Member Spotlight: Megan Staffel

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing is communication and a novel about a particular group of people facing some of the biggest questions of life—love, loss, ambition, confusion—is a novel that invites a reader to get to know and therefore empathize with people who may be very different. In this way, my novel and really, any novel that a reader falls in love with, offers the chance to increase harmony in the world. That might seem like a grandiose claim, but writing is an art form that increases our understanding of people who make different choices than we do, and in that way, it helps to dispel some of the free-floating mistrust and hatred that tends to build in societies. When a reader connects with a writer’s characters, she feels empathy. That’s what the world needs more of; empathy repairs the ragged edges of the human enterprise. This is why I view writing as a calling and a mission on top of the everyday pleasure that story-making gives me.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? When the story bores you, it will bore a reader. Writer’s block is simply losing interest in what you’re writing about. I like to imagine that a story is a shape with many facets or sides. If you’re tired of looking at it from one angle, turn it slightly and look at it from a different angle. Turn it this way and that way until you find the facet that excites you. Start there. Let yourself write a shitty first draft. Don’t worry about quality, just get it down however it goes. Then you’ll have something to revise. That’s my method.

What is your favorite time to write? I work in the morning when I’m fresh and full of ideas.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Don’t talk about your idea for a story or a novel; keep it to yourself until you have completed a draft. Talking about a story or novel that is in process will make the necessity to write it disappear. That necessity is a precious thing. Guard it, keep it close. Don’t seek confirmation from anyone, find it within yourself. I wait until I’ve worked an idea out completely and have a finished draft before I show it to anyone or even talk about it. Another writer warned me about this a long time ago and it’s advice that has served me well.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? These days the doors are flung wide open! There are many small presses filling the vacancies created by the amalgamation of the big publishing houses. In addition, the field has expanded beyond traditional writers, that is, beyond the white male who used to dominate. Work by women and people of color is finding homes in alternative as well as traditional presses and the review venues are giving space to these new voices as well.

Megan Staffel’s The Causative Factor is out now with ‎Regal House Publishing.