Brian Platzer

How did you become a writer?

Between high school and college, I took a year off and taught English in Thailand. I spent a lot of time by myself, and I was very lonely. I was homesick in that way where loneliness and boredom combine to slow time, so I sought ways to rush the days forward. I took walks and made note of everything I passed, I drank myself to sleep, I went to the local Wat and tried to meditate, but the only times I relaxed and felt good—when instead of tricking myself through an hour, I was happy to extend it as long as possible—was when I was writing.

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

James Baldwin, Dave Eggers, Ann Packer, Rafael Yglesias, Philip Roth, Somerset Maugham, Kazuo Ishiguro, Robert Stone, David Simon, Lake Owego Camp, my Bed-Stuy neighbors, and the teaching of Rod Keating, Lisa Stifler, and Alice McDermott.

When and where do you write?

I write new material at home, in my tiny office, surrounded by my books, looking out onto Stuyvesant Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I edit the pages first on the screen, and then I print them out and edit them by hand on my commute into Manhattan to teach middle school English.

What are you working on now?

A new novel, tentatively titled HEAL ME. It’s about the friends and family of a man dealing with a mysterious neurological condition and the difficulties of living in Trump’s America.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes. I’m suffering from it now. I’ve lost the thread of my book, nothing feels as though it should inevitably occur, and I’m stuck and miserable. This afternoon, I’ll print the whole thing, read it through, and try to figure out if I’ve made any mistakes or if there’s an obvious and entertaining way these pretend people would act next.

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

Write every day, if possible. Never leave off at the end of a scene, but go on to the next scene so the next day’s work has already begun. Causality, causality, causality: if possible, each event should feel like the inevitable consequence of previous events.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Find a topic/person/subject that really interests you, and write until you’ve finished the arc of a story. Then go back and spend much more time revising than you’d spent writing. And then, write every day, if possible. Never leave off at the end of a scene, but go on to the next scene so the next day’s work is already begun. Causality, causality, causality: if possible, each event should feel like the inevitable consequence of previous events.

Brian Platzer is the author of BED-STUY IS BURNING, which has received rave reviews in Vanity Fair, NBC, the WSJ, the New York Post, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a BA from Columbia University. His writing has appeared often in the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as in the New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and teaches middle school English in Manhattan.

Barbara J. King

How did you become a writer?

For my first two decades in academia, I wrote journal articles and books based on my research with monkeys and apes. I did then as I do now: read widely and voraciously, particularly science intended for a wide audience and literary fiction. Gradually, I experienced an awakening of sorts about my own work, and craved to write in a more engaging, less-jargon-ridden style. One day I submitted “cold” a book-review essay to Jessa Crispin’s wonderful Bookslut, and started writing for Jessa regularly, then soon for the Times Literary Supplement too, about the books I loved (or once in a while, didn’t love). It all snowballed from there. Lining up my books on a shelf, I can arrange them now from more to less technical, from an evident distance from animals’ lives to an explicit thrilling to animals’ ways of being, thinking, and feeling: that pleases me. When I joined the small team at National Public Radio’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog six years ago, I learned something also about how to write a snappy 900 words a week, 50 weeks a year, and make those words count. Then, in a marvelous series of ever-more-exciting moments in 2015, I took the plunge and left academia altogether. Now I’m a full-time freelance writer. 

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

Jane Goodall’s refusal to buy into the academic insistence that animals must be reduced to statistics, and her insistence on describing individual chimpanzees’ behavior with both love and scientific rigor, made a great impression on me early on. Writers who illuminate the natural world like Goodall, Bernd Heinrich, Brandon Keim, Sy Montgomery, and Carl Safina educate and delight me. I’m extraordinarily drawn also to reading memoirs in the grief genre, and what I suppose could be called the dying genre, maybe because I’ve spent many hours researching and writing about grief and mourning in nonhuman animals. These memoirs— Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney, The Iceberg by Marian Coutts, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates, The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke, The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs—are devastating at times but even more, they burn with resilience, with love and life. In science fiction, fierce books like Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Mars Trilogy coax me to try, just try, to think big. 

When and where do you write?

On the walls of my study are photographs of wild bison, and on the study’s bed there usually can be found a cat or two, and it is there that I write. Even when I had a campus office, I’ve always written best at home. Energizing conversations with my husband, bouts of exercise, and chocolate breaks fuel the process. I read every day, but I try to take weekends off from writing (during which, of course, the writing carries on in my brain anyway). 

What are you working on now?

I’m just venturing again into the wild unkempt territory where I corral first thoughts towards a new book about animals. At the same time, it’s great fun to write “spin off” essays about the lives of pigs, chickens, cows, octopuses and other farmed animals: my Personalities on the Plate has only been out since the spring, so I’m still riding that wave. Writing both short- and long-form at more or less the same time is the optimal mix for me, plus those weekly adrenaline shots of 900 words. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. I’ve suffered from producing some quite bad writing that I couldn’t figure out for a while how to fix! But I always just write, then clean up by revising as many times as I need to (and often beyond that, thanks to the superb editors with whom I work). It’s like being out for a walk in nature, where I’m sometimes not completely sure I’m on the right path: I always just keep moving. 

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

Read aloud works-in-progress, or parts of them. I do this in full for my shorter pieces, with an audience of my husband or a cat, and never fail to amaze at how my ears hear when my eyes don’t see. I can’t always do this for long pieces or book chapters, but even in that case, I’ll select the thorniest bits to read aloud. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Connect on Twitter! Twitter has a bad rap as the black hole where civility goes to die, but that’s not been my experience. I connect with writers, scientists, artists, and animal people: overlapping categories to be sure. My goal (@bjkingape) is to be a generous presence there, sharing others’ work, and at the same time, not caving in to the view that to share one’s own work is “self-promotion.” What a term! It codes for “excessively self-focused,” and it took me some work to break its spell. We write to be read, after all. Done well, Twitter offers a community in balance, sharing what each of us loves most. 

Barbara J. King is emerita professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a full-time freelance science writer. Her latest book is Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat (2017). Her book How Animals Grieve (2013) has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, French (winning a book prize), and Hebrew. She writes regularly for National Public Radio's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog and for the Times Literary Supplement, and has been published in Scientific American, Aeon Magazine, The Atlantic, Undark Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Barbara is active on Twitter @bjkingape, and her website is www.barbarajking.com.

Jill Eisenstadt

How did you become a writer?

I believe that I was born with a brain wired for words. My very earliest memories revolve around things said, the impact words had on me to confuse, deceive, put pictures in my head, produce strong emotions. Gradually, I became aware of the way my words affected others and how I could modulate their reactions by choosing carefully when to speak or changing my tone. From there, becoming a writer was just a matter of learning to read and write.

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

Below are the first (among many) that come to mind.

Books: Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh), James and the Giant Peach (Roald Dahl), From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basel E. Frankweller (E.L. Konigsburg), The Princess Bride (William Goldman), The Member of the Wedding (Carson McCullers), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Black Tickets (Jayne Anne Phillips), To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf). Writers (along with the above and so many others): Sam Shepard, Denis Johnson, Grace Paley, Wendy Wasserstein, Don DeLillo, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Alice Munro, Anton Chekov, D.H Lawrence. Teachers: my high school English teacher, Ms. Rossi, my college teachers, Joe McGinniss and Nick Calabro, my grad school professors, Stephen Koch and Robert Towers.When and where do you write?

When and where do you write?

I write daily but too often too little. When I force myself to sit down and really focus, I’m at a white desk in the corner of my clean bedroom. Otherwise, I might be anywhere, in or out of my house.

What are you working on now?

Something new.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Always. For me, this takes the form of re-writer’s block. That is, I get stuck rewriting obsessively instead of moving forward.

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

Best advice given to me directly (and which I still struggle to follow): “You can’t polish a mess.” Stephen Koch. Best advice I’ve read: “Write what you don’t know about what you know.” Weirdly, this seems to be attributed to both Eudora Welty and Grace Paley.

What’s your advice to new writers?

The above, plus: Get some exercise to help you sit still.

Jill Eisenstadt is the author of the novels, From Rockaway, Kiss Out (Knopf), and Swell (Little, Brown). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Vogue, Bomb, Elle, Town and Country, Lit Hub and The Boston Review, among other places. Jill has been a teacher at The New School’s Eugene Lang College and an editor at BKLYN Magazine. She co-wrote and produced the feature film, The Limbo Room along with her sister, the director Debra Eisenstadt. Jill is a recipient of a Columbia M.F.A writing fellowship, a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Teacher Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.