Shelly Ellis

How did you become a writer?

I’ve been a writer since I was 12 years old, scribbling short stories in my composition notebooks with my own illustrations. I became a published writer when I was 19 when I was one of the finalists for the First-Time Writers Contest held by the now defunct BET Books. I had a short story published in a romance anthology.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

I studied journalism in college and that helped to lay the foundation for storytelling. Outside of that, the best writing “teacher” I’ve had is reading other novels. Seeing how other authors executed a story, crafted characters, and were able to interweave themes into their novels, has helped me immensely as a writer. 

When and where do you write?

I don’t have a specific time or place. I work full-time and I’m the mom of a young kid so I’ve learned to take advantage of windows of time to write when and where I can get them. My favorite and preferred place to write is on my laptop while in bed. (One of my favs, Edith Wharton, wrote in bed, I hear.) But sometimes I’ll type snippets on my phone on the metro train or while waiting for my daughter during soccer practice or while hiding in the bathroom at 2 o'clock in the morning so I don’t wake up my husband.

What are you working on now?

I’ve written women’s fiction and romance for years but I’m moving into mystery/thrillers. I have a thriller that I sold that I’m really excited about and should be getting edits back from my editor soon. I’m also working on the follow up, a dual timeline mystery inspired by an eccentric historical figure. It’s been challenging to write it, but it's an exciting challenge.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Have I ever gotten stuck developing a story idea or working my way through a plot conundrum? Absolutely! But I don’t believe in giving in to the writer’s block. If I can’t figure out that particular story or how to make the plot move forward, I step back from that novel and move onto another. I usually have a few story ideas in the hopper that I can pivot to. While working on the other novel, my “inner brain” figures out the plot knot in the first work and my writer’s block disappears.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Do whatever works best for you as a writer; everyone has their own method. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

A lot of new writers are obsessed with finishing that first manuscript, getting an agent and getting their first book published. And rightfully so! They write entire books and advice columns about doing these things, because they are big milestones. But just remember they are FIRST steps. You have to ask yourself, what’s next? How will you grow your audience? What new ideas would you like to try? Think about the writing career you want. Is your agent on board with these plans? Think about your writing career rather than just getting through the door.

Shelly Ellis is a women’s fiction and romance author who has published more than a dozen novels and novellas. She has been nominated for African American Literary Awards, an RT Reviewer’s Choice award in Multicultural Romance, and was named one of iBooks Rising Stars in Romance in 2015. She also received a 46th annual NAACP Image Award nomination for Literary Work - Fiction. She is married and lives in Maryland with her husband and their daughter. She loves to paint, read, and watch movies. Visit her at her web site www.shellyellisbooks.com.

Gus Moreno

How did you become a writer? 

From a very early age, I always wanted to be a film director. Movies have always been a big passion of mine. I enjoyed reading, but movies usually won over books. That changed my sophomore or junior year in high school. First, I had recently seen The Matrix, and besides being blown away from the visuals, I was intrigued by the ideas expressed in the film. Critics kept throwing a certain word around when talking about The Matrix, so I went out and bought a book called Philosophy for Dummies (a great primer!). I was just being introduced to Philosophy’s basic concepts when I had to read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha for class. And that book changed everything for me. It was a perfect distillation of the internal world of philosophy, and the external world of a fictional story. And not only was it written in a way that I could immediately lose myself in the protagonist, but it was expressing the same ideas and questions I was learning on my own, and more in-depth than a movie could ever get within two hours. I knew right away this was what I wanted to do, make movies that existed only in your head. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). 

Hermann Hesse, George Orwell, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Hempl, Margaret Atwood, Lucia Berlin, Bret Easton Ellis, Stephen Graham Jones, Susan Sontag, Brian Evenson, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, and so many others. 

When and where do you write? 

I write any time and anywhere, because life will usually try to get in the way. That said, I prefer to write first in the morning, usually in my basement, usually with a cup of coffee nearby.

What are you working on now? 

I’m working on my second novel. I don’t want to divulge too much, but it takes place in western North Carolina on the Appalachian Trail. Two families are finishing the trail in honor of loved ones who were murdered on the trail years before. Unbeknownst to them, something is “unearthed” along the trail, and of course, all hell breaks loose. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I don’t know whether this was writer’s block or not, but there was a point in my writing where I could tell the way I was going about things was not going to last. I was very much someone who wrote whenever the mood struck me, or if inspiration struck me. I’d get the idea for a story, but I would let the story linger in my head until it was pretty much fully formed. That changed after a while. I’d get an idea for a story and wait for it to form in my head, but the sentences were few and far between. I found myself sitting down to write without a clue as to what I was actually going to write. It felt like the well I was drawing my creativity from was running dry, until it finally did. Now I would have the kernel of a story, but the words wouldn’t just snap into place like they did before. I had to change my approach to fiction, how I wrote, what I looked for in a potential story, for me to get back into the swing of things. And I had to get used to writing crappy drafts before the story would begin to reveal itself to me. Something that helped was something Chuck Palahniuk talks about, which is something he got from Tom Spanbauer: “Shitting out the coal.” In my own words, it’s basically the idea of pushing out that first draft, the piece of coal, and polishing it until it’s a diamond. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? 

The “best” is hard to pin down. I’ve lucked upon a lot of great writing advice, but the ones that stick out the most come from non-writer sources. Years ago, I read Legs McNeil’s oral biography of punk rock’s origins in New York and then London, Please Kill Me, and something that’s always stuck out to me was how the Ramones approached their music. They were sick of these long, meandering records with six-minute guitar solos and decadent compositions. When they would perform at CBGB, they would promptly take the stage, one of them would yell out “ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR,” they’d play their entire album in twenty minutes, unplug their guitars and get off the stage. They weren’t messing around with the frivolous elements of music at the time, and I just love that attitude. I use that example as the same approach to my own writing. I don’t want to write a chapter that’s maybe boring but conveys valuable information. I want the whole thing to sing as much as the fun parts sing, so it’s important to me that what I write is lean, purposeful, packs a punch, and unplugs before people can scream for an encore. 

What’s your advice to new writers? 

Don’t quit, and don’t despair. I’ve always reasoned to myself that published “bad” writers are just writers who never quit. So if I had any talent or not, if I was a “good” writer or not, it didn’t matter. All I had to do was never quit and sooner or later I would push through. I know a lot of talented writers who gave up because of one thing or another. It’s a matter of time, not strictly talent.

Also, find someone you trust who is also a writer to share and critique each other’s work. Find a writing group, or start one. Critiquing each other’s work provides two benefits: you’re getting feedback on your work, and you begin to develop a thick skin when it comes to criticism. I’m not saying you need to suffer through people bashing your work, but we’re all vulnerable when it comes to our writing, and by letting someone you trust or whose opinion you value read your work and give an honest critique, you’ll learn to see your work in a more objective light, making it easier to edit and revise later, because you won’t be so protective of it. 

Gus Moreno is the author of This Thing Between Us. His stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Aurealis, Pseudopod, and Burnt Tongues, an anthology. His essays and articles have been featured in Publisher’s Weekly, Literary Hub, and CrimeReads. He lives in the suburbs with his wife and dogs, but never think that he's not from Chicago. 

Lincoln Michel

How did you become a writer?

My supervillain author origin story is basically that I was bad at everything else. From a young age, I wanted to be an artist. But I simply wasn’t good at the various artforms I tried. I’m fairly tone deaf and never got the hang of any instrument. Didn’t have the eye for photography. I can’t draw and even my handwriting is near illegible scribbles. Etc. When I was in college, I started to write poems and stories and it just clicked. It made sense to me. I was good at it! Or at least good relative to the other artforms I’d failed at. 

Of course, I’d also been a voracious reader from a very young age so perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that writing was the path for me. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

The first authors who really made me want to be a writer were Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino. I think most of my work still tries to imitate the dreamy unreality of the former and the inventive playfulness of the later. Other major influences for me are Kobo Abe, Shirley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, Octavia Butler, Yoko Ogawa, Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, and Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve been lucky to have some fantastic teachers, among them Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Sam Lipsyte. 

When and where do you write?

Any and everywhere. I’m not a creature of habit, or perhaps more accurately I change my habits a lot. When I lived by the park, I used to write in the park every day. Before the pandemic, I’d spend a lot of time at coffee shops. I edit on the subway. Revise on rooftops. Morning, afternoon, evening. I don’t mean that I’m a super writer who is always writing—indeed like many writers I’m a horrible procrastinator and time waster—but just that I don’t have a specific routine around time of day or location. 

What are you working on now

I’m finishing up what I hope will be my second novel, which I’m describing as Pale Fire meets Star Trek. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

On specific projects? Yes. But not in general. My ADHD brain makes me jump around projects and I always have a lot of things in the works. Right now I have a couple novel starts and a lot of short stories as well as a non-fiction idea and other projects. So when I’m stuck on one, I have others I can tinker with.  

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

When I was in college, I was randomly roommates with the son of a famous author. One time we got dinner with him and a group when he was in town for a book event. My friend (annoyingly) told his father I was an aspiring writer. The famous author turned to me and said only two words: “Finish things.” Then he turned back to chatting with his agent. I still think that’s the best advice. You have to finish things. Finish drafts, finish revisions, finish books. Sometimes they don’t work and you have to move onto the next one. But learning to actually finish things is one of the hardest lessons for writers. A lot of new writers get lost in the drafts and never publish. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

The first and best advice is to read widely. Read across genres. Read old writers and new ones. Read in translation. Read everything you can. My second advice is to lean into what interests you. Sometimes, young writers think they need to balance out their work or write toward what they think the market wants. But what will stand out isn’t another version of what’s out there. What will stand out is what is you unique to you. Take the ideas you think are insane or bizarre or scary or too darn weird, and then write them with the utmost seriousness and all the skill you can muster. That’s the book people will want to read. 

Lincoln Michel is the author of the science fiction novel The Body Scout (Orbit) and the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Granta, NOON, and elsewhere. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and the newsletter Counter Craft.