Ann Jacobus

How did you become a writer? Acting or directing were my early aspirations but I was too inhibited, had four kids, and didn’t live in LA or NYC. In fiction writing I get to do both plus produce, design sets and costumes, stage manage, etc. and can work at any hour any place—a necessity if you have four kids. I didn’t start writing seriously though until my mid-thirties and didn’t publish a novel until my fifties.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I keep a running list of all my favorite writers and books in order to answer questions like this because I tend to go blank on the spot. But it’s seven pages long now, single spaced. Writers learn by reading—and watching and listening. I’ve always been obsessed with story and felt that plotting and premise were weaknesses of mine. So I studied screenplays, plays and watched films for homework. A few screenwriter-playwrights I revere include Thornton Wilder, Charlie Kaufman, Nora Ephron, and Stanley Kubrick for the way they tell a story as much as for the stories they tell. Novelists whose writing I’m in awe of include Miriam Towes (The Fying Troutmans, All My Puny Sorrows), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex), Virginia Woolf (anything), and J.R.R. Tokien (the Lord of the Rings Trilogy). Other inspiring writers for me include Dr. Suess, Dav Pilkey, Carlos Castaneda, C.S. Lewis and Annie Dillard.

When and where do you write? Mornings—I have just a few hours of semi-productive multi-neuron firing in me and then I’m useless. My “office” is a comfy chair with my laptop screen raised to eye level thanks to a small, foldable stand to reduce neck and shoulder wear and tear. I recommend it. Long plane flights are good—Isn’t there some writer who flies to Tokyo and back to revise manuscripts? I’d like to try that if someone will pay for it.

What are you working on now? A ghost story/thriller set in Arkansas about a religiously conservative family and their increasingly clairvoyant daughter’s relationship with an agitated spirit.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yeah, right now. After I send the above ms. off I don’t have any ideas for my next novel. I envy people with a long list of premises just waiting to be spun into prose. Mine come slowly and piecemeal, similar to extracting molars. But I’ll start researching something that fascinates me and wait for a story to bloom.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? An author I admired told me early on that the only writers he knew who were successful were the ones who made it their first priority and never gave up. More myopically, I go by, “Just do it.” Just get something—anything—down and don’t judge yourself. Then, improve it. Also research and write about what pulls you and what you feel passionate about. You may be improving it for a long time.

What’s your advice to new writers? You are perfecting a craft, no different from learning to play a musical instrument to the point where people will willingly pay to listen to your version of “Für Elise.” Don’t be afraid or put off by the work you need to do, but don’t kid yourself either. Write every day, if possible (grocery lists count), take classes, find good readers and/or a writing group. Then, even something that’s well-crafted, and has readers responding enthusiastically, STILL has to be promoted vigorously by you the author, a whole new, unpaid skill-set. If there’s anything else you’d rather be doing, then you are better off doing that. Harumph. But not to be too discouraging—if you can get beyond all the nay-sayers, you’re golden. I wouldn’t do anything else.

Ann Jacobus is the author of YA novels The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent, and Romancing the Dark in the City of Light. She graduated from Dartmouth College, and earned an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has published essays, articles, poetry, and short fiction; teaches YA novel writing for Stanford Continuing Studies; and is a former suicide crisis line counselor and always a mental health advocate. When she’s not reading, she enjoys swimming, sailing, dogs and kids, and binging Netflix series. Find her at www.annjacobus.com, and on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

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.