Edward Hirsch

How did you become a writer?

I began writing in high school out of a kind of emotional desperation. I was overwhelmed by feelings I didn’t understand. Writing helped me get a grip on myself, it helped me gain some distance and control. I wouldn’t call what I was doing writing poetry, exactly, because I was just emoting, not really making anything. Later, in college, I fell in love with poetry and began trying to craft it. I became addicted to making poems, or trying to make them. That addiction turned out to be lifelong. 

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

The English Metaphysical poets were my first love. I came to them through the moderns, especially Eliot, their great champion.  I loved the way that Donne and Herbert shaped poems, their verbal wit and intellectual mode. Then I fell in love with the romantic poets, who brought so much feeling into the lyric. I moved from the great moderns to the Middle Generation, who created poetry on a more intimate, human scale, which I still find moving. 

When and where do you write?

I’ve always liked working in coffee shops and diners.  But I also work at home, of course, and sometimes at my office, after hours.  All through my thirties I often worked through the night in my study at home.  Now I like early mornings. 

What are you working on now?

Last year I published a book-length elegy for my son Gabriel.  Now I’m trying to write poems in the aftermath of a great grief. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

The very term fills me with a kind of superstitious dread. Every writer has dry spells. Sometimes the cisterns empty and need to be refilled. In the meantime, one continues to work, to hope and trust.   

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read, read, read. There has never been a great writer who was not also a great reader. In fact, most writers are readers who have spilled over. We respond to what we read and find ourselves, our own voices, in the process. 

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy that The New Yorker called “a masterpiece of sorrow.” He has also written five prose books, among them A Poet’s Glossary (2014), a complete compendium of poetic terms, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller.

Mark Leibovich

How did you become a writer?

It was mostly by a stroke of accidental masochism, which I think is how a lot of writers get started. I was an English major in college mostly by default (I was terrible at math, science and a lot of other things). My first job was as an editorial assistant in Boston, at the alternative weekly, the Boston Phoenix. I wasn’t led there by any particular hunger to get into journalism; I just needed a job. It paid nothing and involved mostly clerical work and sorting the mail of actual reporters, some of who had gone onto greatness (long-ago Phoenician Susan Orlean!). I loved the osmosis factor of being in a newsroom and listening to reporters talk. After a few years, I realized these were my people. Eventually they made me a reporter.

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

Dorothy Gonson, an English teacher at Newton South High School, in Newton, Massachusetts, encouraged me to get into journalism. She was the faculty advisor of the school newspaper. I’ve had too many great editors to name, but I will never forget the late great Caroline Knapp, my first editor – an amazing writer/editor and beautiful soul. Every year, I try to read “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser, “Mr. Personality” by Mark Singer and “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” by Marjorie Williams.

When and where do you write?

I’m a newsroom guy – not one of those disappear-into-the-wilderness writers. I like being around other reporters and I miss it if I’m not. Even when no one is around – if it’s a weekend or something – I like to be in an office. There is angst in the walls of a newsroom. I like it.

What are you working on now?

Besides my day job, which involves finishing a profile of a presidential candidate, I’m embarking on a book about Tom Brady and the NFL.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Of course. It is part of the process. Or at least that’s how I’ve rationalized it.  I don’t have any great remedies except to just fight through it and “keep your ass in the chair,” which is a great piece of wisdom I picked up from Richard Ben Cramer (he said that in some book). I’ve written that on many Post-It Notes and stuck it on many computers over the years.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Keep your ass in the chair. If it comes too easily, you’re disqualified.

Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, based in Washington, D.C. He is known for his profiles on political and media figures, and is the author of three books, including This Town, about the gilded culture of contemporary Washington. The book debuted at #1 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list in July 2013 and remained on the Times best-seller list for 12 weeks. Leibovich was previously a national political correspondent in the New York Times' Washington Bureau. He came to the Times in 2006 from the Washington Post, where he spent nine years, first as a technology reporter for the Post's business section, then as a political reporter. He lives in Washington with his wife and three daughters.

Thomas Swick

How did you become a writer?

I majored in English in college because I thought I wanted to be a writer. But I had nothing to write about – having spent most of my life in school – so one year after graduation I moved to France, where I studied French for eight months and worked on a farm for the summer. When I came home, I got a job as a feature writer at the Trenton Times in New Jersey (my home state), which was another wonderful experience for a budding travel writer because it taught me how to talk to a wide range of people and to see the world through the eyes of others.

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

It seems presumptuous, definitely wishful thinking, to claim them as influences, but the two writers I return to again and again are Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov, for their elegance of style and sense of humor (though each is elegant, and amusing, in his own way). My favorite travel books are Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water – about his walk as a young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople – and it would be nice to think that they have given me even a dash of his prodigious openness, enthusiasm and curiosity. (I know I fall far short of his erudition.) The list of other travel writers I admire is very long, but at the top of it stand Gerald Brenan, Elliot Paul, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman, V.S. Pritchett, Lawrence Durrell, Kate Simon, Nicolas Bouvier, Norman Lewis, V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris, Colin Thubron and Jonathan Raban.

When and where do you write? 

I write in the morning in the bedless guest bedroom of our Florida condo. It overlooks a canal and a neighborhood of palms. Despite years of working in newsrooms – I was the travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for nearly two decades – I’m incapable of writing in public. Plus, all my books are here. Afternoons are often devoted to rewriting what I wrote in the morning.

What are you working on now? 

A memoir, like everyone. But mine is about me. And because of that it will touch on two momentous developments of the last half century: the demise of the Soviet bloc (I left the Trenton Times to move to Poland for two and a half years) and the decline of the American newspaper.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No. Most writers who spend years in newsrooms develop an immunity.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Nothing original, I’m afraid: Read. Write. Read. And be an eclectic, wide-ranging reader, not necessarily with regard to genres but to perspectives, attitudes, sensibilities that are different from those you and your friends share. This will help you to develop an interesting and distinctive voice. And after you write, read what you’ve written, over and over, until you get it right. (The more good writing you read, the easier it will be to tell when you’ve got it right.) A huge part of writing is self-editing. Paddy Chayefsky spoke for most famous writers when he said: “I’m not a great writer. I’m a great rewriter.” For people who want to be travel writers, I suggest they do what I did: Move to another country for a year or two and learn the language, the customs, the jokes, the rhythms of everyday life. If you’re lucky, as I was, it will be a country that’s in the news, but even if it’s not, you’ll gain a deep understanding of another part of the world. And the skills you acquire through living in one foreign country will help you when you travel to others. 

Thomas Swick is the author of a travel memoir, Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland, and a collection of travel stories, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler. His work has appeared in the Oxford American, the North American Review, the Missouri Review, the Wilson Quarterly, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Best American Travel Writing 2001, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2014. He teaches an online travel writing course as part of the MFA program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.