Jennifer Homans

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer by being a shy person and a dancer. I am very internal and have always liked to sit alone in dark theaters watching dance and scribbling thoughts. Or performing, which is also a very private experience, even (or because) it is for a public. Writing is always for me a way of thinking – I don't know what I am going to “say” before I write it. Dance mattered because, somehow, the direct connection between seeing or moving and the task of describing my own thoughts in the moment, as a thing, but also as an effect on my own being, is something private and natural to me. I see better and feel more when I write it down. I have ideas when I move to music, and often took a pen and paper with me to dance classes. The process was so private that I never imagined I would share my writing, and to this day, I feel oddly surprised when I see my work in print. When I am writing, no one else is there, just me (barely) and the material. In this sense, it is very much like dancing.

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

This is hard – there are so many, and each project brings its own library of influences. Here are a few. Some are dances and dancers; art and music: The dances of George Balanchine. The dancing and teaching of Suzanne Farrell, Melissa Hayden, Maria Tallchief. I have always learned from art – especially painting and sculpture. Recently, Russian literature, especially Tolstoy. Cervantes. Don Quixote. Henry James. William James. So many more.

When and where do you write?

I write at home, usually beginning very early in the morning through early afternoon, with breaks to walk, snack, pace, and talk to myself. I began this way because I didn't have an office or job to go to; later I had young children and wanted to be near them, even if someone else was caring for them so that I could write. Now that I do have an office, I still write mostly at home. I use the floor a lot – for notes, spread out in a sea around me – and I am often on the floor, talking to the pages and moving them around like pieces of a puzzle.

What are you working on now?

At the moment I am working on finding a new subject, which for me means trying out ideas by living with them for a time to see which sift to the bottom and which stay with me. I try to be open and let fate and chance play a role – I don't want to miss a subject that might surprise me. I try to follow my body and go where it takes me – not in a meditative sense, but literally: Where do I find myself standing?

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. I see writing as a craft and if I am stuck, I just keep at it. I don't think of it as writer's block, just a bad day. There are many!

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

Keep going. Stay at your desk and fight it out, BUT also know when to stop and take a walk, go on a trip, get on a train, or go to a gallery. The best ideas usually come to me when I am not at my desk. It is a balancing act, and I try not to get stuck in my own tenaciousness.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write about something you care about and want to know more about. Do not write about yourself unless you have a rare talent and something unusual to say. Curiosity and delight in learning is for me a key; it takes me out of myself.

Jennifer Homans is the dance critic and a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (2022) and Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet. Trained in dance at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, she performed professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet before earning a BA at Columbia University and a PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is currently a Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.

Linda Villarosa

How did you become a writer? 

When I was a little girl, I used to have Wednesday night sleepovers with my Great Aunt May. She was a retired teacher who read to me and taught me how to read before I started kindergarten. She was the first person to tell me I could – and should – be a writer. 

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

My mother owned the Hue-Man Experience, which was the largest Black bookstore in the country. Being around books and authors was very inspiring to me as I was coming of age. I was also very influenced by Susan L. Taylor, the former editor in chief of Essence Magazine. She hired me as health editor and promoted me to executive editor of the magazine, and the experience of working in a Black women-centric environment was foundational to my growth. 

When and where do you write? 

I’m a morning person, but writing isn’t precious to me. It’s my profession, and I can do it anywhere, anytime.

What are you working on now? 

I just finished a book and am now contributing to a special report for the New York Times Magazine on gun violence and children that will run at the end of the year. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. 

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

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. If you feel stuck that means you need to find inspiration by doing more research.

What’s your advice to new writers? 

Don’t let anyone discourage you. Just out of college, at my first magazine job, my supervisor told the rest of the staff that I was an affirmative action hire the day before I started. She later advised other editors not to encourage me because I had no talent. Now I feel great satisfaction each time the New York Times Magazine lands on her doorstep with my name on the cover. 

Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine where she covers race, inequality and public health. Her 2018 Times Magazine cover story "Why America's Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She is the author of Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation which was named as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Time Magazine and NPR – and by the Times as one of the Top 10 Books of 2022. Linda is a journalist in residence and professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism @ CUNY with a joint appointment at the City College of New York.

Elijah Kinch Spector

How did you become a writer?

I come from a long line of writers, so it always felt like a foregone conclusion. This may or may not have been a good thing. Would I have felt the constant urge to write if I hadn't been raised in that environment? Would I still have my deep, compulsive, need for approval and recognition from others? Who knows! But I was a sensitive only child, surrounded by artists and weirdos while I pined for adulthood, so here I am.

More concretely, I majored in Creative Writing, and then spent the next decade trying to break in. I wrote many attempted novels of many types. I made a spreadsheet with an unhinged amount of information on the 40 or so agents I wanted to query. I lay on the floor staring into space and moaning that I'd never get published. One doesn’t have to be published to be a writer, but that's what I fixated on and, in my case, that fixation forced me to improve.

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

Always a tough question, because of course the answer is, you know, everything.

That said, in college I took a course on writing in the first person from novelist Ed Park that still affects my writing every day, even as most of my education fades from memory. One of the books we read in that class was Charles Portis’ True Grit, which opened my eyes to how even the smallest choices in wording and incident can greatly inform a character.

Additionally, a major influence on me from out of left field is Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. In the Quartet’s later books, Durrell’s own… odious views come into clearer focus, but his lush prose, heavy with the history of the setting, remains marvelous—if also orientalist. I write fantasy, but a lot of the tone and texture of my worldbuilding came from Durrell.

When and where do you write?

I don't take well to routine, unfortunately, so I'm never good at having a particular time or place where I write. I have a beautiful little desk my spouse made for me, but it ends up being where I do most other work. I love to bring a notebook and pen to cafes, parks, and bars, or to scribble out a few pages on a lunch break from my day job; but I also love the feeling of banging away on an old typewriter for hours at a time, when I can manage it.

What are you working on now?

I'm currently in the beautiful little grace period between finishing the first draft of my second novel and getting edits back. So, right this second, I'm working on nothing, and it's glorious. But very soon I'll be deep in revisions on my first try at a sequel.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Absolutely, although I wonder if "writer's block" is one term applied to a thousand different things. For me, getting stuck on what should happen next plot-wise is totally different from not knowing what will make a new character interesting, and both problems have different remedies. But changing my location and/or writing tools almost always helps.

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

Don't listen to anyone who says you need to write for at least X hours a day—or even to write every day—in order to be a writer.

What’s your advice to new writers?

If your epigraph isn’t in public domain, you might have to pay for the rights to use it! I learned this the hard way, but it was worth the money.

Elijah Kinch Spector is a writer, dandy, and rootless cosmopolitan from the Bay Area who now lives in Brooklyn. His debut novel, Kalyna the Soothsayer, is available from Erewhon Books.