Alyson Hagy

How did you become a writer?

I was always a reader, but the idea of becoming a writer never occurred to me until I left home for college and my head and heart began to overflow with language. My freshman English professor, a poet, suggested I take a creative writing class after reading the wild tangle of my required essays. I was petrified…and transfixed. I fell flat on my face more times than I can count, but I kept at it. I just couldn’t stop playing with language.

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

Reading fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers gave me permission to write about the rural South. George Garrett, one of the most generous writing mentors around, provided affirmation and counseled patience. Richard Ford kicked me in the behind when I needed it. Writing isn’t supposed to be easy. We don’t deserve easy. He reminded me of that fact. Joy Williams has been a powerful recent influence. Her fiction probes what’s truly existential, the unknowable and forever strange.

When and where do you write? 

I work best in the mornings…in a small, quiet study with a window that keeps the weather and birds right at my shoulder. But my process has shifted when it’s had to. When I had a baby at home, I grabbed any hour I could find. When I was working 60-70 hours a week at my job, I scribbled on the weekends and during holidays. Turns out I can write under less than ideal conditions when not writing at all is the alternative. It’s been good for me to discover (and rediscover) that truth.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a collection of very short stories, some of which look more like fables or parables than “regular” stories, at least to me. And I’m reading a lot, trying to blaze a trail for the next novel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. I’ve always been able to find a short story to work on. I love the form. It just cries out liberation to me. Whenever I feel stickiness setting in, especially if I’m clawing at a novel, I try to counter it by reading—classics I love, crime novels, exciting new fiction, anything that shuts down my editorial mind and takes me into that reader’s kingdom of wonder.

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

Don’t believe that graduate school will somehow make you a writer. Go into the world, get a job that sustains you, and write. If you are writing because you have to, if you are writing when no one is looking and no one cares, then you may indeed be a writer—and you need to cope with that. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read. Read like a crazy person. And read what you love. Don’t shackle yourself with other people’s tastes. Just bury yourself in all the great work that’s out there. Reading is the foundation we all need, and we’re building, and repairing, that foundation each and every day.

Alyson Hagy is the author of eight works of fiction, most recently the novel Scribewhich is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize. She lives and works in Laramie, Wyoming.

Victoria Johnson

How did you become a writer?

I’m a professor (my PhD is in sociology), and academic writing is a big part of my job description. American Eden ismy second book, but it’s the first book I had the freedom to write exactly how I wanted—as a work of narrative nonfiction with character development, pacing, and sensory depth. When I first stumbled across a mention of David Hosack and his lost garden at the heart of Manhattan Island a decade ago, I instantly knew I wanted to write a book that would reach readers of narrative nonfiction. To do this, I needed a kind of mentorship that was not available from my immediate circle of academic colleagues, wonderful as they were. I had the fortune of becoming friends at just the right time with Scott Ellsworth, the author of the brilliant book The Secret Game. He strongly encouraged me to write the book I was dreaming about. He has been my weekly “writing buddy” for many years now, and I couldn’t have written American Eden without his support and ideas. Every new writer should have a Scott Ellsworth in their lives—someone who is cheering you on, talking shop, and keeping you on track with deadlines. 

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

Among nonfiction writers, my three big influences are Ron Chernow, Erik Larson, and Andrea Wulf. I’ve studied their books over and over on my own and have also had the pleasure of conversations about writing with two of them. Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton is indispensable for me, not just because David Hosack was Hamilton’s (and Burr’s) doctor, but because Chernow knows how to make a 700-page book utterly riveting. Larson’s Devil in the White Cityis a masterclass in how to sweep a reader up in the emotional stakes of a character’s life and ambitions. Wulf has written gorgeous, rigorous works of scientific history whose narrative pacing makes the heart pound—especially TheInvention of Nature, her biography of the great Alexander von Humboldt. 

I also read novels constantly; my favorites are Dickens, James, Trollope, and Woolf, and they have definitely shaped my tastes as a writer. But in terms of direct writerly influence from novelists, my sister Elizabeth Kostova (author of The Historian, The Swan Thieves, and The Shadow Land) is at the top of the list. She’s an incredibly imaginative and generous person, and she’s taught me so much about both the craft of writing and the practical aspects of being a writer. 

When and where do you write? 

Every day that I don’t have to be on campus for teaching or meetings, I work in my Manhattan apartment, which is on the top floor of a 21-story building. There’s a lot of sky. I am a cocooner—I have to have music playing in my noise-canceling headphones to settle into my manuscript. I stayed off social media almost completely for years, because it would have ruined my concentration. Some people can toggle back and forth easily. I can’t. Some days I write for ten hours; other days I get only an hour, or even nothing. On days when I don’t get any time to write at all, I try to at least open my writing file and read a little of what I’ve done. It keeps the story and people alive in my imagination until I can write again.

What are you working on now? 

I’ve got some new book ideas percolating, but I’m currently on a sixty-stop book tour, and I also teach full-time. In my spare moments, I’m working on a very short documentary about David Hosack with the graphic artist Markley Boyer. Our video will include a virtual-reality version of Hosack’s botanical garden, which he built on twenty acres of rural Manhattan he purchased in 1801. Today that land is home to Rockefeller Center. You will be able to “walk” toward 30 Rock and suddenly find yourself strolling through Hosack’s fields of grain and up the hill into his conservatory (now the site of Radio City Music Hall). I find it thrilling that we are always moving through layers of history when we go about our daily lives. I tried to convey that thrill in the pages of American Eden. Now I want to make it visually immediate for people.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not in a way that lasted more than a few hours. I had a ritual while writing American Eden. If I was stumped on how to bring an event or character to life with my words, I would open Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City to a random page and read for a while. Because that book is so vivid and intense, this ritual always shook loose whatever had gotten stuck in my own writing. American Eden is a very different kind of book from Devil, and I’m not Erik Larson. But as a way to keep me writing, it worked every time. I think it’s called inspiration. Everyone can find some version of this technique; it’s just a matter of figuring out what unfreezes your imagination.

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

“Write relationships.” A truly great biographer suggested this to me before I started writing American Eden. (Eternal gratitude.) He pointed out to me that people are absolutely fascinated by watching humans interacting. Will they love each other? Hate each other? Snipe behind one another’s backs? Reconcile after falling out? I rushed to apply this advice to my mountains of archival documents and realized that it was the secret to both the structure of my book and its emotional core. After that, I never had any doubts about the form it should take.  

What’s your advice to new writers?

First, if you haven’t read it yet, read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. The title story of this book helped me get my first draft written. The other seven or eight drafts were easy compared to that one—and often very fun. When writing is going well, there’s almost no feeling more joyful and absorbing. Second, if you feel driven to write and would be unhappy if you can’t, you should feel fine about protecting your writing time. It’s not a comfortable choice to make, often, and it’s not without consequences, but it’s legitimate. It might even preserve your sanity and bring you intense happiness, which is good for everyone around you.  

Victoria Johnson is the author of American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in nonfiction and a New York TimesNotable Book of the year. She is an Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College of the City University of New York. For more go to americaneden.org.

Joseph Finder

How did you become a writer?

Not an easy question to answer. In one sense I decided to become a writer when I was eight years old and discovered a book in the Albany Public Library called The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, by Eleanor Cameron. I fell in love with the book — an adventure story about a couple of boys who build a rocket ship and discover a planet — and wrote the author a letter. Eventually she replied, and we corresponded over the course of several years. That was my realization that behind stories and novels are human beings who make all these narrative decisions, and I thought, what a cool job!

But I really became a writer during grad school, right after college. I was at the Harvard Russian Research Center and came to the realization that I didn’t want to be an academic. Or work for the CIA, as some of my classmates did. In my free time I read Robert Ludlum and Ken Follett and Stephen King and some of the older suspense fiction novelists like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene when he was slumming. I really wanted to write a thriller, but couldn't summon the courage to try it. So I had an idea for a nonfiction book, about the most powerful American businessmen and their personal connections to the Kremlin. I submitted it to an agent and got a publisher . . . and I was a writer. I was twenty-two.

But I still wanted to write fiction. I read a novel by Frederick Forsyth with scenes that took place in the Politburo, in the Kremlin, and I thought, now I’m an expert in this stuff and I could try my hand . . .

I took a job teaching writing, and in the meantime I wrote and rewrote and rewrote a political thriller. I gave myself a deadline of three years — if you can sell a novel and be able to support at least yourself on the advance, I told myself, you can quit teaching and write full time. Just days before my deadline I managed to sell the twenty-third draft of my first novel for a lot of money, and the next day I went in to work and quit.

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

Everything I read influences me in some way — I learn from every book I read, good or bad, literary to “popular” — but the authors who come to mind, in no particular order, are John le Carré, Ira Levin, Eric Ambler, Robert Ludlum, William Goldman (Marathon Man), Ken Follett, Stephen King, Thomas Harris, John Grisham, Lee Child, James M. Cain, Ring Lardner. I had a great and terrifying history teacher in college who gave me my first D and made me work on the writing until I got it right. I’m also influenced by good TV (and there’s lots of it these days) and a well-made thriller movie. The classic noir film The Sweet Smell of Success was a major inspiration for my book Guilty Minds.

When and where do you write?

Writing is my job, and I treat it that way. I have an office in a townhouse in Boston a few blocks from where I live, where I keep more or less regular business hours, except toward the end of the writing of a book, when the writing takes over my life. I also have a writing shed at my home on Cape Cod.

What are you working on now? 

My next novel, Judgment, will be out in January 2019, so I’m working on some advance publicity for that. But mainly I’m writing the fourth Nick Heller novel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I used to, for sure. But I learned to approach it diagnostically: do you need to think about the scene more, do you need to do more research, do you need to leave the office and work out? What I always say is that plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, so I don’t let myself get writer’s block. I don’t get it any more. 

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

Just write it. The Russian proverb says, “The first pancake is always a lump.” The first draft is always going to be lousy, but you have to write it so you can fix it. You can’t fix something that’s not on the page.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Whatever you’re working on, finish it. Commit the time. Ideas are actually the easy part of writing, and it happens to all of us — we get 10,000 or 20,000 words into a book and then have a great idea for something else. It’s happened to me (and on at least one occasion, it turned out to be a good thing, but do as I say, not as I do). Almost every idea can wait. What matters is that you finish the story or novel you’re writing now.

Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen suspense novels, including JUDGMENT, a stand-alone thriller (available on January 29), and GUILTY MINDS, the third to feature “private spy” Nick Heller. He lives and works in Boston.