Sydney Ladensohn Stern

How did you become a writer?

Accidentally. I had no intention of becoming a writer – it’s such hard work! I love researching and in my twenties I was very happy to work as a Fortune magazine reporter/researcher. I had all the fun of digging into stories without the pain of writing them. Then I was assigned to work with a new writer on his first story and when I did all the reporting for a sidebar, he innocently suggested that since I’d done the work, I write the piece. I loved doing it, though the editor’s refusal to give me a byline diminished the pleasure a bit. The writers were mostly men and the reporter/researchers were almost all women, and I was told, “If we give you credit, everyone else will want to do it.” He was right. After that, I did too.

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

I assume all writers are readers, so probably everything I’ve read has influenced me in some way. One of my favorite genres is comedies of manners because the authors are such astute observers of human behavior (and misbehavior). The most important person in my writing life was my beloved friend, Deirdre Bair, who died this April. She was a role model in more ways than I realized until after she was gone. Perhaps most important were her energy and her integrity. Deirdre worked so tirelessly that I dared not slack off myself – I’d have been too embarrassed. And she never compromised on the truth as she saw it. I saw her walk away from a work she had spent more than a year researching and writing rather than see it watered down to the point of distortion. 

When and where do you write?

I mostly write at my computer in my home office, looking out onto the Hudson River. Sometimes I am on the floor with pages spread out, cut up into pieces and moved around. And when I’m deep in a project, I’m writing in my head all the time.

What are you working on now?

My dual biography of Hollywood screenwriter/director/producer brothers Herman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz was published last fall and I had started work on a new idea. But with Netflix’s release of Mank, David Fincher’s biopic about Herman, I’ve been writing pieces about the experience of seeing one’s subject on the screen and talking to reporters about what is real and what is fiction. I’ll get back to my next project when Mank-Madness wears off.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I have hit a wall many times and cannot count the trips to the refrigerator, drawers rearranged and now, escape into the Twitterverse, a rabbit hole of distractions and entertainment. If I’m writing a book, I occasionally just abandon the problematic chapter and work on something else. I know I’ll have to return to it eventually, but sometimes the break makes for clearer thinking. 

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

It wasn’t addressed to me personally but without it, you can’t write anything: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” As far as I can tell, feminist/writer/activist Mary Heaton Vorse originally said it to Sinclair Lewis in 1911.

What’s your advice to new writers?

At first let your thoughts flow and don’t edit as you go along (easier said than done, but try). Then be ruthless, including and especially those artistic, poetic phrases with which you’re in love. Read it out loud in your head. Rewrite rewrite rewrite. 

Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s most recent book is The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics. After working as a reporter for Fortune and Money magazines and writing a column, “Suburban Exposure,” for the Scarsdale Inquirer, she freelanced for numerous publications including the New York Times. Her first book was Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry, and her first biography was Gloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique. For more, see sydneylstern.com.

Jenny Bhatt

How did you become a writer?

I grew up in India with strong oral storytelling traditions. Stories have always been a natural way to make sense of the vast, confusing, chaotic world and of my way of being in the world. My earliest childhood memories involve trying to “write” stories on bits of scrap paper at our living room “teapoy” (a kind of coffee table.) When my English teacher got me to enter a children’s short story competition and I won it nationally at age 10, my mind was set that I would be a writer when I grew up. But it wasn’t seen as a respectable profession in middle-class India. So, off I went to become an engineer. But I kept writing through a longstanding journaling practice and for the odd writing workshop in my spare time. In my mid-40s, I finally started sending out and getting work published in literary magazines.

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

So many writers at different times of my life have been profoundly influential. Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf have been the most enduring. A book that changed my life at a formative age (17) was Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Almost all of Woolf’s and Morrison’s novels continue to inspire. When I look at my South Asian literary forebears, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children left a permanent mark because it showed me what was possible as an Anglophone writer. Rohinton Mistry’s story collection, Tales From Firozsha Baag, is one I still revisit from time to time.

When and where do you write?

I’ve written in all kinds of places and spaces given that writing was not a full-time vocation for me until recent years. When I left my corporate job to focus on writing full-time, I wrote from my bedroom, sitting on the bed. Early mornings and late nights have always worked best for me because the world isn’t demanding our attention quite so much then.

What are you working on now?

It’s been quite the year with the pandemic and the US elections. Also, I moved back to the US and got married. And I have two books out in two different countries. So I’m not doing as much writing—beyond the essays and interviews for book promotion—as I’d like to. But I generally like to have multiple projects on the go so I can switch to something daily, even if it’s only for 30-45 minutes. There’s an ongoing novel, an ongoing literary translation, and an ongoing book review. Besides that, I have my bi-weekly podcast, Desi Books.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t think I’ve had writer’s block as I understand the term. I’m never short of things to write about. If nothing else, I’ll fill pages of my personal journal. But there are definitely times when I’m not progressing as much as I’d like with my writing projects. This is more an issue of time management and discipline than anything else.

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

I’ll summarize my top five here:

1/ Write the things we cannot or do not speak about. I can't recall where I came across this some years ago but it's from Diane Williams. To me, there's not much point to writing if the work doesn't do this.

2/ People say: begin with action; in medias res. That's fine. For me, it’s about starting at the point of no return when my protagonist has done or said something they can’t take back. We’re right in the thick of it then. And it gets me writing because I want to know how they’re going to get out of their mess.

3/ With fiction, I’ll ask myself: what would push this scene into some unexpected territory? Not implausible, but unexpected. Then I’ll try to lean into that as far as I can in the early drafts and edit as needed later.

4/ Don’t talk about your writing too much with others. Save all that emotional and cognitive energy for the work. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about the work after you’re done and you’re submitting it, getting it edited or workshopped, published, etc.

5/ I once had a writing instructor who said that a story is as much about what's left unsaid as it is about what's said. In turn, I sometimes tell writers in my workshops: text matters; subtext matters more; and what's not on the page is often more telling than the latter combined. So always be aware of that.

What’s your advice to new writers?

All of the above and this: don’t be in a hurry to get published; get some good, meaty life experiences first. These will give you not just grist for the writerly mill but the emotional energy for your work. Zadie Smith, who was a wunderkind writer, sold her first novel at age 21. But, on a Desert Island Discs episode, as a 40-something writer, she said, “there’s no replacement for experience. You can’t fake it, you can’t fictionalize it. It won’t develop your heart, it won’t develop you as a person. It’s a kind of game that you can play on the page but it’s not the same as being alive. Being alive is a very radical thing; it’s much more difficult.” A thousand amens to that.

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book reviewer, and the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut story collection, Each of Us Killers, was out in September 2020. And her debut translation, Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, was out in October 2020. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in venues like NPR, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Literary Hub, and others.

Matthew Beaumont

How did you become a writer?

As a child, I dreamed of becoming a novelist, but in actual fact I took a rather less Romantic route to becoming a writer, since my books, although increasingly aimed at so-called 'general readers', have emerged from my scholarly engagement with English literature. I've been attempting for the best part of a decade now to explore the literary and cultural histories of cities, especially London, especially at night, and this enterprise has led me not only to write about poets, novelists and others who have written about walking the streets but to record some of my own experiences of metropolitan life (my most recent book contains, in the form of an Afterword, two autobiographical sketches of walking at night, an activity to which I am very committed). I haven't completely given up the dream of becoming a novelist, however, and a couple of years ago the first short story I'd written since attending school was shortlisted for a prize in the UK.   

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

As a child I was profoundly influenced by my uncle, whom I admired enormously. He was a novelist and travel writer called Philip Glazebrook, who is now dead and who is largely forgotten. His prose was extraordinarily elegant and refined, and it was him who helped me understand that, even if Flaubert was a pretty remote example to emulate, there were those closer to home for whom the shape of a sentence was of paramount importance. He gave me a copy of Walter Pater's book The Renaissance  as a teenager, and in Pater's beautiful, rhythmic prose, which Oscar Wilde found utterly intoxicating in the 1880s and 1890s, I encountered an exquisiteness that, though I couldn't possibly reproduce it, seemed something for which to aim.     

When and where do you write? 

I'm forced to fit my writing in around my teaching activities, so I tend to fantasize about sitting at my desk producing reams of perfect prose rather more often than I actually end up sitting at my desk producing small quantities of imperfect prose. I like to write, if I can, in the mornings, when I feel mentally most fresh, with stacks of my books around me (surrounded by these books, which make me secure somehow, I feel a little like those babies whose parents prop them up in their cots with soft toys so that they don't roll over on their sides). I like to go for a walk before I start to write - otherwise I feel as if I haven't connected to the world outside my window.

What are you working on now? 

I'm meant to be writing a history of the literature of London, for Cambridge University Press, but I haven't had time to make a start on it yet, though I am enjoying doing lots of reading related to this project. During the first UK lockdown I started tentatively writing a novel, so I'm hopeful that at some point I can build on the little that I've already drafted.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes, but I cleverly avoid calling it that and tell myself instead that I'd always intended to spend the morning on which I feel blocked reading or walking or even paying bills. The trick is, it seems to me, to trick yourself.

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

That most advice is useless, in that everyone approaches writing in radically different ways... More seriously, though, I'd recommend that people don't get too caught up on the writing itself but concentrate instead on the activities that precede that process - by which I don't mean planning plots or practicing techniques or anything like that, I mean daydreaming. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Go for long walks, in the city or the countryside, and let your imagination off the leash.

Matthew Beaumont, a Professor of English Literature at University College London, is the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015) and The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020).