Sarah Schulman

How did you become a writer?

Hard to say but by age six I knew!

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

Too many to even understand. The Diary of Anne Frank and Harriet The Spy were my first exposures to the idea that girls could be writers.

When and where do you write?

I don't have a standard time or place. I work when I feel like it and have time.

What are you working on now?

About to start a brand new novel, probably in 2 weeks. Just finished a novel, tentatively called The Cure, The Cause.​ Working on a screenplay for a biopic of Carson McCullers called LONELY HUNTER. Working on the musical adaptation of my novel, SHIMMER with composer Anthony Davis and lyricist Michael Korie. Collaborating with Marianne Faithful on a musical called THE SNOW QUEEN using 22 songs of her 60 year career.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Information has consequences. - Irene Fornes

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

Write whatever you want for the first six drafts, then you need to start shaping it into something that communicates to readers.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. Her 20th book, LET THE RECORD SHOW: A Political History of ACT UP, NY 1987-1993 has been optioned for television by Killer Films and Concordia Films.

Yang Huang

How did you become a writer?

I took a long winding journey to become a writer. I first became an engineer, then an immigrant, and then returned to school to study literature and writing. Read my journey in "Why I Write in English." For me, being a writer is not a title but a responsibility. I became a writer because I had to express my authentic experience as an Asian American.

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

When I was a child, I fell in love with Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. When I was in college, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Gardner changed my life. Then as a fiction writer, I admired Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elena Ferrante, Eileen Chang, and so many more.

English is my second language. My education was patchwork. People have mentioned that my novels remind them of the works by Barbara Kingsolver, Elena Ferrante, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Patricia Highsmith, and others. Then I rushed to read and learn from their great works.

When and where do you write?

Since I work as a computer engineer, and I have a family with children, I mostly write at night, on weekends and holidays. I cannot be picky about where I write. A desk behind a locked door is all I need. I call it going to my writing cave.

What are you working on now?

I have a new novel OASIS, currently looking for a home. It’s a story about two lovers being separated by the climate crisis—dust storms and desertification in northwest China. Kaier, the heroine, leaves her village, but her village never leaves her. She makes a courageous choice to go with her heart, which astonishes and gratifies me.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I have suffered from writer’s slowdown rather than block. I call it my “fallow” period. No one expects the land, even fertile soil, to bear crops all year long, so why should a writer be productive every day? There is a time to sow seeds, thin seedlings, water and fertilize the plants, finally harvest and process the crops. A writer’s work is cyclical, like farming.

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

Don’t rely on symbolism; it is a crutch. Describe and reveal your character like a real person, someone like yourself.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read good and enduring books, including the classics, books by minority writers, and literature in translation. Keep writing; don’t give up. Remember: only a born artist can endure the labor of becoming one.

Tom Zoellner

How did you become a writer?

I started as a reporter and worked for a decade at a series of local daily newspapers. The pay was low, but the exposure to all levels of American society was high. I learned how to sit and listen, how to ask questions that elicit answers, how to not take no for an answer, how to write fast and not fear a blinking cursor.

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

I remain awed and humbled by a school of midcentury regionalism; writers like George Rippey Stewart, Zora Neale Hurston, John Gunther, Mary Austin, Wallace Stegner, Richard Rhodes, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the anonymous authors of the 1940s WPA Guides. They knew how to synthesize a pile of facts into supple narratives. Places have as much personality as people.

When and where do you write? 

In a spare bedroom in my house, on a desk purchased from a Kmart in West Lebanon, New Hampshire when I was in graduate school. I aim for 1,000 words a day, per the advice of Carolyn See, typically in the mornings. It's a formula that works.

What are you working on now?

A collection of essays about my home state of Arizona. Regionalism again. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No -- that's an invention. Ignore it. Just start writing, not worrying about quality, and your path will become clear. 

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

Other than the aforementioned 1,000 words a day, every day, and the forsaking of quality in favor of production, it would be an image from Stephen King's "On Writing," in which he compares the act to paleontology -- the exhumation of a dinosaur bone in the subconscious that was always there. You didn't so much create it as unearth it. All you need to do is show up and start digging to find the writing that you've already done. This provides enormous relief, and disproves writer's block.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Understand you'll have to make it an annex of your life rather than the center. We all have to cobble together a living. Don't listen to those who say that teaching is a distraction -- that's a fiction on the level of writer's block. If you set the alarm two hours earlier than you otherwise might, and stay faithful to the thousand-word benchmark, your success at producing a manuscript within six months is as guaranteed as a law of physics. Then it becomes a matter of perseverance. Rejection is normal. Keep submitting. And also understand that the real rewards do not come from publication, money or honors. The best compensation is in the pure act of discovery.

Tom Zoellner teaches at Chapman University and Dartmouth College, and serves as the politics editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of eight nonfiction books, including Island on Fire, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 2020.