Matt Young

How did you become a writer?

I wrote in high school a bit—bad short stories about misunderstood teens and worse news articles for my school’s literary magazine about why marijuana should be legalized. I didn’t write at all for most of my time in the Marines aside from patrol orders and class notes. I didn’t start taking writing seriously until a few years ago—2011 or 12. I got a lot of encouragement from professors and had a story or two accepted to literary magazines and those things kept me coming back to the chair.

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

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is the book that made me want to write. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was a book that helped me understand early on what creative nonfiction could do. Neil Davison was the professor at Oregon State University who told me I should switch my major from fisheries and wildlife science and study English.

When and where do you write?

Recently, I’ve been writing at night from 9 pm to midnight or so. The house is quiet because my wife goes to bed early. I sit at the desk in our loft and warm up writing longhand in a small journal and then transfer whatever I like to the computer. I usually go back and forth between long hand and computer while I’m writing a few times during a session.

What are you working on now?

I feel like it’s bad luck to say.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve gone long spans of time not writing, but I don’t know that I’d call those times blocks. Sometimes it takes me a while to work through a problem in a story or essay and it just needs some time. Those things are frustrating as all hell, but I think natural to the process and I never really feel blocked. Though, now I’ll probably end up with a block. Who knew I was so superstitious?

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

Read more.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read work outside your preferred genre. Whenever I teach an intro to creative writing course most of my students just want to stay in their lane. If they read science fiction or poetry or literary fiction or nonfiction or whatever they want to just read in that genre. That’s BS and it doesn’t help them become better writers. It can be helpful to read within the genre you’re writing to understand the conventions of the form, but ultimately it’s limiting. Reading widely will open you to influences and concepts you might not realize in such a narrow space.

Matt Young holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships with Words After War and the Carey Institute for Global Good. His work can be found in Granta, Catapult, Tin House, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He is the author of Eat the Apple, and lives in Olympia, Washington, where he teaches writing.

George Dohrmann

How did you become a writer? 

I would read the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle with my father in the mornings, and he told me about how people got paid to cover sports teams. He talked about some of them (Jim Murray of the LA Times, for example) with reverence. I wrote for my school newspaper in high school and loved it and I just decided I would be a journalist. Then I did everything I could to land a job in that profession. But I was probably more reporter than writer in my early years as a professional, and I realized that. So, around 2004, I went and got an MFA from the University of San Francisco to try and push myself as a writer. 

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

There are the people who helped me become a writer -- Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Bill Dwyre, Kerry Temple -- and then there are writers I try and emulate, which include Tracy Kidder, David Grann and Susan Orlean. 

When and where do you write? 

In the mornings or the late evenings. Rarely ever during the middle of the day. I like to write in public places, so I got to coffee shops or bakeries or, late at night, to a bar. I put on headphones, sit in a corner, and write.

What are you working on now? 

A book for Ballantine on the way America develops soccer players, why we have been bad at it and why there is hope we'll get better in the future.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No. My training was as a journalist, often writing on a very tight deadline. When I covered basketball, some nights I'd have 30 minutes to write 700 words. You can't NOT file something; I'd get fired if I did. So you always just wrote. Of course, some days the writing is better than others and some days you're tired of writing and feel fried, but even on those days I pick something very easy to write (like a character's basic details or a description of a town), something that is mostly just information and doesn't require any smart crafting, and I get it done.

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

I was a very cautious writer for a long time, which just happens when you are a journalist. A professor at the University of San Francisco told me that it was time I started taking chances in my writing, that it was obvious I could write clearly but now I needed to really write. It was pretty basic advice but something I needed to hear at that time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Learn how to report. Young writers often think they can just sit down and write and it will be brilliant. They don't realize that almost no one does that. Even the best fiction writers do hours and hours of research and reporting for every chapter they write.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

How did you become a writer?

By reading, and by being alone. I grew up in a remote part of the English countryside. As a child I spent a lot of my time walking through the woods, talking to myself, telling myself stories. When I was indoors I was reading. My mother was a clever woman who had been denied a higher education and she was determined the same thing wasn’t going to happen to me. She believed children can understand pretty well anything you give them. They’ve just acquired an entire language from scratch. Their minds are prodigiously receptive. They’re not going to be thrown by an unfamiliar word or a new idea. So she gave me grown-up books to read and my vocabulary and my sense of what can language can do just kept on expanding.

I didn’t speak much – I was a very silent young person – but inside my head I was putting words together all the time.

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

I’ve been reading at least two books a week for over half a century, and every single book I read leaves a residue.  Now, when I’m writing something, I never think ‘I’m going to be a bit Nabokovian now’ or ‘Let’s do this the way Stendhal would do it’ but those possibilities are there, along with a thousand others – tones of voice, rhythms, narrative devices, all stashed away in memory long after I’ve forgotten where I first found them.

Music is important too. When I’m writing I’m aware of tempo and tone, and the need to vary them - the way an adagio passage might require a scherzo to follow it. You get a sense of when a key-change is called for.  None of this is fully conscious when I'm writing a first draft, but afterwards, when I’m revising, I can see it working.

When and where do you write?

I write when I can. Earning a living, looking after family – those things have to take precedence - but there are still plenty of hours in the day. And night. Now I’ve switched to writing fiction I no longer have to lug around a load of research materials. And the wonderful thing about laptops is that they make it very easy to write in bed.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a sequence of short stories, borrowing plots from folk-tales, classical myth, the Bible, and placing them in today’s Britain.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t use that term – but there have been times when I hadn’t yet worked out what I wanted to say.

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

Rather brusquely, from an elderly editor when I was still in my teens ‘Stop going on about wanting to “be a writer”. Just get on and write something.’

What’s your advice to new writers?

See previous answer.

Bio: I’ve been writing for magazines and newspapers all my adult life, beginning with three years as a feature-writer on British Vogue, taking in five years as television critic of the London Evening Standard, and including writing arts features and book reviews for most of the upmarket British newspapers. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association.

My books are

1990 – Cleopatra (winner of the Fawcett Prize and Emily Toth Award)

2003 – Heroes

2013 – The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio (Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa Biography of the Year Award and the Political Book Awards Biography of the Year)

2018 – Peculiar Ground - my first novel, described in the New York Times as 'large and rich... full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail...a grand spectacle'.