Prudence Peiffer

How did you become a writer? In some ways, as soon as I learned how to read I became a writer; that was the magic of what words could do on a page. Some childhood journals resurfaced recently and while I was hoping to find frivolous gossip about crushes and my day to day life, they are filled with long descriptions of plants and insects from my treehouse perch–I wanted my writing to be taken seriously, I guess! I remember writing a poem about looking at snowflakes through a magnifying glass when I was in first grade. I just always had an urge to look at things and write about them. That said, I didn’t really feel like a writer until I was forty and received a grant to help write my first book, The Slip, and I was deeply moved because it felt like a moment of confirmation: okay, I am a writer. I can do this.

Name your writing influences. Everything I read is influential to me. Seeing the importance my parents placed on books–they were always reading to us but also always reading for pleasure themselves–instilled my own love of writing. I have friends whose writing I admire, and my own sister and brother-in-law are incredible writers. I also have always loved the idea that you can find good writing anywhere, even when that’s not the subject. In undergrad I took writing classes with famous authors that were wonderful, but one of the classes that was most influential to me in my writing was with the art historian Alexander Nemerov; his love of language was palpable in the way that he lectured, and the margins of my notes from his class were filled with words to look up or that grabbed me in their direct power. 

When and where do you write? With three young children and a demanding full-time job, I write whenever I can. But my happy place is very early in the morning before anyone else is awake, when the light is just starting to break. I have a desk in a tiny room in my house that used to be my grandmother’s sewing room and is basically a closet. She too was juggling lots of kids and a career outside of writing, and I try to channel her spirit. Next to my desk is a bookshelf my father built, and out the window is a spindly tree where an osprey often comes to perch. These things keep me company but aren’t too much of a distraction. I write on my laptop until a child comes and knocks on the door…

What are you working on now? I am taking a little breather after The Slip, which just came out a few months ago and which I’m still doing a lot of interviews and talks around. But a next project is starting to percolate around love and creativity and an uncompromising artist. I’m assembling some books, reading a lot but not in full research mode yet, letting things marinate so I can figure out what part of this history I want to pull out. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Whenever I feel constipated in my writing, I start reading. I return to something that really moved me, or where I admire the writing. And then I’ll try to go for a walk. The ocean in all its sublime power is a crucial head-clearer for me. It puts things in perspective. And listening to my kids. My daughters have a wonderful way of seeing and describing the world, and they remind me to take a breath, find the simplest route forward. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Lucy Sante has a Paris Review interview where she talks about the importance of reading widely, far outside the subject of your project, to help find arguments and even sometimes actual details that will make their way into the book, and I’ve always heeded that. When I was writing The Slip, I was very moved by Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. And also Deborah Levy’s memoir trilogy–they are both in The Slip in a certain, subtle way.

And working as an editor for a long time has helped me understand structure and argument and pacing and kept me honest as a writer, since it’s always very humbling to be edited. 

What’s your advice to new writers? Don’t wait for someone to validate you, don’t make excuses about why you can’t find the time or right environment to write, just write. Relatedly, there is no one template or model for how to do this. And while it’s so fun to learn about what has worked for other writers, including on this great website, it is ultimately about finding your own methods through trial and error. I am still learning how to write well.

Also: Read your writing out loud. It gets you out of your own head, reminds you that you are writing for an audience, and helps pinpoint knotty sections, places where the rhythm of the text falls away, or, happily, spots that are flowing well. Because what a wonderful feeling when you read a section out loud and can feel it humming along, becoming something independent from you and your labors. That’s the mystical grace of writing you hope to be lucky enough to channel. 

Prudence Peiffer is an art historian, writer, and editor, specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is Director of Content at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She received her PhD from Harvard University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, she was a Senior Editor at Artforum magazine from 2012-2017, and Digital Content Director at David Zwirner in 2018. She ran The Folding Chair, a reading series in Brooklyn, with Oana Marian from 2011-2013. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Artforum, and Bookforum, among other publications. Her book THE SLIP: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (Harper, 2023) was longlisted for the National Book Award.

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.