Jodi Picoult

How did you become a writer?

I have been writing since I was five and wrote a book called the Lobster That Was Misunderstood. I had a ton of teachers who recognized I liked to write, and encouraged it. I applied to Princeton and was accepted into their creative writing program, where I had a mentor, Mary Morris, who really taught me everything I know. My first book was published when I was 25.

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

Mary Morris, as listed above. And believe it or not, Hemingway, for his economy of language. Also F. Scott Fitzgerald. He taught me the joy of using an unreliable narrator…and I lived in the same room he did when he was at Princeton.

When and where do you write? 

Five days a week, in my office, which is the attic of my home.

What are you working on now? 

I am getting ready for a grueling three month international book tour so I am not actively writing fiction. However, I’m helping to adapt Between the Lines as a Broadway musical.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I started writing when I had babies, and the only time I had to write was when they were asleep or watching Barney on TV. I learned to write in fifteen-minute bursts. If you have time, you have writer’s block. If you don’t, you WRITE.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Take a fiction writing workshop course. It will help you create on demand and learn to give and receive criticism. Read – a ton – so that you figure out where your work fits into the literary canon. And most importantly when you start something and decide halfway through you hate it, don’t abandon it. Force yourself to finish. THEN decide if you want to get rid of it or fix it. If you scrap it before you’re done, you’ll never believe you can finish anything you write.

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-three novels, including Leaving Time, The Storyteller, My Sister’s Keeper, and Nineteen Minutes, and two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page, co-written with her daughter Samantha van Leer. Acclaimed as “a skilled wordsmith . . . who beautifully creates situations that not only provoke the mind but touch the flawed souls in all of us” (The Boston Globe), Picoult delivers her most timely novel to date with Small Great Things, which will be published as a Ballantine hardcover on October 11, 2016. Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children.

Philip Hensher

How did you become a writer?

I always had that itch to write. I suppose it needs an opportunity--an urgent subject coinciding with a stretch of time. In my case the occasional, disorganised desire to write something came to a point during four weeks in a house in Sicily in the summer of 1991, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. 

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

The influences come and go, and sometimes I've gone crazy for a writer in the period leading up to writing a particular book - Natalia Ginzburg, Henry Green, Dickens, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Bennett, Evelyn Waugh - a varied lot, I see.

When and where do you write?

When I'm writing, between 7 and 10 or 11 in the morning. I've got a desk but actually I write more naturally at the end of the dining room table. Then all the papers have to be lifted off in time for lunch. 

What are you working on now?

I finished a novel in the spring, which I'm putting on one side and will come back to in a couple of months. It's scheduled for publication in February 2018. I didn't want to rush this one.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. Sometimes I haven't written for a few months or even a year. That's called not writing. If it really won't come you walk away and go and look at life and forget you're supposed to be a writer altogether. In the end it comes. Real writer's block - the sort where you just cannot do it - is rare and I believe terrifying. The sort where you just can't think of something to write isn't worth worrying about - it is a waste of everyone's time to sit and force yourself to type when the tank is empty.

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

Never, ever, write "As X happened, Y started to happen" unless there is a direct cause between the two. There's no need to explain how things are linked in fiction. "As John looked out of the window, Mary started to chop the tomatoes" is always inferior to "John looked out of the window. Mary started to chop the tomatoes." A simple point with profound ramifications about the writer's responsibility to the reader's imagination.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Focus on the externals when writing about character, social exchange, events. The insides of characters' heads are always much more similar than what bags they are carrying, and in the end much less revealing.

Philip Hensher was born in London in 1965. His novels have won the Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and been shortlisted for many others, including the Man Booker Prize. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998 and awarded an honorary degree by Sheffield University in 2015. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa and lives in London and Geneva.

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.