Don Lee

How did you become a writer?

It was a total fluke. At UCLA, my initial plan was to get a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and then a PhD in physical oceanography so I could design, build, and pilot submersibles. I watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau as a kid. But I was bored silly with the science and math courses and took a creative writing class as an elective. I loved it mostly because I loved my classmates—a bunch of renegades and bohemians, so much more interesting than engineering students. That class led to more workshops and an eventual switch in majors to English. 

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

I like to answer this by citing some favorite books: Stoner by John Williams, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, and Selected Stories by Alice Munro. But probably one of the most important mentors I had was Richard Yates. I met him in a restaurant/bar in Boston when I was 24 and saw him fairly often for a couple of years. He only read one story of mine, which he didn't particularly like, but he served as a model for the type of dedication that a writer needs. 

When and where do you write?

Since I teach full-time, I mostly binge-write during the summer. Every day, all day. 

What are you working on now?

I usually take a break after a book comes out, so that's what I'm doing now, not working on anything. But I'm letting an idea for a short neo-noir novel gestate in my head. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not writer's block, per se, but I have suffered from false starts. In fact, with my last two novels, The Collective and Lonesome Lies Before Us, I wasted a year on each, working on an entirely different storyline before abandoning it and starting what would be the eventual novel. Those weren't fun experiences, but I wonder now if that's become my method for writing novels. Yikes. 

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

I don't know where I picked this up, but the best tip I've ever gotten is to use a kitchen timer (or phone or whatever) when you're slogging. Set it for 20 minutes, and make a deal with yourself. Once you start the timer, you cannot go on the internet, look at your phone, check Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, etc. You can't even get up to go to the bathroom. You can only do one of two things: write, or just sit there. You get so bored, you end up writing. When the timer goes off, take a break, then start the timer again. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don't take yourself so seriously. I didn't really improve as a writer until I finally did just that and stopped being so goddamn pretentious. 

Don Lee's latest book, the story collection The Partition, has just been published by Akashic Books. He is also the author of the collection Yellow and the novels Country of Origin, Wrack and Ruin, The Collective, and Lonesome Lies Before Us. He has received an American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives near Baltimore with his wife, the writer Jane Delury, and directs the MFA program in creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. don-lee.com

Lawrence Block

How did you become a writer?

During my third year in high school, I began finding satisfaction, and some low-level recognition, in my writing assignments for English class. It occurred to me for the first time that I could make writing my profession, and from that moment on I never seriously considered anything else. I made a couple of small sales, and a job at a literary agency gave me an inside track, and I just kept on writing and publishing.

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

The Twentieth Century American realists—James T. Farrell, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, etc.

When and where do you write?

For quite a few years I tended to go away to write—to an artist colony like Ragdale or the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, or to the isolation of a hotel room or apartment in some other town. These days I work in what my wife wishes were our dining room. I work in the morning, and not for terribly long.

What are you working on now?

A memoir of a fictional character, Matthew Scudder.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve had times when I haven’t felt like writing, and times when I’ve had to stop work on particular books, or abandon them altogether. I wouldn’t call these incidents writer’s block, which is different in much the same way that a really bad mood is different from clinical depression. My late friend Jerrold Mundis was an expert on coping with writer’s block, and his book Break Writer’s Block Now! (https://amzn.to/3Rn2gQN) is an indispensable tool for any blocked writer. The strategies he developed are effective for anybody who’s having trouble getting words on the page or screen.

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

Henry Morrison, my agent back in the day, read a book I’d written and told me to put my second chapter first.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write to please yourself. And don’t expect too much.

Lawrence Block is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.  His work over the past half century has earned him multiple Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, the U.K. Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, and recognition in Germany, France, Taiwan, and Japan. His recent works include Dead Girl Blues, A Time to Scatter Stones, Keller’s Fedora, and the forthcoming  The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown. In addition to novels and short fiction, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. Block wrote a fiction column in Writer’s Digest for fourteen years, and has published several books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and the updated and expanded Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel—and, most recently, A Writer Prepares, a memoir of his beginnings as a writer. He has lately found a new career as an anthologist (Collectibles, At Home in the Dark, In Sunlight or in Shadow) and recently spent a semester as writer-in-residence at South Carolina’s Newberry College. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

Kate Folk

How did you become a writer?

I think I’ve always been a writer. I’ve always loved stories and felt that the boundaries between reality and imagination are permeable. When I was a kid I wrote a sixty-page “novel” about a cheetah named Damara who escapes from the zoo. It was pretty overwrought. In college and after, I was unsure about pursuing writing as a career, which seemed ridiculous—who was I to think I could do that? I was always looking for someone to give me permission to write, so when I’d get negative or mixed feedback on something I’d written, I would be devastated, and want to give up. I got an MFA from the University of San Francisco, and after graduating, I spent years writing short stories and submitting them to journals. The process of submitting, getting lots of rejections and occasional acceptances, helped to solidify my identity as a writer. I had to get to the point where the main goal wasn’t publishing or other external validation, but the work of writing itself, the daily habit of it, the writer’s life. Though of course validation is always nice, too.

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

The first books I loved were the Babysitters Club series. I was addicted to those books when I first learned to read. I had read all 130-something of them by the end of first grade. Then I got into reading R.L. Stine’s Fear Street Books, and Lois Duncan’s supernatural thrillers. I read Don Delillo’s White Noise for a class in high school, which blew my mind at the time, and probably set me on my current trajectory. Later, the work of Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, James Baldwin, Kafka and Nabokov have all been major influences, as well as contemporary writers of weird and speculative fiction, like Amelia Gray, Kelly Link, and George Saunders. TV and movies have also made a big impact. I spent my childhood watching a lot of TV—too much, probably. The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and The X-Files were the shows that most shaped my worldview and artistic sensibility.

When and where do you write?

It depends on what else I have going on at the time—teaching jobs, other gigs and commitments—but on a day I have free to write, I’ll start with my morning routine of exercise, meditation, and journaling. I journal 1,000 words each day. Then I’ll shower and eat breakfast and start writing. It’s a little ridiculous how elaborate my morning routine has become, but it all lays the groundwork for writing fiction. The front rooms of my apartment face a noisy street, so I do a lot of writing in bed, because my bedroom is tucked in back, quiet and dim. I also time myself when I write, with a timer app on my laptop. I do a loose version of the Pomodoro Technique, especially at the start of a writing session. It can feel daunting to begin, but if I tell myself I’m just writing for 30 minutes at a time, it feels approachable. I’ll write 30 minutes, take a break for a few minutes, write another 30. Once I’m inside the story, I don’t think about the time anymore, but it can take some coaxing to get into that state.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a novel about obsession. That’s all I can say at the moment.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I would call it more an inner resistance to getting started, like my writerly muscles have gotten cold and cramped up. It can be easy to talk myself out of writing. Over the years I’ve gotten better at doing it anyway, even if it’s just for thirty minutes. The routine I described above helps me get over the resistance, because I’m following a well-worn path, a groove in my mind. I used to listen to a few Philip Glass albums on repeat when I wrote, which was another way of training myself, like a dog.

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

My MFA professor, Lewis Buzbee, used to tell us, “don’t confuse impatience with ambition” when it came to publishing, which I think is wise, and not something I’ve always heeded, to my own detriment. I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and I love how he describes revision as a process of making tiny adjustments, based on intuition—rather than thinking at the level of plot, to think on the level of the sentence, and let the work guide me, sentence by sentence, into becoming what it should be, like slowly adjusting a ship’s course. There is so much wisdom in that book, but that part sticks out to me now, as I’m revising a novel.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try a bunch of different things—subject matter, style, structure—until you figure out what you are most compelled to write. Many writers, including me, have struggled until they found the stories they were most suited to tell, and most interested in committing to, day after day. Keep trying until you tap into something that feels alive on the page.

Kate Folk is the author of Out There, a story collection (Random House '22). She has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Concern, and Zyzzyva. Recently, she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.