Andrew Blackman

As a child, I wrote stories to express the things I could never seem to say out loud. In the quiet of my room, alone with a blunt, heavily chewed pencil and a scrap of paper, I felt free. If I made a mistake, I could rub it out and get it right the second time, or the third. I shaped the words with my small, chocolate-stained fingers, and the results pleased me. So different from spoken words, which seemed to come out of their own accord, often jumbled or inaccurate, and could never be rubbed out.

These days I have a laptop, and my fingers are stained with coffee rather than chocolate, but otherwise my writing process remains remarkably similar. 

The results, of course, are different. My ideas have changed radically since I was eight. Rather than being obsessed with the unfairness of teachers or parents, I am now obsessed with societal injustice. Instead of grumbling about having to clean my room, I grumble about who will clean the planet. I have been influenced by literature from around the world: Jorge Luis Borges, André Brink, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. I have had formal training, too: a history degree from Oxford University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia, three years as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York. I have learned much from all of these sources and have watched myself improving as a writer.

But now, as I enter my thirties, I have decided to return to my childhood instinct that the truth is best told through fiction. I have moved back to London, taken a break from journalism, and written a couple of novels and a drawer full of short stories, one of which was recently published by Leaf Books. In the novel excerpted on this site, I try to express the sense of smallness, both geographic and psychological, that I felt on returning from America to Britain. I imagine a couple of Londoners, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic “On the Road,” setting off on a road trip, only to discover that the horizon of Britain in 2008 is not so broad as that of fifties America. I also explore the two countries’ fascination with each other’s mythology, a subject that has informed much of my work recently.

No matter what I write about, though, my main aim right now is to recapture the freedom I felt as a tongue-tied eight year old letting rip against the world with his grubby little HB pencil.

Jerry Ryan

I started writing seriously in the early 90s. I enjoyed an unplanned sabbatical from my job and went back to school. I took a writing course, “Writing the Natural Way” using the book by Gabriele Rico. It was like someone let the genie out of the bottle. I haven’t stopped writing since. The clustering technique unleashes the hidden treasures locked in the right side of the brain and gets them onto paper. It’s a technique I use in writing fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, poetry, and business letters.

I found that writing was the cheapest form of therapy I could find. Fiction writing allows me to test characters with ethical flaws in situations that test those ethics. Sometimes I know what the characters will do. Often, they surprise me and insist on doing something I hadn’t planned for them to do. That’s when writing is really a kick.

As you can see from my submission, I love cycling. With over 30 years and 35,000 miles in the saddle, I've had my fair share of cycling experiences. The idea for writing about cycling came from friends constantly calling with questions about buying a bicycle, what accessories to have, where to ride, how to fix.... you get the idea. The result was a series of articles written for novice to intermediate cyclists and enjoyed by all those who bicycle and love to read about cycling. They say “Write what you know.” It’s true.

I wrote constantly and submitted work for about three years before I hooked up with Windy City Sports. That seemed to be the key to becoming more successful. When someone pays you regularly for what you write, you’re a writer, not just a dilettante. I still enter competitions and still meet with more rejections than acceptance, but I keep plugging away.

I write poetry to work through life issues, to stay in emotional touch with feelings often repressed in daily life. My day job isn’t that satisfying on a gut level. Poetry fills a need that other forms of writing don’t.  I’ve been fortunate to win a few poetry competitions along the way.

Poetry became a tool to prime the pump for ideas for my other writings. I found I enjoyed the denseness of language and economy of words inherent in a poem. Poetry is a discipline that I now enjoy for its own pleasure.

I started entering writing competitions as a way to test the waters for my writing.   As an unagented author, I found it was difficult to get short stories and poems published. Competitions are a great place for your work to be judged by people who will give your work a good, critical read. When you win a few, it helps your bio when you submit elsewhere.

Competitions usually have judges who are sincerely interested in finding work that they would love to publish. Many contests are run by university fine arts programs that are looking for good new work, as opposed to the literary and commercial markets where your story or poem is one more manuscript plucked out of the slush pile and read by an overworked and underpaid editorial assistant or intern.

I entered a competition from Next Stop Hollywood that called for short stories that might lend themselves to film or TV projects. From over 600 submissions, 15 were selected for inclusion, one of mine among them.  "A.K.A." is a love story and a crime story involving two ex-DEA agents and an exotic dancer, a drug deal gone wrong, and mistaken identity. The prize included publication in the St. Martin’s Press anthology (http://nextstophollywood.org), a small cash advance, a split of royalties with the other authors and the publisher, and best of all, some nice participation if the stories are optioned and/or produced.

I try to write every day.  With a full time job, that’s not always easy.  Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird wrote about not waiting for the Muse to move you before sitting down to write. If you sit down to write every day, the Muse will know where to find you.  I’m trying, Anne, I’m trying.

I would recommend joining a good writers' group that offers support along with a high level of critique, a group that allows you to read your work aloud. It’s amazing how your best work stands out, and how your less than stellar effort show up when you hear it out loud. It’s easy to spot the bumps in your work.