Nathan Gorenstein

How did you become a writer?

In the 6th grade I failed to complete the required reading for a book report, so I concocted something, don't recall exactly what, and got a B+. So I figured I could write. My next writing adventure was in high school, when I joined the student newspaper as a reporter and ended up as managing editor. As was reinforced by my college experience, I found the managing editor actually runs things while the editor does long lunches. Despite being managing editor at the college daily I gravitated towards writing rather than editing for much of my career.
Not that I am adverse to long lunches.

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

Oddly, for someone who has spent a career writing non-fiction, the author whose prose I admired the most when starting out was John le Carré, and I recall telling a friend in a burst of youthful hubris that I could do what le Carré did. Of course I could not, but his skill with language was something to aspire to. In college my enthusiasm for newspapers was mightily encouraged by the late, great Howard Ziff at the University of Massachusetts, who placed journalism's importance within the context of history, governance and democracy, lessons that have withstood the test of time. George Orwell’s work was also a major inspiration, and once I met Seymour Hersh, who was friendly to a young journalist. Despite a career in newspapers, I always wanted to write books, which I finally did after taking a buyout.

When and where do you write?

At a desk, in a home office, on a computer. I work newspaper reporter hours, starting from about 10 am with a break in the afternoon and ending between 6 and 8, depending on how the work is going. As I write non-fiction, the writing is almost always interspersed with reporting, as no matter how much one does before sitting down, new questions constantly arise. I couldn't do what I do – within a reasonable timeframe and without research assistants – if not for the internet. 

What are you working on now?

Just finished my second book, published in May 2021 by Simon & Schuster, “The Guns of John Moses Browning,” a social history/biography of the man whose inventions, as my elevator pitch goes, started World War One and won World War Two. I’m casting about for another topic sufficient to sustain my interest for three years…all suggestions welcome.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not in the usual sense. I do struggle on how to structure complex non-fiction timelines, say where an event in 1900 only becomes significant in 1920, while in the meantime I need to write about events in 1910. As my editor at S&S, Rick Horgan, told me, you need to keep a linear timeline or else risk loosing the reader. It was a struggle but I figured out how.

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

Not sure who gave it, or whether I figured it out myself, but you need the ability to see what is actually on the page, not what you think is on the page. That requires the brutal ability to be a candid critic of yourself. And that means tossing pages and pages of supposedly finished text, and much research, upon realizing the approach you’ve taken isn’t working. For my latest book I spent much time researching and writing about a young man who used a lightweight flintlock “squirrel gun” to track and shoot the “last” wild deer in Indiana. (Yes, deer were almost extinct 120 years ago). Yet it just didn’t fit the chapter and I ended up using one sentence from all that work.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Re-write. And then re-write again. And once more. Don’t let anyone tell you no if, after an honest self-critique, you believe you are right.

Bio: I grew up in Medford, Mass., went to UMass Amherst, majored in Journalism/English, barely graduated, worked on the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton Mass., the Wilmington Delaware News-Journal, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I did long investigative pieces, daily reporting, political reporting, and was an editor for a few years, which helped with my writing. My first book was “Tommy Gun Winter,” about a once-infamous 1930s Boston criminal gang: an MIT grad, a minister’s daughter, and two of my relatives (first cousins twice removed.) Its on option to the left coast, but we’ve all heard that before! Then the John Browning book. It’s pretty good. Actually, both are! :)

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.