Amina Akhtar

How did you become a writer?

I’ve always loved writing. Our big weekend outing as kids was to the used bookstore, so reading and writing have always been my favorite activities. I went the journalism route because I wanted to make a living. I went to NYU and got my journalism degree. I’ve worked at Vogue, ELLE, NYTimes, NYMag, along with smaller sites. But then the lifestyle media world imploded, and after working in the fashion media world for almost two decades, I decided enough was enough and wrote my first book, #FashionVictim.

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

It’s funny because I like to think we writers soak up others’ work like sponges. My dad always had us reading the classics, so my favorite authors to read as a kid were Oscar Wilde (and yes, I have a very large tattoo of him), as well as Dante, Camus, Kafka, Fitzgerald. I was totally pretentious that way! But reading in general was king in our home, no matter who or what it was. (So yes, lots of VC Andrews got in there!) I love Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, because it’s like, get out of your head and just write. And I needed to hear someone say that—or read it! 

When and where do you write? 

I try to write daily, but sometimes that’s not possible. I have chronic migraines so some days I’m just not functioning. But I usually try to do two-four hours a day of writing or editing, and I’m one of those people who works from bed. It works for me!

What are you working on now? 

I’m revising my third novel, which is about a woman who doesn’t believe she’s being haunted, and we, the readers, aren’t sure if it’s her or actually happening.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No, I don’t really believe in writer’s block. There may be moments when the idea isn’t flowing for me, but that’s part of my process. I usually wait a day or two and bam! I figure it out. It floats into my brain. I think if you’re struggling with something, ask yourself what it is you’re fighting against. What are you resisting? Usually, those ideas come to me right before I fall asleep, when I’m “off.” So I always make myself grab my phone and jot them down. 

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

Not writing advice but my dad changed his career in his mid forties. He was a professor and realized that with three kids, he needed to do something else. So he went to medical school. And having that as an example to me was helpful because we’re never too old to change our paths. Just because you’re in your forties or fifties doesn’t mean you can’t try something new.

What’s your advice to new writers?

You know that voice in your head that tells you you’re no good? That your writing and idea sucks? Yeah, strangle that voice. It’s not helping you. There’s a difference between looking at your work critically and beating up on yourself. That voice is fear, and you have to let that go if you want to write. You have to have faith in yourself and your work, because if you don’t, no one else will.

Amina Akhtar is a former fashion writer and editor. Her satirical first novel, #FashionVictim, drew rave reviews and acclaim and was covered in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Martha Stewart Living, Entertainment Weekly, Fashionista, Book Riot, CrimeReads, and more. Akhtar’s new book Kismet takes on the world of wellness and all the crystals that go with it. This #OwnVoices novel is set in Sedona, Arizona, where nature is just as much a character as anyone else. Akhtar has worked at Vogue, Elle, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, where she was the founding editor of the women’s blog The Cut. She’s written for numerous publications, including Yahoo Style, Fashionista, xoJane, Refinery29, Billboard, and more. She currently lives not too far from the Sedona vortexes. Kismet (out 8/1) is her second novel. Find out more at aminaakhtar.work.

Frances Peck

How did you become a writer?

I’ve written for as long as I can remember. I guess it was a sperm-plus-egg thing. My dad, when he wasn’t policing, read constantly, including (surreptitiously) the dictionary. He wrote fine, fine letters and, as we discovered only after he’d died, a handful of short stories. My mom was a closet poet who scribbled when she could. After she died, we found dozens of poems. It was one of the few things my parents had in common: they both considered writing to be furtive and private, something done on the sly. (Not the best basis for a marriage, BTW.)

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

Miss Lahey, in grade three, kept several of us “imaginative” kids busy with writing prompts. “Make a story out of this,” she said, and we did.

As for writers and books, it’s impossible to zero in. I’ve always read avidly and indiscriminately. As a kid, I plowed through everything on the family bookshelves, from Gone with the Wind to The Great White Hope to Jaws. My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest, and I was addicted to the “Drama in Real Life” stories. Maybe that’s why my first novel is about an earthquake and my second an airplane crash. I studied Victorian and Canadian literatures, wrote a thesis on Thomas Hardy, adored Timothy Findley and Margaret Laurence, hoovered up Stephen King and Barbara Pym, Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich, David Adams Richards and Charles Dickens and William Goldman. And on and on. It’s like having this cauldron of soup inside you that’s pureed so fine you can’t say what all is in it.

When and where do you write?

These days I write in my home office, usually first thing, before I can talk myself out of it. That’s largely what I did for my first two novels too, though in those days I travelled more, teaching workshops. I got a lot of writing done in airplanes and hotels. There’s something about travel and its pockets of in-between time. If you can snatch them, they can be weirdly fruitful.

What are you working on now?

I’m chipping away at a third novel. So far it’s resisting me, I think because some aspects are nearer to my own experience than was the case with my other books. It’s like the closer I sneak up on my own life, the more my defenses go up.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. There are times I don’t feel like writing. Those times occur approximately every single day. But I do my best to impose a schedule and stick with it. I side with those writers who say the important thing is to show up. Sit there at the keyboard and just type. Your words will be bad, your sentences will be worse, and your manuscript, when you get to the end of it, will be your life’s greatest embarrassment. That’s okay. You put it away and then come back to it later. Then the real writing starts.

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

That would be from my dad, who said: become a lawyer. I dunno...coming from a lower-income family where “writer” was not viewed as a valid occupation that you could do seriously, out in the open, I didn’t get much writing advice, at least not in my formative years. Maybe I can answer with the best writing advice I neverreceived, which is to go for it. If there are stories in you and voices clamoring, for God’s sake let them out. Being creative is not a waste of time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Fear is your biggest foe; you’ve got to do whatever you can to slay it, or at least tie it up and hurl it into a dungeon. Bury all the questions and doubts that hold you back—stuff like will it be any good and is it worth my while; like does the world need another story, especially my story; like will I suck, and if I do, will I suck worse than any writer has ever sucked? Lock those poisonous thoughts away. Your goal is to write something, from beginning to end. That’s it. Not something good, not something publishable. Just something. So quit thinking about it. Just do it. Finish it. Then see question 5.

Frances Peck wrote fiction and poetry until her early twenties, when she stopped so she could earn a living from words. Now, after a career as an editor, ghostwriter, and teacher of editing and writing, she’s rediscovering the magic of making things up. Her debut novel, The Broken Places (NeWest Press), explores what happens when a major earthquake rocks the Pacific Northwest. Her second novel, Uncontrolled Flight, is due out in fall 2023. She lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Visit her at https://francespeck.com/.

Eddie Muller

How did you become a writer?

My father, who never went to college, was a sportswriter. So writing always seemed to me a viable career option. Even as a young kid I was a storyteller, making my own comic books and writing elaborate stories and reports for school assignments. I never imagined doing anything else, really. It’s how I’ve earned my living for the past forty years.

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

Obviously, my father. Sportswriters were an early influence. My dad’s reportage was included in several collections of “The Year’s Best Sports Stories,” which I’d read cover-to-cover. In my teens I discovered crime and mystery fiction, and Raymond Chandler was a big influence. Many of my colleagues will say the same thing. In school they’d made us read the classics, like David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn. But it wasn’t until I read Chandler that prose connected with me in a visceral way. Because it was a vivid and romanticized depiction of a world we could recognize within our own reality. Later I’d come to prefer Hammett’s simple elegance, but they were both influential. I was really taken with Leonard Gardner’s Fat City (1969), which I read shortly after it came out. I was too young to comprehend it, but I loved the writing. I re-read it regularly. It’s the book that made me want to be a novelist. So the fact that Leonard wrote the Foreword for the paperback edition of my novel The Distance—that’s the most gratifying thing in my life as a writer.

When and where do you write?

I write mostly in the morning, and rewrite whenever I can. But I am really writing constantly. It’s like breathing. There was once a time when I waited for inspiration to strike … Ha! What a luxury. It’s not the when and where that’s unusual for me, it’s the how. I write differently depending on what I’m writing. If I’m writing scripts for my TCM introductions I do that on my laptop; likewise with any non-fiction work. Writing fiction, on the other hand, I tend to draft things in longhand. I’ll handwrite a chapter and it’ll be an indecipherable mess and then I’ll type it into the laptop and rewrite. 

What are you working on now?

I just finished my first children’s book, which was fun. It’s noir for kids, and I agreed to do it if the publisher agreed to black-and-white artwork. Seemed like a great way to get kids familiar with a black-and-white world so they won’t be put off by classic films that aren’t in color. I also did a cocktail book inspired by film noir. Both of these came to me suddenly, because of the success of Noir Alley on TCM. I’m not sure anybody else is putting out a kid’s book and a cocktail book at the same time, under the same name. I’m also working on a comic book series, a screenplay, and the third Billy Nichols mystery (I regret that I’ve been saying that for too many years!)—in addition to the scripts I write for Noir Alley. There’s very little down time around here, but I’ve learned to be productive without stressing out. I make my deadlines.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, not anymore. I feel fortunate. I’m sure there are many disparate reasons for writer’s block, but from my experience, and what I’ve seen in others, insecurity can play a big part in that paralysis. You’re questioning yourself too much, letting self-doubt be an impediment. I developed a degree of discipline early on because I’ve always made a living writing on deadline. I’ve been able to transfer that discipline to “creative” writing, which is where “writer’s block” is more common. It’s a writer’s job to produce the work, not judge it while it’s in progress.

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

Many years ago, Bill Barich, a wonderful essayist and author of a great book called Laughing in the Hills, read a draft of my first novel and gave me the best writing advice I ever got: “Don’t be afraid to be obvious.” He could see me writing—with the words dancing and circling around the point instead of my finding the precise words to make the point and move on. It was a simple thing, but it freed up my writing. It made me realize that too many writers—especially those grappling with blockage—think about the writing, the words and the sentences, instead of the narrative flow. If you’re struggling to find the perfect words—just make your point, as clearly and concisely as possible. You many find better words later, but it’s more vital to move forward and not obsess.

The other priceless advice was bestowed by an agent, Sandra Dykstra, who told an audience of wanna-be writers, “The world is not asking for your work.”  It sounds harsh, but it’s an essential truth that helps a writer not spiral into depression when they face rejection.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Enjoy the process. Especially when writing fiction, it’s as close to time-travel as we can get. You’re able to disappear into the place that you’re creating and when it’s going well you lose all sense of linear time. It’s the highest state a writer can achieve. And I’ll offer the same advice I give about everything—do it with passion and enthusiasm. Otherwise, why bother? These days I’d also add—think of the reader. Internet blogging has developed a generation of typists who think their “readers” have an infinite amount of time. They don’t. Be concise. Be clear. Be cogent. To me, that applies to 75-character tweets as well as 700-page novels. The internet has led to less and less editing of people’s work—which is not a good thing. But it creates more opportunity for writers who can get to the point in an artful fashion.

Eddie Muller, host of TCM’s Noir Alley franchise, is a contemporary renaissance man. He writes novels, biographies, movie histories, plays, short stories, and films. He also programs film festivals, curates museums, designs books, and provides commentary for television, radio, and DVDs. He produces and hosts NOIR CITY: The San Francisco Film Noir Festival, the largest noir retrospective in the world, which now has satellite festivals in six other U.S. cities.

As founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, he has been instrumental in preserving America’s noir heritage, which to date has included restoring and preserving (with the UCLA Film & Television Archive) more than 30 nearly lost classics, such as Too Late for Tears (1949), Woman on the Run (1950), and The Bitter Stems (1956). Muller has also presented and lectured on film noir at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

His debut novel, The Distance, earned the Best First Novel “Shamus” Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Muller is a two-time Edgar Award nominee from the Mystery Writers of America and has earned three Anthony Award nominations. Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, which he co-wrote with the actor, was a national bestseller in 2007. His classic volume Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir  was recently published in a revised and expanded edition (Running Press, 2021). He has twice been named a San Francisco Literary Laureate.