Dean King

How did you become a writer? From a young age, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I loved to read, and that led to wanting to write. My mother, an avid reader of The New Yorker and books of all sorts, particularly nurtured my love of reading, taking me to the library weekly to get books. There is no replacement for reading voraciously when you’re young. You soak up the words and the style like a sponge. It all becomes part of your DNA. Later, when it was actually time to write and I was at a loss on how to go about it, I did two things. First, I started keeping a journal so that I was writing at least a little bit every day. And second, I did some Q&A interviews, the most basic kind of writing you can do. I sent my clips to Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and got my foot in the door of the magazine world.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). There are so many. First my mother and my grandmother, who also read The New Yorker cover to cover and loved to do crossword puzzles. Then my kindergarten and first grade teachers, Mrs. Carver and Mrs. McGrath, who had us write and make books, wrapping the covers in burlap and stitching them together. They tried to have one of my early stories published as a children’s book. A middle school teacher, Liston Rudd, loved The Hobbit and inspired me to read the Tolkien Trilogy. In high school two teachers stand out: George Squires admired my concise writing, which made me realize that longer did not mean better. And Ron Smith challenged me (and all his students) to think deeper and to be more exacting. As an undergraduate writing student in Chapel Hill, I studied with such literary lights as the poet Jim Seay and the novelists Doris Betts and Bland Simpson. In graduate school at NYU, I studied with Gloria Naylor, Wesley Brown, John A. Williams, and E. L. Doctorow. Along the way the authors I read and loved, and now certainly draw upon, are too many to name. The grooms’ gifts at my wedding were volumes of Faulkner. Then there’s Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, J. D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Portis, Patrick O’Brian, Studs Terkel, Tom Wolfe, Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx, Richard Price, Hillary Mantel, James Elroy, Tim Gautreaux, Daniel Woodrell, Mark Bowden…. 

When and where do you write? I write in my office in the house that I grew up in, which my wife and I bought from my mother when we moved back to Richmond from New York City. The house was built in 1917 as a country summer cottage for people living in downtown Richmond. My office is in what used to be a screened-in porch, where we ate dinner most summer nights at a rustic octagonal game table made by my father. I remember watching storms blow in, furious downpours, and lightning strikes in the backyard, as well as languid nights made magical by the flash of lightning bugs. Alas, the city grew up around us. The street traffic is more dominant, and now the porch is enclosed. It makes for a great sunny office though. I am there 24/7, except when I can’t be.

What are you working on now? I am in the thick of promoting Guardians of the Valley. After spending five years or so working on a book, I enjoy speaking and connecting with readers. It gives me a break before I dive headfirst into the next book.  

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Since I write nonfiction, I’m not very susceptible to writer’s block. If anything, it’s the opposite. As I’m figuring out my path through the true story, I sometimes go down intriguing rabbit holes and write whole chapters that won’t ever appear in the book. I don’t feel like this is a waste of time, though, because I’m absorbing the story as I write and gaining insight. And often bits of the cut chapters make it into another part of the book.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Having had the fortune to study with so many talented writers, I’ve been the recipient of a lot of great writing advice, but I’ll never forget Jim Seay’s admonishment on the first day of poetry class: “No autumn leaves.” It was sage advice. As beginning writers, we were not equipped to take on so common and romanticized a subject matter. To add meaningfully to the autumn leaves conversation, there’s a very high bar of voice, originality, and insight needed to avoid cliché. Easier to begin with something more personal or under the popular radar. When I first heard the idea that a book is “never finished, only abandoned,” it was freeing. I repeat it to many writers. You have to let go at some point. 

What’s your advice to new writers? Don’t write about autumn leaves. Kidding. Leap in and tell your story. Don’t worry about how well you’re writing. Just write. That is success in and of itself. Make the effort and exercise your writing muscles. There will be plenty of time to get it right. But also know that editing is part of writing, and you will need to edit far beyond your original expectations. 

Dean King is a nationally best-selling author of nonfiction books, including Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, Skeletons on the Zahara, and The Feud. The Wall Street Journal called The Feud “popular history the way it ought to be written.” “King’s poetry is a match for Muir’s,” says the New York Times Book Review of his latest book, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite (Scribner, 2023). King’s writing has also appeared in Esquire, Granta, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, New York, and The New York Times. www.deanhking.com

Jinwoo Chong

How did you become a writer? I started writing when I was nine or ten years old: a succession of really terrible derivations of things I was reading and obsessing over at the time: The Hunger Games, The Magic Tree House, etc., come to mind. I assume, all the usual suspects for someone my age growing up in the 2000s. You become a writer when you write, and forever after, so yes, I was a writer back then. I did not become a published writer until I was twenty-five, when the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum published a short piece of fiction in their annual anthology.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My debut novel, Flux, was inspired by—among other things—Ellison's Invisible Man, Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Yu's Interior Chinatown, the short stories of Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, and Carmen Maria Machado. I am inspired most days by my dad, and his dad. 

When and where do you write? I write almost exclusively at night, after dinner but before any sleepiness has set in. I also tend to work in short, intense bursts that can take over an entire week/weekend, then come to an abrupt halt for a month or more.

What are you working on now? I'm writing a new novel, something more joyous, grounded, and autobiographical than this first one. I turned to writing and reading during the pandemic as a way to cheer myself up, and as a result found myself avoiding especially sad or desolate fiction. This has bled, somewhat, into the types of stories I'd like to tell moving forward.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I seem to have the opposite problem: I am sometimes distracted by so many different ideas that I have a hard time making any real progress on any one thing.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Stephen King wrote in On Writing that he often abandons his work for months at a time, comes back to it, and becomes energized by all of the opportunities for revision that reveal themselves after he's taken some time away from it. It is, genuinely, the only thing that I've tried that helps me revise.

What’s your advice to new writers? Writing and publishing are so different. They are two halves of the lifecycle of anything you put out into the world, in which it is at first yours alone, and, after you publish it, in which it no longer belongs to you but to everyone else. New writers: learn to let it go. Work on something new. I think about this every time a bad review begins to sting me. What am I going to do? Go back and change it? There's no point being upset. 

Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, published March 21, 2023 in the US and UK from Melville House. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, andElectric Literature. He received the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Fiction from The Southern Review and a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart Prize anthology. He received an MFA from Columbia University and is an editorial assistant at One Story.

Henry Hoke

How did you become a writer? As soon as I could read – Calvin and Hobbes in the newspaper – I immediately began writing my own knockoff comics strips. Throughout childhood I was always more into the idea of being a writer (my parents were voracious book people), than of publishing. I illustrated and stapled together magazines about made-up celebrities. I came up with concepts for 20 bestselling novels, designed and drew their glossy covers, but never wrote a word of them. In middle school I wrote a serial romance/comedy series starring all my friends who were coupled up, and passed it around to them. I was not coupled up. It took me a long time to imagine I could put in the work to create a book for real, not just pretend.

Name your writing influences. I’m mainly inspired by musicians who have a particular, idiosyncratic cadence. Cam’ron, Joanna Newsom, Lucinda Williams. That’s what I strive for in my work: sustained voice punctuated with unexpected turns. My two writing goddesses have been with me for most of my life: Truman Capote and Suzan-Lori Parks. They have a thousand demi-goddesses sitting below them, dipping their toes in the dark pool where I’m treading water.

When and where do you write? The meat of my creation happens in bursts and fragments, in the middle of the night, at the end of a long walk. Notes typed on my phone or scribbled in journals. I record all the solid story moments and memorable lines when they come to me. Then I commit to concentrated collaging of all these elements, so I’m never starting with a blank page. Each book has been a little different, but the actual construction takes its time. In my daily writing practice I aim for a page, and sometimes I get two, or ten. It’s never worth it to beat myself up for falling short.

What are you working on now? I’m writing two different books. One for my mom, one for my dad. The mom one’s deep southern and haunted, a monologue in cassette recordings. The dad one’s a sprawling travelogue, and I’ll probably never finish it. I keep putting it aside. I wrote Sticker and Open Throat in those asides. So that’s the dad book’s function right now, to be cheated on.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Oh, honey.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? This was actually advice I got from a writer friend about playing squash, which was “It’s slower than you think.” Don’t rush for the ball. Cultivating patience in my practice was difficult, but vital.

What’s your advice to new writers? Besides the above, I think my career trajectory has taught me to ignore every obnoxious industry/workshop pressure or adage that doesn’t serve you, that rubs you the wrong way, and follow your own heart to write the most idiosyncratic, most you thing possible. Weaponize your juvenilia. Don’t leave anything behind if you love it. And, of course, life’s too short to write long books.

Henry Hoke is an editor at The Offing and the author of five books, most recently the novel Open Throat(MCD/FSG & Picador) and the memoir Sticker (Bloomsbury).