My name is John Kiss. I have been writing since age 5. I love storytelling. I love to be able to communicate and reach people through words. Stories changed my life. When I read a book about a person who lived decades ago, maybe a person who is no longer alive, and I connect to that person, I feel elevated. I feel liberated. This is what I try to do when I write. I try to liberate, move you as the reader to become a better person essentially. I believe that literature has the power to make us all better human beings.

Under the Floorboards tells an incredible true story about a boy, a Jewish boy, who runs away from the Nazis in 1942 Poland and he is hidden by a very kindhearted Polish woman who takes the risk of hiding him under the floorboards of her bedroom, risking her own life, her husband's life and the lives of her children. This is based on a true story of a Righteous Among the Nations, a woman who had the courage to do something that I'm not sure if you or I would've had the courage to do in that situation. The story follows the harrowing months of the war as well as the time after the war when that boy grows up and is determined to repay the kindness showed to him by that Polish lady and her family. It's a really moving story.

When I first heard of it a decade ago, I was like "how come not everyone knows about this story? What can I do to spread this story?" And it was then that I decided to write this novel. It took me a decade to write this story and to tell it in its current form, and I'm just so excited about this story finally reaching the readers who have been waiting for it.

When I was in, I believe it was, fourth grade, I began writing these serialized stories that I read in front of the class and I was a really shy kid, very uncomfortable in my skin, very girly, didn't play with the boys and was always with the girls. I was just really shy and I wrote these short stories and read them in front of the class. I could see how the entire room was captivated and it elevated my social standing. I became the cool kid because of these unique stories, intricate stories, that I told and they kept wanting to hear the next chapter, the next episode and I felt seen. I felt validated and I think that that's when I realized that I wanted to be an author.

If I weren't an author, I would have been some form of storyteller. Maybe a choreographer. I really like dancing and I believe in the power of ballet and modern dance in telling a story. I think it's underutilized right now and I would've loved to have created stories that move people that are told with the human form, with the human body, with movement. I find that many tribal rituals are very cathartic for a group of people and I think that really can be experimented with and further researched. I would have loved to have been a choreographer.

The most rewarding part of being an author is hearing from the readers. The emails that I have gotten over the years for my articles and for different books that I wrote under pseudonyms really, really moved me. In fact, I tend to print emails that have been sent to me by readers to hang them around my office and those emails really, really touch me. The emails and the people reaching out on social media telling me that my book helped them during a difficult time or that my book helped them feel more grateful for what they have. For me hearing from readers has been the most rewarding part of the journey.

Years ago, I published a memoir about the Jewish attitude towards success. I published it and no one read it except for a few friends of mine. It was my first book. It was not the best of books and a reader called Rochelle read it. Somehow, she found it and she wrote to me an email saying she really loved my book. In the beginning, I thought it was a hoax. I thought some of my friends wanted to--maybe I complained to some of my friends that no one is reading my book and maybe they--I felt that there was a disbelief in me that someone actually read it. I replied to her and she replied back and it was a real person not related to me. It was not my aunt. It was not my friends. It was a real person who read the book and felt connected to the themes that I shared. That experience was huge. It was really life-changing and it just reaffirmed my belief that books can touch people and connect people. This was nearly a decade ago, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. Since then, I've unpublished the book. I was displeased with it, so I pulled it back but in the future, I would like to republish it.

When I was in my preteens, I began reading novels religiously, like it was my escape. The novels that moved me the most were ones that helped put me in another person's skin. Whether it was a girl in World War II or a boy during slavery or a kid during the Spanish Inquisition, all of a sudden, it expanded my horizon. There was something about the fact that this was a true story or situated in a true historical setting that really made me soar. I just really believe in the power of historical fiction. It can help teach us about past mistakes of humanity and how we can, as a society, as humanity, learn from the past. I find that there is definitely an educational aspect in everything that I write when it comes to historical fiction. I really want to educate and empower the readers. Nothing does it better, in my view, than historical fiction.

I have been blessed by stories that haunt me. Last night, midnight, I should be in bed, but I am researching down this rabbit hole about this parashooter who had escaped Slovakia, moved to Palestine in 1939 and this crazy woman, wanting to save people in Nazi-occupied Slovakia, parashoots herself back to Slovakia in 1944. Eventually, she is captured by the Nazis and is killed. It's a true story and I went down the rabbit hole for hours and hours. Researching things in Slovakian. I don't know Slovakian so I was using Google Translate and going down old textbooks and speaking to an archivist in Israel during her 7:30 am and my 9:30 PM. Asking her if I can find people who knew that parashooter.

I'm blessed with stories that attack me and they don't let go. The story of Felix? I was waiting for it to leave me alone and it didn't. It pestered me again and again until I was like okay, I'm going to tell this story.

So, right now, I have a list of many stories that I feel obliged, for some reason, to share. Most of them are World War II but some of them are 19th century, talking about the Black experience. I feel really called for some reason to slave narratives and the time of Reconstruction. Some of them are about the feminine perspective of war and peace, especially in the 19th century and mid-20th century.

I feel like those stories beckon me to tell them and unfortunately, I cannot run away. It's almost a compulsion. It feels like an uncomfortable duty that I cannot avoid.

There are two authors that really moved me in recent years. One of them is Anthony Doerr with his All the Light We Cannot See, very poetic and at the same time, fast paced and moving. I really loved his writing.

The other is Kristin Hannah, who is just an amazing storyteller. I cannot stop reading her. Sometimes, I'm like "do I really wanna go down the rabbit hole 'cause I will not be sleeping tonight." Her books are like you know that you sign up for 10 hours or 12 hours of a page turner. She has been a great teacher for me. I never met her, but the way that Kristin Hannah writes so fast-paced and yet, emotional. She's very inspiring to me.

I really like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho because it's so simple. There's a great power in simplicity. There were a few things I stole from Paulo Coelho when it comes to Under the Floorboards. Coelho never uses names. There are no names except for the first sentence. There is no name for any character in the novel and I thought that was brilliant. There is a sense of a return home, a full circle, that he offers that is really elevating. I really tried to do the same in my writing.

I really enjoy doing research and I enjoy watching World War II sad films. I like crying. I think it's very cathartic for me. It's almost like going to therapy. So I sometimes go on YouTube and I will search for "movies to make you cry" or stuff like that. Crying is very helpful for me.

I write a lot about World War II for a couple of personal reasons. First of all, most of my family, four generations ago, was killed in the Holocaust. In Romania or Moldova, there are mass burial sites and graves to which the Jews were taken and killed. It's like a shadow, a haunting shadow, that has been hovering over my conversations with my grandparents. My grandfather had a bullet from a Nazi sniper so there was a scar on his arm, a scar on his thigh, a missing toe in his foot. So his foot had four toes and I was like “what's happening?” He was reluctant to tell how he got them. There was this silence in the family. 

I think that silence is never good. I find that the entire family is post-traumatic. There is this epigenetic, genealogical trauma that we carry in our body. I've found that with many African Americans and many minorities. I've found that these things need to be healed and I go to World War II to heal.

Another unfortunate thing for me is growing in the shadow of war. When I was 5, there was a war in Israel, a terrible experience for me. Unfortunately, it never ceased. Every few years of war and constantly there was a fear of growing up in Israel, being afraid of suicide bombers. Growing up in Israel during the Gulf War was not an easy thing. 

I was 5 years old when I first heard sirens and we were rushed into my family's small bedroom. We were cramming into this small room and my father who was always kind of calm, reassuring, strong, seemed frantic. I saw him pale. He was taking duct tape and beginning to seal the door and putting rugs in water and putting them underneath the opening of the door. My mother was searching the radio to silent wavelengths that would tell where the missiles were falling. I was scared. Everyone was scared. This experience that repeated again and again during my most formative years scarred me.

I think that everyone in the Middle East. Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, Palestinians, Israelis. Everyone has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. For me, focusing on World War II really helps me to heal and process at a safe distance. That is why I love writing about the Holocaust and World War II.

I learned over the years that for successful writing, you have to truly commit yourself. I write daily whether I want to or not. I look at it as work, not like a hobby. I turn my cell phone off. I focus on the blank page and I write. Sometimes, it sucks. Sometimes, it's not good, but I always try to get something down.

I write seven days a week. I love writing. It's one of those things where the more I dedicate myself to it, the more it yields, the more the payback, the more the returns. So, daily discipline of writing is my routine. It's something I would highly recommend to someone who wants to be an author.

Maybe let's go to the next question because I don't have anything smart to say except for the fact that I have no balance.

When I first started writing, I was what we call in the writing community a "pantser," meaning you write off the seat of your pants. You write without planning. It was very exciting. I didn't know what was coming next. I flipped the page and kept writing. I thought it was really good for my first few manuscripts.

Over the years, I've seen that the more planning one does in advance, the better the book becomes. So, nowadays, I'm what we in the book community call a "plotter." I go with the plot and I will plot those few pages, making sure every chapter is where it needs to be and that it targets the very simple aspect of moving the plot forward. 

So, in the past, I didn't know that and now that I know that, I dedicate much more time to having clear, robust plots that are like Jenga, like a tower where if you pull one element out, everything collapses. I try to create a skeleton that is very strong and only then, only once I have that, and it can take months, sometimes even years, to get that good outline. Only once I have that outline do I begin writing. 

I didn't know that in the beginning and in the beginning, I even thought "plotting? That's so boring and so non-creative." But nowadays, I want every page to move the plot forward. I wanna write page turners and I find that if I don't know where I'm going, I cannot foreshadow it. If I don’t know my destination very clearly, I will veer away from it. I cannot do that for the reader. I really want to write bestselling page-turners and I am dedicated to working on the outline and erasing things again and again and again until I really have a tight outline. I did not know that in the beginning and this is what is making my writing stronger.

A question that I often get is how do I deal with writer's block and my answer may not sound very respectful. Many amateur authors do not enjoy hearing it, but I do not believe in writer's block.

I believe that if you are committed to your work, you will sit and you will write something that sucks and that's okay. I think that writer's block is judgement over what wants to come out. You judge it as being stupid or silly and because of that judgment, you do not write. I try to write shitty first drafts and I allow myself to suck. I think thanks to that I have something to edit.

We say in the writer's community "you cannot edit a blank page." So my goal is to get a really nasty, badly written first draft so that then I can edit it. Because of my commitment to that, I do not have writer's block.

There are two books that really helped me with creativity.

The first one is by Steven Pressfield. It is called "The War of Art." It's very good and it is short, really readable and explains a lot about creativity and resistance. He uses the word Resistance with a capital R to describe our procrastination and our hesitation and our self-criticism and our driving for "perfection"  as the enemy.  It's a really wonderful book about creativity. I loved his energy.

Another one is a more recent one from the past decade that is called "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert. That is such a fun book. She is really the one to tell you the truth to your face. I really love her tough love and unlike many other authors, she has the resume to back what she says. She wrote one bestseller after another. She is the author behind "Eat Pray Love," which was adapted to the screen with Julia Roberts. She is such a creativity expert. I really love her.

"Big Magic" and "The War of Art" are two books which can really help set your mindset on any creative endeavor.

I published a few novels under pseudonyms early on. One of them was about the life of Felix Zandman. The feedback was so great. Readers told me just how much the story impacted them and it felt that the universe was telling me "take that novel. Rewrite it. Truly put your heart and soul, pour your creativity into it and perfect it, so that that book can be a book that you will be willing to not put a pseudonym on, but your own name."

About a year ago, I decided to take that novel and rewrite it from scratch. Six hundred pages later, I ended up with a manuscript that I'm pretty proud of. I still would like to do a second edition and a third edition and to keep improving it, but I do feel that I have done justice for the historical story. I feel privileged to be able to tell this moving story.

I cannot wait for readers to read this story and to learn of true courage, true courage and true love.