Joanna Walsh

How did you become a writer? 

I tried not to write for a long time: I didn't want to take a position of 'authority' in any way. I was talking to Claire-Louise Bennett recently, and she said she'd treasured her period writing as an 'amateur' before the publication of her first book. I've been thinking about that a lot, and wondering whether it's possible to re-gain that amateurism... or whether it's as hopeless as trying to regain your virginity.

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

I did an undergrad degree in English Literature, but it wasn't until I started reading books in translation (and in French, which I started off by teaching myself) that I saw work that made me want to write. I love the work of, amongst many others, Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Elfriede Jelinek...

I love prose written by poets: Anne Carson, Anne Boyer, Vahni Capildeo, Eley Williams.... I also like reading theory/philosophy etc. There are writers I come back to again and again as triggers for my work: Freud, Heidegger, Breton, Wittgenstein...

When and where do you write? 

I have a deliberately tiny desk — a shelf set into an old chimney nook. It only just fits my laptop so I have no option but to keep it clear. It faces onto a wall that's painted black. I work there when I want to concentrate on a set task. A lot of my work is done by stealth tho, so it's necessary that I work in places that are not my desk, so I can fool myself about what I'm doing. I sometimes work at my kitchen table, and sometimes in bed. 

What are you working on now? 

I'm editing a book of essays I've commissioned for gorse editions: writers writing on their influences. I'm correcting the proof of my next book, Break.up, I'm working on a PhD about wordplay in Cyberfeminism, I'm occasionally writing a short story, or a piece of journalism. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No, possibly because I don't ever really set out to write anything in particular: I play around with words and ideas and it's only when they build up and take some shape that I decide what form they might take. 

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

I honestly can't remember any. If I see work I like, I get a lot of fun out of trying to strip it down like a car engine, to see if I can find out how it works. The 'advice' I've got from writers is what I can elicit from their writing.

What’s your advice to new writers? 

I'd love to see more people ignoring the conventions of plot, character and genre. These are not the only ways to do things. I guess my advice is: define carefully what makes you uncomfortable, and dwell in that difficulty. Find ways to enjoy it. Note that this is writing advice, not advice on how to get published.

Joanna Walsh's latest book is Worlds From The Word's End, published by And Other Stories. In 2018 Break.up will be published by Semiotext(e) and Tuskar Rock. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Granta Magazine, and The Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction. She was awarded the UK Arts Foundation 2017 Fellowship for Literature. She edits at online literary journals 3:AM Magazine and Catapult.co, writes literary and cultural criticism for an number of publications including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian, and runs @read_women.

Kathleen A. Flynn

How did you become a writer?

I was an avid reader ever since I learned how and I have wanted to write novels since I was 12. Although I wrote a lot in high school and college, I drifted away from it in my 20s with the pressure to earn a living. I ended up becoming a newspaper copy editor and for more than a decade I put aside, or did not take seriously enough to believe in, my wish to write fiction. Finally one day I had an idea that I was excited enough about that I did not quit.

I think that the only way to learn to write a novel is by writing one. Which sounds ridiculous, because you don’t know how when you start. But you have to start somewhere and figure it out as you go.  In my experience there is a lot of sitting alone in a room, and a lot of false starts. You have to not give up.

Name your writing influences.

I don’t mean to suggest in what I said above that you can’t learn from people, and from books. Books about how to write won’t solve the main problem -- you still have to write the thing -- but they clarified my thinking. It is also helpful to have writing buddies. Classes are a great place to find them; this can be easier or harder depending on where you live, so online classes are also good. I found the ones I took at the Writers Studio helpful. Sackett Street Writers Workshop was also valuable to me at two crucial moments: when I first decided to start writing again seriously, and a few years later when I had a manuscript to workshop.

I enjoyed Ann Patchett’s “Getaway Car.” Jane Smiley’s “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel” is one I return to again and again. A new book about writing I wish I’d had the chance to read earlier because it might have saved me the pain of figuring some things out through trial and error is “The Hidden Machinery” by Margot Livesay.  “The Kite and the String” by Alice Mattison is also helpful and practical, particularly about psychological barriers to writing that can seem insurmountable.

But before we are writers we are readers, and the books that have influenced me most were not books about how to write novels but novels themselves. Great novels have certain lessons, good but flawed ones have others, and bad novels are also highly instructive.

Where and when do you write?

Whenever I can, mostly in my apartment or on the subway to work (if I can get a seat). The subway is good for first drafts because there is a limited amount of time and no real way to escape from your task. When I got serious (or desperate) about writing, I started getting up at 4 a.m., assuring myself a few hours a day when nothing was going to disturb me. I’ve relaxed that somewhat, but I still get up between 4:30 and 5 most days. I feel less judgmental about what I am doing in the early morning. Later in the day is better for reading.  When I am writing seriously I am thinking about writing even when I am not writing; it’s like a computer program running in the background.

What are you working on now?

I am trying to figure out if a sequel to my first novel makes any sense, so I am playing around with that. Although the story is complete, there may be more I could learn about the characters in a new adventure.  I have some other ideas for historical novels as well, including something about Irish revolutionaries.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I suppose you could call it that, all those years when I wasn’t writing. But to me, “writer’s block” isn’t a real thing so much as a description of a cluster of problems, the way people in the 19th century would be said to have “neurasthenia.” Now when I get stuck writing, I understand there’s something I haven’t figured out yet, maybe a solution that hasn’t come to me. I often pose questions to myself about some aspect of what I am working on, in a file labeled Thoughts. I find when I state the question clearly and then stop consciously thinking about it for a while the answer will come. Or I get up from my desk and take the dog for a walk. That often does the trick.

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

I remember being very impressed by something Heather Aimee O’Neill, my writing teacher at Sackett Street, said about outlining in the first class I did with her. I had expressed the concern that writing an outline took all the suspense out of writing, if you already knew everything that was going to happen in your novel and were just dutifully going along and filling it in. No, she said, it’s not like that at all. You know the basics of what’s going to happen, but the magic is what happens in between what you know. And not just in what happens, but how. This struck me as extremely profound, and after that I became a dedicated outliner. The irony is that often I don’t follow my own outlines because I get a better idea as I am going along, so my fear of destroying suspense was doubly misguided.

What’s your advice to new writers?

My first advice would be to read as much as possible, especially but not only of the kind of fiction you want to write. Analytically, thinking about how the writer is achieving certain effects. If something isn’t working for you, why not? When you read something really moving, try to figure out how the writer is accomplishing that.

My second would be to not agonize too much over your first draft. The secret of writing is in rewriting, and the first draft is like scaffolding on a building – you need it to get started, but later you will discard it. Don’t be too hard on yourself in the beginning, because there will be plenty of time to be hard on yourself later.

My third would be to never be content with your own first attempt. Or your second, or your tenth. There are many places in life where perfectionism is out of place, but your art is not one of them. A typical novel has between 60,000 and 100,000 words. You need to have weighed each of them, more than once. Does every sentence delight you with its subtle music? (Read it aloud and see.)Are you learning something new about the characters in each paragraph? Are there are unnecessary adjectives and clunky constructions? Is there an improbable plot development? Until you are satisfied with the answers to such questions, you are not done. You are not going to please every reader, but you need to please yourself.

Kathleen A. Flynn grew up in tiny Falls Village, Conn., and lives in Brooklyn. She is a lifelong lover of words, particularly when found in novels, and a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. Having studied English at Barnard College and journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she edits at, and sometimes writes for, The New York Times. The Jane Austen Project (Harper Perennial) is her first novel.

Ronald Wright

How did you become a writer?

I'd wanted to write since my teens. But my twenties were busy with studies, working odd jobs, and backpacking around the world. Not until I was thirty, when I fell ill during a long journey through the Andes, did the writing urge return. Knocked flat in Peru for months, I read everything I could find or borrow. When I got home I began my first book, Cut Stones & Crossroads: A Journey in Peru, published three years later by Viking Penguin in New York. Around the same time I took up freelance journalism in print and broadcast media.

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

D.H. Lawrence was a strong influence during my schooldays (Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley, Mornings in Mexico) and I still go back to him, most often for his wonderful essays. I also took an interest in his poetry (plus Pound and Eliot) and in Middle English epics, especially the alliterative ones (Piers Plowman, Gawain and the Green Knight), whose form comes down from Beowulf. But my favourite writers back then were the great satirists in both prose and verse: from Dryden, Swift, and Pope to H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, War of the Worlds), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), and George Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his essays, such as the essential "Politics and the English Language").

Much of this was on the Eng. Lit. curriculum, with Chaucer and Shakespeare of course. All very white and male, as things were in those days. Later I discovered Mary Shelley (The Last Man, Frankenstein), Amelia Edwards (A Thousand Miles up the Nile), Shirley Hazzard (Transit of Venus, The Great Fire), Harriet Doerr (Stones for Ibarra), and many other important women writers.

By then I could read Spanish, which took me into the literary world of Latin America, from its modern authors to early historical works by Indigenous and Spanish writers such as Inca Garcilaso (Royal Commentaries of the Incas), Felipe Waman Puma (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), and Cieza de León (Discovery and Conquest of Peru).

My fascination with Peru began at thirteen, when I happened to pick up a dusty Victorian adventure tale by W.H.G. Kingston, who had lived there himself. The book, called Manco, was set during the great Tupac Amaru revolt of the 1780s, as recent when Kingston wrote about it as World War II is now. The author was good at evoking sympathy for underdogs, in this case heroic Incas struggling to free themselves from Spanish rule. Manco awoke my interest in the ancient American civilizations and their modern descendants. Peru became the subject of my first book (Cut Stones & Crossroads), and my tenth, The Gold Eaters.

When and where do you write?

Mostly at home in the Gulf Islands near Vancouver. I find the writing goes best in the afternoons.

What are you working on now?

Not ready enough to talk about.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Every day, for about an hour or so.

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

Read. The rule of thumb is ten hours reading for every hour of writing. Of course not every day has to be like that. Nor does all the reading need to be related to your work. But I've found the overall ratio is about right. Almost any good book sends the mind to interesting and unforeseen places; these unlock creativity. Reading is a good remedy for writer's block.

What’s your advice to new writers?

See above. Also, for good writing of almost any kind you need to have gathered a fund of knowledge and experiences. This is the writer's raw material. Though I didn't know it then, I was doing that in my twenties when I was backpacking and driving trucks. Last, a word about revision. Successful writers do a lot of it, often 5 or 10 drafts before a book is ready to be seen. When I get really stuck and lose all hope and perspective, I put the draft away and do other things for at least two months. The fallow time must be long enough to "forget" what you've written so you can read with fresh eyes. When you do go back to the stalled work, imagine it was written by somebody else. It's always easier to see the flaws in others' work.

Novelist and historian Ronald Wright is the author of ten books published in 16 languages and more than 40 countries. Wright’s first novel, the dystopia A Scientific Romance, won Britain’s David Higham Prize for Fiction and was chosen a book of the year by the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, the Sunday Times, and others.

His Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, won the Libris Nonfiction Book of the Year award and inspired Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Surviving Progress.

Born in England to British and Canadian parents, Wright took archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, pursuing these interests with years of travel and study in the Americas and elsewhere.

His first three books--Cut Stones and Crossroads, Time Among the Maya, and Stolen Continents--were recently re-issued in the Penguin Modern Classics series. His latest novel, The Gold Eaters, is set during the Spanish invasion of Peru. RonaldWright.com.