How did you become a writer? I was seven years old when it occurred to me that if books exist, it means people must be writing them. I was a kid who learned to read early, but before that, I had never thought to wonder how books came to be at all. I was content just reading them.
The lightbulb moment came one school day, when my teacher put a poster on the blackboard—it was an illustration from a children’s book, and it featured a squirrel in a tree, and a bird flying close to the squirrel. We were told to imagine what the two animals might be saying to each other. Maybe the bird was lost and needed directions?
Completing that exercise was the most fun I’d ever had. And that was the day I came home and announced, “I want to be a writer.” I kept at it, writing little stories, and then detoured my way through some pretty bad poetry in middle and high school, and started a lot of things I never finished in college.
Becoming a journalist taught me discipline. It taught me to sit down and write. In a newsroom, the writing has to happen now. There is no time to wait for inspiration. And running marathons taught me that if I work on a bigger goal a little bit every day, those small efforts will add up to something larger. That’s how I ended up being able to write novels.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). Megan Abbott, for starters. The Fever was the first novel of hers I read, and it was life-changing. I was struck by her prose, and by the way she writes about girlhood and womanhood. I set out to read her other books and couldn’t get enough of her work. There is something so vivid and sensory about her writing, including her latest novel, Beware the Woman, which had me in its thrall from the first pages. All of which is to say, Megan Abbott changed my life as a reader and as a writer.
Mary Higgins Clark was also an influence: I spent an afternoon reading my mother’s copy of Loves Music, Loves to Dance, one summer when I was a kid. I started flipping through it, skipped to the big reveal, thinking I’d jump to the most interesting part, then learned a vital lesson: you cannot enjoy the payoff of a crime novel if you don’t go through the buildup first. The ending of that book is absolutely terrifying.
And, you know, I’m always reading, and I have intense memories of books I read while I was working on The Quiet Tenant. Those included Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer; Alexis Schaitkin’s Saint X; Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose; Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall; Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song; Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind; Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister; Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa; Daisy Johnson’s Sisters; Hilary Leichter’s Temporary; Lucie Britsch’s Sad Janet; and Lily King’s Writers & Lovers.
Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is why I ended up writing the main character’s perspective in The Quiet Tenant in the second person, and Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites informed much of my thoughts about the ways we think and talk about crime.
When and where do you write? Whenever I have time, and wherever I can. I’m on book leave right now, so I get to write at my desk during the day. When I’m working at my day job (I’m a journalist), I’ll work on my fiction in the morning and/or in the evening. Sometimes, if I feel the need for a change of venue, I’ll move from my desk to the little red cafe table in the kitchen. That’s enough to feel like I’m moving from one job to the other. But really, I’ll write anywhere. I have written on my phone in the subway. When I’m working on a first draft, all that matters is getting the words down. It’s liberating to let go of the ideal writing setup – and I offer this as a suggestion to other writers.
What are you working on now? What am I not working on? The night before The Quiet Tenant came out, I sent my agent the draft of a new psychological thriller. The following day, I broke the laptop on which I wrote that novel (which was also the laptop on which I wrote The Quiet Tenant), so you could say I’m working on not breaking any more computers! But really, I’m working on this manuscript, getting it into shape. That’s my favorite part: when I have a complete draft and can play with various aspects of it, and hopefully make the whole thing a little better.
I’m still working on a few things for The Quiet Tenant, too. I have a bit more travel planned, and as I type this, I’ve recently returned from Brookline, where I did an event with Paul Tremblay, and Houston, where I did an event with Ashley Winstead. It’s been a fun summer promoting the book and meeting generous writers and readers. I’m working on getting my life back to normal after all this excitement. As of this morning, I have groceries in my fridge, for the first time in a week!
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I don’t think I have. That doesn’t mean I think I’m immune to it, though. Nor does it mean I haven’t struggled, been stumped, or had moments of uncertainty. So far, my experience has been: “Get an idea, white-knuckle my way through the first draft, start having more fun during revisions, endure occasional moments of intense paranoia that nothing is working, and carry on.”
I have a friend who told me countless times, when I was working on The Quiet Tenant, to just finish the first draft. A friend like that might be the best remedy to guard against writer’s block.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I had a creative writing professor in France who was also a novelist. One day, while talking about character development, he said, "By the end, you have to know everything about a character. What are they like? What do they eat? How do they f**k?” So very French, no?
I found it a bit cliché. I mean, it seemed like something an eccentric writing instructor would say in a movie. But years later, I discovered he was right! Once you’ve written a novel, you know if a particular aspect of a character’s life doesn’t come through on the page. You just do. So, as long as I don’t know something about a character…I keep digging.
What’s your advice to new writers? Read. When you think you’ve read enough, read more. I don’t care which format you read in—paper, e-book, audiobooks, First Folio, whatever gets you to read. You cannot write if you don’t read. Read in your genre, and read outside of it, too. You never know what’s going to end up instructing your writing.
And, of course: Finish. The. First. Draft. It doesn’t matter if it’s not good. You’ll fix it in due course!
Clémence Michallon was born and raised near Paris. She studied journalism at City University of London, received a master’s in Journalism from Columbia University, and has written for The Independent since 2018. Her essays and features have covered true crime, celebrity culture, and literature. She moved to New York City in 2014 and recently became a US citizen. She now divides her time between New York City and Rhinebeck, NY.
