B.A. Shapiro

How did you become a writer?

After working high-pressure jobs for many years and having two children, I decided I didn’t want to be superwoman anymore. I quit my job but didn’t know what else I wanted to be. I asked my mother what I should do now that I wasn’t superwoman anymore, and she answered with a question: if you had one year to live, what would you do? My answer: write and novel and spend more time with my children. That’s when I became a writer.

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

I have three degrees in sociology so I don’t have any of the classical influences most novelists have. I’d say my influences are the thousands of novels I’ve read over my lifetime. I believe that reading gave me an innate knowledge of and appreciation for story. That and thousands of hours at the keyboard.

When and where do you write?

I have a study in my home in Boston, Massachusetts. My desk is pushed into a bay window and I watch the world go by as I write.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a novel – working title, The Collector’s Assistant – about post-Impressionist and early modern art and I’m completely taken with the work of Matisse, Renoir, Picasso, etc. The book is set in Philadelphia and Paris between 1920 and 1936, so I’m also deep into research about that time and those places. But mostly I’m obsessed with my main character, a deeply damaged and flawed woman who does what she has to do to right the wrongs against her.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t believe in writers’ block. Do plumbers get plumbers block? I don’t believe it’s a choice – it’s my job. So I force myself to write it wrong, to write crap, but to keep writing every day. Just like a plumber gets up in the morning and goes to work whether he feels like it or not.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Get your butt in the chair and stay there.

B.A. Shapiro is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of THE ART FORGER, THE SAFE ROOM, BLIND SPOT, SEE NO EVIL, BLAMELESS and SHATTERED ECHOES. She has also written four screenplays and the non-fiction book, THE BIG SQUEEZE. THE ART FORGER has been on many bestseller lists including the NY Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Amazon and Kindle, and it won many awards including The 2013 New England Book Award for Fiction. Her new novel, THE MURALIST, released by Algonquin Books in November 2015 is a #1 IndieNext Pick, a LibraryReads Pick and an Amazon Best of the Month.

Suzanne Braun Levine

How did you become a writer?

For more than half my professional life, I was an editor, not a writer. And I thought the two were mutually exclusive. As editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, I often talked to journalism students; I told them in no uncertain terms that they should figure out whether they were the right metabolism of one or the other, and not try to do both. Maybe my metabolism changed somewhere around age fifty, because that is when I began writing, but I think the real reason I was drawn to writing at that point in my life is that only then did I have something to say. Women of my generation have had to learn to speak up, speak out, and speak our minds after a life-time of paying more attention to what people wanted to hear. Middle age liberated us in many other ways too, including not caring whether other people liked us — or our work.

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

I remember the first time I was complimented on my writing by a teacher — it was in the third grade. I even remember the sentence the elicited that praise: “The sun hung by a golden thread.” So, becoming a writer was always in the back of my head. At my first job (on Seattle Magazine) I was plunged into magazine writing and was lucky to be edited by one of the greats, Peter Bunzel (who had come from Time Inc.). As much as I learned about reporting from him, I was even more impressed by what a good editor did. So I went in that direction.

When and where do you write?

I find that I can only write when dressed, so I have always preferred to have a room somewhere — even if I had to pay rent — where I could be alone with my writing. And not get distracted. Of course, during most of my writing years, there was no Internet or cell phones. 

What are you working on now? 

I've gotten quite fond of writing blogs. It’s like writing an old-fashioned essay. I work just as hard on them - two or three days — as I would on any other piece of writing. Even though I know that people only spend seconds on a blog. I also polish my e-mails. So I guess you could say what makes me a writer is that I have great respect for the written word and for whatever talent I have.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really, but I think writers of non-fiction are mostly spared. If you can't write, you can always do more research.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don’t wait till you are middle-aged to find out what you think. You can change your voice over time, and you can even change what you think, but you have to be in touch with your convictions, perceptions, and priorities in order to really be able to share them.

Suzanne Braun Levine is a writer, editor and lecturer on women, families and changing gender roles. She was the first editor of Ms. magazine and the first woman to edit the Columbia Journalism Review. She is the author of two recent e-books “You Gotta Have Girlfriends" and "Can Men Have It All?" which continue the conversations she began with her groundbreaking books: “Inventing the Rest of Our Lives” and "Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First." She is a frequent blogger for AARP, Huff/Post50, Encore.org, NextAvenue.org and others. A George Peabody Award recipient for the HBO special, "She's Nobody's Baby," she was honored as a "Ms. Woman of the Year" in 2004, was a presenter at TEDxWomen in 2011 and was honored on MAKERS: Women Who Make America in 2014. She has taught journalism at several universities.

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.