Daniel Brown

How did you become a writer?

In steps:

1. Came to feel (rightly or wrongly) that I had some facility with words.

2. Tried to write fiction, but found I was doing so much chiseling and whittling that it was taking forever to get anything done.

3. Had the thought that my slow rate of production was probably more suited to poetry than prose. 

4. Didn't know where to begin, since I knew next to no poetry, had no models, and didn't have anything "poetic" to say.

5. Stumbled on Randal Jarrell's appreciative essays on Robert Frost and was blown away by the essays and Frost's poems alike.

6. Started writing pieces that sounded like Frost (and were about "country" subjects--a problem since, as someone who grew up in and around New York City, I didn't know the first thing about the country.

7. Happened to try to write a poem about something I really had, forget poetry, to say: a poem to my mother (I was in my early twenties) telling her it only looked liked I was idling in my life; that even though I wasn't producing anything, I was working hard at trying to 7) Was driven, in attempting to say this thing I really had to say, to say it as I really would.

8. Realized, in considering the resulting poem, that a) some of the "unpoetic" things on my mind were suitable subjects for poetry b) my actual voice could be the voice in my poems.

9. With these related realizations was off and running.

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

As mentioned above, Frost (via Jarrell) was my first influence; came to love many poets, old and new, but wouldn't single out any of them as remotely comparable to Frost in terms of influence.

When and where do you write? 

I've always had 9-5 jobs, so my writing has necessarily been confined to evenings and weekends (and the second hour of the occasional two-hour workday lunch).  Maybe a word or two is in order on my not taking the MFA/academic route. Having an "ordinary" job has been beneficial in my not having to look to my writing to support me (hard enough with prose, not to mention poetry), not having to write about anything I don't feel truly moved to, and not having to fit my poetry to current fashions/expectations. The downsides are not having ready access to a network of fellow writers, mentors, sponsors, and not having as much time to write as I'd like to. (I've tried to keep to jobs that haven't been too high-pressure or demanding, so as to have time and energy to write.) If I weigh the positives and negatives of a 9-5 life against each other, I'd have to say the positives win (of course that's just for me; my path could be all wrong for the next person).

What are you working on now? 

Poems for a next collection (no theme or "project"; just miscellaneous things). Also essays, since some of what I feel moved to say seems more suited to prose. (So it turned out that, my answer to 1) above notwithstanding, I am able to write prose--but expository rather than fictional.)

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No. I think it's because I don't start a poem until I have a strong desire to say something--and then do what people tend to do under that circumstance, which is get it said.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I have none; can only say what's worked for me--which is to start with something (an anecdote, a joke, a thought, an exhortation, a cri de coeur...) that I think would interest a stranger, and say it on the page as I'd really say it to someone.

Daniel Brown's poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Parnassus, The New Criterion and other journals, as well as a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi). His work has been awarded a Pushcart prize, and his collection,Taking the Occasion won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. A new collection, What More?, was recently published. His Why Bach? is an online appreciation of the composer. Brown's poetry can be sampled at his website, daniel-brown-poet.com.

Bonnie Friedman

How did you become a writer?

Desperation and pleasure drew me to writing – I was desperate to understand the significance of the experiences I’d had, to discover their inner meaning. And the pleasure of reading, once I could read by myself, was certainly the most reliable in my life, and so that impelled me, as well. I grew up in a noisy Bronx household, the youngest of four children. I shared a bedroom with a flamboyant, dominating sister. Reading offered calmness and access to a hidden splendor. I always had a book with me. The keen pleasure of reading made me want to write.

But I didn’t really become a writer until I was a member of a writing workshop in my mid-twenties. I just had no idea how to make my writing better, before then. I had no self-awareness on the page. I had no idea how to improve what I wrote. The workshop method was frightening and revelatory, and I slowly acquired some awareness about the shape of my work.

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

Virginia Woolf showed me a kind of writing that illuminated the way a person’s mind worked. She was one of those writers who made me grab my pencil and underline. I read Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Moments of Being over and over, to the point where now I must leave them on the shelf since I’ve worn their magic so thin. Colette taught me the sensuality and drama of the page. Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, and E. M. Forster showed the potential power and length of a scene, and the connection between the novel and the play. James Baldwin’s personal essays demonstrated ruthless, unbudging honesty. A friend once said that a personal essay is a reckoning, and I think of that when I read Baldwin – he comes to conclusions. He doesn’t trail off with an ellipsis. He doesn’t leave things merely suggestive. Samuel Butler showed me the power of a surprising turn of events. He made me laugh out loud. “People aren’t allowed to say such things!” I always feel like remarking of the narrator in The Way of All Flesh. And then I smile and turn the page. No wonder so many modernists delighted in this long-hidden novel. He brought a gust of air into the house of fiction that even now feels welcome.

Writers one loves are not necessarily always writers one can learn from. Laconic writers like Didion and Hemingway thrill me but they constrict me as well. Their ways are not mine, much as I admire them.   

When and where do you write? 

I must write at home, in the midst of surroundings so familiar I don’t see them. I write at the kitchen table, generally in the morning. First I must drink an enormous amount of coffee. Then I must continue to drink coffee.

What are you working on now? 

I am revising a novel I drafted years ago. It came out to almost 800 pages because I never printed it out from fear it was too short. Now it is 400 pages but threatens to loosen its corset, which I am forever tightening.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Yes, although I, like many writers, have for the term a kind of superstitious loathing. It was when I received the contract for my first book, which I’d sold on the basis of two complete essays and an outline. I was able to write all during the time of the block, I just couldn’t write the book I was contracted to write. I wrote other things.

Finally I entered psychotherapy with a woman who promised, “Enter treatment with me and you will write your book.” I did, and I did, and then I wrote a book about that, which became my second. I remain grateful for that psychotherapy, since the doctor introduced me to many truths about my experience that I would not otherwise ever have grasped. I was so averse to conflict that I would merge with whatever strong personality entered my life. I had a strong streak of masochism that expressed itself in going into bookstores and searching out new books by young writers that made my own writing appear negligible. Psychotherapy gave me a method for discovery and growth akin to the method of writing but that, at that time, was perhaps even more useful. After seven years – like a biblical contract – I left the therapist, having incorporated what I needed into myself. My own writing block came about from not believing I inherently made sense. When I trusted that I made sense without having to be fraudulent or strain, the writing returned, and was again alive to me.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Everyone says you should read a great deal, and this is true. Most real writers don’t need to be told to read; they want to. Re-reading is at least as important as reading. That second time through, you can notice how the writer sets up a scene, what he or she leaves out, where they cut, what kind of transitions they make or don’t make, etc. The first reading, you succumb to the magic. The second, you see how it’s done, or at least much more how it’s done. It’s like seeing a movie twice: the second time through, the director’s choices become more obvious.

I am the author of Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy, and Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays. My essays have appeared in The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Buddhist Writing, The Best of O., the Oprah Magazine, and The Best Writing on Writing. My website is www.BonnieFriedman.com, for those curious to know more about my work.

Peter Trachtenberg

How did you become a writer?

I was the only child of parents who spoke English as a second (or really a third) language, so long before I learned how to write, I was making up stories as a way of entertaining myself.  Probably, I was also trying to express some deeper truth about myself, or rather, discover what that truth might be. By the time I started school, I was so practiced that making up stories became an easy way of getting favorable attention, as opposed to the other kind. That ease meant I didn’t value it too highly or devote much effort to it, not even in grad school, which I entered mostly out of cluelessness and a floundering desperation to be seen. I had no idea what I wanted to write, I certainly didn’t like the process of writing the way I liked the process of reading or having sex or getting high. I just wanted to be published someplace (note the passive construction), and I spent the next two years trying to imitate the kind of writing I saw being published in literary magazines. In the early 80s that was minimalism, for which I had no feel or talent. Imitating Raymond Carver and Joy Williams was a pleasureless exercise for me, and it’s no surprise that I never published a single one of the stories I wrote under their influence. The first piece I did publish was the libretto of an imaginary opera about a character based on Patty Hearst, ostensibly composed by her rejected fiancé. The songs were classic Motown and rock n’ roll songs whose lyrics I translated into very literal Italian and then back into even more literal English so that their sources were only distantly recognizable. I’d be surprised if a hundred people read it, but it was fun to write, and it expressed some fundamental part of who I was, a love of music, a love of language, and a love of literary play. It was another ten years before I found a way to translate those impulses into a book, and that was only after I’d had the experience of writing other things for money— not enough money, as it turned out— and feeling as intensely dissatisfied as I’d been when I was still unpublished. If I have any professional regrets, it’s that I squandered the better part of twenty years using writing as a means to some other end—money, recognition, love—when the only value it’s ever possessed for me is as a thing in itself, a practice that may result in something good, or, if I’m honest, something I can look at a few months later without cringing, but whose true significance is that it makes me feel alive and conscious and fulfilling some larger purpose. 

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

Among writers, Philip Roth, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil, W. G. Sebald, Primo Levi, and Spalding Gray. Among non-writers, the late Lou Reed, who saw his songs as short stories. My three great teachers were Frederic Tuten and James McCourt, two avant-gardists possessed of bottomless reserves of erudition and playfulness, and Donald Barthelme, who in my first workshop with him let me read for 15 minutes from a story I was too proud of, then stopped me, and told the class, “After this is when it gets good.’  

When and where do you write? 

I sit down at my desk at around 9 and stay there more or less till dinner-time, with a 2-hour break for exercise. On days I teach, I still write for an hour or so before I start grading or prepping for class. I find the only way I can write successfully is to treat it as a job, one I may not always love or even be that good at, but that I have to show up for. If home, as Frost wrote, is "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” a job is the thing you have to show up for, even when you don’t want to. 

What are you working on now? 

At the risk of sounding coy, I try not to say too much about work in progress, lest I end up jinxing myself. But I’m working on two books, one a novel set mostly in New York in the 1880s, the other a collection of essays on singers. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Of course. See above. Aside from whatever intrinsic value it has for me, the second piece is always a hedge against getting blocked on the first. I also sometimes copy pages of a writer I love. I make my students copy 500 words of Primo Levi’s essay “Zinc.” I tell them that the only way to learn how to write a good sentence— a sentence that’s beautiful and truthful and startling— is to copy them, so that the rhythm of those sentences is propagated through the nerves and muscles and the microscopic pathways between the hand and the eye and the brain, with the heart about midway between. 

What’s your advice to new writers? 

Whatever advice I have for new writers is implicit in the answers to the earlier questions but could be summed up as:

1) Don’t write as a means to an end but rather as a thing in itself, the one thing you have to do, even if you never make a dime at it, even if nobody ever reads it, or nobody but your mom, though maybe not even her since what you write might shock her or hurt her feelings. 

2) Treat your writing as a job and perform it faithfully and reliably, as though you were an aircraft controller, the only one in your city. 

2a) Given the contradiction between 1 and 2, you’ll probably need to take a second job to support the first. Find one that pays you the most money for the least time and the least humiliation and moral compromise.

3) Read constantly. Read great writers, and good ones, and even the occasional shitty one. Part of your reason will be to see how they accomplish whatever they do, though personally I find that you can identify what makes a particular writer good or shitty, and even imitate it. Greatness, however, is impossible to imitate. 

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos (1997), The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (2008), and Another Insane Devotion (2012), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. His essays, journalism, and short fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR’S All Things Considered. Trachtenberg is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and part of the core faculty at the Bennington Writers Seminars. He’s the recipient of a NYFA artist’s fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a 2010 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a 2012 residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. The Book of Calamities was given the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”

www.petertrachtenberg.com.