J.A. Jance

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer by writing. I wasn’t allowed in a university creative writing class in 1964 because, as the professor told me, “You’re a girl. Girls become teachers or nurses. Boys become writers.” So I lived my life. I taught high school English for two years and served as a school librarian for five. Then I spent ten years in the life insurance business. In my late thirties, in March of 1982, I gave myself permission to try living my dream of being a writer. My first book, which weighed in at 1200 pages, never sold to anyone but it was my on-the-job training for being a writer. That was 36 years and 57 books ago. So I became a writer by writing.

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

As soon as I read the Wizard of Oz in second grade I realized that a living, breathing person put the words on those pages, and right then—at age eight—I knew that was what I wanted to do.

When and where do you write? 

I write every day. Usually in a comfy chair in the family room or out on the porch with my laptop on my lap. Right now I’m in a family room with my fingers on the keyboard and with my elbow resting on the back of my long-haired, miniature dachshund, Mary.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on the next Ali Reynolds book, # 14. It’s called The A List.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’ve suffered from writers block often. The only cure for it is actually more writing.

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

The man who sold me my first computer in 1983 fixed it so that whenever I booted up, these are the words that appeared on the screen: A WRITER IS SOMEONE WHO HAS WRITTEN TODAY! Those were words that sustained me before I became a published writer and they’re a gift I pass along to the new writers I encounter along the way.

What’s your advice to new writers?

See number six above.

Bio: I was born in South Dakota, raised in Arizona and now live with my husband and two dogs, dividing our time between homes in Tucson and Seattle.

Howard Michael Gould

How did you become a writer?

I sort of backed into it. We had a 10 watt radio station at my high school. By my senior year I was its program director, and I gave myself a one hour block once a month to do a sketch comedy show, inspired by Saturday Night Live, which at the time was fairly new. I wrote it all myself. But I didn’t think of it as writing; I thought of it as doing radio.

The following summer, right before college, I was a counselor at a camp for the arts, running their closed-circuit radio station. I had a friend there who was a writing counselor. He was a little older, had been writing and putting on plays at Yale. I played him cassettes of some of my radio stuff and he suggested I try writing a play. I kicked out a one-act on a day off, we did a reading, and I was hooked.

Thirty-five years later (yikes), I sort of backed into becoming a novelist. I’d made my living as a writer for all the years since college -- five years in advertising, then TV (mostly sitcoms) and then movies. I had this detective screenplay which I thought was as good as anything I’d ever written, and we kept coming so close to getting it made, but couldn’t quite get it there. It occurred to me that even though detective movies weren’t as common as they used to be -- which was why we were struggling to get it produced -- they still published a whole lot of detective books. So I got the book rights back from the producers and wrote a reverse adaptation, just because I didn’t want this good material to die.  I didn’t know if I had the talent to write fiction -- I hadn’t tried since my teens -- so I wrote it under a pseudonym, so that if it stunk it wouldn’t damage my TV and movie career.

But then I got a book agent right away and he sold it right away. Thirty-five years, and it was the first thing that ever came easily. Somewhere in there I dropped the pseudonym and now I think of myself as a novelist who still occasionally does some TV and movie work.

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

First, that fellow counselor, Glenn Gers, who to this day is one of my closest friends and the most talented writer I know, full stop. And also the most deeply thoughtful writer about the activityof writing. (More on this below.)

I had three important English professors at Amherst College, right after I started writing, who shaped the way I think about literature and my own work: Richard Cody, William H. Pritchard, and Benjamin DeMott. I still think about the things I got from them at least every month, probably every week. 

Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart were my first creative role models, and Mike Nichols, too. Later I had the great fortune to have Nichols as a mid-career mentor for a while. I also learned a lot from Allan Burns, whom I worked with early in my TV career.

Nothing was as powerful as my first time reading the Christopher Durang one-act SISTER MARY EXPLAINS IT ALL FOR YOU, when I was eighteen or nineteen. It was like the sky cracked open. Woody and Gelbart were gentle; SNL was gentle; this guy was out to break things and somebody could get hurt. I hadn’t realized comedy could be like that.

The biggest influence on the fiction I’m writing now has to be Scott Turow, but I didn’t realize that until I was deep into my sec ond novel. Now I’m going back through all his books and can really see where a lot of my instincts came from. He went to Amherst, too, but well before me. I don’t know what that means.

When and where do you write? 

I start early mornings, seven days a week, at a coffee shop about three quarters of a mile from my house. I walk there and treat it like an office, put in a full morning, then usually go somewhere else and work through an early lunch. My brain’s fried by 12:30 or 1:00; then I walk home, take a short nap, and spend the afternoon reading and exercising and handling whatever miscellaneous work I have floating around, like answering these questions.

What are you working on now?

Usually I’m deeply focused on one project, but this summer it’s been sort of a potpourri. I’m spending this week and next making small revisions for the publisher on a second Waldo book. I’ve been polishing a draft of a stand alone comic novel, fairly different, and starting to plot out the third Waldo. I’ve also been doing a little movie work (revisions for the director on the screenplay version of LAST LOOKS, which will, with luck, go into production soon) and a little television development.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’m so terrified of the blank page that long ago I worked out an M.O. to get around it. I outline like mad, months and months sometimes, so that the “actual writing” is really just finding the words (dialogue for a movie or TV script, prose for a novel) to fill in scenes I’ve already worked out thoroughly. When I’m writing TV or movies, I’ll write the first pass as fast as I can, as badly as I have to, then revise like mad, too, scribbling on it with a red pen, then typing in the changes and doing it again, pass after pass after pass until I’m finally satisfied. Novels I treat a little differently, trying to write as well as I can sentence by sentence, but I’ll still go back and do three or four or five or six laborious passes at each chapter before I’m ready to move on to the next, knowing even then that I’ll be back for more passes later.

So, no, I don’t get writer’s block, but only because I’m so terrified of it that I’ve figured out how to inoculate myself. 

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

This goes back to the last question, and to Glenn Gers, whom I mentioned earlier. It was about twenty years ago. I was already a successful TV writer and showrunner and I was doing one of my first screenplay assignments, an adaptation of a novel for Jack Nicholson to star in, and I had done my extensive outlining and I blasted through a pass, and it sucked, but I was frozen in place, so intimidated by the idea of Big Jack reading it that I couldn’t think of how to make it better. I guess that’s a cousin to writer’s block, a rare case of even that for me.

Glenn said: Just do whatever it is you did when writing has gone well. Work the time of day you worked, eat what you ate, drink what you drank, use the same pens or pads or computer or whatever. The same process, in every way you can control. I did, and broke through whatever had been holding me up and it turned out really well.

It was the first time I gave thought to regularity of process, about keeping my mechanics simple and constant so that the creative part can happen without distraction. I’ve become kind of neurotic about it since then. I need the same three software programs on my laptop (MS Word, Scriptware, and Writers Blocks, my secret weapon), and I bop between them constantly, even on novels. When I’m working in pen I need to use a Uniball 0.2 mm Roller, red when I’m scrawling on a printed page and black when the pages are new, and, for those new pages (more common on a script than a novel), I need a three-hole pad so I can add them to my loose leaf binder, and not just any pad but a National Porta-Desk, college ruled. (I order a carton of them every few years.)

By the way, on that Nicholson project, the director slipped in an old script of his own instead, and they made that one. Jack never read mine. But still.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don’t let anyone outwork you; keep your butt in the chair. Learn to love outlining; it’s your best friend. Learn to love revising; it’s your second best friend.

Howard Michael Gould graduated from Amherst College and spent five years working on Madison Avenue, winning three Clios and numerous other awards. In television, he was executive producer and head writer of CYBILL when it won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series, and held the same positions on INSTANT MOM and THE JEFF FOXWORTHY SHOW. He wrote and directed the feature film THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY LEFAY, starring Tim Allen, Elisha Cuthbert, Andie MacDowell and Jenna Elfman. Other feature credits include MR. 3000 and SHREK THE THIRD. His play DIVA premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival and La Jolla Playhouse, and was subsequently published by Samuel French and performed around the country. LAST LOOKS, his first novel, will be published by Dutton in August. A sequel, BELOW THE LINE, will follow in 2019.

Anastasia Edel

How did you become a writer? 

It was a two-part process, with a thirty-year-long gap in between. 

When I was five years old, I fell into a pothole. I’d been walking home from a store, holding my mother’s hand, and suddenly the familiar disappeared—the poplars, the cracked asphalt, the torn mesh fence. The sky remained, but smaller and farther up, and all around me were telephone wires—red, yellow, white. Dry and quiet inside. In a few minutes (which must have seemed quite long to my mother) a passerby pulled me out. The scratches on my elbows and knees healed quickly, but what remained was the intense awareness of a reality shift. I spent a good part of my childhood disappearing into imaginary potholes, and though it would be years before I’d actually start committing some of them to paper, I think of that incident as an entry point of sorts, an initiation into possibilities afforded by a shift in perspective.  

Part two happened some twelve years ago, when, late at night, I sat down at the kitchen table to write a reminiscence of my trip to the south of France. I remember deriving immense pleasure from describing all the things that had struck me—the lavender fields, the way the sky seemed to have absorbed their color, the swallows darting along the dusty road that zigzagged towards the sea.  I also remember how that story should have ended: with a turn towards the airport, and a flight home. Instead, the person at the wheel—no longer me— turned in the opposite direction. I didn’t know it back then, but at that moment my life changed drastically. Slowly, writing would subsume everything else. A career I’d been pursuing would come to an end, and the new path I found myself on had no set destination. I embraced it—or it embraced me. Either way, I’ve been walking it ever since. 

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

I grew up in the last two decades of the Soviet Union, so my literary sensibility was formed, not surprisingly, by Russian classics. Chekhov, with his humor, his insights into the human soul, and his imperceptible shifts between light and despair, was my favorite. From the Soviet literature, there was the satirical duo of Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, quite possibly the funniest writers on earth.  By high school, I could quote “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf” virtually from any place. 

Then, in 1986, when I was in sixth grade, my mother exchanged twenty-five kilograms of used newspapers for a coupon that entitled us to buy a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “Master and Margarita,” now in wide circulation.  I read it in three nights, and to this day remain under its spell. It has everything a novel should have—language, satire, adventure, magic, philosophy, invention; good and evil. Each time I read it, I find something I haven’t noticed before.  

I also had a practical insight into the writing profession early on: by a strike of good luck I had married into a writers’ family long before harboring any literary ambitions. My husband’s father and grandfather used to work for Russia’s famous satirical magazine “Krokodil,” and my husband grew up in a writers’ cooperative in Moscow, with neighbors like Vladimir Voinovich, Bella Akhmadulina, Vasily Aksenov. I had lived in that house too. And though we’d all left Russia, the “Writers’ House” stayed with us: our family conversations invariably revolved around literature. That extended “steeping” period proved to be of an enormous advantage to me when I started writing. Setting out, I had readily available advice from fine writers and critics right under my roof. They encouraged me, cheered me, and saved me from obvious missteps.    

I also studied craft formally at the Pacific University MFA Program in Oregon, where I was challenged and nurtured by great writers—Jack Driscoll, Frank Gaspar, Kellie Wells, Valerie Laken. But I owe the most David Long, my first semester advisor. By refusing to cut me any slack for not being a native speaker, and by insisting I ditch abstractions in favor of concrete things, David awoke me to a higher level of writing—deeper, clearer and emotionally resonant. That first semester was like falling into one of my potholes: I emerged a different writer. 

When and where do you write? 

When I started writing, I was working full time and had two young kids, so I had this insane schedule of writing between 9pm and 2 am. I knew every single coffee shop in the area that stayed open until midnight, knew how to slip into my own house without waking anyone up and write a couple more hours at my own desk, knew how to get up in the morning, take the kids to school, somehow make it to the office in the city and not fall asleep at the meetings. I wrote on buses, trains, airplanes and sometimes at work, when I thought people couldn’t figure out what I was doing. 

Now that writing is my main job I can work during daytime, and I am still in awe. This is when I try to do most of my “fresh” writing and save evenings for editing and research. 

What are you working on now? 

A book tentatively titled “The Gone Empire,” a meditation on the strange lives we lived in USSR. It continuously stuns me that the country I grew up in, along with millions of other Soviet citizens, no longer exists. But we do. So the book is an attempt to recapture the lost world, to record our collective memories before they’re buried under the sand of time, and before others could manipulate them for their own gain.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I suffer from fear of not being able to write a new good piece. The only remedy for that is to sit down and start writing. There are periods, of course, when conquering that fear results in pages of merciless garbage, and that is draining. That’s when I stop writing for a day or two, and just read, think, and run. Eventually I get to a point when I can either solve the problem, or at least talk about it. Invariably, something happens, and the fire is reignited. 

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

“Don’t kill all your characters in Chapter 5.” 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Writing is part magic, part craft. There’s nothing you can do about magic: it either happens or it doesn’t. But learning the craft is possible. So while you’re waiting for the muse to visit you, work on your craft. Study writers who succeeded where you’re struggling, push yourself hard, never coast: the gods of writing are very demanding. A writer is this lonely creature that dares to insert herself between the world and whatever it is doing at the moment and demand: “Look here. I have something important to tell you.” It’s an opening, an opportunity and an enormous challenge. The better equipped you are, the higher the chances that you will be heard. 

Anastasia Edel grew up in southern Russia during the last years of the Soviet Union. She graduated with a degree in English and German studies and worked as a fiction translator. A recipient of the British Government Chevening Award, she moved to England for postgraduate studies, and then to the US, earning her MFA in Writing from Pacific University.  She's the author of “Russia: Putin's Playground” (Callisto Media, 2016). Her prose has appeared in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Project Syndicate, Quartz, and World Literature Today. She lives in California and teaches Russian politics and culture at OLLI UC Berkeley.