Bonnie Kistler

How did you become a writer?

I’ve been making up stories since childhood and always aspired to be a writer. I majored in English lit in college and wrote my first full-length novel during my sophomore year. With all the optimism of the ignorant, I sent it off to a big-time New York publisher – who rejected it almost by return mail. Daunted, I decided on a different career path and went to law school. But during my many years of practicing law, I never lost the writing itch. I wrote another novel, and another, and the third time was finally the charm. Here’s a nice irony: my publisher today is the same one who rejected my sophomoric effort all those years ago. 

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

My specialty in college was the nineteenth-century English novel – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, the Brontës. I love the rich tapestries of those big books, the huge casts of characters, the many subplots. But fiction today demands a tighter pace, and that’s what I learned from film and TV – how to distill an idea to its essentials, how to accelerate the action, how to build suspense, etc.

When and where do you write?

 I write in my home office on the top floor of our house. I could have a nice view of the mountains from there, but I deliberately turn my desk to a blank wall so I can’t be distracted. I never listen to music while I write, and I can’t focus if I’m even just aware of other people in the house. An isolation chamber would make a good office for me.

I write whenever the urge hits me – but only when the urge hits me. I don’t hew to a schedule or clock word count. Whenever I try to force my writing, it reads that way – forced. Instead, I let the stories wander around my mind for a while, and when the words come spitting out, that’s when I sit down and write.

I know this is contrary to the practice of most writers, who subscribe to the view that it’s best to simply get something on the page and revise later. But that workmanlike approach doesn’t work for me.  

What are you working on now?

My current project is another psychological thriller, but I should call this one a capital P Psychological thriller, because it’s about mind games and dementia and gaslighting. Very dark, even though it’s set in Florida.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t believe in writer’s block. If I can’t write, it’s because I’m not ready to write. The ideas need to ferment a little longer. The book will come when it’s ready to come.

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

“Bonnie, make time,” my agent once said when I told her my frenetic law practice left no time for writing. Her words were what convinced me that it was finally time to leave the law and write full-time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I have two bits of advice for young people who wish to become writers:

A. Become something else first. Your writing will be that much richer for having lived in the wider world and encountered different kinds of people. 

B. To be a good writer, first be a good reader. Read, then deconstruct what you’ve read. Think about what worked for you and how the author accomplished it. Think about what didn’t work for you and how you might avoid the same traps.

Bonnie Kistler is a former Philadelphia trial lawyer and the author of House on Fire and The Cage. Her next novel, Her, Too, will be released in February 2023. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, with Honors in English literature, and she received her law degree from the University of the Pennsylvania Law School. She now lives in Florida and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Vauhini Vara

How did you become a writer?

I've been a journalist since high school. Then, I took my first creative-writing class in college, with the writer Adam Johnson, and fell in love with it. I've been writing both nonfiction and fiction ever since.

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

My writing influences have always been my writing friends and peers — people like Alice Sola Kim, Anna North, Anthony Ha, Gerardo Herrera, Jenny Zhang, Karan Mahajan, Katie Founds, Sarah Heyward, and Tony Tulathimutte.

When and where do you write?

Whenever and wherever I can. I have a lot of different jobs — teaching, editing, reporting, and writing both nonfiction and fiction — and I'm also a parent. I've never managed to have a consistent schedule, and sometimes months go by and I don't work on a single bit of creative writing. And then, at other times, I'm working on fiction nonstop for weeks. I can write anywhere: at the kitchen table, in the basement, at coffee shops, in bed. 

What are you working on now?

A collection of short stories, This is Salvaged, which comes out in 2023.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No.

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

Keep going.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Keep going.

Vauhini Vara is the author of The Immortal King Rao (2022), which Justin Taylor described in the New York Times as “a monumental achievement.” She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has been honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has also written and edited nonfiction for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine; her essay “Ghosts,” published in The Believer, will be anthologized in The Best American Essays 2022. Vara is the secretary for Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color, and a mentor for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project.

Natalie Jenner

How did you become a writer?

I wanted to be a writer before I could even read or write, or—frankly—talk. My mother says I walked around the house as a toddler with a pencil and paper and made weird little “writing” noises as I scribbled. When I was eight, I wrote my first story with a beginning, middle and end and only stopped creative writing to pursue the study and practice of law throughout my twenties. I began seriously writing novels at age thirty and gave up after five manuscripts, twenty years and three hundred agent rejections. Ten years later, my husband was diagnosed with terminal lung disease and I turned to Jane Austen for comfort and distraction during that harrowing time. When my husband’s lung decline slowed down due to an experimental drug regimen, I felt the smallest measure of hope, followed by a sudden new desire to write again. It turns out that I am a writer who needs to feel hope to sit in the chair! I wrote my debut The Jane Austen Society in such a state and, first wave of the pandemic notwithstanding, I wrote Bloomsbury Girls in a similar condition, on the heels of my debut resonating with readers.

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

My biggest writing influences are my favorite writers, whose voices feel like music to my ears: Jane Austen, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and—much more recently—Penelope Fitzgerald, Ian McEwan, Susan Minot, Paul Auster and Elizabeth Strout. For books on craft, I swear by Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Wayand Syd Field’s Screenplay. But it was the encouragement and support of a handful of teachers, from middle school through university, that gave me the confidence and belief in myself that turned out to be critical to withstanding the twenty years of rejection ahead!

When and where do you write?

I wrote my first five novels (all firmly locked away in a drawer) as a full-time stay-at-home mum and consultant, so my only time to write was from 5 am until 7 am each morning including on the weekend. I think the diligence of keeping to such a schedule for many years trained my creative brain to kick in at that particular time, which I sometimes rue as an empty-nester! I will write anywhere there’s a chair but my favorite place is the little writer’s shed in our garden—just far enough from the family to forget about mundane responsibilities, but close enough for them to bring me cups of tea.

What are you working on now?

I am finishing up the first draft of my third book for my publisher. A character from my debut novel reappears in my sophomore effort Bloomsbury Girls and now one of its characters will be the focus of this new one. In this way my first three books share connective tissue, allowing me to indulge in some world-building as well as never quite leaving my characters fully behind. They got me through some really difficult times, so I appreciate that!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Never, I am sorry to say. There is a lot going on in here [knocks own head]. But as with everything in life, I am sure my time will come!

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

From my agent—always from my agent: “if you write like you know where you’re going, the audience will follow you anywhere.” This fostered so much creative latitude in me that I had a fictionalized version of Daphne du Maurier instruct one of the aspiring writer characters of Bloomsbury Girls with these exact same words.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Although it is important to build the writing muscle through diligence and perseverance, it is also okay to take a break at times (in my case, a ten-year one!). But do try to keep writing for as long as it gives you pleasure (and I use that word loosely here, as “pleasure” can include hard-earned knowledge or skill) because the goal is to be sitting in the chair, exercising those creative muscles, when the muse strikes. If there is one thing that I have learned about this industry, it is how critical it is to be genuinely and uniquely inspired—which is a huge matter of luck, especially given that publishers are constantly acquiring books in the hope of their resonating with readers in almost two years’ time.

Natalie Jenner is the internationally bestselling author of THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY and BLOOMSBURY GIRLS. A USA Today and #1 national bestseller, THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY was named one of the best books of 2020 by Amazon and Goodreads and has been sold for translation in twenty-one countries. BLOOMSBURY GIRLS released in May 2022 and is a June Indie Next Pick and People Magazine Book of the Week. Born in England and raised in Canada, Natalie has been a corporate lawyer, career coach and, most recently, an independent bookstore owner in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs.