Karan Mahajan

How did you become a writer?

Through bad poetry and a love of dissonant music. My interest in prose is primarily musical. I have a failed musician’s attitude toward my art. In high school in India, tilting on a wave of Agatha Christies and PG Wodehouses, I wrote rhythmic, rhyming poetry. The milieu in Delhi encouraged flowery writing.

All of that fell away in the US in college. I took a fiction-writing workshop, discovered I was bad at telling stories, experienced a massive competitive urge, spent the next summer in Delhi writing stories, and came back and became addicted to fiction.

Reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in college—it is sort of the Indian Augie March—played a freeing role. Naipaul’s Half A Life had a huge impact on me, particularly its folktale-ish aspects and surging but compact storyline that spans several continents. Later came the genius Jewish writers: Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow.

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

I was reading the other day in Zia Haider Rahman’s novel that the true influencers are those who give you permission to do certain things you would have considered taboo. In this sense, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul, and Cynthia Ozick were formative. Tonally I have an affinity for RK Narayan and Saul Bellow; I might be closest to them in worldview. I read The Corrections as a young man, and seeing my bourgeois background reflected in Franzen’s was tonic.

When and where do you write?

I write in a sort of a manufactured chaos. I try to go to a coffee shop first thing in the morning—not to write, but to establish my presence as a human being in a city. Then, with the Americano still fuming in my hands, I head back to my living room and scribble in a notebook. I get frustrated and tired after the writing ends, around eleven. I’m inconsolable after that, bored. The only solution I’ve found is to drink more coffee—which makes me more inconsolable and bored—or to write non-fiction or to read. I write best in the presence of friends. A lot of my second novel was written on the sofa of a friend in Austin, who was also very disciplined with her work. We wouldn’t talk to each other except at lunch and we’d work in the same room. When I hit a block I would discuss it with her. She’s a screenwriter, and therefore sensible and no-nonsense about events in a novel. She’s moved to LA, alas.

In India, I write either in my childhood bedroom at night, or in a lobby area that has been turned into a makeshift study for my father. The country of my writing is really my laptop and my moleskine. I find it easy to fall into the fictional universe in those pages.

What are you working on now?

A third novel. With each novel I’ve been zooming closer and closer to the place I grew up in and I think I’m going to smash right through it.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes, though the thing about a block is that you don’t actually recognize it as such. For four years, while writing The Association of Small Bombs (then called Contempt), I was revising furiously. I had many sections, written independently, with independent characters, connected by the idea of “terror,” but not even in the same universe of tone. Every few months I’d try to jam these people and sections together. I’d go back and cut and paste and rewrite. I ended up with 1,400 files in my “Novel 2” folder. No one could have said I was “blocked.” In fact I was. A blockage is a failure to move forward, that’s it. It’s a failure of the ego, as Norman Mailer said. To avoid being blocked you have to write badly for a while. You have to accept that there will be languors in the prose, as in life. As long as you are building honestly toward something, readers will stay with you. We don’t live antic lives; prose shouldn’t strive to ingratiate itself, but rather to convey people forward, slowly, toward a destination they couldn’t have foreseen when they waded into the river of your thoughts.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Be kind to other writers. I was very judgmental as a young writer; this judgment inevitably turned on myself. Nothing was good enough.

I would also say that it is dangerous, emotionally, to become a writer. There’s a lot of despair and disappointment involved. It takes courage to get through it. The courage doesn’t guarantee money or fame or anything. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a sort of religious act. You have to believe you’ll achieve something from your writing beyond pure aesthetics. Even if this is not true, even if this is hubris, it is important to believe. At the core, you have to believe writing is noble.

Karan Mahajan was born in 1984 and grew up in New Delhi, India. His first novel, Family Planning, was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was published in nine countries. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was published by Viking in March 2016. Karan's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR's All Things Considered, The New Yorker online, The Believer, n+1, and other venues. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Larissa MacFarquhar

How did you become a writer?

My mother always thought I should become a writer. When I was a kid she forbade me to read Enid Blyton books because she thought Blyton’s writing was revoltingly cute and sentimental and would be a bad influence. Naturally I read as many of them as I could find. It’s true that reading bad writing can have an insidious effect on you (I think I’m more susceptible to this than most—I tend to mimic what I hear). But I also think that analyzing what bad writing does badly can be very helpful in learning how to write better. When I was seven or so I loved a book about a boy who accompanied his father on long-distance trucking hauls, and I read it over and over again. Then I picked it up a year or two later and noticed that the writing was quite ham-fisted. At first this was a disappointment, but then it was exciting: I realized that I had a better sense of writing than I’d used to, and I thought, I am growing up.

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

Probably everything you read influences you to some extent, but the book I’ve read most often as an adult is The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. I must have read it fifteen or twenty times. I love not only the writing (which is beautiful and hilarious) but also the story: I find the struggles of people trying to live up to a constricting morality very moving (which is why I wrote about them in my book, Strangers Drowning). I love fiction writers who deal with such characters—Marilynne Robinson, Graham Greene, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.

When and where do you write? 

I’ve always wanted to be one of those writers who takes a laptop to a café and writes while people are talking and the door’s banging and cutlery’s clinking and the espresso machine is making that loud noise it makes. But unfortunately I’m too easily distracted for that—I find even a window distracting—so I usually work alone in a room. I don’t care what room it is, as long as it’s impersonal and boring. Cheap hotel rooms are the best.

What are you working on now? 

I’m writing a piece for The New Yorker about a hospice nurse and trying to figure out my next book.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really—I have a method for avoiding it. When I’m sitting down to write something new, I figure out which bits are going to be easy and which are going to be hard. I start with the easiest bit (which, when I’m writing an article, is usually a scene, because it involves transcribed dialogue, so it’s half-written already), then go on to the next-easiest, and so on, finishing, once I’ve got plenty of momentum, with the hardest bit, which is usually the beginning. Then I stitch it all together.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don’t have too many friends, and live somewhere cheap. Also: I know a lot of people say you should write every day, but that never made any sense to me. Write no matter what? Even when you have nothing to say and are just going to produce a lot of blather? The idea behind the write-every-day thing seems to be that writing uses muscles that can atrophy, but to me, writing is just another form of thinking. If you didn’t think every day, that would be bad. Maybe it’s different for novelists, but as a nonfiction writer I spend quite a lot of time researching and interviewing and reading before I start writing. I scribble lots of notes, but nothing more than that.

Larissa MacFarquhar is the author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, where her profile subjects have included Hillary Mantel, John Ashbery, Barack Obama, and Noam Chomsky.

Ellen Urbani

How did you become a writer?

By accident and by yearning, in equal measure. Which is to say that as a young person the things I wrote won some acclaim, which made writing seem like a good fall-back skill, so I put myself through college and such working as a writer for various publications but for whatever reason never considered it my ‘profession.’ I went on to a career in other arenas. These many years later, I’ll say I’m an author if someone asks me what I do — because I have a new book out and it seems a reasonable assessment of my present time investment/commitment — but I also feel that I am just as much a farmer (I own my own tractor and can mow an enviably straight row in a hayfield!) and a mother and a beast-wrangler (dogs, llamas, horses, and the occasional errant guinea pig) as I am a writer. When I sit down to write a book or an essay, I do so only because I am no longer capable of holding the ideas inside me anymore. It’s like my gut has caught on fire and I have to spit the flames out of me onto paper to get any relief. That burning/yearning is the only reason I write. 

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

I could name a handful of gifted authors — Wallace Stegner, Michael Chabon, Pat Barker, Anne Fadiman — and go on and on about the ways in which their talent captivates and inspires me. But I believe the non-literary lessons of confidence, tenacity, and perseverance have, more than anything else, influenced my writing. My 10th-grade AP English teacher, Dr. Elizabeth Tarner, taught me to believe in myself because she so fiercely believed in me that I couldn’t fathom letting her down. My aunt, Joan Urbani Vance, with the help of her mother Jeannette McSorley Urbani, raised four children on her own while battling mental illness and yet every day found the strength to get out of bed and face the world. The women who sheltered me in Guatemala lived lives rife with poverty and illness and child-loss and violence (domestic, national, racial) but daily laughed and loved anyway. Every one of these women — all of whom have made their way into my books — modeled for me the sort of courage and self-determination that serves me well in my writing and in all the rest of my life. 

When and where do you write?

In bed or on the sofa, with my laptop balanced on a pile of throw-pillows. The throw-pillows drive my husband mad, for they are everywhere in our home; enough to make a pile must always be within arm’s-reach. 

What are you working on now?

I’m still touring a good deal with Landfall, which came out this summer, and am otherwise working at detaching myself sufficiently from promotions and social media so as to turn my attention to other things. I recently had a personal essay appear in The Rumpus but am focused now on the impending task of churning out a new book of historical fiction … in which my miniature donkeys may very well have a cameo!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Naturally. I can be a terrible procrastinator, and also, moreover, I find that I tend to write about weighty subjects that I sometimes need to remove myself from for a spell in order to get some emotional or psychological reprieve. I’ve gotten better about allowing myself that distance without ruing it, or feeling guilty about it, as I’ve gotten older. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Ignore all the advice. If you’re inclined to write every day, write every day. If you’re inclined to write only when you feel like it, write then and harvest vegetables or walk your dog or love your spouse or read a book in the other spaces. No one else can tell you how to live your life or express your passions, so stop giving others egress and opportunity to try. Heed the burning in your own gut, and tend your own flames. 

Ellen Urbani is the author of Landfall, a work of historical fiction set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the memoir When I Was Elena, a Book Sense Notable selection documenting her life in Guatemala during the final years of that country’s civil war. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and numerous anthologies, and has been widely excerpted. A Southern expat, she now resides on a farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with her family and a passel of barnyard pets.