DEANNE STILLMAN is the author of the critically acclaimed Twenty-mine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines and the Mojave (William Morris 2001), a book that Hunter Thomson called "a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer." Stillman’s reportage, essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Mademoiselle, Playboy, Salon.com and Slate.com, among others. An award-winning playwright and much-anthologized author, she is a former columnist for the Village Voice and Buzz magazine. Stillman participated in the University of Oregon's Literary Nonfiction program in January 2003 when she conducted a workshop entitled Writing About Place.

Q: Your book, Twentynine Palms, took ten years to research and write. What advice can you give to new writers embarking on long-term projects?
A: The story really chose me. I knew I had to tell it as soon as I heard about it. Two rivers converged for me … my love of the desert and my love of misfit kids. I knew from having spent a lot of time in the desert before stumbling onto this story that no one pays attention to the kids out there. When I heard about this story, I knew I had to tell it.

I didn’t know how long this would take. If I’d known beforehand that it would take ten years, I probably still would’ve done it. The interest … waxed and waned over time. There were times when I had to get away from the story altogether. Then I would go back and regroup, and sooner or later something would remind me that this is my mission in life, to tell this story.

When I was first starting out, I didn’t have the chops for something like this. I couldn’t have received it. You need to be at a certain point in life before you can take on a story, and you’ll know what’s right for you.

Q: Your writing career includes playwriting and screenwriting as well as narrative nonfiction. How are the disciplines different or similar?
A: I love literary nonfiction because it employs fiction techniques such as character development and placing an event in a cultural, social, historical, or even mythological context. I think that allows the author to illuminate connections that other forms of writing don’t necessarily reveal.

I love writing plays for the same reason. You can go back and forth in time. You can have characters involved in an interior monologue. It’s so much about the word. It’s such a writer’s medium.

Screenwriting is not my favorite thing to do. It’s so much more mechanical. It’s a very visual medium. I find such constraints are not right for the kind of stories I like to tell. In screenplays, you have to pull out these big dramatic moments, but often these moments are at the expense of other layers and contexts.

Q: One piece of advice often given to writers is that they shouldn’t write to their limit, since that can lead to burnout. But you exhausted yourself writing the gruesome murder scene in Twentynine Palms, to the point where you couldn’t work on the book for several weeks. Are there times when a writer just has to push all the way to the edge?
A: I kept putting it off and putting it off … I was just dreading it. After weeks of dancing all around that scene, I finally sat down to do it. What helped me get through it was yoga, swimming, and riding my bicycle on the beach … Yoga helped me break through barriers. Sometimes, when you get to a certain position in yoga, you can’t go any further. I wondered, "Why can’t I go any further?" I took those lessons with me when I went back to write the scene.

In retrospect, I don’t know how else I would’ve done that. You don’t want to exhaust yourself with writing. If you’re always tired when you’re writing, you reach a point of diminishing returns. You definitely want to pace yourself, but also take it to the limit.

Q: You once said, "Don’t go into writing as a cash cow." Is it fair to say you view writing as a kind of spiritual calling where the material rewards are secondary?
A: I don’t know why people think that writing is an easy thing to do, and something they can quickly cash in on. They don’t say that about singing, or sculpting. Writing is hard work. It’s physical labor. It’s heavy lifting a lot of the time.

I consider it a blessing to make money doing what I love to do. And I don’t think writers should starve. It’s great when writers make money. Just don’t let it drive your work. I think if you’re following your heart, the money will come in – if you take care of the business side of things.