WWA: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

RT: I wanted to be an illustrator or painter first, when I was about ten. My interest lay in making things, putting things together, creating small worlds. But I wasn’t very good at art and I didn’t like to practice it. I was just a doodler. By the time I was thirteen, I suspected I didn’t have the talent for art. At about that time, I met a boy who was writing a novel (swords and sorcery stuff) and he encouraged me to write one too. After I handed in a creative writing assignment for ninth-grade English, my teacher encouraged me to write too. So I started. My first story was a James Bond knock-off, which I still have somewhere.

WWA: Who are some of your influences? What are some of your sources of inspiration?

RT: Early on, Steinbeck was important to me because his style was very accessible. Mark Twain for his humor and voice—I agree with Hemingway that “Huck Finn” is the wellspring of much modern fiction. I was really into Hemingway and Vonnegut as a teenager. Flannery O’Connor and Virginia Woolf too. Then Ann Beattie, who seems to have disappeared these days. Some of my contemporaries, like Peter Cameron, have been influential.

WWA: What do you see as the greatest challenge to writers today, regardless of where they are in their career?

RT: The greatest challenge is to keep writing in the face of rejection and indifference.

a) Americans are not a bookish people. Our culture puts its energies elsewhere—into video games and theme parks, for instance. Most Americans are looking for a cheap thrill, not an illuminating encounter with a piece of fiction. This means that most people aren’t going to understand or appreciate your efforts as a writer.

b) Editors and agents are motivated by the bottom line. They can be desperate and callous in their drive for a money-maker. Literary history is crowded with examples of their poor judgment. Their rejection of your work does not necessarily reflect on its quality; it reflects their notions of “marketability.”


WWA: Do you have a personal method for writing? Do you prefer to write in the morning, afternoon, evening, night? Any bizarre or quirky rituals?

RT: I write whenever and wherever I can. I had to train myself to do this. Early on, I believed I needed a full day to write. But that belief was a product of insecurity. Give me five minutes and I’ll write a few lines. Give me ten and I’ll write a paragraph. I’ll take whatever I can get. I carry a notebook (the paper kind) with me at all times. Also I carry electronic devices that allow me to write and save stuff on the go. You don’t have to write every day to be “a writer.” I might go a month or two without writing. It depends on the demands of my life.

I know people who have rituals or certain practices, like committing everything to a legal pad in long-hand first. But I’ve managed to escape such practices, probably because, as a teenager, I learned to type and, since that time, have written all my drafts on a machine of one kind or another. But, if I have to, I can write with a pencil and paper too.

WWA: What are the three most important things every writer needs to know?

RT: a) If you’re meant to be a writer, nobody and nothing will stop you from writing.

b) Writing something, anything, no matter how bad it may be, is better than writing nothing. I tell my students to stop being so hard on themselves—the blank page (“writer’s block”) is a product of the writer’s internal criticism, which tells him/her that nothing is good enough to put on the page. If you dare to be bad, at least you’ll have something to work with.

c) Writing is not about publishing and fame; it’s about making sense of the world.

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