Robert Dugoni

How did you become a writer?

Answer: I became a writer because I’ve always loved stories. When I was twelve, my mother, a former English teacher would hand me all these classic books to read. The Count of Monte Cristo, The Old Man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men, and others. I fell in love with stories. As I got older, I began to reader John Irving’s novels, like A Prayer for Owen Meaney and The World According to Garp. I read Patrick Conroy’s books, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides and The Lord’s of Discipline. I loved Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.

I fell in love with characters and stories and when I got to high school I had a choice to make. I wasn’t a very good athlete, though I worked hard, but I was a good writer. My senior year I gave up basketball to be editor of the newspaper. I was accepted at Stanford University and wrote for the Stanford Daily, then briefly for The Los Angeles Times.  But all my brothers and sisters were becoming professionals – doctors and pharmacists and lawyers. So I thought I needed more education and became a lawyer. Once a lawyer I again did a lot of writing and speaking. I was telling stories to the court and to juries. Then I woke up one day and realized I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer. My wife and I made the decision to try. I moved to Seattle and began writing. It was a long process, but eventually, after many rejections, I got an agent and had my third book accepted – a true story called The Cyanide Canary.

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

See above. Also Stephen King, but more of his contemporary novels. John Grisham and Scott Turow as well. Loved Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey and Sol Stein’s book, On Writing.

When and where do you write? 

I have two offices, one at home and one at the law firm I used to work at. It’s important for me to “go to work” every day. It helps me to treat writing as a job, though the best job ever. Plus I like the feeling of getting out of the house. I keep an office at home if I have things to do during the day – appointments, or signings, or appearances. This is because I can get more done than if I have to commute both directions to my other office. I like to maximize my time writing.

What are you working on now? 

Promoting the release of a new series with Charles Jenkins, former CIA agent from the David Sloane series called The Eighth Sister. Working on the copyedits to the next Tracy book, A Cold Trail, and writing the next Charles Jenkins book, The Last Agent.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really. I get stuck at places, but usually because I don’t write from an outline and I’m trying to make my character’s job as difficult as possible. For instance, I recently wrote a great series of scenes where Charles Jenkins goes back to Russia but the person he seeks to help is in Lefortovo Prison. I got stuck for two days on how to get the character out of the prison. But I wouldn’t call this writer’s block.

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

“Write every day. If you get stuck, but you know future scenes in your book, then write those future scenes so that you’re always working toward a completed manuscript.” – Mike Lawson, Seattle Writer.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Learn the craft. Learn traditional story structure as espoused by Joseph Campbell and popularized by Chris Vogler in The Writer’s Journey. Learn it, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time.

Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, #1 Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon Internationally Best-Selling Author of 17 novels in The Tracy Crosswhite series, including, My Sister’s Grave, the David Sloane series, and the Charles Jenkins series, which includes The Eighth Sister, as well as the best-selling The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, The 7th Canon and The Cyanide Canary. He is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction, the Mystery Writer’s Spotted Owl Award and a two-time finalist for the International Thriller Writers and the Harper Lee Awards, the Silver Falchion Award, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. www.robertdugoni.com

Aaron Shulman

How did you become a writer?

I decided I wanted to become a writer when I was 17 in two steps, one that was rational and the other less so. At the time, I wanted to be filmmaker, but I read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and loved it, and then saw the movie, and thought it was so weak compared to the book. Knowing that it had swept the Oscars the year it came out--in other words, that it was a masterpiece, but felt paltry compared to to the novel it was based on--I decided that books were the superior form. Then I read Kerouac's On the Road, and as a bored suburban teenager, the writing life portrayed in that book seemed heady and wild, which appealed to me. Of course, I grew out of that when I went from wanting to be a writer to actually becoming one, which took years and years of hard work sitting at my desk, failing at a few novels, getting experience as a reporter, researcher, and essayist, and then finally landing on the non-fiction project that felt custom-made for me, my first book: The Age of Disenchantments.

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

Fiction writers I adore, who I've tried to learn from, include: Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, Kafka, Marilynne Robinson, Deborah Eisenberg, Vladimir Nabokov, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Enrique Vila-Matas, Ben Lerner, Javier Marías, Javier Cercas, James Salter, Megan Abbott, Rachel Cusk. Non-fiction writers include: Stacy Schiff, Joan Didion, Jon Lee Anderson, Michael Paterniti, Catherine Bailey, Janet Malcom, Tom Reiss, Brendan Koerner, Alice Bolin, Emmanuele Carrere, Maggie Nelson. By those writers, some especial favorite books are: White Noise, Pale Fire, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, A Heart So White, Leaving the Atocha Station, Housekeeping, Outline, The Journalist and the Murderer, Vera, The Skies Belong to Us, The Secret Rooms. As an undergraduate, I studied with Alice McDermott and Stephen Dixon, who gave me a lot of important encouragement, and for non-fiction the journalist Tina Rosenberg mentored me at key points.

When and where do you write? 

Most days I'm at my desk in my home office from around 8am to 5pm, though not all of that is writing time. There's email, escapes to go surfing for an hour or two, time set aside for reading, and occasionally a bit of procrastination.

What are you working on now? 

I'm working on a longform magazine piece and doing research for a possible new non-fiction book.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really in the kind of clinical way people often talk about it. I'm very disciplined about just sitting down and getting stuff onto the page, but often I have periods of reading and research during which I don't write, storing up ideas and information so that when I do finally sit down it comes pouring out of me.

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

Oof, so many good nuggets I've heard it's hard to choose. In terms of storytelling, that it's very important to always keep at the front of your mind what your characters/subjects want and are going after, since if you know that usually you won't get blocked because you'll know what happens next. As for process, that you have to be prepared for more hard, tiring work than you want to do or are likely prepared for.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Work really hard. Be patient. And try all the different forms (fiction, essays, journalism, screenwriting) to discover where your strengths are--and know that your strengths might not lie where you want them to. 

Aaron Shulman is the author of the non-fiction historical narrative The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War (Ecco/HarperCollins, March 2019). After growing up in Michigan, Aaron attended Johns Hopkins as an undergrad and then the University of Montana, where he received his MFA in creative writing. A former Fulbright scholar, his work has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, The American Scholar, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among many other places.

Anna Smith

How did you become a writer?

I was writing when I was a child and teenager, and then worked as a daily newspaper journalist covering stories and investigations all over the world. I gave up the day job to write full time.

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

As a teenager I loved J D Salinger (Catcher In The Rye), and the poignant voice of the young character. Later, I would read everything from thrillers to romances, from Irwin Shaw to Harold Robbins to Michael Connolly. One of the great Scottish crime writers who influenced me was William McIlvanney who created the cop character Laidlaw, and that has spawned a raft of police procedurals from authors across Scotland and beyond. 

When and where do you write? 

I write mostly in Ireland where I have a house on the West coast, or I go to Spain to the Costa del Sol, mostly locking myself away to write. I do write sometimes here in Scotland, but I find it easier to work if I’m away from people. 

What are you working on now?

At the moment I’m working on the third novel of a gangland crime series, set in Glasgow, London and the Costa del Sol, featuring a strong female protagonist who is the reluctant head of a gangland family.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I never suffer from writer’s block, because I believe if you just sit and write something, then before you know it a character will speak to you. 

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

I’m not sure I’ve been given a lot of advice on writing. I write from instinct, maybe even from need. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

If you are a new writer, then the message is to keep going, keep writing, never stop believing. And even if you get knocked back from a few publishers or agents, go back to your characters and move the story on.

Anna Smith is an award-winning journalist who spent a lifetime in daily newspapers, reporting from the frontline all over the world. Her first series of thrillers featured a gritty Glasgow journalist Rosie Gilmour, and Anna used her vast experience as a journalist to create the popular character. Her growing army of readers are now enjoying Anna’s gangland crime thrillers, and the first novel Blood Feud introduces Kerry Casey, who becomes head of a Glasgow crime clan with contacts all over the UK. The sequel, Fight Back, is in Amazon Kindle’s top five for the past month. It’s published in paperback on May 2.