Helen Scales

How did you become a writer?

I was in my mid-twenties when I decided to become a writer, and it came as quite a surprise. Until then, I saw myself first and foremost as a scientist and I used words simply as a means to an end — to pass exams, write papers. Then, in grad school, I began to realise the power of good writing to communicate ideas and inspire people, to send them off to places they’ll never see themselves and offer a different view of the world. It’s odd that it took me so long to figure that out, because I’d been going on those journeys myself, avidly reading popular science books since I was in high school, but it never occurred to me that writing books like that was something I could do.

So, once I’d had the initial spark of an idea to try it out, I started writing as much as I could. I wrote for the student newspaper, I entered science writing competitions, tried a bunch of other things including student radio, and I discovered not only that I like writing but that with practise I could get better at it. By the time I came to writing my doctoral thesis (itself a book-length treatise) I had already decided I wanted to write a more creative book that hopefully more than 2 or 3 people would read.

The rest of the ‘how’ part took another couple of years after that, of working on book ideas, writing for websites including regular news pieces for National Geographic, publishing my first magazine features, getting an agent and landing my first book deal.

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

Early on, my literary influences were mainly writers and scientists who occupy a liminal space between science and art. As a teenager I read a lot of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo and Carl Safina’s Song for the Blue Ocean both made a huge impression on me, also Eugenie Clark’s Lady with a Spear, Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Rachel Carson’s ocean trilogy. 

My more recent influences include Kathleen Jamie, Rebecca Solnit, Richard Powers, Tim Winton, Roger Deakin, Barry Lopez, Amy Leach,  Victoria Finlay, Fredrik Sjöberg, Piers Torday, Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Kolbert, Susan Orlean, Susan Casey, Mary Roach, Annie Dillard.

When and where do you write?

I am not a morning person. My best mornings start slowly with coffee and yoga, before I open my laptop, reply to emails, dip into social media, then I open Scrivener and start something new or carry on with whatever I'm in the middle of. If I’m home alone and if the writing is going well, then I’m very bad at stopping. I graze when I get hungry, switch from coffee to tea after midday, and only stop when something or someone tells me to. I listen all day to BBC 6 Music.

Usually I write in either of two places: my study in Cambridge, a little, book-crammed room at the back of the house, at a standup desk with a tall chair that I cheat on, or in our little house in the woods by the sea in the far wild west coast of France. I dream of building a writing studio in the woods there, so I can simultaneously write and forest bathe.

What are you working on now?

Right now I’m working on a couple of books for younger readers and an illustrated book for readers of all ages. I’m also working on some stories for National Geographic Magazine. I love collaborating with artists and photographers, combining words with visual storytelling.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve not suffered from anything I’ve recognised or named as writer’s block. Sure, there are days when the words feel more difficult, but never to the point of complete blockage. I have, though, suffered bouts of crippling self doubt when suddenly I realise that my words and ideas are no good and my past successes have been nothing but a fluke. The feeling can last anything from a few moments to a few months. I’m starting to spot the things that unleash my imposter syndrome and try hard to keep her at bay by letting the good stuff seep in when I need it, the positive reviews, the enthusiastic fan mail.

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

I was roughly half way through writing my first book when I met with a writer friend for tea. He asked me how much I’d written and what my plans were for the rest of the book. I rattled off a list of places I planned to visit and carry out research. He told me to stay at home and write. He was right. I was being way too ambitious with my research plans. What I needed to do was get the words down. I do my best to remember that advice whenever I tumble yet again down another never-ending rabbit hole of research, even if it’s just reading books and papers and not island hopping around Scotland.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write.

At first it doesn’t so much matter who you write for and where or whether it’s published. For science and nature writers especially there are so many places out there online to contribute to. But just write. It’s the only way you’ll get better at writing and find your voice.

Also read.

Read so you can work out what you like and what you don’t, what is good (and why) and what is not. Then you should start being able to see what is good and bad about your writing too.

Also, if you don’t enjoy doing both of those things — writing and reading — then I politely suggest you go find something else to do. 

Dr. Helen Scales is a marine biologist, writer and broadcaster. Her highly acclaimed books include Spirals in Time and The Brilliant Abyss. She writes about the oceans for National Geographic Magazine, the Guardian and New Scientist among others, appears regularly on BBC Radio and presents the podcasts Catch Our Drift and Earth Unscrewed. At Cambridge University, she teaches science writing and marine science, and she’s scientific advisor to the marine conservation charity Sea Changers. Helen divides her time between Cambridge, England and the French coast of Finistère.
www.helenscales.com

Vera Kurian

How did you become a writer?
I think by becoming an avid reader first. Around fourth grade or so I started writing a long story that combined horror elements with Greek mythology, then it was a My Side of the Mountain knockoff except with a girl, then on to the inevitable vampire novel when I was in high school. I was offered the unusual privilege of attending writing workshops for free my last two years of high school (I went to a special arts school) where I then worked on some short stories and a young adult novel which is unfortunately lost to the digital archive that is floppy disks. I wrote a lot in college—this was before literary magazines were really online—and started to cluelessly send out submissions. Things took a bit of a break when I went to graduate school because of how intense the pace was, but I went back to writing short stories in 2013, after I came back to Washington DC after graduate school. I always said that I never wanted to write a novel, because frankly short stories are easier to write and easier to get published, but one day I wrote a story that someone said I should turn into a novel, which I did. That was the first novel I unsuccessfully queried. Never Saw Me Coming is probably the sixth novel I’ve written, but the first to get an agent and get a book deal. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I grew up reading Stephen King and think in many ways I’ve developed into an old-fashioned storyteller like him: character and setting driven, where the crazy stuff is in the setup, not the execution. I am always in deep admiration of writers who can do the lyrical prose I can’t, writers like William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. I like authors who can handle big, unapologetically expansive novels, like Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell. I would kill to have lunch with Elena Ferrante. There are a lot of writing teachers I could shout out (the encouraging ones, the ones who were excited when I walked into literary workshops with space opera) and shout down (the ones who doubted me), but I had one teacher in particular who I want to highlight. Regrettably I can’t remember her name, but she was my typing teacher in eighth grade and during her class period she let me work on a novella (a Western clearly inspired by Young Guns II) and defended me against an English teacher who accused me of plagiarism without any evidence. The English teacher “questioned the authenticity” of a creative project I had turned in because she “hadn’t seen anything like it before” from me. The typing teacher talked to her and said, she’s writing a wholeass novel. (Okay, she probably didn’t word it that way). 

When and where do you write?
Mostly at my kitchen table. Pre-COVID I would sometimes work at coffeeshops because I like the ambient noise (when I’m not listening to chillhop, or the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings, I’m listening to coffeeshop sounds on Spotify). As for when, there’s a brief period after work, after dinner, but before the gym where I write. A few hours on the weekend. I am hugely a believer that you can work full time and still be a writer, and it doesn’t require waking up at 5am or making some enormous, painful sacrifice. I still see my friends, play with my dog, work out, and watch shocking amounts of terrible TV. You just need to be efficient with your time.  

What are you working on now?
Secret project. It’s a mystery, and a more complicated one than Never Saw Me Coming. I did a lot of the foundation-laying for this book during the downtime of the publishing cycle of my debut novel. Now there is so much going on with the book coming out that I don’t have a ton of time to devote to the new book—at least for now. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
I’m not a believer in writer’s block. I’m either actively writing or passively writing. I tend to write really fast, but when I’m not writing, it looks like I’m not working at all, but I am. It looks like I’m binging old seasons of Survivor and Love Island and writing long blog reviews of horror novels, but what I’m actually doing is percolating. By the time I sit down to write something, I’ve already worked out 80 percent of it in my head, both characters and plot. I’m “writing” when I’m walking my dog or lifting weights or driving somewhere because I’m mulling things over. I like to think that I’m feeding my unconscious the stimuli, then letting it stew for a while. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Two things. The first was told to me by a college writing professor, who said that the most successful writers from his doctoral program were not necessarily the most talented, but the ones who had some combination of talent and persistence. To be a writer you need to have some talent. To be a traditionally published author, at some point the skillset shifts from just being someone who can write a book to a whole other set of things: someone who endures despite all the rejections, someone who has the business savvy to figure out how to get an agent and how the industry works, someone who can market a book, write copy, be charming in interviews. You can be good at writing and be bad at all the other stuff, but ideally you would be good at everything. The second thing is more nuts-and-bolts: I took a workshop with novelist Daniel Torday, and he said when revising a book to only work on one thing per revision. (So go through the book entirely only looking at one problem at a time, rather than a vague sense of “fix everything” at the same time.) This is particularly useful when working on multiple POV novels. 

What’s your advice to new writers?
Read promiscuously. Read both literary and genre fiction. Read more than you write. Spend less time daydreaming about publication and more time reading and writing. 

Vera Kurian is a writer and scientist based in Washington DC. Her debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, is forthcoming from Park Row Books (US) and Harvill Secker, Vintage (UK) in September. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Day One, and The Pinch. She has lived in Washington DC for most of her adult life. She has a PhD in Social Psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology, and quantitative methods.

Catherine Dang

How did you become a writer?

My parents owned a liquor store when I was a kid, and occasionally my sister and I were stuck there. We did our homework and read books in the backroom, but I’d get bored. That was when I started writing short stories in a notebook. They were often about shows that I wished I was watching instead.

I was a pragmatic kid. Writing never seemed like a “real” career. I figured I was supposed to do something more realistic, like law. Since my family never had much money, I wanted to change that in my own future.

I botched those plans in college, though. I told myself that I was only taking fiction and screenwriting classes for “fun.” But I think a part of me just wanted to test the waters. I wanted to see how my writing stacked up to my peers. I wanted to see if I could commit to writing whole projects. I started with poems, then short stories. Then I finished an entire two-hour screenplay for my thesis. And I understood that I was a decent writer.

I knew I was going to regret it if I didn’t take writing seriously. I wanted to give myself at least one chance to fail. So right after graduation, I started work on the manuscript that would become Nice Girls. I also entered the workforce. I got a day job, I hated the day job, and then I left the day job in 10 months. That experience changed my life, though. It made me desperate enough to finish Nice Girls. It kept me disciplined enough to edit the manuscript. And I began querying agents right after. Slowly, things took off from there.

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

I was a "Reading Rainbow" kid. LeVar Burton told stories in such a captivating way—he made me want to read everything. I also watched a lot of anime and true crime in childhood, then movies as a teenager. I think all those experiences taught me the mechanics of a good story.

Judy Blume and Sylvia Plath are probably the two biggest influences in my own fiction writing. Their novels felt so honest and confessional, and I happened to read them at the right times in my life. They resonated with me deeply. Blume gave me comfort, and Plath seemed to understand me. I’ve always wanted my own writing to have that same undercurrent of honest emotion. It doesn’t matter how light or brutal the feeling—it just has to feel real.

I also admire distinct prose. I love Sally Rooney, Ocean Vuong, and Haruki Murakami. Their prose is sparse and delves into the mundane (Murakami loves his food descriptions!), but they know how to pack an emotional punch. On the other hand, I’ve also been struck by Cormac McCarthy’s and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ prose. I read The Road and Between the World and Me in two entirely different summers. But the writing had the same kind of magic: just beautiful, elegant, winding prose about some of the most painful, brutal things. Their writing lingers.

I’m someone who gets influenced by a little of everything—music, articles, the way people talk. I even get impressed by memes.

When and where do you write?

I usually write in the mornings at home. But when I’m in a slump, I like to go to a coffee shop and pretend that I’m as productive as the people around me.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on my next novel. I told myself it would be lighter. So far, it’s…bloodier.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

It hits me fairly often. For me, writer’s block can happen for a multitude of reasons: I’m bored, I’m not inspired, something in the book feels “off.” If I’m feeling really stubborn, I’ll keep chipping away at the writing. Sometimes a good run or exercise helps get rid of the block. Other times, I get out of that funk by consuming other stories, whether it’s reading a book or watching a movie. I like experiencing someone else’s creation—it motivates me to get back into my own work. And honestly, some of the best writing comes after the writer’s block.

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

The one Nike ad: “Yesterday you said tomorrow.”

What’s your advice to new writers?

Talent is good; resolve is better.

Catherine Dang is a former legal assistant based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota. Nice Girls is her first novel.