Tom McAllister

How did you become a writer?

I think there are two parts to this answer: 1) how did I get into books and writing in the first place, and 2) how did I transition that into doing it professionally. 

I started reading and writing in earnest when I was in 7thgrade, after reading my first “real” book for school, Of Mice and Men. My father had always been a voracious reader, so the house was filled with books anyway, and we played lots of word games (Scrabble, games in the newspaper, etc), and so it’s not like reading was new to me, but it was the first time I thought about writing as a real thing one could do. 

In college, I started as a journalism major because I was pretty good at writing and knew that was a job that could lead to being paid for writing (in theory). I hated those classes, though. I took an elective with Justin Cronin, who had not yet become the big, famous author he is now, and that changed my life. Though it was probably more gradual than this, I remember it as a single moment of epiphany, saying, “Okay, this is what I want to do with my life. I want to be like him.” He helped me take writing seriously, and helped me get into grad school, where, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by talented, dedicated writers who pushed me to demand much more of myself. 

I still didn’t publish anything at all for another 2 years after grad school, but that was how it got started. 

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

Teachers: Justin Cronin, Frank Conroy, Charles D’Ambrosio. Also a number of non-writers who taught me in high school and college and encouraged and supported me in incredible ways. 

I think the question of influential books is a little tricky, because the books I love now are not the ones I loved when I was 20, and vice versa. But some books that have had a huge impact on the writer I am right now: Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Pastoralia (George Saunders), Play it As it Lays (Joan Didion), The Antagonist (Lynn Coady), inscriptions for headstones (Matthew Vollmer), Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson), An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Elizabeth McCracken), Men We Reaped (Jesmyn Ward), everything by Jo Ann Beard. 

When and where do you write? 

I teach at Temple University, and lately I’ve had early classes, so on teaching days, I try to get work done in the afternoon before my wife gets home. On non-teaching days, I try to write in the morning, getting most of my work done before lunch time, if possible. It’s when my head is relatively clear and it prevents me from doing that thing where you keep tricking yourself into thinking the day is infinite, and eventually you’ll get to it. I’m fortunate, too, that my job allows me a summer break, when I try to get a ton of writing done, if possible.

Where I write: the answer is boring. I have an office in my house, with a standard desk and a standard computer and the standard knick-knacks on and around the desk. 

What are you working on now? 

I’ve had two novels come out in the past 16 months (they were both written over a long period, and the release dates are sort of a fluke), and all the activity around that has slowed me down some. I’m in the very early stages of drafting a new novel, but I hate even calling it a novel; right now, it’s 10,000 words in a document on my computer. It’s nothing. Maybe in a year it will be something. 

I’ve always been working on a number of essays that I’ve been half-writing for years. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Right now, as I’m being more unproductive than usual, I don’t think I would call it writer’s block. I’m distracting myself. I’m on social media and I’m obsessing over the news, and I’m wasting time. That’s not about being blocked, though; that’s about slipping out of my good habits and doing sloppy work. 

The only time I could say I was feeling truly blocked, unable to do anything, was in grad school, when the deadlines paralyzed me with fear. Now, I have so many notes, and so many partially started ideas, and so many writing prompts I could use, that I only have myself to blame if I’m not getting something done. 

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

Is it cheating if I name two? 

One, from a variety of writers and teachers: if you’re getting bored while you’re reading it, then it’s boring. Don’t try to convince yourself it’s not.

Two, from my friend Dave Housley, who has written a number of books (most recently This Darkness Got to Give): don’t be afraid to get weird. Take that dumb idea you’re afraid nobody is going to like, and write that, because only you can do it. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Stop measuring yourself against other writers. Very, very few of us will ever achieve anything close to fame or longevity; the only goal is to tell the truest, best, most interesting version of the story you want to tell. Every single other thing is out of your control. 

Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower’s Handbook, and the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He co-hosts the podcast Book Fight! and is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse. He lives in New Jersey and teaches at Temple University.

Isaac Marion

How did you become a writer?

I don't know if I ever really "became" one. I've been writing stories since I was a little kid, they just gradually got more ambitious and—I hope—a little better written.

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

I've never been good at pinpointing specific influences for my writing. It just distilled from a mixture of everything I've absorbed over the years and I have a hard time defining a hierarchy. There are a handful of authors I could name that were significant to me at some point in my life but my tastes and interests are always on the move so I can't really stand behind anything I liked more than a few years ago, and I think people are too eager to latch onto "influences" as short-hand for "this is what I do." I could list Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Charlie Kauffman, and so on, but my writing isn't really anything like theirs, so...I don't know if it's helpful!

When and where do you write? 

Since I started writing full time I've done most of it in coffee shops, first thing in the morning. I like being able to leave the house and "go to the office," it helps establish some kind of structure for my day, and I feel like the ambient human energy in the air does something for the writing. The downside of this is the high potential for distraction—like when an annoying guy sits at the table next to me and starts humming and dancing in his chair or doing a Skype call at full volume, etc. I have been trying to wean myself off of the coffee shop setting because it would be very convenient and clean to write from home, but so far it just hasn't clicked in my brain.

What are you working on now? 

I just finished editing another draft of THE LIVING, which is the final book in the Warm Bodies Series. There will be more editing to do on that one, but when that's done, it will finally be time to leave that series behind and start a whole new era of writing, which is daunting but thrilling. I have been circling a story that I wrote in a primitive form a long time ago, about an alternate reality that people access via dreams and the alternate selves that live there. We'll see.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Yeah, it happens. Ideas are ephemeral things that emerge from a complex alchemy of experience and you can't force them into existence when they aren't ready. So I've had terrifying moments when I just don't know where to find the story. But it usually just takes a few long drives and sweaty night jogs to reopen the valve.

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

The only bit I can think of is a surprisingly practical one from Hemingway, something about always trying to end your writing session on an "easy" part so that you have something welcoming to jump back into for your next session. Until I heard that, I had always tried to just keep writing until I got stuck and couldn't continue, but that means every writing session is going to start with an obstacle. I learned that leaving something juicy for tomorrow makes it much easier to plunge back into the flow.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don't treat your writing like a product. Don't do market research to find out what genre is hot right now. Don't tailor your writing to fit a trend or to please a particular audience. Doing these things will make you a successful writer who sells lots of copies. Most writers are trying to do these things. Please don't do these things. My advice may not be entirely in your interests. I may have other motives, like when an ecologist advises you not to dump your garbage in the river even though it's easier than recycling. If your goal is to write to a formula in order to satisfy the mainstream market and keep the shelves of department stores stocked, my advice will not sway you, but I will say it anyway. Please don't write to appease others. Not the market, not a demographic, and not your family. Write the story that fascinates you in the way that electrifies you, and ignore everything else.

Bio: I wrote the Warm Bodies Series. The first book was adapted into a movie and was a big deal for a minute. I continued the story in three more books, the last of which is called THE LIVING and will be released soon, after which I will never speak of zombies again. I live in Seattle with my cat Watson and play a weird synth thing in the band Thing Quartet.

Nina Allan

How did you become a writer? 

The short answer is, I don’t know! I began writing my own stories and poems more or less as soon as I could read, and never really stopped. Writing things down came naturally to me as a way of recording my experiences, feelings and thoughts – a way of confirming to myself that something had actually happened. I took my writing for granted in a way, as an internal extension of my exterior self, which might be part of the reason it took me a relatively long time to begin my career as a writer. My first published story appeared in 2002, in a UK fantasy magazine called Dark Horizons. 

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

Always other writers. Older writers – often dead writers – who set out on this path long before me, the real trailblazers. As I began to attain maturity as a reader, the Brontë sisters and their works became increasingly important to me as examples of what the power of the imagination could achieve. A little later I became obsessed with the novels of John Wyndham and Iris Murdoch. I wrote my Masters thesis on the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, whose work perhaps remains the ultimate demonstration of what can be accomplished by words on a page. In terms of books aboutwriting, there are two that stand out for me. Firstly, John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, which I discovered almost by accident soon after I began writing for publication, and Stephen King’s On Writing, which I recommend to everyone even remotely interested in writing, or simply as a reading experience. Both these guys take very different approaches – sure proof that in writing there really are no rules – but what unites them is their passion, the seriousness with which they approach their subject matter. For Gardner as for King, writing is not just a craft or even an art, it is a vocation. It is this sense of commitment, more than anything, that sets the seal on whether someone will ultimately succeed in their desire to write.  

When and where do you write?

I write every day, unless I’m travelling. I am one of those writers who thrives on routine, so you’ll normally find me at my desk, in my office, looking out on the Firth of Clyde and progressing at a slower pace than I would ideally like. 

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new novel, set here in Scotland, on the Isle of Bute. A photographer returns to her childhood home to confront the truth of what happened to her best friend, who was murdered. It starts out reading like a murder mystery but becomes increasingly weird the further you get into it. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t normally find trouble in writing or even in finding ideas – there are always too many ideas to choose from, which can be a problem in itself. My own peculiar version of writer’s block is changing my mind about a project half way through. The book I plan to write is never the book I end up writing, which inevitably means I end up scrapping a lot of material. I had already written 60,000 words of draft for my 2017 novel The Rift before I realised I had started in the wrong place – I trashed everything and began again. It sounds frustrating, terrifying even, but I have learned to accept this process of revisionism as a normal part of my working process. And no writing is ever wasted – even the stuff you throw away is stuff you have learned from. 

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

‘Write a proper second draft’. This piece of advice was given to me by my partner, Christopher Priest, soon after we met. He described his own method to me, which was to print out his first draft, then begin typing it out again, from the beginning, making necessary changes as he went. It sounded like hell to me and I privately swore I’d keep to my own method, which was to edit on the page, going over and over the draft as it existed until it felt right. Several months later I was having problems with a short story, and so I decided to give Chris’s method a try, experimenting with just the first page. The results were so instantaneous, and so dramatic, that I switched over to his method immediately and never looked back. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

The only piece of advice I feel confident in giving – because I know it is essential – is to read, read, read above your level. It is tempting to keep looking over your shoulder at what your coevals are up to, but ultimately the only way to learn and to progress and to put fire in your belly is to read works by writers who are above and beyond you, so far ahead of you that you feel you’ll never be able to achieve what they have achieved. Discover your own literary heroes, your own personal canon. Set the bar high, and remember, there are no rules. 

Nina Allan was born in East London. She studied German and Russian at Exeter University and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where she completed an MLitt and monograph on madness, death and disease in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. With her short fiction appearing in many magazines and anthologies, Nina’s story collection THE SILVER WIND, a meditation on time, memory and the nature of reality was awarded the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France) in 2014. Her debut novel THE RACE, set in an alternate Britain and dealing with themes of identity and loss, was shortlisted for the Kitschies Red Tentacle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2015. She also won The Novella Award for THE HARLEQUIN. THE RIFT, a tale of two sisters separated as teenagers and reunited in mysterious circumstances twenty years later, was published in July 2017 by Titan Books and won the British Science Fiction Award and The Kitschies Red Tentacle. Nina lives and works on the Isle of Bute, together with her partner the writer Christopher Priest. Nina's new novel, THE DOLLMAKER, will be published in spring 2019 by riverrun (UK) and Other Press (US).