Lincoln Michel

How did you become a writer?

My supervillain author origin story is basically that I was bad at everything else. From a young age, I wanted to be an artist. But I simply wasn’t good at the various artforms I tried. I’m fairly tone deaf and never got the hang of any instrument. Didn’t have the eye for photography. I can’t draw and even my handwriting is near illegible scribbles. Etc. When I was in college, I started to write poems and stories and it just clicked. It made sense to me. I was good at it! Or at least good relative to the other artforms I’d failed at. 

Of course, I’d also been a voracious reader from a very young age so perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that writing was the path for me. 

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

The first authors who really made me want to be a writer were Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino. I think most of my work still tries to imitate the dreamy unreality of the former and the inventive playfulness of the later. Other major influences for me are Kobo Abe, Shirley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, Octavia Butler, Yoko Ogawa, Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, and Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve been lucky to have some fantastic teachers, among them Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Sam Lipsyte. 

When and where do you write?

Any and everywhere. I’m not a creature of habit, or perhaps more accurately I change my habits a lot. When I lived by the park, I used to write in the park every day. Before the pandemic, I’d spend a lot of time at coffee shops. I edit on the subway. Revise on rooftops. Morning, afternoon, evening. I don’t mean that I’m a super writer who is always writing—indeed like many writers I’m a horrible procrastinator and time waster—but just that I don’t have a specific routine around time of day or location. 

What are you working on now

I’m finishing up what I hope will be my second novel, which I’m describing as Pale Fire meets Star Trek. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

On specific projects? Yes. But not in general. My ADHD brain makes me jump around projects and I always have a lot of things in the works. Right now I have a couple novel starts and a lot of short stories as well as a non-fiction idea and other projects. So when I’m stuck on one, I have others I can tinker with.  

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

When I was in college, I was randomly roommates with the son of a famous author. One time we got dinner with him and a group when he was in town for a book event. My friend (annoyingly) told his father I was an aspiring writer. The famous author turned to me and said only two words: “Finish things.” Then he turned back to chatting with his agent. I still think that’s the best advice. You have to finish things. Finish drafts, finish revisions, finish books. Sometimes they don’t work and you have to move onto the next one. But learning to actually finish things is one of the hardest lessons for writers. A lot of new writers get lost in the drafts and never publish. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

The first and best advice is to read widely. Read across genres. Read old writers and new ones. Read in translation. Read everything you can. My second advice is to lean into what interests you. Sometimes, young writers think they need to balance out their work or write toward what they think the market wants. But what will stand out isn’t another version of what’s out there. What will stand out is what is you unique to you. Take the ideas you think are insane or bizarre or scary or too darn weird, and then write them with the utmost seriousness and all the skill you can muster. That’s the book people will want to read. 

Lincoln Michel is the author of the science fiction novel The Body Scout (Orbit) and the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Granta, NOON, and elsewhere. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and the newsletter Counter Craft.

Nathaniel Ian Miller

How did you become a writer?

I was one of those precocious, obnoxious kids who consider themselves “writers,” and it was encouraged. In the 4th or 5th grade I collected all of my fiction to date—seven stories—and we ran off a few copies with my hand-drawn cover, bound in those thick plastic spirals that office people used for boardroom presentations back in the 80s. It was called Ragged Randoms—The Best of Nathaniel Miller, and there was some sci-fi, and a ghost story, and the worst dialogue you can imagine. I still have a copy. Looking at it right now. As for these days, in sober retrospect, maybe I became “a writer” two springs ago, when, at long last, someone (other than my parents) wanted to publish my work. I would’ve loved to be one of those writers who doesn’t give a damn whether anyone ever sees their work, and their ego lives on undiminished, but for me, until my luck changed, the designation felt hollow.

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

So many! Books that left a lasting mark can hardly be counted, but the writers I carry with me are Dame Beryl Bainbridge, Patrick O’Brian, Frantz Fanon, Frans Bengtsson, Larry McMurtry, Subcommandante Marcos, Jim Harrison, J.R.R. Tolkien, Elizabeth Bishop, Cormac McCarthy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brendan Behan, Jane Austen, Haruki Murakami, Tomi Ungerer and Margaret Wise Brown. To name a few.  

When and where do you write?

If I’m engaged in a project, I’ll write whenever time presents itself (which, as I’m also a farmer, is more often in winter). Most of it occurs in my beloved office, which overlooks the barnyard and what people in Vermont call “the dooryard.” The windows are rather old in this part of our 19th C. farmhouse, so I am joined here by marauding hordes of cluster flies. But if I’m insufficiently engaged in a project, I could have all the time in the world, and I won’t write a word.

What are you working on now?

Ideas are finally congealing productively on a new novel, but as it’s still in its infancy, I hesitate to say more. I’ll say this: there are motorcycles in it. And tobacco.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t think so, though I fear it appropriately and raise the sign of aversion against the evil eye when it is mentioned. My problem is a total lack of writing discipline, unless I’m rolling.

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

The truth is that I haven’t been offered much writing advice, or any that I can remember. It could be that my conflicted feelings about the writing life form a visible barrier around me, and few would wish to give advice to someone who repels it. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know very many writers, and the ones I know are not advice-givers. This is unlike farming, which somehow everyone has advice about. And child-rearing. And how to change one’s perspective by simply changing one’s perspective.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Oh man, I stepped right in it. Maybe this (in a stentorian voice): New writer! Cultivate, if you can, a second line of work that provides you with a sense of worth and identity. If you cannot, I raise my glass to you, friend, for we are together in this.

Miller’s debut novel, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, was published in October by Little, Brown & Co. He has also written for the Virginia Quarterly Review and newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin and Montana. He lives with his family on a farm in Vermont.

Allison Moorer

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer because I had stories to tell. I was raised in a musical family, but my father also had a minor in English to go along with his major in Agriculture and Teaching Arts, so there were good books around — he had his opinion on what those were. I think my ear was tuned to great language very early on, and my love of words developed hand in hand with that. I’ve used that ear in both songwriting and prose. How it happened, in my case, was because I had to get my stories told. The degree to which I am effective varies and is ongoing as any writer would agree we start all over again every time there is a blank page.

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

All of the great books that I’ve had the opportunity to read have influenced me. And that’s all to say that I haven’t even scratched the surface. It brings me a bit of disappointment to know that I will die not having read everything I want to read. The MFA work I did at The New School influenced me a lot. There is a great faculty there. Otherwise, most things I read or hear influence me in some way. 

When and where do you write? 

A writer writes whenever and wherever they can’t not. I have reservations about saying any writing with some amount of considerable quality imbued through it is created under other any circumstance. Practice is important as is craft, but passion and inspiration provide the life that is needed to make those things matter.

What are you working on now? 

I'm not working on anything now, which is interesting after spending the past ten years writing two memoirs.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I’ve gone through periods of having nothing to say. I’m in one now. I’m trying to honor that and allow myself to have a fallow period. I need a season of import, not export.

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

Start with what you know and write into what you don’t.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don't try to write until you know how to feel.

Allison Moorer is a singer/songwriter, producer, and author who has released ten critically acclaimed albums. Her first memoir, Blood, was released in October 2019 to high praise and received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. Her second, I Dream He Talks to Me, was just released in October 2021. She has been nominated for Academy, Grammy, Americana Music Association, and Academy of Country Music Awards. Allison holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School; her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, American Songwriter, Guernica, No Depression, Literary Hub, and The Bitter Southerner. She received the Hall-Waters Prize for Excellence in Southern Writing in 2020. She lives in Nashville.