Douglas Waller

How did you become a writer?

I’d like to say I was focused and intent on being a writer early on, but that wasn’t the case. I drifted from course to course in college and finally ended up as an English major at Wake Forest University, but hardly a stellar student. My junior and senior year, I began taking a few journalism classes and working on the student newspaper. I found I liked journalism.

My first eight years out of college, I worked for newspapers in North Carolina, where I sat on a copy desk, covered the criminal courts, wrote some investigative pieces, and learned the craft of writing along the way. I took a break from journalism for eight years and worked as a legislative assistant in Congress. Next I moved to Newsweek and then to Time magazine as a correspondent. At Newsweek I began writing books on the side. Now I write books fulltime.

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

Bynum Shaw, who had worked for the Baltimore Sun, taught the journalism classes at Wake Forest and had written several superb novels, was my mentor. He taught me the basics of reporting and inspired me. He also got me my first two newspaper jobs in North Carolina. As a young writer, I read countless fiction and nonfiction books along the way to try to copy the styles of the authors.

The best book I’ve ever read on writing clearly and concisely is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. At Newsweek, my boss Evan Thomas (who was the magazine’s Washington bureau chief and a best-selling author) taught me how to be a magazine writer and passed on a lot of valuable advice on book writing.

When and where do you write?

Writing is a nine-to-five job for me. I go to the office (which is now the third floor of our home) Monday through Friday to research and write.

What are you working on now?

Simon & Schuster just published my sixth commercial book: Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan. This is a World War II spy book, which follows my last biography of General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II spy agency. For my next book, I plan to shift from World War II to the Civil War and write about spying during that conflict.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. Some days the writing might be more labored than on other days. But if I ever became afflicted with writer’s block, I’d just say to myself--“Get over it. And get over it quickly.” Writing is a job like any other job, as far as I’m concerned. If you’re a factory worker, a business person or whatever, and you show up one morning and tell your boss, “I don’t feel like working today,” he or she will likely tell you, “Get over it or you don’t get paid.”

What’s your advice to new writers?

I’m frequently asked this when I talk to students who want to be writers. Or I plant the question with the audience. My answer: study everything, absorb everything. Read not only poetry, short stories, plays, novels, and nonfiction works to soak up the style and voice of other authors. Also take classes in the sciences, mathematics, history, politics and economics. You don’t know what you’ll need to know as a writer.

I’ll give you an example. I wrote BIG RED, a nonfiction book on a Navy nuclear submarine. I recounted in one dramatic scene how the crew tracked enemy submarines and fired torpedoes at them. Calculating the firing solution for launching a torpedo at another sub requires the crew to use trigonometry. I had trigonometry in high school and it went in one ear and out the other. Before I could watch this exercise in the sub and recreate it for my readers, the boat’s executive officer gave me evening classes in trigonometry so I would understand what I was seeing.

On October 6, Simon & Schuster released Douglas Waller’s latest book: Disciples: The World War Two Missions of the CIA Directors who fought for Wild Bill Donovan. His other books include the best-sellers Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, The Commandos: The Inside Story of America's Secret Soldiers, and BIG RED: The Three-Month Voyage Of A Trident Nuclear Submarine. Waller also wrote Air Warriors: The Inside Story of the Making of a Navy Pilot and the critically acclaimed biography, A Question of Loyalty: Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Court-Martial that Gripped the Nation.

Celeste Ng

How did you become a writer?

Honestly, I can't remember not writing. I was an early reader and for as long as I can remember--since age 3 or 4--I've been writing stories and poems and plays. When I wasn't writing them down, I told them to myself in my head. So writing has always been how I've made sense of the world. After college, I went to the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and did freelance work while finishing my novel, and I had a lot of lucky breaks along the way.

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

Writers: Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett. In my childhood days, Laura Ingalls Wilder, L. M. Montgomery, Lloyd Alexander, Joan Aiken, L. Frank Baum, Edward Eager and E. Nesbit. And these days, I get a lot of inspiration--and learn a lot--from reading other contemporary writers, especially other new novelists.

Books: The Bluest Eye, The God of Small Things, Amy and Isabelle, and Bel Canto were all touchstones while I was writing my novel Everything I Never Told You. It's cliche, but I love To Kill a Mockingbird and have reread it many times.

When and where do you write? 

I have little boy, so when he's at preschool, that's my writing time--every morning until lunch, and a few afternoons a week as well. Email and other writing word cuts into that time, but I try and at least open up my current draft every time. I write a lot in the Cambridge Public Library, in my favorite coffee shops, and at home in my office.

What are you working on now? 

I'm working on a second novel, and a few short stories that have been on the back burner are starting to nudge me. I've been lucky to do a number of speaking events, so I also have a few speeches and talks to write. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I don't believe in writer's block--which to me suggests you're out of ideas. I've never felt short of stuff to write about! But I have definitely had times where for one reason or another, I haven't been motivated to work, or I'm just not happy with what I'm working on. I used to fight that really hard, by forcing myself to sit down and write, or by beating myself up about it emotionally. But now I see those times as a sign that I need to think more about what I'm working on, that I need an influx of new ideas. So when I feel stuck, I read the manuscript again and think about it; I read work by other writers; I take a lot of walks; I go to museums or learn about something new--science, art, history, etc. Often the new stuff clicks with what I'm working on and gets sparks flying again.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read a lot--read widely, and try things that are outside your comfort zone. You don't have to finish it, but you never know what will inspire you. Write a lot--again, try things outside your comfort zone, by writing in different genres and by imitating writers you love. That's how you develop your own voice. And keep at it. Even writers who appear to be "overnight successes" have put years of writing and hard work. 

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named best book of the year at over a dozen outlets. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, One Story, Gulf Coast, The Millions, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere, and she has been awarded the Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan) lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her and her work, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing). 

Peter Ho Davies

How did you become a writer?

There are probably half-a-dozen “threshold” moments for any writer – the first book that really speaks to us, the first reader who encourages us – but a couple of significant early “becoming” moments for me include encountering a variety of “making-of…” “behind the scenes” articles and documentaries about movies I loved as a kid (Star Wars etc.), and reading a book of interviews called Who Writes Science Fiction, all of which turned me on to the idea that someone created all the stuff I loved to read and watch. That adolescent impulse to create was augmented in my late teens by some challenging family experiences (my grandmother’s senility) and the discovery of the power that lay in writing about something so emotionally close to home.

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

Kurt Vonnegut was my gateway drug. He got me from SF to literary fiction – from Slaughterhouse Five to Catch 22 to The Naked and the Dead to For Whom the Bell Tolls to…Gatsby. But we’re influenced I think as much by what we hate as what we love. We can emulate the latter, but also learn from the former, defining ourselves against something, and I’ve been (belatedly) grateful to some of my teachers for encouraging/allowing that.

When and where do you write?

Whenever and wherever I can. I used to be more precious about my writing routines and spaces – most writers tend towards a kind of magical thinking that says that we need to be “in the mood” – but since I had a child ten years ago I’ve been obliged to me more pragmatic. If I had my way, though, I’d write always at home, and in the mornings.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing the final edits on a new novel this week (which is something I only get to say about once every 6 or 7 years).

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Sure. Life intervenes, my head isn’t always in the right place, sometimes for weeks or months. The pace of life – the mental metabolic rate of e-mail etc. – isn’t always conducive to the slower more reflective pace of writing (reading fiction, actually, is a great way for me to slow down and I tend to write best when I’m also reading a lot). It’s easy too to get tense about writing, and I often have to remind myself that it’s supposed to be fun, which helps me past blocks. I try to think of blocks as part of the process – a necessary pause for my brain to negotiate some issue in the text. Blocks, in that sense, often precede breakthroughs and are perhaps even required for them.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I like Flaubert’s line: “Talent is long patience.” Patience – the patience to out-wait a writer’s block say, or to let a story reveal itself to us – is valuable for all writers, but new writers especially are often in a hurry, playing catch-up with everyone who’s come before us. My own MFA students are typically young and talented, and precisely because youth and talent are the enemies of patience (talent is supposed to be an accelerant after all), it’s the one (sometimes the only) thing most of them lack at first.

Peter Ho Davies is the author of a novel The Welsh Girl, and two story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, and been selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories. A recipient of the PEN/Malamud award and one of Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists," he teaches in the MFA Program of the University of Michigan.