Mark Haskell Smith

How did you become a writer?

I blame it all on Joe Orton. I had just graduated from film school with a degree in cinematography when I saw Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane in repertory at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles. Suddenly, after years of studying film, all I wanted to do was write satire. It was an actual epiphany. I moved to New York to study playwriting and one of my early plays became popular as a writing sample with Hollywood executives. I moved back to Los Angeles and started writing screenplays. Despite being well-paying, screenwriting is a fairly soulless and frustrating pursuit so I began to write novels to have some kind of control over what I wanted to say. Novel writing led me to nonfiction writing. I just follow the story, the story tells you what it wants to be.

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

It's strange to say it, but the earliest creative influencers for me were filmmakers. Especially the German new wave. R.W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Diane Kurys, Fellini, and all got me thinking about how emotion creates narrative. It was from watching The American Friend that I discovered the books of Patricia Highsmith which kind of kicked the whole thing off. 

I have always been an avid reader. Early influences were writers like Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Kathy Acker; basically anyone my High School teachers disapproved of. 

Recently I've been inspired by books from Jane Gardam, Deborah Levy, Tom Drury, Liska Jacobs, Saad Z. Hossain, Lisa Moore, Paul Beatty, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Idra Novey, Michel Houllebecq, and Viet Than Nguyen.

Since I also write nonfiction, I should mention Sarah Bakewell, Bill Buford, William Finnegan, Gabriela Weiner, Katherine Boo, and Geoff Dyer as being inspirations.

When and where do you write? 

I usually work in the mornings. After that I try and get out of the house for lunch with a friend or some exercise. I'm a big fan of pilates. But I often come back and put in another couple hours in the afternoon. I work at home. I have a small office with a supportive chair, but I usually end up in the living room. I like to have easy access to nap-able surfaces. 

What are you working on now? 

A nonfiction book looking at the history of pleasure. I'm basically asking the same question Epicurus asked in 300 B.C. which is "why don't we organize our society so that everyone can experience pleasure?" I'm starting in classical Athens with a comic poet who, according to Aristophanes, "invented cunnilingus," and working my way to present day looking at how organized religion and capitalism have turned pleasure into a something we no longer value and what we might learn from the ancient Greeks about reclaiming pleasure for ourselves. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really. Sometimes I don't have the solution to whatever narrative problem I'm facing, and that means I need to take a walk. 

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

Do your own thing. Write the book that you want to read. Follow your instincts. My agent likes to say, "Let your freak flag fly." And that's really it, I think. Just write the best book you can, the way you want to tell it.  

What’s your advice to new writers?

One of the things I try to impress upon my students is to be a good literary citizen. Read widely (not just the nine books everyone in New York is reading), but really widely. Take a chance on a book in translation. Read books by small independent publishers. Shop at independent bookstores. Go to author events.  You'll want this ecosystem to be healthy when your book gets published. 

Mark Haskell Smith is the author of six novels with one-word titles, including Salty, Raw, and Blown; and the nonfiction books Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing Optional World and Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Salon. He lives in Los Angeles.

Spencer Wise

How did you become a writer?

Getting dumped a lot. Reading sad books. My sister making me listen to The Jesus and Mary Chain, Morrissey, and The Cure, when all I wanted to do was go outside and practice shooting free-throws for my inevitable tryout for the Boston Celtics. My sister holding me hostage in her room turned out to be prescient. I guess she knew, somehow, that a 5’9” Jewish kid wearing Rec-Specs was never going to play basketball at any level. So she probably did me a big favor. At the time it was torture. But I always loved to read and that’s something that my mother, a former English teacher, got me into at a really young age. According to her, I could read when I was 3 weeks old. It gets younger every time she tells the story. Then I started to write. Terribly. So bad. It’s unconscionable really how bad I was but you have to start somewhere. And there aren’t a lot of writing prodigies. You need to practice. A lot. Like to the point where Depeche Mode doesn’t even sound that sad anymore. And you need experiences with other humans, for better or worse. The worse the better. So then I started taking creative writing classes in college, but I went into journalism after school for a while, living in New York. I guess I didn’t realize that when people kept saying you could be anything, you have to actually pick something. So I went all in on writing. I went to grad school at University of Texas at Austin. They let me in for some reason and I didn’t have much success but I kept going. I’m a late bloomer. I was an early bloomer when it came to doing anything dumb and dangerous but late for everything else. I went to get my PhD at FSU in creative writing. So that’s the traditional academic route of writing I guess. But I grew up around some amazing storytellers. My father is terrific. My old friend, Jake Kheel, told amazing stories. You could listen to him all night. Anyhow, I kept at it. I asked a lot of questions. I had a great mentor in Bob who showed me how to get to the stuff that really mattered in my writing. I don’t have a glamorous answer for you. A lot of hard work. Luck. A bit of talent. All three, probably. And honestly, here’s the real answer, I became a writer when I published a book and people started calling me a writer. Before the book, nobody called me a writer, which is too bad. I was writing. Only nobody cared. I hope people reading this will think of themselves--published or not--as writers so long as they’re writing and enjoying it.

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

I love Salinger. Raise High the Roof Beam. Franny and Zooey. Nine Stories. I read all of those over and over again. I love the dialogue. Sarcasm. Loneliness. Humor. Jonathan Wilson, a great writer himself, and my mentor at Tufts, got me reading some of the Jewish authors whom I read obsessively: Leonard Michaels, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Roth, Bellow, Mamet, Singer. Issac Babel is one of my all-time favorites. Bruno Schultz. Bohamil Hrabel, Robert Olen Butler. Bob really helped me write about the things that were close to the bone, the things I was sort of dancing around for years. He made me look straight at them and write. But I had amazing teachers and supporters along the way. Elizabeth Harris at Texas. Julianna Baggott and Elizabeth Stuckey French at Florida State University. 

When and where do you write? 

I can only write in an isolation chamber. I wrote the whole book in my office, windowless, wearing noise cancelling headphones. Sometimes I’d put on music between scenes to hype myself up or establish a mood. But I really can’t have any ambient noise or I get distracted. It was also like 110 degrees in the office, which mirrored the conditions of the Chinese shoe factory where I’d lived to research my novel, so it was a bit like method acting. I chewed on toothpicks and the hours dripped away. Sometimes I’d go in on Saturday or after I taught my classes and I’d write for 10 hours. Usually it was dreck. After 8pm, my brain is mush. But it’s a matter of persistence. Of writing everyday. 

What are you working on now? 

A new novel that I’m totally excited about, but I don’t talk about writing projects until they’re done. Before they’re done, I want to leave myself open to anything happening in the narrative. I don’t know where it will go. That’s the fun part. You go along for the ride with the characters and see what they’ll do.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I think I’m having it right now. I just moved to a new city, started a new job, and I’m finishing the book tour--so it’s hard to get my writing routine established again. For me, a routine really helps. I admire those folks who can write in any kind of conditions. Jean Genet wrote his whole book, that gorgeous masterpiece, Our Lady of the Flowers, in prison on a roll of toliet paper. Then the guard found it and threw it out. So Genet rewrote it! That’s all you need to know. That’s commitment.

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

Write on toilet paper. No, let me give you one piece of advice that jumps to mind and it’s so startlingly simple and obvious that it’s almost like a Buddhist koan: Writers write. Butler says that. It sounds silly, I know. He means this: it’s a lot easier to think about writing or talk about it than it is to sit down every day, rain or shine, and actually do it. The only way around is through. Some people make it look easy--write a great book in a few months when they’re 25--but we all hate those people behind their backs. The rest of us have to dig straight through. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Practice the habit of writing every day no matter what. You can come up with a million compelling reasons not to write today. There’s so much quotidian bullshit in life (excuse my language) it could fill up your whole day. You could spend all your time at your job and then handling all those very real, very tedious adult things piling up on your desk. Those need to get done. But put aside an hour or two. Even a half hour, done the right way--meaning without self-recrimination or self-analysis--can be hugely productive. I’m trying to lose myself in the narrative voice, go so deep into a character that I’m essentially living in his or her shoes. To get into that trance or fugue state or the zone, whatever you want to call it, could take me 10 minutes or 10 hours. Sometimes I write for 10 hours but only the last half hour produces anything worth keeping. I mean, it could take that long for my critical functioning to shutdown and for my creative side to take over. I wait my brain out. I let my mind spin until I’m exhausted and then the writing gets good because I’m too damn tired to overthink and second-guess everything I’ve written. So you got to find whatever tricks you need to let yourself create. 

Spencer Wise is the author of the novel, The Emperor of Shoes (HarperCollins, 2018). His work has appeared in journals such as Narrative Magazine, Cincinnati Review, The Literary Review, and New Ohio Review. He has been awarded the Gulf CoastPrize in nonfiction and a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. Wise is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Augusta University.

Jennie Melamed

How did you become a writer?

I have always written, as far back as I can remember. As a kid, I was obsessed with animals and unicorns and princesses and tropical islands, so my stories had a lot of those elements. In middle school I wrote a four-novel series heavily plagiarized from Secret of the Unicorn Queen that actually started­—from my adult viewpoint—to get interesting by the fourth book. Then I got writer's block and focused more on poetry and short stories. I've always written, even though it took me so long to publish anything!

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

I went through a period in adolescence where I read a lot of the great women of literature: Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Charlotte Bronte, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood. Their stories took my breath away. All I knew was that someday I wanted to write stories that did the same to other people. I'm certainly not in their league yet, and may never be, but it's a good thing to strive for!

I read constantly. It's the most important contribution to my writing. I am trying to expand my knowledge of the classics, and currently am reading Henry James and W. E. B. Dubois, with some Anthony Trollope thrown in to lighten things up a bit. However, I'm totally psyched for a novel called Vox that is coming out soon, and will probably take a break to fit that in. 

When and where do you write? 

I write whenever I have the time, which isn't nearly as much as I'd like. I work full-time. I've stopped having any hobbies, really, I just write. Sometimes words or sentences occur to me and I have to run to the computer and write them down, or dictate them into my phone, or make a note on the back of some envelope. So I guess I write everywhere, but the bulk of it is in my office. We moved a few months ago; before that, I had a desk shoved into my bedroom, but now I have a bookshelf and a desk and my pictures on the walls! Luxury.

What are you working on now? 

My third novel since Gather the Daughters was released. Novel One was rejected by my editor as being too dark (which I immediately saw the wisdom of when people began reacting to Gather the Daughters) and Novel Two by my agent, because it had elements too similar to Gather the Daughters. ( My heart's still a little broken; it's shelved, but I'm not giving up on it.) 

I don't want to say too much about my current project, but it's a story that's been in my mind for a long time. It starts off with a young girl driving a stolen car with a blind dog in the backseat. She stops to pick up a hitchhiker, and the tale goes from there.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Oh God, yes. What I usually do is tell myself to just write one sentence a day. Sometimes that's all I can fit into my day anyway! I just work on describing a certain detail, or some dialogue that's not vital, and eventually it goes away. Sometimes it takes a while. Running helps, I always seem to get good ideas while I'm running. 

If all else fails, I usually have a backup project I can work on while I wait for my writer's block on the other project to fade. My agent recently recommended a huge, book-changing alteration to my current manuscript, and whenever that happens, I have to wait a week or two while working on something else. Some unconscious process goes on to figure out how it's going to fit together, and then eventually it comes to the forefront of my mind. Sometimes when I'm faced with a writing dilemma I say to myself, shelve it, and it gets put back in some corner of my brain where my mind can work on it unobserved. 

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

I always heard, write what you know, and the best advice I ever got was not to listen to that! We'd never have speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, if everybody did this. Yes, it's good to write about things you can portray authentically, and we all bring our lives to what we write, but it's also good to stretch your imagination to the limit and make up something new.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Keep trying to get published. I spent almost two years looking for an agent before the incredible Stephanie Delman rescued me from the slush pile. I can't count the number of queries that were rejected. I actually put Gather the Daughters on the shelf and said, Okay, maybe this isn't publishable. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a writer. But after a few months I decided to try again, because I just knew I had written something good.

If you know you have something good, don't give up on it. 

Jennie Melamed is the author of Gather the Daughters, published by Little, Brown in 2017. Gather the Daughters was listed as a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and Booklist, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her writing has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Teen Vogue, Lithub, and other publications. Jennie lives in Seattle with her husband and two Shiba Inus.