Larissa MacFarquhar

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really—I have a method for avoiding it. When I’m sitting down to write something new, I figure out which bits are going to be easy and which are going to be hard. I start with the easiest bit (which, when I’m writing an article, is usually a scene, because it involves transcribed dialogue, so it’s half-written already), then go on to the next-easiest, and so on, finishing, once I’ve got plenty of momentum, with the hardest bit, which is usually the beginning. Then I stitch it all together.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Don’t have too many friends, and live somewhere cheap. Also: I know a lot of people say you should write every day, but that never made any sense to me. Write no matter what? Even when you have nothing to say and are just going to produce a lot of blather? The idea behind the write-every-day thing seems to be that writing uses muscles that can atrophy, but to me, writing is just another form of thinking. If you didn’t think every day, that would be bad. Maybe it’s different for novelists, but as a nonfiction writer I spend quite a lot of time researching and interviewing and reading before I start writing. I scribble lots of notes, but nothing more than that.

Larissa MacFarquhar is the author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, where her profile subjects have included Hillary Mantel, John Ashbery, Barack Obama, and Noam Chomsky.

http://www.advicetowriters.com/interviews/2016/3/29/larissa-macfarquhar.html