Colin Broderick

How did you become a writer?

Some days I'm not really sure if I am a writer.  Some days I am a carpenter, other days, just dad.  I've been writing on an off my whole life. I tried to write my first novel when I was nine or ten. I still have the notebook somewhere. I think I got to about page three.  I'm getting better at finishing my stories now.

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

When I was a kid it was Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton. As I got a little older it was Bukowski for a while, then the obligatory Hemingway and Fitzgerald phase. Then as I aged I drifted into John Irving (earlier Irving). Over the past twenty years it's been mostly Philip Roth, and of course The Snow Leopard by Matthiessen which I re-read again and again. I love clarity when I read. I want to know where I am in a book. I love a good story. Give me a good story with some depth to it, clear concise no-nonsense writing and I'm all over it.

When and where do you write?

I write at home with my laptop in my lap. I like a quiet room if at all possible; soft light, a nice window, a view of some trees, leaves falling, to remind me of the impermanence of it all.

What are you working on now?

I am frantically polishing my first feature movie, "Emerald City." I wrote it, directed and acted in it. We've just been accepted into The London Irish Film Festival and it's been shortlisted for Best Feature. I also just signed the contracts on my new book, "The Writing Irish of New York." Fordham University Press will publish that one in 2017. I also have another couple of screenplays currently in development: "The Catalpa" and "The Rising."

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

There was a period of about eight years when I went back drinking in my thirties where I didn't write at all but I've been pretty active ever since I got sober again. I have two kids; I can't afford writers block.

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

"Writers write." I can't remember who said it...maybe it's just what my inner voice yells at me daily. My mentor Billy Collins also used to say, "All writing is rewriting." That's true also. Everything is a work in progress until they pry it from your cold dead hands.

What’s your advice to new writers?

My advice is just write: write, write, write...but just as important: know when to let go. You must let go in order to move forward. Again and again I see young writers I admire getting stuck on one book. They try to get it published and nobody wants it and they go back and tweak it again and again for years without getting into something new. My advice is, "LET IT GO!" Stick it in a drawer, move on. Trust me, you will get better just by virtue of experience, and if you turn out to be Ernest Hemingway twenty years down the line, they'll ask you what you have stored away in that drawer of yours.

Colin Broderick was born and raised in Northern Ireland. He has published two memoirs "Orangutan" Random House 2009, and "That's That," Random House 2013. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, two kids, and a dog named Beckett. His new book, The Writing Irish of New York, will be published in 2017 by Fordham University Press.

Blake Bailey

How did you become a writer?

In college I surprised myself by writing a pretty good senior thesis on Walker Percy. "Maybe I can do this," I thought, then spent the next 15 years writing bad fiction and the occasional book review. Suddenly I stumbled into a number of lucky breaks, and before I quite knew what was happening I managed to sell a proposed biography of the novelist Richard Yates. Oddly enough I learned thereby that my main calling was to be a literary biographer.

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

In no particular order: Wodehouse, Strachey, Christina Stead, Waugh, Nabokov, Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, many others (including my own biographical subjects and their influences), various literary biographies such as Brian Boyd's superb two-volume work on Nabokov, Gerald Clarke on Capote, and (of course) Ellmann on Joyce.

When and where do you write? 

I try to stop farting around with email, Twitter, the NYT website, etc., by 10:30 AM or so, and write most of the day--when I'm writing. (Bear in mind biographers go through years of research without a properly stringent writing routine.) Then I write all day, allowing myself a break at lunch if I've managed to meet roughly half my daily quota, about 600-750 words. My office is on the third floor opposite my 12-year-old daughter's bedroom; she's very considerate and quiet and has her own work to do, after all.

What are you working on now? 

A biography of Philip Roth.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Oh yes. Especially when I was trying to write fiction. Nowadays I try to prepare my notes as meticulously as possible, precisely because I have a horror of getting stuck.

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

Writing is rewriting.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Find what interests you passionately and write about it. If, after a seemly interval, you find yourself hating your life, do something else.

Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.

Maddie Dawson

How did you become a writer?

In some ways, I think I’ve always been a writer. I wrote my first story when I was six years old when my mother wouldn’t give me money for the ice cream man…and sold it to the neighbors for 25 cents, which in those days would buy a very nice banana Popsicle. I could see right then that writing was going to be a very lucrative path for me—I’d always have all the frozen desserts I wanted! Later on, I became that kid, the one in the corner writing down snippets of dialogue and then forcing my friends to act in the plays I was writing. I majored in English lit and journalism in college (figuring out by then that I’d need to make a living that included money for more than Popsicles), and worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine columnist. But I never got over the desire to write fiction, so I started writing a novel on the side. It took me 17 years, but after that, I was on my way.

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

Wow, there are so many! I read everything—especially when I’m on deadline supposed to be writing my own stuff. I have a network of writer friends, and we all share our agonies and stories and characters and give each other advice during what we call our “plot walks.” I love Anne Lamott and her down-to-earth advice about writing in Bird by Bird. And John Truby (The Anatomy of Story) has taught me how to put all the elements of a novel together in much less than 17 years! I’m in love with Alice Mattison’s book, The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control and Live to Tell the Tale, which is an entire Creative Writing course in one book! 

When and where do you write? 

Oh, boy. This question! I am practically a nomad when it comes to my writing life… walking around with my Macbook Air under my arm, looking for a friendly spot where the words might be located. I have a desk and an office at home, but I mostly hate being in there, so I’m often at the dining room table, curled up on the couch, in bed, on the back porch, in the Adirondack chairs outside, or at Starbucks, on Metro North (that’s my favorite office—something about the movement of the train and the fact that I can’t get up makes it my most productive space). I write on and off throughout the day to get my page count, but my very favorite time is the middle of the night. Unfortunately for my regular life, that’s when the scenes play in my head almost like a movie, and I have to get out of bed and hurry to write them down. Sometimes I’ll sit down to make a few notes and then am stunned to see the sun coming up!

What are you working on now?

I’m halfway through a novel that is under contract. It’s about a woman who finds her regular life turned upside down when she unexpectedly (even reluctantly) inherits a house that comes with a whole cast of characters who need her to solve their lives.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t think so, not for any ongoing length of time, at least. I’ve certainly had times when I didn’t know what was going to happen next in my book, and I spent a few weeks staring off into space and moaning and groaning while I waited for the next thing to occur to me…but I’m lucky in that it seems that whenever I’ve been about to finish a book, the next book is right there, taking shape out of the ether, all ready to pull me in.

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

To write every single day! I think it was Annie Dillard who said that if you don’t work on your book each day, if you let it go for a while, it turns feral, and you practically need a whip and a chair to get it into shape again. I love that analogy. Also, if you write each day, the book stays front and center in your head, and your subconscious mind keeps working on it even when you’re doing something else. Best of all, you don’t then have to go back to the beginning and read it all again before you can write your new pages; re-reading is deadly for your fledgling book! After all, everything, even War and Peace, would start to sound trite and boring the 3,476th time you had to read it. Best to re-read as little as possible, just keep moving forward, writing little notes to yourself, and know that you can (and will) fix what needs to be fixed when you have the draft finished.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Keep going. Don’t be shocked at how long it takes to get your work to the point it’s ready to go out into the world. Work on it steadily, don’t give up, and know that every writer out there is writing bad first drafts (and slightly less bad second, third, and tenth drafts, etc.) We all want to be writing final drafts first, but that’s not the way it works. It came as such a relief to me to realize that it wasn’t just ME who couldn’t get the words right the first time. Writing gets better through time and through reading and watching how others do it. Read everything, the bad and the good and the amazing. And work to discover your own authentic voice. It’s there, lurking, waiting for you to hear it and pay attention.

Maddie Dawson is the bestselling author of five novels, the latest of which is called The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness, which will be published this month by Lake Union. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with her husband. She formerly wrote under the name Sandi Kahn Shelton and is the author of three non-fiction humor books about parenting as well as a novel. She also teaches writing workshops.