We’ve all read the tortured-writer books. We’ve seen the movies. I’m blocked! Someone stole my story! My number-one fan cut off my feet—or broke my ankles, depending on whether you read the book or saw the movie. And then there are depictions of crazy, wild success, in which writers are mobbed on the street because everyone has read their books and recognizes them from their book jackets and their many appearances on cool late-night talk shows.
The reality falls in between. My new series of interviews, Craft of Writing Q&A, checks in with different writers to delve into how they work, why they write, and what we can learn from one another. Welcome to the first Craft of Writing Q&A, which features author Susan Erlandson Washburn. Read on, write on, and enjoy.
Susan Erlandson Washburn is the author of a book on relationships, Partners (Atheneum, 1981), and has contributed articles on human behavior to Redbook, More, and Playgirl. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Poet Lore, Phantasmagoria, RiversEdge, and The Chaffin Review. Her most recent book is My Horse, My Self: Life Lessons From Taos Horsewomen (Casa de Snapdragon LLC, 2014), a collection of interviews with photographs by Jett Ulaner Sarachek.
Q: Because everyone always wants to know this: Describe your writing environment.
A: My what? I’m a nomadic writer. Anywhere I can sit with my feet up and avoid glare on the screen of my MacBook is fine. I like the living room sofa, a little desk in my back hall, coffee shops, and especially airplanes during transoceanic flights.
Q: What are must-haves and must-not-haves in your writing space?
A: It varies. Sometimes I can’t settle in without endless cups of tea, or, later in the day, a scotch and soda. Sometimes I need background music, usually Bach or cool jazz. And sometimes crappy bland elevator music, which is strangely soothing. But no rap. Ever.
And preferably no clutter and mess, which brings out my incipient OCD.
Q: What kind of writing do you most enjoy doing—and is “enjoy” the right word?
A: I truly enjoy every aspect of novel writing—the passionate excitement of the germinal idea, the research, and most especially watching the ensuing movie in my head and putting into words what I see and hear and feel and hear. And smell.
Q: What compels you to write—and what do you like least about writing?
A: I suspect I write fiction primarily to entertain myself. It enables me live a double life, my “real” life in the physical world and another as my point-of-view character in a fictional world. Writing fiction is, for me, like lucid dreaming; I have partial control over my creation but there’s sufficient unpredictability to keep things interesting. My nonfiction projects, on the other hand, come from the shameless desire to win people over to my point of view.
What I like least about writing is that it requires me to sit still. I am VERY bad at sitting still.
Q: What role does inspiration play in your writing?
A: Inspiration, in the sense of some highly energized image or phrase popping into my head seemingly out of nowhere, is essential. Without it writing would be sheer drudgery, a dry intellectual exercise in arranging words on paper.
Q: I know you don’t believe in writer’s block, but what do you do when you’re not feeling the mojo?
A: Writer’s block is a self-defeating concept. It’s the result of focusing on the outcome, not the process. (Or obsessing about deadlines.) I write when I feel like it and I don’t write when I don’t feel like it. If I get stuck on a work-in-progress I don’t worry about being “blocked.” I do something unrelated to writing—ride my horse, walk the dog, clean the toilet—until I can see past the point where I’m stuck.
Q: What made you decide to write My Horse, My Self?
A: I undertook the My Horse, My Self project because I had been spending too much time alone. I needed to do something that would force me into contact with people. Many years ago I’d written an interview-based book about romantic relationships so I thought it would be fun to do something similar about the psychological aspects of the human-horse relationship.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Currently I am writing a dark psychological novel based on my experiences as a gold miner in a remote part of New Zealand. My characters are fictional but the deluded narrator, is, I hate to admit, a version of myself. And her serial misadventures represent actual events.
Q: What are you currently reading, and what do you think of it?
A: If I can manage to get through each week’s New Yorker I count myself lucky. But recently I read Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz, and it’s the best book I’ve read in decades. It should be required reading for every thinking human being.
Q: What advice would you offer the novice writer?
A: My advice to novice writers would be “Don’t.” Not unless you (1) feel compelled to express yourself in words and (2) have something honest and heartfelt to express and (3) are willing to self edit to make sure you’ve expressed it in a form that’s comprehensible to other people. Otherwise just keep a journal to clarify your thoughts and feelings and don’t inflict it on the world.
Q: What didn’t I ask that I should have—and what’s the answer?
A: What you didn’t ask me was why I don’t think of myself as a writer, which I don’t. Writing is just one of the things I do, like architectural design, riding horses, or, in the past, gold mining and anthropological research. I have a very fluid professional identity, if indeed I have one at all.
