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. 

Elizabeth Hay

How did you become a writer? It happened when I was fifteen. An English teacher asked us to open our books to a poem by D. H. Lawrence, to read the poem, then to close our books. Now open your workbooks, she said, and write down whatever comes into your heads. Since we’d been given no warning, there was no time to get nervous. I plunged in and wrote easily, off the back of Lawrence’s poem, astonished that I had images and thoughts in my head and that they had a way of coming out. From that moment, I was hooked.

Name your writing influences. English teachers, certainly. The one I’ve just mentioned, who was responsible for the turning point in my life, even if I don’t remember her name, and she wasn’t, in fact, a very good teacher. In my final year of high school, Mr. McLean was calm, astute, encouraging, and didn’t play favorites. He steadied me and I gained confidence in his class. I still rely on poetry—often to start my day and put me on a creative path. Louise Glück, Frost, Tranströmer, Margaret Avison, Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Ondaatje. Prose writers: Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Coetzee, Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín. If I get stuck, I open one of their books and a page of their writing takes my mind off my impasse, and my thoughts start to flow again.

When and where do you write? Mostly I write in my second-floor study either at my desk or in a sturdy rocking chair, using notebooks and a pen or pencil, as well as a computer. If computer, I print out what I’ve written so I can revise on paper. Mornings are best; early mornings before anyone else is up are best of all.

What are you working on now? My most recent novel was hard enough to finish that I have no desire to start another right now, so I’ve turned to short personal stories.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Almost never and often. Almost never in that I’m usually working on something, but often because I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels. I have stretches of time—I’m in one now—where I’m not writing a lot, but that’s less a case of writer’s block than of some necessary fallow time to mull things over. Or so I tell myself.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The best advice was a remark that stung me at the time. I was in my early thirties, struggling to write stories. I showed my husband a few pages about a fight we’d had and he said, “I wish you would enjoy the people you write about. No matter how fucked up they are, enjoy them. All you do is criticize.” I came to see the plain truth of this after I started to write novels. To create living characters, you need to see them from many different angles. To appreciate rather than judge them. Otherwise, they remain one-dimensional and under your thumb.

What’s your advice to new writers? Keep a working notebook. Not a daily journal of what you’ve done, but a working notebook in which you make a habit of jotting down details about things you notice and hear and think about. This is your raw material. If you don’t write down the details, you will forget them.

Elizabeth Hay is the Giller Prize-winning author of six novels, including Late Nights on Air, A Student of Weather, and His Whole Life. Her most recent novel is Snow Road Station (Knopf Canada, 2023). A former radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City, and makes her home in Ottawa, Canada.