Imbolo Mbue

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer after first teaching myself to write over the span of almost a decade, then writing a novel, and finding an agent to represent me. Most of my self-education came from reading writers I admire—in their works I found inspiration and saw what excellence looked like. I also read far and wide: thrillers, poems, non-fiction, works by authors from all over the world, anything and everything I could read to see great writing in as many forms as possible.

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

The long list of writers whose works inspired me include Toni Morrison, Frank McCourt, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Franzen, Gary Shtenygart, Isabel Allende, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Pablo Neruda, Kazuo Ishiguro…

When and where do you write?

I write sitting at the dining table in my living room, usually early in the morning or late at night.

What are you working on now?

I’m mostly writing essays on topics like dreams, home, and migration.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Thankfully, no, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it stays at bay. I have, however, decided at many times to step away from my work so I could “spend time” with characters, or see the story more clearly.

What’s your advice to new writers?

My advice is to keep writing—it’s the advice I got from agents who read my earlier work but rejected it because it wasn’t yet ready. Getting rejected repeatedly was far from pleasant, but I’m glad I took the advice and kept writing and pushing myself to get better.

Imbolo Mbue is a native of Limbe, Cameroon. She holds a B.S. from Rutgers University and an M.A. from Columbia University. A resident of the United States for over a decade, she lives in New York City. Behold the Dreamers is her first novel.

Mark Haddon

How did you become a writer?

By a long and circuitous route, partly because I came from a family which was neither hugely bookish nor hugely cultured, and partly because I spent my childhood reading books about science in preparation for my planned career as a paleoanthropologist. When I was fifteen, however, I began to see how literature could give me access to similar mysteries and generate a sense of awe not unlike the sense of awe I felt when looking up at the Milky Way. Reading Patrick White was  large part of that revelation. The prospect of becoming a novelist was, of course, preposterous and inconceivable. I could draw, however, and was scraping a living after leaving university by illustrating for an eclectic string of magazines – the New Statesman, the Catholic Herald, the Banker… So I began writing and illustrating children’s picture books. I must have produced fifty before Gilbert’s Gobstopper was finally published Hamish Hamilton.

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

I was sent to a boarding school where the teaching was done by force rather than by encouragement, so my influences are all literary and fall into three categories. The first contains those novels which continue to take my breath away and remind me why I continue to do this ridiculous job. Bleak House, Beloved, Middlemarch, Voss… The second category contains those novels from which I am constantly learning and relearning how to write. Examples from the last couple of months would include The Girls by Emma Cline, Golden Hill by Francis Spufford and New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus. The third category includes stories which simply don’t work, in my opinion. They flag up potholes into which I might fall and sometimes contain wasted ideas of which I think I might be able to make better use. I won’t name any of those books…

When and where do you write?

I’m a great fan of cafes. I like the hubbub and the sense that I am wholly unconnected to the rest of human life. It’s also harder to waste time when other people are watching you. I can rarely write for more than four a day without the quality heading rapidly south. When that happens I have to go and do something else or I’ll spend the following morning unpicking the mess I made the previous afternoon.

What are you working on now? 

A novel which opens with a house fire. I won’t say any more for fear of invoking the universal curse which dooms all writing projects discussed in public.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I get it all the time. Writing is just plain hard work. To complicate matters, I’m a poor writer but a persistent editor of my own work. Nothing I produce sounds good until the twentieth draft at least and most of it gets thrown away before that. As a result it’s difficult conjuring up the necessary self-confidence when you know what lies ahead. On the other hand, it’s the best job in the world and I wouldn’t last a morning in an office

What’s your advice to new writers?

One: Read lots, read widely and read forensically. Remember that every book is a long string of words chosen and ordered by another human being. Take it to pieces. Try to understand why it works, or doesn’t work. Two: Write lots, edit more and get used to throwing work away and starting all over again. Three: find a reader whose reactions chime with that little voice in your head which is repeatedly saying, “I’m not sure about this word / this sentence / this paragraph / this story but I might just get away with it.” If you can’t hear that voice you probably need to be a dentist or a wilderness guide.

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.

Alice Mattison

How did you become a writer?

I’ve become a writer many times. Decided at 13 I had to write. Wrote poetry for years, always feeling bad that I wasn’t writing more. Became serious at around age 30—an emotional change brought on, I think, by motherhood. Published one poem, then nothing for years. Published a book of poems in my late thirties. Started writing fiction at 34 or 35, published stories for the first time in my forties. Stories in magazines, then books of stories, then a novel (age 50), then more novels. I had one big break: The New Yorker took several stories, one after another. Other than that, slow shifts in direction, small failures and successes.

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

I was turned into a writer first, as a child and  young woman, by reading a lot of poetry, studying Latin and some Greek, and reading a great deal of Henry James. Dubliners. Jane Austen’s Emma. Around the time I started writing fiction, books by Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, William Maxwell, Peter Taylor, and, more recently, Edward P. Jones affected my writing of short stories. As for novels—E.M. Forster, Lore Segal, Paule Marshall. But I was also made a writer by friends: the writing friends who have read my manuscripts over the decades, talked writing, talked books, showed me their work, rivaled my anxieties with theirs. THE KITE AND THE STRING is dedicated to my novelist friend Sandi Kahn Shelton, who writes as Maddie Dawson. We’ve been yanking each other along for almost forty years, since we met and said we were writers (on slim evidence back then), then slowly began to do it for real.

When and where do you write?

I’m the world’s only afternoon writer (and of course it’s often hard to free afternoons). I rarely have a good idea before lunch, and close down around suppertime. I usually write in my house. I have a room for writing but it’s crowded with rational thoughts: I’ve written so much nonfiction, emails, letters to students (my job in the Bennington low-residency MFA program requires writing many letters to students) that it’s hard to write fiction there. To think incoherent, messy, fictional thoughts, I retreat to a different room, with soft furniture.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a novel about friendship in a difficult world. Three women protested the war in Vietnam. One became a violent revolutionary. One wrote a novel about the revolutionary. The third is the main character. The book is also about her friendship later in life—that is, now—with a woman who runs a social services program. Also her marriage, to a man whose conscience is even more vigorous than hers, and all the trouble that causes. Also about the novel within the novel, which causes even more trouble.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not enough writer’s block. Being stuck is good—it means that what needs to be written is intense, maybe painful. Or it’s complicated and requires careful consecutive thought. It’s often possible to get unstuck by asking oneself simple, sensible questions (like, “What do I already know about this story?” or “about the next scene?”). But maybe I’d write better books if I let myself remain stuck longer.

What is your advice to new writers?

KITE is all advice, so it’s hard to choose. Also, not everybody needs the same advice. My guess is that the five things I say to students most frequently are: 1. Never mind whether it’s good. Write it whether it’s good or not. 2. Protect your writing time. 3. Plot is whatever provides forward momentum, and, yes, you can make up a plot. 4. If you say what’s happening, the reader will know how it feels, so you don’t have to say. 5. Write when you’re sleepy and stupid, so your strongest feelings get into the work.

Alice Mattison’s new book is THE KITE AND THE STRING: HOW TO WRITE WITH SPONTANEITY AND CONTROL—AND LIVE TO TELL THE TALE. She is also the author of six novels, four collections of stories, and a book of poems. She teaches fiction in the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College.