Tom Lin

How did you become a writer?

I’m not sure I have a satisfying answer to this question—I’ve always written stories for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t really think of writing as something I could do until probably high school. So high school, then. But I didn’t publish anything before The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu.

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

For sense of place and momentum: John Steinbeck, whose East of Eden is one of my favorite books. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as well as “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” For beauty of language: José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, Blindness, and The Double. Wallace Stevens’s poems and aphorisms, as well as Mary Ruefle’s luminous genius in both poetics (Dunce) and criticism (Madness, Rack, and Honey). For the intersection of the surreal and the real: Jorge Luis Borges and his mind-bending shorts, as well as László Krasznahorkai’s weird and twisty Satantango and his single-sentence The Last Wolf (which, in my edition at least, comes bound in an inverted pair with Herman, also great). Art is also a huge influence: I love the vibrance and color of James Turrell’s Skyspace installations, the arresting topologies of Richard Serra’s Joe and Torqued Ellipse series, and J. M. W. Turner’s inconstant, delicate Rigi watercolors. I’m lucky enough to have had some truly excellent teachers. Among them are my undergraduate advisor, the late and brilliant Arden Reed, and Jonathan Lethem, who taught the one and only creative writing class I’ve ever taken.

When and where do you write?

When the mood strikes me, I write on my laptop at my desk. I wish the mood would strike me much, much more often. I also have a baby-blue IBM Selectric sitting on a bookshelf—it once occupied a little writing desk, but I had to move it up and out of reach of the cat’s reach—and I use it for no-stakes freewrites of scene or character sketches. I like to write in near-total silence in long, uninterrupted stretches, which means that (though I’d very much like to!) I can’t write in a coffee shop, or really any other fun, interesting place.

What are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on my second novel, which is still in its early stages. I think it’s a really interesting idea and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

All the time. For me, writer’s block gets worse the more you try to push through it. So I try to find a way around it—going on a walk, doing some more research, going for a drive—and trust that my mind will keep working on it even when I’m not literally sitting at my computer trying to make sentences. 

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

Keep going. And the old chestnut, write what you know, but with an addendum: you know a lot of things, more than you’d think. In writing, “what you know” can put on any number of disguises.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Read as much as you can: good writing so you can figure out what makes it so good, bad writing so you can learn what to avoid. Fiction and nonfiction and poetry and criticism. Old stuff, new stuff. Everything. A text is magical not because it retains some history of its being written, but because it offers the possibility of its being read. Writers must always be readers first.

Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he is currently in the PhD program at the University of California, Davis. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is his first novel.

Daniel Loedel

How did you become a writer?

I have always been in love with storytelling. As a kid, I would spend long car rides with my mom telling her tales from my invented fantasy world; sometimes I'd even ask for silence during a walk or meal so I could "play my game"--meaning, tell stories to myself in my head. In middle school that obsession with stories got transferred to an obsession with movies, and in high school and college it got transferred to novels, where it's been since. But I believe it's the same instinct I had as a child in my mom's car, just nourished and transformed over time.

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

The impossible question. Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Fyodor Dostoevsky are probably my three biggest influences, though if you read my book you'd probably be befuddled by that. I think the goal is to read widely enough that your influences become like ingredients in a soup you can no longer distinguish. But I name those three since they are the writers who most shaped my broader perspective on writing, set the goal posts for it in a way. If my influences are a soup, the three of them are the bowl.

When and where do you write?

My writing routine used to be pretty rigid and organized around the morning: I'd wake up at 5 and write till I had to go to work. Now it's a bit looser, both because of the pandemic and because being a book editor (as opposed to an editorial assistant) requires me sometimes to focus on authors' manuscripts in those hours instead. Now I'm basically just writing whenever I get lucky enough to discover I have a couple hours to myself. Usually this writing is done on my couch with a coffee and my bookshelf behind my head. It's not very glamorous, but it's very comfortable.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another historical, vaguely supernatural novel set in South America. But I have more than one novel in my proverbial "drawer" that has been abandoned, and there's always a chance this one finds itself there.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

In a certain sense, I suffer from it all the time. If writer's block means not having ideas of what to write, then no--I always have ideas for stories. But if writer's block means being unable to write them, because I don't know how or because I know what I'm writing isn't working--that I have all the time. I hit walls of that sort every couple months. And I just keep knocking my head against them until I break through--or go around to a different story.

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

It wasn't advice per se, but it's the statement that I most rely on these days to believe in myself as a writer. The first novel I wrote failed to find a publisher. It devastated me and also embarrassed me, since I worked in the same industry as many of the people who turned the book down. But then several years later I sold another manuscript to the publisher of my dreams, and when my agent and I celebrated, she told me, "You're a weed. Nothing can kill you." On days when the writing is hard, or the writing world is, I just think to myself, I'm a weed. My writing will survive.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try to write a book you believe that only you can write. Yes, the publishing industry makes a big deal of having comparative titles for books. But I'm an editor at a publishing house, and I can assure you that what is a bigger deal to me when reading a manuscript is the question of whether it's special. Have I read anything like it before? The only way the answer to that will be no is if you find a way to write a book that with your specific psyche and experience only you could write. No one else.

Daniel Loedel is a Senior Editor at Bloomsbury. Previously he was an editor at Simon and Schuster for eight years. The authors he has worked with have won or been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize and many other accolades. Prior to becoming a book editor and moving to Brooklyn, he lived in Buenos Aires. Hades, Argentina, his first novel, was inspired by his half-sister, who was disappeared in Argentina in 1978 by the military dictatorship.

Jack Wang

How did you become a writer?

I decided on writing relatively late. My first year at the University of Toronto, I dropped a full-year course in calculus at Christmastime — I was pretty much failing — and took another course in the spring called, simply, The Short Story. That’s when I got turned on to literature and had the first inkling of becoming a writer myself. 

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

Influence is a cumulative and lifelong thing. Every book is a “rep” in the thousands of reps you need to become a writer, and everything you like or dislike influences you in some way. Recently, The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan helped me unlock some things in my own writing.

When and where do you write? 

A few years ago, my wife and I renovated the second floor of our house in Ithaca, NY, and we converted the master closet into a small windowless office. That’s where I write. I like to write in the morning, but I’m a slow writer, so I often push on into the afternoon. 

What are you working on now? 

A novel called The Riveters, about Chinese Canadians who served in shipyards and various branches of the military during the Second World War to earn citizenship and the franchise. The novel is due next year.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Yes. In my experience, there are different kinds of writer’s block, each with different causes and remedies. One is a kind of existential block, when you don’t yet know what your true subject is. You want to write, but you don’t really know what story is yours to tell. There’s no remedy for this kind of block except to keep reading and living and coming into yourself as a person.

 Another kind of block is rooted in perfectionism. It’s when your skills don’t yet meet your own lofty expectations for yourself as a writer. Jennifer Egan says, “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly.” Give yourself permission to write badly, put in the reps to get better, and eventually your skills and your expectations will meet somewhere in the middle.

Yet another kind of block is your unconscious mind telling you that something isn’t right about the work. Sometimes our intuition senses problems before our conscious mind does. In that case, you have to obey your instincts and try to puzzle out how to approach things differently.

Finally, there’s a kind of writer’s block that’s rooted in lack of information. You don’t know enough to make the scene or the story convincing to yourself, much less anyone else. Sometimes, the answer lies in imagination, but often it means doing some research — sometimes deep dives — until you have the knowledge to make the scene or the story seem “real.”

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

Lauren Groff says to write where the heat is. You don’t have to write in a linear, orderly, or plodding way. Write whatever’s on fire in your imagination.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Remember Flaubert: “Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”

Jack Wang is the author of We Two Alone (House of Anansi, HarperVia), winner of the 2020 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best debut collection in English in Canada. His stories have been longlisted for the Journey Prize and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2014-15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and he is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.