Geoff Nicholson

How did you become a writer?

I liked books and reading from a very early age (four or five years old) and I told my parents I “wanted to be a writer” but I suppose only in the way that kids who like football want to be football players. I obviously had no idea what was involved.

Growing up I mostly read novels (and wrote my first one when I was 12), but when I was in my late teens I developed a brief infatuation with the theater – wrote a few plays, some of which got performed in student productions and then on the fringe in London and at the Edinburgh festival. One play was also broadcast on BBC radio, at a time when radio drama seemed quite a big deal in England.

I also did some comedy writing for TV and radio but none of this was really very satisfying. When I started writing my first novel Street Sleeper (and I had no idea whether I could write a novel or not) it all seemed to fit into place. 

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

There are writers I love but whose influence don’t seem apparent in my writing – examples would be Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler – and in any case who would be foolish enough to claim to be “influenced” by them - but I’m sure reading them has made a difference at some level.

Ian Fleming was an early, and now incomprehensible, passion.

When I started writing plays I was in the shadow of Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco – but then so was everybody else in England at that time.

At university I was taught by JH Prynne – a poet of thrilling obscurity, whose writing has absolutely no similarity to my own, but he taught me to go my own way, and also a love for the complexity of language.

JG Ballard and Angela Carter were very important to me when I started writing prose. I didn’t think I could write a Gravity’s Rainbow but I thought I might just possibly write a High-Rise or a Moving Toyshop – I was wrong about that, of course, but it seemed a reasonable goal at the time.

When and where do you write? 

I aim to work pretty much 9 to 5, five days a week – at home in a small dark room without much of a view. “Writing” in this context includes research, editing, replying to emails, and sometimes staring off into space, or into the craw of Youtube. I also try to walk every day – and the creative process certainly continues in my head as I walk.

What are you working on now? 

I’m putting the “finishing” touches to a novel that keeps changing its name, currently titled The Miranda. It’s a book about walking and torture, and about men who do bad things for good reasons, (at least that’s what I think it’s about – authors are rarely the best judges of these things, I find).

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I think most serious writers constantly question the value of what they’re doing, and they inevitably experience periods of weariness and nausea with the whole business of writing, when they absolutely can’t see the point of carrying on. I experience this on at least a weekly basis. But of course that’s the moment when if you’re a serious writer you have to butch it out, get your head down and carry on, which I do. So I suppose the answer has to be no, to writer’s block.

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

Keith Waterhouse, author of Billy Liar, said, “I never drink when I’m writing, but I sometimes write when I’m drinking.”  Words to live by.

What’s your advice to new writers?

If you find writing easy you’re probably doing it wrong. If it were easy every damn fool would be doing it – and of course there are plenty of damn fools who are doing it, but don’t be one of them. Also, of course, do listen to advice, but then feel completely free to ignore it.

Geoff Nicholson was born in Sheffield, England, and studied English at Caius College, Cambridge, then European Drama at the University of Essex. He is the author of 16 novels and 8 books of non-fiction. His debut, Street Sleeper, was shortlisted for the Yorkshire Post First Work Award; Bleeding London (1997) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize; and Bedlam Burning (2003) was a New York Times Book Review notable book of the year. Non-fiction titles include Sex Collectors and The Lost Art of Walking, and his journalism has appeared in, among other publications, The New York Times, Bookforum, Gastronomica, Art Review, The Believer and McSweeney’s. He is a contributing editor to The Los Angeles Review of Books. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Alina Tugend

How did you become a writer?

I’ve always been a writer ever since, well, I could write. I loved writing short stories when I was a kid (there’s a family classic I wrote in fourth grade from the viewpoint of a piece of bubble gum in a bubble gum machine.) I also wrote poetry from childhood on, received some awards, and was included in some anthologies. I added on journalism probably in high school, when I wrote and was features editor for the school newspaper. I enjoyed – and still do - learning about new things. interviewing people and bringing to light issues or wrongs most people don’t know about. And I managed to get hired to do that.

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

Well, my grandmother, who was from Germany and not warm and fuzzy, loved my writing and strongly encouraged it, as did my parents and numerous teachers. But the drama of Watergate and the role of Woodward and Bernstein – I was in my teens then – certainly influenced me. So did some of the great journalists I read in my hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, such as Barry Bearak and David Lamb – they travelled the world writing about fascinating topics and also crafted beautiful sentences. Joan Didion’s spare direct writing was also an influence, and brilliant non-fiction books like Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas and Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I am so impressed when an author can make an apparently dry or difficult subject, as Lukas did with Boston school desegregation or LeBlanc with urban life in the Bronx, and turn it into a compelling narrative that changes how I look at things.

When and where do you write?

In my house, in what was first called the play room, then the TV room as my sons got older. It’s an odd, two-level room, so my desk, computer and all my stuff is on the upper level. It actually has worked surprisingly well over the years. When my sons were young, I mainly wrote while they were in school, but sometimes I had to do an interview when they were deep into a TV show or video game. They quickly learned that if I made a wild gesticulating motion with my hand, they had to hit the mute button.

What are you working on now? 

A long education piece for a national magazine that is still in process, so I don’t want to talk about it because I’m superstitious and it’s not published yet. I just finished an article for the Berkeley Alumni Magazine that I’m proud of on the research behind why most of us fail to live up to own ethical standards and how that can be changed.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really. I’ve certainly had the writer’s dread of the blank screen, but I’ve always forged ahead. I think journalism or even writing non-fiction books is different, though, than writing novels. As the paperweight on my desk says, “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.”

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

At my first internship at United Press International, a seasoned editor told me, “You can give the same article to 10 different editors and it will come back 10 different ways.” It is so important – and I have to remind myself of this even now, decades later – that there is no one way to write anything. Also “ass in chair” which some famous author (I can’t remember who) said was her best piece of writing advice.

What’s your advice to new writers?

You can’t be a writer without being a reader. And be willing to do lots of grunt work, but don’t sell yourself short.

Alina Tugend is a long-time journalist and author who has worked in Rhode Island, Washington DC, Southern California, London and New York.  From 2005-2015 she wrote the award-winning biweekly Shortcuts column for The New York Times business section. She still writes regularly for the Times, and her work has appeared in numerous other national publications, including The Atlantic, O, the Oprah Magazine, Family Circle and Inc. Magazine. In 2011, Riverhead published her first book, Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong. She currently lives with her husband (and two sons when they’re home from college). Follow her on Twitter at @atugend and see more of her work at www.alinatugend.com.

Jean Kwok

How did you become a writer?

I immigrated from Hong Kong to New York City along with my family when I was five years old. We lived in an apartment that was overrun with rats and roaches, without a working central heating system, and the windowpanes were covered with a layer of ice on the inside throughout the bitter winters. After school, I went with my father to work at the sweatshop in Chinatown, where my brothers and mother also worked. Much as I loved reading from the moment that I learned to speak English, there was no space in this life for dreams of becoming a writer.

Yet it was somehow in this difficult period that my brother managed to save enough to buy me a gift one evening. Instead of getting me a toy or piece of candy, he brought me something that would change my life: a blank diary. He said, “Whatever you write in this will belong to you.”

From that moment on, I kept a journal, which kept me on course throughout all those years of being an awkward outsider. I entered Harvard as a physics major and it was only there that I realized I would not have to return to a life at the factory. Slowly, I understood I could try to pursue that which I loved most: writing.

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

I concentrated in modern poetry as an undergraduate, so there are many poets I love: Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton. Novelists I admire include Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt and Jennifer Egan.

When and where do you write?

I am by nature a night person but having children has cured me of this. It’s impossible to live my life and be a night person so I am now a morning person. When I’m not under a deadline, I get up at 6 a.m. so I have time to use the elliptical in our attic before I start my day. Then I write when the kids are at school. When I am under pressure, however (as I was recently in order to finish my latest novel), I get up at 4 a.m. to have enough time to exercise, shower and write before the events of the day overwhelm me.

I have an office in our attic but more and more, I find myself writing wherever I can. The only certainty is that I need to be alone and I like to have all of the curtains shut. 

What are you working on now?

I have just finished my third novel, so I am getting ready to work on it with my editor.  I’m really excited about it. Here’s the short summary: when an underachieving Chinese American woman journeys to the Netherlands to probe the cause of her brilliant older sister’s mysterious disappearance, the secrets she uncovers reveal more about her own family - and herself - than she ever could have imagined. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I prefer to call it resistance and yes, I think it’s a part of every writer’s life. As I’m working, many thoughts and fears plague me. Sometimes, I’ll freeze. I try to ease myself out as gently as I can. Over the years, I’ve developed a process that enables me to build up a book piece by piece, so that I don’t have the same fear of the blank page I once did. I accept my terrible first drafts and I spend much more time thinking about the overall structure of my novel before I actually write it.

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

Well, I think the worst advice was that Doctorow quote, “Writing is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” This quote has caused me much heartache and many worthless pages, but of course, I am a person who can get lost anywhere. It works for other writers but not for me.

I need to have a plan of my novel pretty much from the beginning. That plan changes greatly but it still ensures that I can think about foreshadowing, symbolism, pacing, character development and structure as I write.

I loved the book by Rosanne Bane called, Around the Writer's Block. She talks about how putting words onto the page is actually the last step of a long creative process. What we may think of as a block is simply the incubatory silence before the words flow.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Be kind to yourself. Sometimes, life can be so overwhelming that the only thing that indicates you are a writer is that burning desire itself. It’s all right if you haven’t written a word in far too long. Corporate lawyers don’t lie awake at night worrying that they didn’t get any creative writing done that day. Try to gently make the time and mental space for yourself and the writing will come.

Also this: don’t worry about being perfect. It’s most important to write something that is alive. It’s much better to create a passionate, flawed beast with a rampaging heartbeat than a perfectly proportioned corpse on the page.

Jean Kwok is the New York Times and international bestselling author of the award-winning novels Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown. In between her undergraduate degree at Harvard and MFA in fiction at Columbia, she worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer. Her work has been published in 18 countries and taught in universities, colleges and high schools across the world. She has been selected for honors including the American Library Association Alex Award, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award international shortlist. Jean’s writing has been featured in Time, The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek and Vogue, among others. She has spoken at many schools and venues including Harvard University, Columbia University and the Tucson Festival of Books. A television documentary was filmed about Jean and her work. She lives in the Netherlands with her husband, two boys and four cats, and has just finished her third novel.