Sonia Shah

How did you become a writer?

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor, like my parents. When I was in high school, I aspired to be a painter or an actor. But writing was always in the background. I maintained a tortured journal as an adolescent. I wrote for the school newspapers, in high school and in college. And reporting and writing always felt natural. I'm shy--as a child I was painfully so--but also very curious and opinionated. Fading into the background, bearing witness, and then writing about it resolves that temperamental paradox. When I was finally able to devote myself to writing full-time, it was almost a relief.

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

My dad gave me a copy of "Lives of a Cell" by the physician and essayist Lewis Thomas when I was around 14 years old. I'll never forget it. I spent the next five years shamelessly trying to copy his style and his ideas. I wouldn't say that my writing teachers encouraged me. It's more that they failed to discourage me. Certainly, I got the signal from my pre-med, art and theater teachers that it would be best to drop my non-writerly aspirations. 

When and where do you write?

We have a weirdly large bedroom, which we've split into two spaces with some strategically placed bookcases. On one side is the sleeping area and on the other my study, which consists of a second-hand chaise lounge, more bookshelves, and a unfinished wood door balanced on two short file cabinets, which serves as my desk. It's comfortable and functional, with plenty of room to spread out various source materials. 

My books are a mix of reporting, research, and writing, so I rotate between the three, spending a few months reporting, then doing research, then writing. Most days, there's writing of some kind or another to be done. I think posture makes a difference in how I write. If I'm synthesizing research, I'll sit upright at my desk, balanced on a yoga ball. If I'm writing narrative, I prefer to lean back, either on the chaise or in bed. 

What are you working on now?

An article for a magazine elaborating on some of the ideas in my last book and research for a new reporting project on the migrant crisis in Europe. I'm also slowly developing my next book. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I wouldn't say I've been blocked, but there are days when writing feels like pulling teeth. There's no flow. I take it as a sign that either I'm not feeling brave enough to say what I want to say, or I don't really know what I want to say yet. If I can take a break, I will. But often I keep writing anyway, with no expectation that I'll keep what I write. At that point, it's therapy. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

I agree with what Ta-Nehisi Coates said a few years ago, which is that if you can stick it out for the first ten years, it gets easier. 

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author. Her fourth book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond has been called “superbly written,” (The Economist) and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her writing on science, politics, and human rights has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American and elsewhere and has been featured on CNN, RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people around the world. Her 2010 book, The Fever, which was called a “tour-de-force history of malaria” (New York Times), “rollicking” (Time), and “brilliant” (Wall Street Journal) was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize.

Summer Brennan

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer by first being a reader. I read a lot, and because I was very poor in my twenties, I often read the same books several times in a row. I would finish the last sentence on the last page and then flip right to the front again and start all over. I wanted to understand books and so I would read them once through to get the effect, and then a few more times to understand their secrets and how they were put together. Then I tried and failed to write a lot of things. Lots of tries and lots of failures. Eventually I got better at marshaling my ideas in a way that other people would enjoy. Generous people helped and encouraged me. Working at a weekly newspaper helped me get better at finishing things—every week I had to think up, report, and write at least one long feature story, plus shorter news items, and that was excellent practice. I wrote (or tried to write) three nonfiction book proposals before finally finishing one that I sent to agents. The first person I sent it to became my agent, and my first book, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics and the Future of Wilderness in America, was published less than two years later. I'm now working on my second an third books.

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

Writers who have had the most direct influence on my work include critics, literary reporters and memoirists, although as an adolescent I read mostly novels, poetry and plays. I loved novelists that presented richly immersive worlds like Dickens, Tolkien, or Le Guin. As a teenager I especially adored Shakespeare, and was in love with the poetic rhythm of language; how the musical impact of a word could convey as much if not more than just its definition. I then discovered Diane Ackerman, who is a master of sensual and romantic science writing. From there I fell for book-length works of literary journalism that I found by hanging around in bookstores, like Philip Gourevitch'es We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families or The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and thought, "that's the kind of thing that I want to do." Other works of narrative nonfiction that have strongly influenced me include The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson, and Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. My favorite books last year were H is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald and Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich. I have also been influenced by the books and essay collections of Rebecca Solnit, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Eula Biss, and Leslie Jamison, to name just a few.

When and where do you write? 

I write whenever I can, but I prefer the early morning when it's still dark and quiet. When I was finishing my first book, I often woke up at 3am so that I could write before going to work at nine. That was last year, and I think I'm still catching up on sleep. I mostly write at home; at my kitchen table while drinking tea, or in my office which has one wall covered in bookshelves and another that is a chalkboard for plans and ideas, or (quite often) I write in bed on my laptop. My most common writing outfit is pajamas. I'll sometimes go to cafes to write, but I would rather be at home.

What are you working on now?

Right now I'm writing a short work of cultural criticism for Bloomsbury publishers called High Heel: An Object Lesson, as part of their Object Lesson series done in partnership with the Atlantic Monthly. It's about choice, consent, feminism, and performing femininity in the labyrinth of modern womanhood. I am also working on a longer work of investigative narrative nonfiction about an art mystery. My agent will be pitching it to editors soon. In the meantime, I have a few magazine articles I'm trying to finish.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Nearly every day. I get writer's block quite severely. No matter how much I tell myself that it's all in my head, it still insists on doing a marvelously lifelike impression of reality. For me it isn't usually a case of not having an idea, but more that I can't get my ideas to behave themselves and show up on the screen in readable English sentences. The worst writer's block I ever had lasted about six weeks. I was on deadline for The Oyster War and needed to write more than I ever had in my life, and yet I could hardly write anything. One chapter in particular was giving me trouble. I ended up going for walks and speaking my ideas into a tape recorder, and then writing the whole thing down 100 percent verbatim. It was a mess, but I sent it to my editor as a placeholder, and then four months later I went back and edited it. It ended up being one of my favorite chapters, and was excerpted in Scientific American.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Before becoming a writer, make sure that it isn't possible for you to become anything else instead. Only write if you have to. Once you decide that you must write, try to write something. An essay, a short story, a book, a novella. Whatever it is, make sure you push through and finish it, because only by doing that will you be able to see the places where you are weak. Obsessively read in the genre in which you want to write. If you want to write a memoir, then read memoirs like a maniac. If it's dystopian science fiction, then read that. Find a few books that are your favorite and read them again and again until some of their secrets are made known to you. I think of it a little like how, when you're very little, your parents will sometimes dance with you by letting you stand on their shoes and hold their hands while they waltz around the room. Reading great writers works in this way, too. Stand on the shoes of people bigger than you. Let yourself be carried along by good plots and good sentences, and after a while you'll be able to dance through them on your own.

Peter Rock

How did you become a writer?

1.  My father read to me. Most notably Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, but also The Chronicles of Narnia, etc.  (I now read these books to my daughters.)

2. I got attention for making things up and writing in school.

3. My mom gave me Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar for Christmas one year in high school and Brautigan--so simple, rather whimsical, attracting very attractive women--seemed like someone to emulate.

4. Kept this idea of being a writer, seeing it as a kind of lifestyle, and followed my education so that I was unqualified to do anything else.

5. Worked on ranches, worked as a security guard in an art museum, read a lot, wrote many bad novels, wrote a lot of letters that were probably better than the novels. Was delusional.

6. Does one become a writer? I like to think I've gotten better at writing, or at least more comfortable amid confusion, but I think of myself more as a person who likes to write. It's not an identity or a calling, really. It's a decision, an action. There are days when I could be called a writer and days when it wouldn't be right.

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

A few: Yasunari Kawabata, by far my favorite; Laura Ingalls Wilder, close second; Ursula Le Guin; Gertrude Chandler Warner; Elena Ferrante, recently; Alice Munro; Maggie Nelson; Hemingway; Julio Cortazar; Murakami; Octavia Butler; folktales of all sorts. Oh man, I just re-read Island of the Blue Dolphins the other day: pretty much a perfect book.

When and where do you write?

In my basement, usually between 4:30 and 7:00 in the morning; sometimes I get some other morning time. I have small children, though, and teach full-time, and am a housewife. I used to have the privilege of possessing many rules for when and under what conditions I could write, but now I just get after it whenever I can.

What are you working on now?

A long piece of narrative prose that revolves around artifacts of my past life in 1994 and involves open water swimming, the painter Charles Burchfield and his writings, floating in isolation tanks, letters to ex-girlfriends, etc; also a fragmentary novel-in-photographs, SPELLS, that has been a gallery show and hopefuly will be a book. It's a collaboration with five photographers. And secret projects that may or may not surface.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Have fun. Don't listen to the hype or worry about whether anyone will ever read what you're writing. Read a lot and give others your enthusiastic attention.

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel is Klickitat, which concerns mysterious writing, wilderness survival and the relationship between two sisters. He is also the author of the novels The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, and a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. His novel-within-photographs, Spells, was shown at Blue Sky Gallery in 2015 and continues to travel around Oregon; a book of that project is in the works.