Diane Cook

How did you become a writer?

I don’t remember if I ever wrote stories in my youth outside of the books they’d make you write and illustrate in elementary school (which I still have and loved doing) but I just was a writerly person. It just was something I wanted to do. I minored in creative writing in college. But after college I moved to radio producing. It just seemed really impractical to try to make a career out of writing. Or it just didn’t seem like something I could ever figure out how to do. But in that job I met many writers who’d made a career out of writing and after a few years of working with them I felt like I had to give myself a chance to succeed or fail at it, rather than simply decide not to try. So I went back to graduate school and tried really hard to find my voice as a writer and figure out how to make it a bigger part of my life.

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

A few are The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Orlando by Virginia Woolf

When and where do you write? 

I used to write at a shared desk office in my neighborhood. But I haven’t been back since March. I write when my daughter is at pre-school. But I have a new baby and there’s no preschool right now so I’m not sure when and where I’m going to be writing when I go back to work. Before I had children I would try to go away to write, to landscapes that inspired what I was writing, or just to the woods. I write a lot about the natural world, and being close to it helps me work.

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a screenplay right now. I haven’t figured out what my next book project is.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’ve suffered from “I can’t get myself to sit down and work” or “I can’t figure out what this thing is or should be” or “I’m not sure I can do this” but that’s not writer’s block. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block as people imagine it. I can always write something, as long as I let myself play, take risks, and let myself write something I throw away later. It’s more the inability to really access the characters or story or space you need to access. And that is a creative block, or whatever you want to call it. It’s too facile to call it writer’s block. It’s about inspiration and all artists and probably even all scientists and all engineers and anyone who makes things are stricken with it from time to time. So yes, I’ve been against a wall, frustrated, wouldn’t look at my draft for a while. But I get out of it simply by writing. And if it feels lonely I can just remember that it is a creative problem, a creator’s problem and so everyone experiences it from time to time.

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

Write what you want to write, not what you think you should. And if you’re worried that a story has been written before, don’t let that stop you because it has never been written by you. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

There’s no rush. No one is waiting for this thing you’re working on, so relax. Enjoy the process, take risks, let yourself write things you’ll delete later, play, write yourself into places of discovery, ask questions.

Diane Cook is the author of the novel, The New Wilderness, longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection, Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and her stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life, and was the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Daniel Hornsby

How did you become a writer?

In college, my professor Dan Hoyt gave me a stack of some old copies of Hobart (the lit rag) and it was just amazing, funny, and fresh. I started writing short, weird stuff in that vein, and not long after that the Austin-based anthology Unstuck picked up one of my pieces. It turned out that they also published writers like J. Robert Lennon, Carmen Maria Machado, and Amelia Gray; I hunted down what I could from these greats online and in the university library, and it gave me a sense of what younger, contemporary writers were doing. Nothing grows an artist faster than a scene, even an imaginary one. 

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

I feel like I’m always turning toward Ishiguro, Charles Portis, Joy Williams, and Rachel Kushner. Nabokov and Morrison, too, as common as those two gods must be as answers to this question. Valeria Luiselli is another who, even though she’s not much older than me, has been something of a personal lodestar. And I’ve had some great writing teachers: Peter Ho Davies, Dan Hoyt (This Book Is Not for You is a real treasure, a Kansas classic), Katy Karlin, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Nick Delbanco (the debonaire legend), and Elizabeth Dodd. My literature and religious studies teachers have given me a lot, too (shout out to Lisa Tatonetti, Karin Westman, Stephanie Paulsell, Matt Potts, and Luis Girón-Negrón, a genius with a beautiful singing voice).

When and where do you write? 

It used to be at the Memphis mainstay coffee shop, a scrappy, hippie joint called Otherlands (more shout outs, to Mike, Rachel, John, and Steven, for all the coffee) in the morning before heading to the diner/bar where I used to work, pre-pandemic. One slow night at the bar I managed to outline most of my current novel project on guest check pads—thank god my boss wasn’t around. Nowadays it’s still the morning, on our couch. I get too grouchy to write much at night, but sometimes I turn this prickliness toward editing and it helps, actually. One last shout out to the Memphis bar the Lamplighter, where I’ve worked through a few drafts. Looking forward to returning to its beautiful world of cigarette ash, piss beer, and dusty lampshades someday.

What are you working on now? 

Don’t want to say too much about it, but I’m working on a novel with vampires, scammers, and punk bands. (Like every novel premise, it sounds like idiotic, I know. You’ll have to trust me!) I play music here in Memphis as Beauty School and collaborate with a bunch of other musicians, too, so I’ve been writing/recording a lot of songs nowadays, too. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

My blockage usually comes in the form of bizarre fixation on a phrase or sentence that I just can’t get past. The basic cycle goes a little something like this: obsession with a minute detail, existential crisis and despair, then usually some sleep followed by laughing at myself for my idiocy. Think I should find a therapist? Meditating really helps me hop out of these loops, it turns out.

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

My MFA friend (a freaky smart dude named James Kusher) would make these simple moodboards on printer paper. They’d have little grayscale printouts of paintings, schematics of ships, photographs of settings. It wasn’t advice, exactly, but I copied him and now I make all my writing students do it. (My wife, the brilliant essayist Alice Bolin, has started employing these, too.) I’ve found them incredibly helpful early in a project, allowing you to leave some room for dreamy mystery while still letting you explore things. You’re into Eva Hesse? De La Soul? Hummingbirds? Cram all your passions/obsessions into your project and let them talk to each other, find their freak harmonies and sympathetic vibrations.

What’s your advice to new writers?

This might help: think about narrative gravity, the big MacGuffins that pull readers through a book or story. I used to despise plot on principle (I didn’t think it was fascist, really, just kind of dumb), and of course, a lot of the best books truly shine on the paragraph level. But I think that sometimes the architecture for longer projects gets overlooked (at least in my education). This doesn’t have to be a thriller plot, just a kind of unanswered question or empathetic trickery to keep people in your world. Some examples: in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance or Agnes Varda’s great film Vagabond, it’s simply the vulnerability of a lone child on a journey that keeps you moving through the episodes. For a book like Andrew Martin’s excellent Early Work, it’s a love triangle, and for Lydia Kiesling’s Golden State, it’s the narrator’s precarious situation with her baby and her husband in immigration limbo. This might seem stupidly simple, I know, but I think plot God View and microscopic sentence work can really charge each other, and it’s taken me too long to figure out how to make it work for me.

Also, reading plays to sharpen scenes has helped me tremendously. In plays, talk is part of the action, and I think keeping that in mind can be key in making dialogue feel kinetic. To the same end, get a job in food service. Waiting tables introduces you to every kind of character and provides infinite dialogue fodder. I once waited on a woman who daily suits up in scuba gear and cleans the hippo tanks at the zoo. TWO of my old regulars were Navy vets: one worked in cryptography, the other spent years as a “ping jockey” in a submarine as long as a football field. I mean, where else are you going to get that kind of material?

Daniel Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. His stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. His novel Via Negativa was published in August by Knopf. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jessica Gross

How did you become a writer?

The simple answer is that I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was a child. The longer answer: it took many years and many discursions until I had the courage and resilience to really try writing fiction (and showing it to people!). I’d written fiction up through college, but once I graduated, I stopped for years. I did Teach For America for two months; quit and worked at a startup; went to journalism school; and worked as a freelance journalist. It wasn’t until I started taking classes with the amazing Beth Ann Bauman at The Writer’s Voice in Manhattan that I returned to writing fiction in my late twenties. Beth created just the kind of space I needed: supportive, warm, and playful—and not at the expense of rigor. And so I started writing again. 

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

Beyond Beth, I’m indebted to so many gifted, generous wonderful writing teachers. In college, Gabe Hudson taught me how to play on the page. At NYU’s program in Cultural Reporting and Criticism, Katie Roiphe expanded my notion of what was possible on the page, and Susie Linfield taught me how to write—that is, how to think—with relentless clarity. In the New School’s MFA program, where I wrote my debut novel Hysteria, Helen Schulman interrogated my writing while also nurturing me; Darcey Steinke encouraged me to lean into my weirder impulses; Luis Jaramillo’s novel-writing course was a revelation; and Katie Kitamura’s incisive feedback as my advisor helped shape my manuscript. As far as influences I’ve met on the page, they’re far too many to count.

When and where do you write?

Mostly in the mornings, at the kitchen table. 

What are you working on now?

A new novel!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I prefer to think of it as “writer’s fear.” There are so many kinds of fear that can repel me from the page: fear of writing poorly; fear of writing my way to something I’m not ready to see; fear of others’ judgment. I could go on. It’s been helpful to me to set aside just half an hour each day to write. I can keep going, but I don’t have to. That makes it less scary: how much can really happen in half an hour? (Well, a lot. But don’t tell future-me—the one who’s going to wake up tomorrow and do it again.)   

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

Almost all the good stuff happens in revision.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Have fun.

Jessica Gross’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Longreads, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. Her debut novel, Hysteria, was published by Unnamed Press in August 2020.