Brin-Jonathan Butler

How did you become a writer?

My first memory is of the sound my father's finger tips pounding away at an old type writer before dawn up in the country. It stirred me out of a dream. I had an early romance with the mystery and dark magic of his private struggle filling blank pages yet not being able to finish the book. It was never a stain I had much interest in mopping up. The spike broke off in the vein pretty early for me with this racket and with my old man.   

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

Italo Calvino, George Orwell, Van Gogh's letters, J.D. Salinger, Lydia Davis, Margarite Duras, Robert Hughes, Cervantes, Richard Ben Cramer, Steinbeck, Gogol, DBC Pierre, Jimmy Cannon, Mark Kram Sr., Hunter S. Thompson, Kundera, Kerouac, Michael Herr, Hemingway, Kafka, Patricia Highsmith

When and where do you write? 

I write at four in the morning wherever I happen to be located, preferably in the company of my cat Raul here in Spanish Harlem. I come from generations of Dutch farmers and don't think I look at a blank page much different than they looked at untended, fertile soil. 

What are you working on now? 

A profile of an aging fighter looking for redemption with a heavyweight title shot. Maybe another book down the road. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Nearly every morning, but that makes a couple thousand words a little sweeter by the time you're done. Maybe you get to keep 500 of them as a bonus. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Van Gogh's: “What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.” Having written a million words before I sold even one, these words kept me afloat. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

People are always remembered for what they gave, never what they had. Funny how that is, huh? Well, unfortunately we don't always make it that easy, but try to find something in your audience that makes us worth letting all your stars out. 

Brin-Jonathan Butler has had his work published in ESPN The Magazine, Esquire, Harper's, The Paris Review, Salon, and Vice. His Cuban memoir, The Domino Diaries, was short-listed for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing and was a Boston Globe Best of 2015.

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.