V.V. Ganeshananthan

How did you become a writer? I became a writer in, I think, the way that most people do. I was an avid reader and it just seemed to me like there was no better job than telling stories. From a very early age, I was pretty decisive that that was what I wanted to do. Then my mother encouraged me also to pursue journalism as I went into high school, and I kept doing that in college and a little bit afterwards as well. And all along, I was always writing fiction. I do consider myself first and foremost a fiction writer, but I was published first as a journalist. So those were the paths that I took to those two genres.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I was privileged to have amazing teachers very early on. In high school I had a teacher who was both the creative writing teacher and also the journalism advisor. She was extraordinarily encouraging and has published fiction of her own. Her name is Jan Bowman. In college, I studied with Patricia Powell and Jamaica Kincaid, and then at the Iowa Writers' Workshop I studied with ZZ Packer, Jim McPherson, Elizabeth McCracken, Marilynne Robinson, James Hynes, Frank Conroy, Chris Offutt, and Ethan Canin. I basically took class with almost everyone who was on the faculty there. They had varied styles, and they were incredibly generous. So I'm grateful for that. As a working journalist, I also, for a period of time, worked for James Fallows—after graduating from college, I worked at The Atlantic, where Jim was writing about higher education. I did research for him and also wrote a piece with him and he was a fantastic mentor and gave great advice as well. But, again, in a separate genre. So in both the creative writing world and in the journalistic world, I was lucky to have a lot of people editing me, really. And I think that was how I learned the most.

When and where do you write? I write mostly on my couch or in my bed. I also sometimes write at my desk. And I write whenever the time presents itself. I probably write best in the afternoon or late at night but I do write at all hours and I'm a little bit of a binge writer. So if I am on a writing streak, I might wake up and start writing and basically write until I go to bed. And then I do have streaks where I don't write at all. Because I have a motor disability that limits my typing, I sometimes have been concerned about my ergonomic setup, but when I'm just talking to the computer using voice recognition, that's obviously less of a concern, and I'm able to move around as I would like.

What are you working on now? I'm now working on some short stories and essays that I started while I was working on my novel, but that I hadn't brought to the finish line. I'm having a lot of fun with those; I don't really have a sense of where they're going, which is delightful. It's interesting to return to the space of not knowing what the end product is, or trying to decide what it might be, what is its form. And I have to reteach myself how to do that. I don't know at what point I decide, oh, I'm working on a short story collection, or oh, I'm working on an essay collection, or oh, I'm working on a mixed genre collection with the same themes, or oh, this short story wants to be a novel. So I guess I'm in the period of figuring that out.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I guess I have suffered from writer's block, although I don't know at the time that I called it that. I don't think that I've ever been very good at admitting that I can't do something. I'm probably more likely to do it badly. So probably writer's block, for me, looked like writing a lot of pages that were just really terrible. And that definitely happened. So I think I have a tendency to hurl myself against the closed door rather than walking away from it, and I'm not sure that's the best habit. Sometimes walking away from your work for a little while seems like it could be really helpful.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best writing advice I've ever received is probably from Jamaica Kincaid and Elizabeth McCracken. So Jamaica Kincaid would always tell us to read our work aloud. And she's certainly not the only writer who's said that, but she's the first one who said it to me. She's also the first person who ever made me read my work aloud to her in her office. And she would edit me verbally as I went through each sentence, which was excruciating and also extraordinarily useful. And that, I think, is tied to Elizabeth McCracken's instructions to think about each story teaching you how to read it, which is also something that I think about pretty often.

What’s your advice to new writers? I always feel funny giving advice. I think that, at the beginning of each new project, anyone might feel like a new writer. And I also think that any writer can benefit from just having someone around to cheer them on. There's a lot that's been said about workshop and critique. And I think that those things are really valuable. But when a project is kind of young and tender, I know that I have benefited hugely from having people say, “This is good, keep going!” In the early stages of certain projects, including my first novel, including my second novel, that was the feedback, that was what readers said. That was what helped me to keep going.

V.V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. Since 2017, she has co-hosted the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

Michael C. Bland

How did you become a writer? I’ve always loved telling stories. When I was 10 years old, I created three comic books featuring robotic bugs I’d created from drafting paper. Yet I didn’t pursue writing at first; instead, I focused on business. After college, my first job was in collections, which included repossessing cars. That made me ask myself what I wanted to do with my life. (Something I should have pondered before I graduated.) This led me to explore writing. Yet other than buying a few books on writing, I didn’t take any formal training for a number of years. That was a mistake. It was only after I began taking classes at the University of Iowa’s summer writing program that my skills as an author began to improve. I also found a partner in Robert Kerbeck, who edited my writing while I edited his. That elevated my skills. Having someone who gave blunt feedback, who pushed me to be better, helped me become the writer I am today.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Robert Kerbeck, who I just mentioned, is an influence both as a writer and editor. He has two nonfiction books (Ruse and Malibu Burning) which are both excellent. I’ve been influenced by the more classic science fiction authors, Robert A. Heinlein, Carl Sagan, and Isaac Asimov. My father was a big sci-fi reader, and I would read his copies of their books when I was a kid, dazzled by their stories. I’ve also been inspired by Pierce Brown with his Red Rising series. The voice of his main character is outstanding. And I’ve loved Blake Crouch’s work, with his stories centered around technology that could really happen, and how they impact the main character(s).

When and where do you write? I have an office where I do most of my writing, which at first looks very professional…until you notice the Star Wars figurines crowded under my computer monitor; the framed pictures are artists’ renditions of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Flash; a lightsaber is resting on the back of the couch, and so on. I have a Surface, so I’m actually able to write almost anywhere. As far as when I write, I primarily write on the weekends, as I have a full-time job. Yet I never truly stop writing. My Notes app on my phone is filled with countless entries regarding my next book and ideas for other stories.

What are you working on now? I am working on the third book in The Price Of trilogy. The story has been mapped out, and I’m fine-tuning my notes before I begin the rough draft. Readers don’t need to read The Price of Safety before reading The Price of Rebellion. I wrote The Price of Rebellion as a stand-alone book, including the pertinent information readers need to understand Dray Quintero’s world. It’s more about the journey he and the other main characters take in this book, and how it changes their world.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes, but not in the traditional sense of staring at a blank screen, as I don’t turn on the computer if I don’t know what I want to write. I know that sounds like cheating, but don’t worry, there have been many, many times where I’ve been unsure what to write, how to develop a story, and so on. With The Price of Rebellion, I knew I wanted certain events to occur in the story, but the book didn’t come fully formed. I had to work at crafting the story. To me, it’s like walking in a fog, with the “fog” being the endless choices that could be made with the story. As I define my story, the fog clears, those endless choices coalescing (over an excruciatingly long time) into the final path the story takes.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? “Keep your day job.” This wasn’t a criticism of my writing ability. It was a harsh reality that few people can truly support themselves as a writer. Many do, but as I focus just on novels, that limits my income. As I produce more publishable work, I can build my readership and sell more books, but it’s a long process. Writers who support themselves with royalty income from their novels are few and far between. It’s not impossible, but don’t expect your first book to become a national bestseller that will enable you to quit your day job.

As far as writing, Stephen King’s advice to take your finished rough draft, stick it in a drawer for six weeks, and work on something else before editing the draft was great advice. I get a much better perspective if I step away from the book for a while. With The Price of Rebellion, after I completed the rough draft in early 2020, the pandemic hit, which forced me to put the book aside for over six months. When I was finally able to pick it back up, I was better able to see the parts that worked and the parts that didn’t.

What’s your advice to new writers? To go back to my fog analogy, there will be many times you will be frustrated and feel you won’t be able to see your story, your characters’ motivations, or even remember why you’re writing in the first place. Keep at it. Writing isn’t easy, at least not the level you need in order to get published. Take classes. Join writers’ groups. More than likely, your writing will be subpar at first. Almost everyone’s is. But just like playing the piano, snow skiing, or piloting an airplane, you don’t instinctively know how to write the first time you try. To be good at anything takes time, practice, training, and focus. The more you do it, and the more you strive to improve your writing, the better you will become. That second part is important, because if you just write without taking classes, getting feedback, reading others’ works, etc., you will just be spinning your wheels.

Michael C. Bland’s debut novel The Price of Safety, was published in 2020. Though released during a global pandemic, The Price of Safety reached #7 in Amazon’s rankings for Dystopian novels and received Finalist awards three times: by the Indie Book Awards for both Science Fiction and Thriller, and by National Indie Excellence Awards for New Fiction. The second novel in the trilogy, The Price of Rebellion, will be released on May 16, 2023. The novel recently won Best Science Fiction Novel of 2022 by Indies Today. Michael is a founding member and the secretary of BookPod, an online book support group. “Elizabeth”, one of his short stories, won Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest 2015 Popular Fiction Awards contest, and two of the short stories he edited have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He currently lives in Florida. Website: www.mcbland.com.

Tom Comitta

How did you become a writer? Until I was 22, I identified as a songwriter/composer. One friend in college said that I wrote “absurdist rock,” but the songs also incorporated country, folk, funk, experimental music elements, samples, and even sound poetry—a term I didn’t know at the time, but later found to resonate with the percussive word play in my music.

My path to writing began when I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina a few months after college. I spent the summer living at home in West Chester, Pennsylvania and working for my father. Then in August I sold my car and got a one-way ticket the city where I’d visited briefly when I was studying abroad in Santiago de Chile and where I’d heard was a magnet for international artists. My goal was to work on my Spanish and meet musicians to collaborate with.

About a month into living in the San Telmo neighborhood, I started to feel crammed in my small apartment, working away for hours on solo recordings, meeting few people, and seeing little of the city. Soon I started to get out of the house more, taking buses to different neighborhoods and writing lyrics or poems in cafes and parks. In retrospect, it all sounds grossly romantic, like a bad Bertolucci movie. And in many ways it was. While in Buenos Aires, I was thrown into a tumultuous romantic relationship and regularly stayed up all night drinking heavily, doing cocaine, and partying with local and international artists—a virtuosic preamble to the exciting but destructive lifestyle that would force me to get sober years later.

Still, it was an important transitional period. Two months into my time in Buenos Aires, I left music behind completely, preferring writing not only because it got me out of the house—I wrote on buses, in bathrooms, even while walking—but because I found it was the words I was most interested in all along. While still in Argentina, I penned a poetry manuscript and sent it to MFA programs. Within a year I was back in the States again, living in a residential hotel and delighting with my new writer cohort in that great American tradition: a decent literary education funded by crippling student loan debt.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My mother, my father, my sister, my mom’s mom, my mom’s dad, my mom's step dad, my dad’s mom, my dad’s dad, TV shows when I was a kid, Broadway musicals my mom would play in the car, the Cyprus Hill, Right Said Fred, and B-52s albums my dad would play in the car, X-Men comic books, Jim Morrison’s shitty poetry, my uncle—the only other openly queer person in my family—who killed himself before I could know him but who has obsessed me much of my life, the Flaming Lips, three high school teachers: Victoria Croul, Anthony Rotondo, and that awful teacher whose name I forget who made us answer pop quiz questions about what clothes the characters wore in the novels we were reading and who made me despise English classes and novels for over a decade, the end of Camus’s The Stranger, early Arcade Fire, the Three Colors trilogy by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Funny Games (the original), other foreign films I watched in college like Underground by Emir Kusturica, Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis (tr. William L. Grossman), Gabriel Matthey Correa (teacher and friend), Chilean poets and novelists including Nicanor Parra, Elvira Hernández, Raúl Zurita, and Roberto Bolaño, Martin Kippenberger’s bad paintings, Gerhard Rühm’s poetry and pencil music and his idea of a non-communicative writing, ubu.com, Fluxus word scores and John Cage’s music as described in Words to Be Looked At by Liz Kotz (a gift from author Kevin Killian), Jacques Rancière, Tino Sehgal who I danced for while in grad school, Kota Ezawa and Emily McVarish (teachers and friends), Philip Glass (everything through Einstein on the Beach), Vicki Bennet aka People Like Us’s Welcome Abroad album and particularly “The Sound of the End of Music,” George Kuchar's Weather Diaries, Komar and Melamid and Dave Soldier’s People’s Choice Music akamy favorite album of all time, Rick Prelinger’s writing and films, Michelangelo Antonioni’s films and writing, my partner Medaya Ocher who taught me how to read novels, A Tribe Called Quest’s first two albums, Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its nearly Oulipian symmetrical framing structure, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Fiction for Dummies, Cixin Liu whose work I loved until I read “The Wandering Earth” which is the most pro-authoritarian literature I’ve ever read, free and spiritual jazz particularly Pharoah Sanders, Yusef Lateef, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, the Sespe Gorge north of Ojai for thirteen weekends the first summer of the pandemic, César Aira’s Conversations, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s lefty crime novels, everything by Muriel Spark and Percival Everett, Beverly Glenn Copeland, Wendy Carlos, my child Simone.

When and where do you write? It depends on the project. Writing the first draft of my novel, The Nature Book, which just came out from Coffee House Press, I wrote in a large studio at the Bemis Center for the Arts in Omaha, taking advantage of the many disposable tables they had on site. Because they offered an honorarium and I didn’t have to pay rent at the time, I worked from 10 am to 8 or 10 pm each day, collaging thousands of found nature descriptions into a single novel.

After that residency, I rented a much smaller office space in Los Angeles where I wrote the remaining six drafts of the book while juggling graphic design work. I kept a strict schedule, going to the office four nights a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday) for six hours at a time. I hardly had a life while working on that book.

Since finishing The Nature Book, I work in an even smaller office in our apartment or even on our couch or bed. Now that I do less collage work, I don't need as much space, and I find lying down to write for hours on end leads to less back pain. I write when I can—we have a ten-month-old baby and I still support myself with design work. This means I usually write at night or whenever freelance work runs dry. I pray for grant money to regain the flexibility that I had back at the Bemis.

What are you working on now? I’m currently deep in a two-book project in which I use the results of a public opinion poll—the kind employed by marketers and politicians—as literary constraints. I spent a year designing a “National Literature Survey” with a Johns Hopkins survey design expert and then polled a representative sample of the United States in December 2021, asking everything from favorite genre to setting to characterization to verb tense. With the data in hand, I’m now writing two novels: one with all of the most desired results, The Most Wanted Novel, and another with everything few people or no one voted for, The Most Unwanted Novel.

The Most Wanted is a 250-page traditional thriller about a woman fighting a murderous spiritual tech leader with a quantum computer. The Most Unwanted (but in my opinion better book) is a 500-page experimental epistolary novel that blends romance, horror, historical fiction, and classic literature. Set on Mars on Christmas Eve after talking cats take over Earth (since people don’t want to read about talking animals and largely prefer dogs over cats—sorry cat lovers!), The Most Unwanted is about elderly aristocratic tennis players searching for love, venturing down harrowing VR rabbit holes and into the darkest caverns of the macabre.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. I call it taking a break. All writers need breaks. MFA programs teach us that we must operate like a factory, regularly cranking out pages and always staying productive. But that’s not how writing actually happens. People take breaks for months, years. Every project I’ve ever worked on has benefitted from long stretches of time when I’ve abandoned it, worked on something else, or convinced myself I’ll never return to it again. In moments when writing feels stilted, I give myself the task to intentionally write bad (I mean very bad), which is freeing. The gears get moving pretty soon after.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I’ve found some great advice on YouTube: Laurie Anderson, in a 2012 address to the New School, suggested that creative people shouldn’t wait for an invitation to present your work; you could be waiting forever. She talked about her first European tour and how, without actually booking any tour dates, she made a press release that said “Laurie Anderson is going on tour” and sent it to every performance venue she could find. Because she asserted herself and put herself out there, venues booked her, and the tour came to fruition. I can count on one foot the times that anyone has solicited my work; I’ve gotten all of my successes by being persistent and learning to live with rejection. I don’t know how you get it done any other way.

John Waters, in a Brown commencement speech, talks about the joys of keeping track of your expenses for tax purposes—particularly in the ability to write off bad movies as an expense. Even if you have a full time job, if you bring in a little bit of money for your writing or for readings or are writing a book that might make money one day, you can expense the books you buy as well as movie, music, and museum tickets; streaming services; paying your friend to edit your manuscript; and more (a quick online search will give you the full list). It’s so hard to make ends meet as a writer, and this is one of the few benefits.

What’s your advice to new writers? Write a novel in one night. I’m serious. Take three hours. Take five. Whatever time you have. Open a Word document and change the page size to 6 x 9. Figure out a way to fill 200 pages in one night. Copy and paste from websites, from Project Gutenberg. Play the computer keyboard like a piano. Increase the text size if you have to. Just stick to the 200-page goal and use your intuition. Think quantity, not quality.  Once you’ve filled the pages, design the cover. Don’t forget to put your name on it. Then publish it on a print-on-demand site before you go to bed. Order a copy.

As of that night you will be a published writer—no waiting necessary. You’ve written a full book, published it, and learned something about writing, design (which more writers should know about), and what it feels like to finish a book. When the book arrives, give it a look. Smell the pages. Hold it in your hands. How does it feel? What has this process taught you about books, writing, design, publishing? Is this book actually a novel? Is it any good? What is “good”? Now get to work on your next book.

Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book, recently out from Coffee House Press. Their other books include O (Ugly Duckling Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. In 2015, Royal Nonesuch Gallery installed these books in a multimedia exhibition containing drawings, video, vinyl window installation, and a sound poetry computer program. Comitta’s fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.