Janet Evanovich

How did you become a writer?

I was always the kid who could draw and I majored in studio art in college. Truth is I was never a big reader and never wrote as a kid but I always had an outrageous imagination. I was a master at living in fantasyland. Halfway through college I developed a rash from the pigment in paint and that was the end of Janet the Artist. I started writing in my twenties but wasn’t published until I was in my forties. I was a slow learner.

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

Carl Barks (Uncle Scrooge comics), Robert B. Parker (Spenser), Nora Roberts (love her early romances), I Love Lucy, Moonlighting television show are some that immediately come to mind.

When and where do you write?

I write seven days a week in my upstairs office with my dog, Ollie, who sits patiently on the sofa waiting for me to take him for a walk.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on Plum 26. Can’t believe I’ve written this many Plums. It seems like yesterday that I created Stephanie.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I'm happy to say that I have never had that problem. I suffer from writer’s snacking.

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

Don’t save anything for the next book. Put all the good stuff in the one you’re writing.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try to write every day. Get over chapter one and move on. If every agent in New York tells you your work sucks, it probably does. That doesn’t mean your next one will suck. Have a glass of wine and some birthday cake and start over.

Bio: [From my website]: When I was a kid I spent a lot of time in LaLa Land. LaLa Land is like an out-of-body experience -- while your mouth is eating lunch your mind is conversing with Captain Kirk. Sometimes I'd pretend to sing opera. My mother would send me to the grocery store down the street, and off I'd go, caterwauling at the top of my lungs. Before the opera thing I went through a horse stage where I galloped everywhere and made holes in my Aunt Lena's lawn with my hooves. Aunt Lena was a good egg. She understood that the realities of daily existence were lost in the shadows of my looney imagination. After graduation from South River High School, I spent four years in the Douglass College art department, honing my ability to wear torn Levis, learning to transfer cerebral excitement to primed canvas. Painting beat the heck out of digging holes in lawns, but it never felt exactly right. It was frustrating at best, excruciating at worst. My audience was too small. Communication was too obscure. I developed a rash from pigment.

Somewhere down the line I started writing stories. The first story was about the pornographic adventures of a fairy who lived in a second rate fairy forest in Pennsylvania. The second story was about...well never mind, you get the picture.

I sent my weird stories out to editors and agents and collected rejection letters in a big cardboard box. When the box was full I burned the whole damn thing, crammed myself into pantyhose and went to work for a temp agency.

Four months into my less than stellar secretarial career, I got a call from an editor offering to buy my last mailed (and heretofore forgotten) manuscript. It was a romance written for the now defunct Second Chance at Love line, and I was paid a staggering $2,000.

With my head reeling from all this money, I plunged into writing romance novels full time, saying good-by, good riddance to pantyhose and office politics. I wrote series romance for the next five years, mostly for Bantam Loveswept. It was a rewarding experience, but after twelve romance novels I ran out of sexual positions and decided to move into the mystery genre.

I spent two years retooling -- drinking beer with law enforcement types, learning to shoot, practicing cussing. At the end of those years I created Stephanie Plum. I wouldn't go so far as to say Stephanie is an autobiographical character, but I will admit to knowing where she lives.

It turns out I'm a really boring workaholic with no hobbies or special interests. My favorite exercise is shopping and my drug of choice is Cheeze Doodles.

I read comic books and I only watch happy movies. I motivate myself to write by spending my money before I make it. And when I grow up I want to be just like Grandma Mazur.

Jericho Brown

How did you become a writer?

I got really excited about reading poetry and about its possibilities when I was a kid. And I wanted, then, to make things that could create feeling in people in the same way that poems I was reading created feelings in me. I just never stopped wanting that.

When and where do you write? 

Whenever I can. On my lap. Right now, because of how I’m leaning, it’s a cream-colored couch in the Hurst apartment for visiting writers at Washington University. Sometimes, it looks like that tray that comes out of the back of the chair in front of me on an airplane. My gray bare kitchen table. Or my gray kitchen table with mail and books strewn all over it when I haven’t cleared it of clutter. Or the glass dining room table. Most often, though, my lap, and sometimes, in front of a window where I can see my front yard or my back yard. 

I wake up and eat something. Then I read something by Ernest Holmes, usually just a few paragraphs. Then I pray. Then I open my laptop and see what lines are in the single file I have of all my lines that eventually (and magically, it seems) turn into poems over time. I do that for about an hour and a half to two hours and then I stop because by that time two to three hours have passed, and I know it because I’m hungry again. So I get up again to eat, and that means I’m done writing for the day unless some unexpected inspiration appears.

What are you working on now? 

These questions. I'm giving them my all.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No, because I don't think typing is writing as much as thinking is.

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

"Never say no." -Nikki Giovanni

What’s your advice to new writers?

"Never say no, but always use condoms unless you have another plan in mind."

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2019. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.

Joe Moran

How did you become a writer?

I was shy and introverted when I was growing up (and, for that matter, now). I suspect that the art of sentence writing, which lets you endlessly rework your words until they fall right, appeals to people like me who in life are tongue-tied and slow-witted.

I started my career writing academic articles and monographs. Writing in academia is regarded as a fairly neutral activity – simply a way of disseminating your research findings. But this does at least get you into the habit of writing and publishing. And so, when I moved into journalism and writing books for a broader readership, I’d learned some of the ropes.

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

I tend to like writers who write in clean, elegant sentences: Annie Dillard, Diana Athill, Jamaica Kincaid, James Baldwin. I’ve also been influenced by a lot of new nature writing (Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane) – not because I write that kind of book, but because I liked its combining of deep, scholarly knowledge with a personal, intimate voice. Academic writing tends, for perfectly good reasons, to hide itself behind an anonymously professionalised voice and I wanted to move beyond that.

When and where do you write?

I can write anywhere. But my favourite place, when I have time, is at my office desk at work, where I have the luxury of two screens: good for checking facts and multitasking, bad for getting distracted. 

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a family memoir about the island that my grandmother came from in the west of Ireland. It will hopefully have a bit more of a story in it than my previous writing but will also be about bigger things: the relationship between Ireland and Britain, postwar history, families, memory and grief.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not fully, although I’ve had many bad days and many false starts. I’m quite an incremental writer, chipping away gradually, so although it’s a bit of a slog and I never ride on a wave of inspiration, it never quite grinds to a halt either. If you write non-fiction, as I do, there’s always something else to do if you get stuck with the writing: fact-checking, research, reading, reading. The American poet, William Stafford, said something like ‘if you get stuck, lower your standards and carry on’. So if you get writer’s block, just lower your standards. You can always improve it later on.

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

My late father, who was also a writer, said that writing was like dropping a stone down a very deep well. For ages it feels like nothing is happening, and even when you’ve published something, it seems to disappear into nowhere. But then you might hear a tiny “plop” in the water as it makes contact with someone. You never quite know what impact your writing will have, so you just have to write in a way that feels right to you and hope that it connects with someone when it finally reaches the bottom of the well.

What’s your advice to new writers?

First, focus on technique as much as on ideas and subject matter. The painter Edgar Degas once complained to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé that, while he had great ideas, he couldn’t seem to write a great poem. Mallarmé responded that, alas, poems are made of words, not ideas. That feels right to me: writing is made up of words. The only way into your ideas is through the words, so you need to learn how to choose the right words and put them in the right order.

Second, remember that writing is rewriting. Get a first draft down as quickly as you can, and then the hard work begins.

Third, read your work out loud to yourself or, better still, get someone else to read it to you. It may help to clear your head of what you think you’ve said, and introduce you to what you’ve actually said. In other words, it will turn you from a writer into a reader of your work.

Joe Moran is the author, most recently, of First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life (Viking). He has written for the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS and other newspapers and magazines. He is Professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.