Wanda M. Morris

How did you become a writer? I think I've always been a writer and just took the circuitous route to become a novelist. I've always journaled and still do every morning before I start my writing day. As a lawyer, I always wrote--memos, briefs, summaries, etc. But I've never enjoyed writing as much as I do when I am creating stories in my head and bringing them to life on the page. 

Specifically, my journey to publication was not an easy one but I hope it inspires and encourages other writers. It took me 13 years from first draft to publication with my debut novel, All Her Little Secrets. I started a draft of the book and then put it away for 7 years because I convinced myself that nobody would want to read about a 40-ish Black woman who worked with really awful people. I think people  want an escape when they read a book and who would want to escape to the world I had created in that book?! During that time, I continued to write whether it was personal essays or journaling, but I didn’t go back to the book. Then I had a health scare a few years back and I started to look at my life differently. I’ve always loved to write, so why not do what I love to do? I pulled out the manuscript. When I read it again, I knew it was pretty bad, but that was okay. All first drafts are bad. I knew immediately I needed to improve my craft. I began reading about fiction writing and took night classes on creative writing. I attended workshops, including Robert McKee's Story Seminar.

After revising the manuscript, I began querying agents. I did so with horrendous results. My queries either went into a black hole of which I didn’t hear a word back or I got a standard form letter thanking me but advising that the project was “not right” for them. I still felt deep down that I had something with this book, so I kept revising and polishing it. I queried some more. More rejections. But this time, some agents responded that they liked the premise but went on to give me specific comments about why the book wasn’t working for them. I took those comments and poured them back into my manuscript revisions. 

While on my “Journey of Rejection,” I did a really smart thing – I built myself a community of support in other writers, some more advanced in their journey and some right where I was in the journey. I came to rely on their friendship, wisdom and insight. Rejection is hard and having people to support you along the way is hugely important. I joined groups like Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime and Crime Writers of Color. I continued to query and continued to rack up an painfully impressive number of rejections. And while you would think I would have given up on this book, I didn’t. I had this mantra in my head that came from the lyrics of a gospel song, “I almost gave up. I was right at the edge of a breakthrough but couldn’t see it.” I knew if I just stayed with this book, I would see a breakthrough. 

Finally, in July 2019, I attended a writing conference and participated in their pitch. I met a lovely woman, Lori Galvin of Aevitas Creative Management, who became my agent. She is a fierce advocate for this book and my career. After I signed with Lori, she gave me notes and I spent another nine months or so (the pandemic intervened and at one point I was not writing all!) working on more edits. We went on submission in July 2020 and the book sold 12 days later at auction!

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My mother, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alafair Burke, Lou Berney, Robert McKee, Don Winslow, Steven Pressfield's book, The War of Art, and my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Shirley Cook.

When and where do you write? My brain is fresher in the early morning so I try to get in the bulk of my writing then. I write in a small room off my living room. I have library envy when I look at other people with large, impeccably decorated rooms with wall-to-wall bookshelves that they modestly call their "study."

What are you working on now? I am working on my third book that is currently untitled. It is about a young woman who returns to her hometown in coastal Georgia after suffering a devastating loss. When she learns that a Black landowner is missing and his very valuable property is being redeveloped, she makes a desperate search to find out what happened to him and others like him. The book deals with themes of Black land ownership and generational wealth and what it means to have a home.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Thankfully no. I view writing full-time as my new career. I couldn't show up at my previous job as an attorney and say "I can't practice law today because I'm uninspired." When I feel like I am stuck in my writing, I try to work through it by changing up my routine. That may mean changing the locale where I write or leaving a particular point in the project to work on a different section of the project, or simply distracting myself from the problem by reading to free up my brain. As Stephen King says, I let the "boys in the basement" do their work.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Grow a very thick skin before jumping into publishing. It can be a tough industry. And that's coming from me, a person who worked in the cut-throat world of the legal profession. I don't think publishing is necessarily cut-throat, but it can be filled with inordinate amounts of rejection and subjectivity.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read as much as you can. Reading helps you develop "an ear" for discerning when narrative works and when it doesn't. I also recommend that new writers read outside the genre in which they write. If you write literary, read a thriller on occasion to learn something about pacing. If you write mysteries, read a biography on occasion to learn about characterization. Read often and read widely.

Wanda M. Morris is the acclaimed author of All Her Little Secrets, which was named as one of the “Best Books of 2021” by Hudson Booksellers and selected as the #1 Top Pick for “Library Reads” by librarians across the country. All Her Little Secrets won the 2022 Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery Novel. Her new book, Anywhere You Run, was named as One of the Top Ten Crime Fiction Books of 2023 by The New York Times. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. Wanda is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Crime Writers of Color and serves on the Board of International Thriller Writers. She is married, the mother of three and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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.