Mark Braude

How did you become a writer? The same way Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: Gradually then suddenly.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). For lasting influence nothing can match the records my parents played when I was small. “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime, too.” “The sun shall not smite I by day, nor the moon by night.” “Ce que j'ai fait, ce soir-là.” “Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s fly.” “These are the days of lasers in the jungle.” “There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.” I heard short stories, poems, riddles. What made someone a Gold Dust Woman? Why did Mickey Mouse grow up a cow? How do you become a satanic mechanic? Where is Electric Avenue and how do you take it higher once you get there? A few of the big ones since then (from a much longer list): Isaac Babel, James Baldwin, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Charles Dickens, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, Seamus Heaney, Ernest Hemingway, Patricia Highsmith, Pico Iyer, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenkō, Yukio Mishima, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, J.D. Salinger, Lucy Sante, Patti Smith, Zadie Smith, Strunk & White, Tom Wolfe, Tobias Wolff, Virginia Woolf.

When and where do you write? Children keep commandeering my offices, so right now I’m writing on a foldup desk in a walk-in closet with a north facing window. My wife is ten feet away at her own desk.

What are you working on now? My most recent book focused on the party that was Paris in the 1920s. I’m not done with Paris and the next logical step seemed to be to write about the hangover. So now I’m working on something in the 1930s, and it might stretch into WWII.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. Sometimes a day will pass without the word doc getting any bigger, and then I just hope something else I’ve done has helped the work in ways not yet known: a walk, something seen, something overheard. But since most often I feel like I’m fighting just to get a couple of hours of quiet at the desk, once I’m there, I’m there and I’m on. Note also that I only started writing in my thirties, so maybe missed out on some stretches of block because I’d already done my share of wandering and experienced false starts in other arenas before I got going with writing.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I read or heard Michael Chabon saying something along the lines of: Success as a writer, however you define it, depends only on three things: talent, luck, and hard work. And since hard work is the only one of the three you can control that’s where you should focus your energy, and everything else is just noise that you have to ignore. I’m mangling it because I’m not Michael Chabon. But that was the gist of it, and although seemingly simple advice, it’s really tough to follow.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read outside of your genre as much as possible. And on the page try to be generous, above all.

Mark Braude is the author of Kiki Man Ray, The Invisible Emperor, and Making Monte Carlo. His books have been translated (or are being translated) into Czech, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. Kiki Man Ray was one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2022, a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, and was named to the Harper’s Bazaar 100 for 2022.

Dean Gloster

How did you become a writer? I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wrote. But I have this deep attachment to eating food and living indoors, so I made some money as a lawyer before I turned to writing full time. I worked on my first novel, Dessert First, after my then-teen daughter found a scene on the printer and got really angry at me, that I was wasting time as an attorney, when I could actually write.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.) Too many to name. I mostly write young adult novels, and my influences include A.S. King, whose Please Ignore Vera Dietz expanded (well, broke) my orderly mind: It has chapter in flow charts from Vera’s dad, narrated by her dead friend Charlie, and from the point of view of a pagoda-shaped building in town. I realized you can do almost anything—if you have the chops to pull it off, and if it’s right for the story. I was fortunate to go back to school in my 50s to get an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I had the most amazing mentor-advisors there—Martha Brockenbrough, Linda Urban, Tim Wynne-Jones, Shelly Tanaka, David McInnis Gill.

I also used to do stand-up comedy in the ’80s in San Francisco, and seeing two comics there that I was never going to touch pushed me to writing instead: Robin Williams was so much better at improv than I’d ever be, and this (then mostly unknown guy) Dana Carvey was so much better at physical comedy (the church lady, Sears and Roebuck boy) that I had to figure something else to do.

When and where do you write? Augh. If I was one of those super-productive types, I’d say all morning, but even without me launching into that, there’s enough lying on the Internet these days. I write in fits and starts, and try to make sure I get at least 300 new words every day. The morning is best, but I find that even if I’m exhausted at the end of the day and have just been thrown around for 90 minutes in Aikido class by 30-somethings, I can still do 300 words in the evening, before bed, if I haven’t gotten to it by then.

What are you working on now? It’s so fun. I’m writing a YA urban fantasy about a girl from a family of mythical creatures going to a human high school for the first time. I was really drawn to the cyberpunk novels of the 80s and 90s and Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovaks novels (Altered Carbon) because of how visceral and present the story world is, and I’m trying for something like that, with a girl from the Shadowscene, where there are real creatures from myths and legends, with their own political power struggles. And it’s fun to look at a U.S. high school from a complete outsider’s perspective, who’s really more worried about whether her family will survive what happens in the Shadowscene that week.

Have you ever suffered from writers’ block? I wouldn’t really know. I’m such a slow writer, it would be pretty much indistinguishable from normal productivity. My debut novel, Dessert First, was a story of a girl dealing with her younger brother’s cancer, and I had to stop working on it for a couple of years when my brother got diagnosed with cancer, until he was clearly in remission. It was just too close. But during that break, I worked on a different novel, and the story world for that hopeless muddle led to the one I’m writing now.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When in doubt, give your point of view character a scene goal and have that goal end in disaster. Fictional dialogue is a compression and intensification of real speech. Make sure there’s tension in a scene, and before you drop in any nuggets of backstory make sure the front story hooks the reader and there’s some suspense to keep them reading.

What’s your advice to new writers? Write. You have a huge advantage, in that you don’t know what’s especially difficult. You can take risks in the first draft that some of the rest of us would be nervous about. New writers are like those people who create successful startups: Because you don’t know how hard it really is, you can use the momentum of your enthusiasm to create astonishing progress. But then go back and fix it, and get some input, and make it even better before you send it out into the world. And then also concentrate on craft, because after you’ve got a manuscript that you’ve gotten feedback on, you have actual problems to solve that you can apply all that craft wisdom to.

Dean Gloster is a former Supreme Court clerk, former standup comic, and the author of Dessert First. He has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As @deangloster, he has 145,000 followers on what he now describes as “that unfortunately rightward listing sad flaming hulk formerly known as Twitter.” He’s also at www.deangloster.com.

Mike Errico

How did you become a writer? I always wanted to be one, so I always wrote, but I never had anything that needed to be read, if you know what I mean. It was therapy, and sketches, and atrocious conversations between talking dogs. A lot of that became songs—talking dogs and all. It wasn’t until I began teaching that I felt I could write something worth someone’s time.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I didn’t get an MFA or anything, so I basically had to teach myself how to write. I found books by Stephen King, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Annie Dillard, and others. For how to structure an abstract thought, I went to Rebecca Solnit, George Saunders, Mary Ruefle, and back as far as I could reach with philosophers—I wrote a lot during the pandemic, and for some reason, the Stoics spoke to me. I shared some Stoic principles with my students in order to help us all survive, because by late 2020, their songs were getting pretty damn bleak! Lots of “dancing to the end of the world” stuff. I tried to infuse some hope and a sense of agency, which, now that I think about it, is what a lot of pop songs try to do. Stylistically, I love anything that proposes an alternate reality: Richard Brautigan is a long-time favorite, and more recently I discovered Ocean Vuong, who seems to blur poetry, prose, and lyric. I think it would be cool to set him to music. For the life of the songwriter, I read David Byrne, Jeff Tweedy, Questlove, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Patti Smith (of course), among many others. Biographies are a mixed bag because their journeys are not replicable, and oftentimes the writers are as baffled as the readers about how it all happened. Or they just talk about drugs, which gets boring. And I always try to interject the heavy reading with fun stuff: Andrew Sean Greer, Maria Semple, graphic novels… Bill Bryson had me snorting, which I did not expect. There’s a list of books at the end of Music, Lyrics, and Lifeentitled “Summer Reading for Some Time Later in Life”—it’s as scattered as my music collection, but it’s a good list. I recommend them all.

When and where do you write? I write in the morning, mostly. I get up at insane hours without an alarm, and go till I can’t, or till it’s getting dumb, or till my hand gives out. By then, the house is waking up, and I’m grateful. I find that the writing tools really do act on my thoughts, to paraphrase Nietzsche—longhand for longer prose, computer for blurting what might be songs. Where do I write? Wherever. “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.” That’s Annie Dillard, a complete boss.

What are you working on now? I am in the middle of an EP, which I’ve had to pull back on because I have some long Covid symptoms that are affecting my voice. As for prose, I’m taking notes for a follow up to Music, Lyrics, and Life. The similarities and dysfunctions of the music and publishing industries are really stunning. But I just put my head down and do what I do.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I go into this at length in my book: There’s no such thing as writer’s block. It was invented by a Freudian psychiatrist named Dr. Edmund Bergler in the 1940’s. He blamed things like breastfeeding mothers who were stingy with their milk, which is something I enjoy telling my 18- to 21-year-old students in 2023. Anyway, people who studied the “affliction” actually did come up with a cure: Write through it. Which is to say, keep doing what you’re doing whether or not you have the “affliction.” Which is to say, it doesn’t matter if you have the “affliction” or not. I definitely do have feelings that are mistaken for writer’s block: I’ll hate what I’ve written, or resist completing an idea for a thousand different reasons. That’s not a block, though—that’s fear. The only real block is getting hit by a bus.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I don’t know if it’s advice, but when I walk into the indie bookstore in my neighborhood, my lungs fill as if I’ve been holding my breath since the last time I was there. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I love the energy coming off the shelves; I love the covers, and the spines, and the feel of the pages, and the anticipation of a new and transporting piece of work. That feeling comes to me as advice: “You’re in the right place. Keep going.”

What’s your advice to new writers? I can only give what was given to me by an old showman: Save your money; Never believe your publicity, and leave the party early.

Mike Errico is a recording artist, author, and songwriting professor at Yale, the New School, and NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. In addition to his performing and teaching careers, Errico’s opinions and insights have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and CNN. His new book, Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter, is available everywhere, including: Bookshop | Books Are Magic | Amazon |  Bandcamp (signed copies).