing who or what I want to write about, writing lots and lots of pages that do nothing much for me except, I hope, get me closer to the place where I will actually feel some sense of being impelled forward.  

What’s your advice to new writers?

The main thing is to read a lot and write a lot. That will teach you just about everything you need to know. Also, get yourself a copy of Bird by Bird. I avoid 99% of all books about writing and craft and etc., but this is one I turn to again and again, more for its compassion and wisdom about the process of writing than for its particular nuts-and-bolts advice, though it's good on that too.

Bio: I grew up in a suburb of Washington DC and went to college in New York City, where I studied English. I now live in Brooklyn with my wife and our beloved but insane mutt.

Norman Dubie

How did you become a writer?

In 5th grade, my English teacher held up a Webster's dictionary saying there are only two words in it that defied definition. The first was the point in geometry and the second was the poem. I told the little girl sitting next to me that it would be difficult for me to become the point in geometry but that I was going to become a poet. She asked why and I responded it sounds like there's no bosses in that world.

I think I was always intoxicated with the language of Shakespeare and the King James Version of The Bible. So I also blame the Elizabethan underground for sixty years of writing verse! Ha!

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

When I was in my early twenties, John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Homage to Mistress Bradstreet pointed me in a direction--call it ventriloquism or whatever--that I've yet to abandon. In terms of strict lyric poetry, I moved from John Donne to Sylvia Plath to Denise Levertov to John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Among the Moderns, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens were very important to me. But I must confess to being an omnivore who's clearly read across a couple hundred years of world poetry. And I'll finish by saying that I will not in this lifetime ever recover from my original experiences with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

With regard to teachers, I was blessed with having studied with Barry and Lorraine Goldensohn. I also studied with George Starbuck and Marvin Bell.

When and where do you write? 

I've always written at the kitchen table and usually in the middle of the night.

What are you working on now? 

I'm working on a manuscript now that remembers my childhood living on a peninsula on the coast of Maine.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

The truth is, I've always found it fairly effortless writing poetry and it gives me great pleasure. So it is not a torment for me! When I published my first book, The Alehouse Sonnets, I did suffer writer's block for one year, thinking I may never write again. I've now written some thirty volumes of poetry. It's also true that I walked away from the writing of poetry, but not from the teaching of young poets throughout the 1990s. I dedicated this decade to my spiritual life as a Tibetan Buddhist. I think at the beginning of this "silence," I'd already published ten book-length volumes of poems and I was concerned that I would soon be writing caricatures of my own work. So, following the example of Robert Duncan, I just stopped. Since that silence, I've published a big volume of collected poems and six other works of poetry in addition to a 400-page poem written in the tradition of Science Fiction--it's called The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake (Blackbird Online archives).

So I was briefly blocked early on and then chose to be silent for a while--I don't regret any of it.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read everything! Write fearlessly!

Norman Dubie was born in Barre, Vermont in April 1945. His poems have appeared in many magazines including The American Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, Crazy Horse, Gulf Coast, Narrative, The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry. He has won the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems won the PEN Center USA prize for best poetry collection in 2002. He has published with Blackbird, a book-length futuristic work, The Spirit Tablets at Goa Lake. His most recent collection, The Quotations of Bone, is from Copper Canyon Press. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, and is a teacher at Arizona State University.