Elizabeth Hay

How did you become a writer? It happened when I was fifteen. An English teacher asked us to open our books to a poem by D. H. Lawrence, to read the poem, then to close our books. Now open your workbooks, she said, and write down whatever comes into your heads. Since we’d been given no warning, there was no time to get nervous. I plunged in and wrote easily, off the back of Lawrence’s poem, astonished that I had images and thoughts in my head and that they had a way of coming out. From that moment, I was hooked.

Name your writing influences. English teachers, certainly. The one I’ve just mentioned, who was responsible for the turning point in my life, even if I don’t remember her name, and she wasn’t, in fact, a very good teacher. In my final year of high school, Mr. McLean was calm, astute, encouraging, and didn’t play favorites. He steadied me and I gained confidence in his class. I still rely on poetry—often to start my day and put me on a creative path. Louise Glück, Frost, Tranströmer, Margaret Avison, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Ondaatje. Prose writers: Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Coetzee, Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín. If I get stuck, I open one of their books and a page of their writing takes my mind off my impasse, and my thoughts start to flow again.

When and where do you write? Mostly I write in my second-floor study either at my desk or in a sturdy rocking chair, using notebooks and a pen or pencil, as well as a computer. If computer, I print out what I’ve written so I can revise on paper. Mornings are best; early mornings before anyone else is up are best of all.

What are you working on now? My most recent novel was hard enough to finish that I have no desire to start another right now, so I’ve turned to short personal stories.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Almost never and often. Almost never in that I’m usually working on something, but often because I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels. I have stretches of time—I’m in one now—where I’m not writing a lot, but that’s less a case of writer’s block than of some necessary fallow time to mull things over. Or so I tell myself.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best advice was a remark that stung me at the time. I was in my early thirties, struggling to write stories. I showed my husband a few pages about a fight we’d had and he said, “I wish you would enjoy the people you write about. No matter how fucked up they are, enjoy them. All you do is criticize.” I came to see the plain truth of this after I started to write novels. To create living characters, you need to see them from many different angles. To appreciate rather than judge them. Otherwise, they remain one-dimensional and under your thumb.

What’s your advice to new writers? Keep a working notebook. Not a daily journal of what you’ve done, but a working notebook in which you make a habit of jotting down details about things you notice and hear and think about. This is your raw material. If you don’t write down the details, you will forget them.

Elizabeth Hay is the Giller Prize-winning author of six novels, including Late Nights on Air, A Student of Weather, and His Whole Life. Her most recent novel is Snow Road Station (Knopf Canada, 2023). A former radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City, and makes her home in Ottawa, Canada.

Yael Goldstein-Love

How did you become a writer? This suddenly seems like a very timely answer because of the movie but, no joke, Barbies. For years my mom wouldn't get me a Barbie on feminist principle, but when she finally caved she caved big and let me get dozens. Immediately they became the live-action cast of my first works of fiction. I'd spin the stories out over months -- they were always about religious persecution for reasons I will not get into here -- and because I was deeply, weirdly committed to these dramas I was never made to clean up my room, which would have gotten in the way of story development. As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that most mothers probably wouldn't have allowed a seven-year-old's story development to trump having floors you could actually navigate and so it might be worth adding to the "how" that my mother is a (fantastic) novelist, which means I grew up in a household that took play and make-believe very, very seriously. I think giving due respect to play and make-believe might be the #1 requirement for becoming a fiction writer. Well, that and a high tolerance for rejection.

Name your writing influences. I'm not sure that there's a single book I've read that hasn't in some way influenced the writer I am. Or that there's a single book I will read that won't influence the writer I become. Is this too cheesy to say? I think it probably is, but I'm going to say it anyway because it seems so obviously true.

The ones that come to mind as having quite a lot of influence, especially for my most recent book -- Madeleine L'Engle and Octavia Butler showed me early on in my reading life that you could bend the laws of nature just a bit in order to reveal things about reality that would otherwise remain hidden. George Eliot and Henry James taught me that novels can tell you more about what it's like to be a human than actually going about the project of living day-to-day as a human ever could (at least for me). Victor Lavalle is a tremendous more recent influence for the way he never seems to worry about what genre he's writing in; he just lets his brilliance unfold in whatever form it takes. Also, I can't stop myself from adding in The Portable Curmudgeon. That little book of perfectly cynical quips on every topic made me want so badly to also wield words with precision to tame the confusing world around me. 

When and where do you write? I'm a single mother of a six-year-old, I'm getting my doctorate in clinical psychology, and I see a caseload of psychotherapy clients so I write whenever and wherever I can. If I have an hour between clients, I'm going to use it to write. If my son is occupied rearranging his Pokémon collection, you'd better believe I'm going to use those ten minutes to write. I used to be precious about my writing time. I wouldn't even open a document unless I knew I had several hours cleared to sink into creative work. I'd have been horrified back then to see the way I write now, but it really does turn out to be possible -- and actually even kind of fun -- to write in this catch-as-catch-can way.

What are you working on now? A new novel that is still in that period of play when it is impossible to describe what it actually is to anyone else, but the feel of it is slowly taking more and more definite shape in your mind. I love and hate this stage very much.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm suffering it now? I think whenever I begin a new novel I'm worried about the pace at which it's coming together, and worried that it never will, and I start trying to force it (always a bad idea for me), and go into some despair that I'll ever write a book again. But for some reason I never label that "writer's block." I label it "I'm out of ideas" or "I am actually, it turns out, not a very good writer." Same for when I get stuck in the middle of writing a draft. 

I'm not entirely sure that I know what "writer's block" means now that I think about it. Is it analogous to depression or anxiety -- a symptom that could indicate an infinite number of things going wrong, as varied as the humans struggling with it? Or is it something more specific? I'm going with the former. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? If you're not enjoying writing it, they won't enjoy reading it. I think about this every time I'm trying to plod through a scene or plotline. I'm not saying good writing is always fun -- it's often not -- but if you're not feeling the spark as you're writing, if it's feeling boring to write what you're writing, chances are high that this is not the correct way to write it. Find another way, one that breathes life into the process.

What’s your advice to new writers? Play, enjoy, keep going. It's so easy in our achievement-obsessed culture to get hung up on external goals for our writing -- I want to be published, I want to become a bestseller, I want to win prizes. These are all fine fantasies, and they might even happen, but if they fuel your writing you're going to be miserable. The only way to really sustain yourself in this work is to regard it as meaningful for reasons that have nothing to do with external validation. Try to remind yourself constantly what those are for you.

Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of the novels The Possibilities (Random House, 2023) and Overture/The Passion of Tasha Darsky (Doubleday, 2007).

Esmeralda Santiago

How did you become a writer? My writing career began as a proposal writer for grass-roots organizations and charities in Boston. The potential funders often commented my proposals included human interest stories that supported the statistics, budgets, mission and financial statements. Around that time, my husband and I founded a documentary film company, where I learned how to write narrations and script educational films. It was a slow process of learning and accepting writing was my strength: telling stories in my second language where, at the time, I had a limited but enthusiastic audience.

I explored writing personal essays, taking a chance at publication with magazines and newspapers. Merloyd Lawrence, an editor at an educational publishing house, had her own imprint, and after reading one of my essays, queried me. She liked what she’d read and wondered whether I had more essays like the one in the Radcliffe alumni magazine. I showed up at her office with clippings from the mélange of publications where my essays and opinions had appeared. She suggested I write a memoir about my life as a rural Puerto Rican migrant to New York City. She nurtured me through the writing, always compassionate, encouraging and supportive. My first memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican, was published under her care and imprint. Thirty years later, it’s still taught in schools and colleges, has been translated into several languages, and is being updated in 2024 with prologues by prominent writers and a new Reader’s Guide.

Once that book was in the world, I dedicated to writing full-time. As of 2023, I’ve written three memoirs, three novels, have co-edited two Latine anthologies with Joie Davidow, wrote the story for an illustrated children’s book, a radio play, a film version of my second memoir for Masterpiece Theatre, and countless personal essays and opinion pieces. At the moment, I have a finished novel at my agent’s, and am halfway through another. As I get older, time compresses. I feel as if I were on a race track, slogging toward an invisible finish line.

Name your writing influences. My earliest literary influences were Puerto Rican poets Luis Muñoz Rivera, Julia de Burgos, lyricists Bobby Capó, Tite Curet, Rafael Hernandez, Mirta Silva and Silvia Rexach, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Nicaraguan Ruben Darío, Spanish authors Juan Ramón Jiménez, Corín Tellado and Federico Garcia Lorca.

I learned English by reading, and my earliest influences in that language were lyricists Cole Porter, and authors Langston Hughes, Carson McCullers, an untold number of Harlequin romance writers, Archie comic books dialogue-bubble writers, and newspaper writers.

When and where do you write? Public speaking, lectures and keynote addresses support my writing, so I’m frequently on the road. I write when I can in airports, planes, hotel rooms. Between trips, I work in my home office, and, when I can manage it, I take extended writing retreats in friends’ guest houses and AirBnBs. I carry an A.5 notebook and fountain pen but have written an entire essay in a Japanese restaurant, in very small print, on the inside of an opened chopstick envelope, and another on the back of a greeting card I’d plucked from my mailbox as I left earlier that day.

I ruminate for days, weeks, months, or years before setting anything down on 3x2.5” index cards. The cards are big enough to hold one idea, theme, question, or piece of dialogue. Once I have enough of them, I organize them on my wall. I assign colors to each character so I can track the plot along a timeline. I draw  topographical maps of the neighborhoods where my characters live, and floor plans of their homes. If they have a striking physical feature, like Conciencia la jorobá, a character in my second novel, Conquistadora, I draw a portrait. Admittedly, I’m not much of an artist, but they give me a sense of what I’m after during the outlining phase.

Once it seems a book is gelling, I number it. For example, Las Madres is N.4 (novel #4). N.3 hasn’t been published yet, but it was written long before N.4. I create a journal for each new book where I scribble ideas, research leads, quotes, complaints about the progress, emotional outbursts, frustrations, and insecurities about that particular book.

I usually work on more than one book at a time so that when I reach a wall, I don’t fret. There’s another book in progress that needs my attention.

What are you working on now? I’m working on N.5, a novel based on interviews with Puerto Rican elders who told me fantastic stories about the early 20th century on the island and in the US.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? When I reach a brick wall with one of the books, I open another in-progress work. I also find a visit to a museum clears my head and inspires me by the creative choices of other artists. And of course, when I’m not writing for whatever reason, there’s the endless hole of internet research.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I began my writing career, I had a conversation with the poet Martin Robbins. I worried I might be spending hours, days, weeks on stories about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans when, in my experience in the USA, no one cares about us. “But you do,” he said. That’s when my writing career really started.

What’s your advice to new writers? Read everything you can get your hands on. You will likely write stories you’d like to read, so you need to be clear about what moves and interests you.

Esmeralda Santiago is the author of three acclaimed memoirs: When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover. She’s also a novelist: América's Dream, Conquistadora, and her most recent, Las Madres. She can be reached at EsmeraldaSantiago.com.