Riley Sager

How did you become a writer?

Like pretty much every writer, I started out as a reader. As a child, I always had my nose in a book. At some point in high school, I started writing, mostly out of curiosity. I wanted to see what it was like to create a story rather than consume it. That curiosity remained all through college, which is when I made my first attempt at writing a full-length book. Never did I think it would become my career. It was more of a challenge to myself -- write a book. Once I did that, the challenge changed to trying to get published. Even now, I continue to set challenges for myself. It keeps me motivated. 

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

Well, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY by Roald Dahl was the first book I can remember sinking into so deeply that the real world just fell away. The same thing happened with Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. Stephen King was definitely a huge influence, as was my English teacher my senior year of high school. Kind and wonderful Mrs. James, who encouraged me to keep writing.

When and where do you write?

I can't for the life of me write at a desk. I just can't do it. So now most of my writing is done in a plush chair in what I call my book nook. It's a small room at the top of the stairs of my townhouse filled with bookshelves and comfy furniture. I try my best to write in the afternoons, even though I've always been a night writer. I tend to do my best work in the darkness and quiet of the middle of the night.

What are you working on now?

I'm nearing the end of my next psychological thriller, which I can't say too much about at the moment. But it's a little bit of a departure from my previous books. I'm simultaneously nervous and excited about how it will be received when it's done.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Definitely. There's always a point in every book where I hit a wall and just have no idea how to continue. But I always find my way out of the weeds somehow. The key is to just work through it. 

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

There's a quote attributed to E.L. Doctorow that I've always loved. "Planning to write is not writing." And it's so true. I spend so much time thinking about my book that it borders on the ridiculous. I always have to remind myself that thinking doesn't get words on the page. Nor, quite frankly, does it pay the bills. Only finished books can do that.

What’s your advice to new writers?

There's so much advice out there that I'm reluctant to add to it. I guess it would be to ignore what others are doing. Their success or failures don't matter to you and your writing career. Everyone works at a different pace. Everyone has a different idea of success. Identify your goals first and then figure out a method for achieving them that works best for you.

Riley Sager is the pseudonym of a former journalist, editor and graphic designer who previously published mysteries under his real name. Now a full-time author, Riley's first thriller, FINAL GIRLS, became a national and international bestseller and won the ITW Thriller Award for Best Hardcover Novel. Translation rights have been sold in more than two dozen countries, and a film version is being developed by Universal Pictures. His latest novel, THE LAST TIME I LIED, was a New York Times bestseller. A television adaptation is being developed by Amazon Studios. A native of Pennsylvania, Riley now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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.