Jay Turner

How did you become a writer? One summer, when I was in my early twenties, someone gifted me a box of great American novels. I read each one. By the end of the summer, I knew I wanted to write. I just didn’t know what. I spent a year trying to write my own novel, but realized I was going to need more structure than that. That led me to pursue graduate studies in history, which has been the focus of my writing since.

Name your writing influences. The power of William Styron’s descriptive language and the endless depths of his vocabulary caught my imagination early on. John McPhee’s eye for detail, his gift for developing characters, and his ability to make the most common of topics fascinating convinced me that I wanted to write non-fiction. William Cronon, who blurred the conceptual boundary between the natural and unnatural in ways that made the environment meaningful to me in new ways made me want to be an environmental historian.

When and where do you write? When I’m working on a book, I usually write at home in the morning. I’ll get up at 5:30 am or so, make a cup of tea, and starting working until 8 am or so. I never write much past that, and if I’m working on a big project, I try not to skip a day – weekends, holidays, even vacation…everyday starts with writing, even if just for an hour or so. If I skip a day, it takes two days to catch up.

What are you working on now? I’m in between projects. I’m writing short articles, opinion pieces, and research papers while I figure out what my next book is going to be about.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. I just write. I’m a big believer in getting something down that I can then return to. I almost never delete…I keep pushing text down the page, often circling back to what didn’t seem so good at first, and findings ways it works.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Write every day, even if just for a little bit.

What’s your advice to new writers? Sometimes it makes sense to start over. My most recent book is a history of batteries. I actually wrote a different book first, sent the manuscript to the publisher, and got positive comments back. But in writing that first manuscript, I realized what I was really trying to accomplish. So when I sat down to revise it, I actually hit the reset button, turning the previous manuscript into one chapter of what became the final book.  

Bio: I’m a professor in the Environmental Studies Department at Wellesley College. I grew up in Virginia, completed a PhD in history of science at Princeton University, and have spent most of my career at Wellesley College.

Anne Enright

How did you become a writer? I didn't become a writer, I just wrote. And I wrote from an early age. I wrote bad poetry at 16, I suppose. I’m still writing bad poetry, actually, but in The Wren, The Wren. (Well, not badpoetry. People have been very kind about the poetry in The Wren, The Wren.) I was the sort of person that people in Ireland thought should become a writer. So I think becoming a writer was a kind of arranged marriage. But I'm very happy in it.

Name some of your writing influences. It took me decades to own the fact that James Joyce is a huge influence because he gave permission to writers to do whatever the hell they wanted. Whether you're looking at the Joyce of Dubliners or the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, the development there is amazing. You can pick a point in his writing and imitate that for a while and see where it gets you. Are you going to be like the Joyce of Dubliners? Are you going to be like the Joyce of A Portrait of the Artist? Or are you going to push out the experimental boat and work language harder and have more fun and try and see what happens when you splash around a bit like he did in Ulysses.

And I had one of those great English teachers, a guy called Theo Dombrowski, in a school I went to in Canada. He was very ironic and very engaged and a wonderful teacher. He left more red ink on your essay than there was blue. He interrogated your punctuation. He made jokes in the margins. It was like having a conversation. He had a really lively classroom, lots of debate, lots of fights. I mean, we fought over literature. It was great fun and I adored him. All his students adored him. He’s still a friend.

What are you working on now? Nothing apart from some nonfiction. I'm looking at the wonderful writer Sigrid Nunez and hoping to write a long piece about her. And I have various fragments collected over the years about the idea of travel. Something called Flight Paths. I have these title ideas that I return to between books. They don't always come to fruition, but they make you realize that you have something cooking on a distant back burner.

Have you ever suffered from writer's block? You see, I don't do writer's block, I do procrastination. I would have three things on the go at once and I work on the thing I shouldn't be working on. Which is sometimes a novel because I'd have a short deadline and I'd say, no, I'm going to work on my novel instead. I avoid pressure by working on something else.

What's the best writing advice you've ever received? “Use the five senses in every sentence” is a good one. And early in my career, somebody said, “You've got too much white space between your paragraphs.” That was a revelation to me. If I moved all the words a bit closer together on the page, it started to flow more. Interesting, because my work wanted to fragment. I had to knit it together a bit more. So watch the white space. Also, if you're doing dialogue, it should be different lengths. It should be ragged at the edges. Unless you're Beckett. And you aren't Beckett.

What's your advice to new writers? A lot of people look for external validation and for  ideas to come from outside themselves. The answer to your problem is already on your page. Stop thinking about the critic or the public. Stop second guessing what people want to read. So my advice is always to turn back to the page, back to what you’re doing already. Honor what you've got in front of you.

Another thing I often say is that no one has any confidence, so the fact that you don't have any confidence doesn't make you special. Put all of that in a box and stick it under the bed for later.

What sort of reactions have you had to your writing advice? People are always looking to be rescued from the blank page, so when I refuse to rescue them, they look at me kind of blankly. Yeah. Disappointment. The fact that I can't wave some magic wand and make it happen for them is disappointing. But I think you have to empower yourself.

Anne Enright is the author of eight novels, most recently The Wren, The Wren. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.

Leah Redmond Chang

How did you become a writer? Slowly, without realizing that it was happening. Like most writers, I came to writing through a love of reading, which I spent most of my childhood doing. Then, sometime at the end of primary school, I started to write poetry. In 6th grade, I had to write something for a creative writing class assignment, and I chose to write two poems. The teacher, Mr. Grantham, was gruff and stern and knew how to keep kids in line. I don’t remember ever seeing him smile.

When he returned the assignment to me, there was nothing on the page except an austere “See me.” In my mind, those letters were in red ink, but who knows. I was shaking in my shoes.

At his desk, Mr. Grantham looked through the poems, and asked me if I had written them myself. I could barely whisper “Yes.” He paused for a beat, then said: “Keep writing.” That was all. I went back to my seat, relieved. And, as you can imagine, I was also glowing inside.

Clearly, I’ve never forgotten that moment. The memory is very vivid. It speaks to the power that teachers have, doesn’t it? And when I think back on it, this was when I realized that writing was something I could do, maybe even do well.

Name your writing influences. There are so many influences. I’m always paying attention to craft, no matter what I read, so I guess everything is an influence and a teacher. That’s probably obvious, isn’t it? But it’s true. I try to read across genres, fiction, history, biography, memoir, essay. On some level, everything speaks to each other.

There are two authors that I’ll name here, though — Laura Ingalls Wilder and William Manchester. As a child, I was obsessed with Wilder’s Little House books. I’ve gone back to them recently, trying to understand why they were so important to me. I was a little taken aback when I revisited her prose. There is something in the cadence of her sentences that I think I’ve aspired to all these years; even my love of the semi-colon might come from her. Wilder’s novels are historical fiction, although they are written as if they are autobiographies – until adulthood, I thought they were non-fiction. Even so, she’s still telling us about the world she lived in, marrying storytelling to history. Unlike Wilder, I do write non-fiction, but that is what I’m going for: history that reads like a novel.

I read William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire in college, just before I entered my PhD program to study Renaissance literature. That was the first history I remember reading that utterly gripped me. I couldn’t put it down. That history could be thrilling in a narrative way was a revelation to me.

When and where do you write? My writing times have shifted over the years. I used to write best at night, and I suspect that I still would, but with my kids at home, I find that evenings get too busy. Once everyone else is in bed, I’m ready for bed too. Now I write mostly in the mornings and into the early afternoons. I’ve shifted in my career from writing scholarly stuff to writing narrative history for a general reader, but my projects still require a great deal of research. When I’m in heavy research mode, I might write a little in the morning to keep working the writing muscle, but I’ll devote the rest of the day to research. Once I really commit to the writing, I’ll work for long stretches. I’ve found, though, that it’s best to force myself to stop by mid-afternoon to wind down. Otherwise, I can write myself into a corner that can be difficult to get out of.

I generally work at my desk in my study, but if the writing gets difficult, I like to move to a new place, like the kitchen table, or maybe go out to a café. I’ve found that I’ve never written very successfully in a library, which is too bad because I spend a lot of time in libraries.

What are you working on now? I’ve just published a narrative history, Young Queens, and am still in publicity mode. I’ll see that through, and then I’ll dive into the next project, although I’m still figuring out what that will be. I’m reading a lot, keeping my mind open for a bit; we’ll see which seeds ultimately germinate. Undoubtedly the next book will have something to do with the relationship between women and power because I always seem to be writing about that, one way or another.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Yes and no. Yes, in that I struggle at regular intervals; no, in that I’ve come to accept the struggle as part of the process. I’ve also learned that trying to write my way through it, no matter how bad or messy, usually works. I don’t know if that’s considered blocked? If I’m really not feeling it, I’ll leave the writing for several days, or move to a different part of the project, if that’s possible. But I’ve found that writing through usually works for me.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Keep showing up at your desk (or wherever you write). And be at peace with the crappy first draft.

What’s your advice to new writers? Two pieces of advice. First, take your job as a writer seriously. When you first start, it’s so easy not to commit either to the work or to your identity as a writer. Personally, it took me a long time to accept that I am a writer. Why waste so much time? You are a writer!

Second, keep reading as much as possible. And dip into all sorts of genres. You never know where you might find inspiration and insight into ideas, themes, and craft.

Leah Redmond Chang writes narrative history and biography, and is the author of Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power (Bloomsbury, UK; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, US). She was trained as a literature scholar, and her writing draws on her extensive research in the archives and in rare book libraries. A former tenured professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University, Leah has also been an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London. She lives with her husband and three children in Washington DC, and spends as much time as possible in London, her favorite city.