Andy Ihnatko

How did you become a writer?

The Sensitive Artiste answer is that I became a writer on some school night in the 6th grade, when I entered a contest in a computer magazine. You were supposed to explain why Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak named their new company "Apple" and I wrote a three-page short story about it. It was, I think, the first time I ever wrote something strictly for fun as opposed to because an authority figure promised dire consequences if I didn't. When I got to the end of the story, I was filled with the as-yet unfamiliar sensations of joy and pride, and I was eager to keep right on chasing that dragon.

Around this same time, I read "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" for the first time and was introduced to another unfamiliar sensation: reading something for sheer pleasure and enjoying every single page. I sat down and wrote my Magnum Opus: a twelve-page story (my longest to date) that was an utterly shameless ripoff of Douglas Adams' style. It wasn't good writing but it was a great moment. I recognized it was weak sauce but instead of discouraging me, it made me eager to write something better straight away.

The Cold Capitalist answer to the question is that I started writing the monthly meeting report for my local user group's newsletter. I did it for a couple of years, receiving no reward other than a byline. But! When a magazine editor invited me to send him some samples of my writing, I had plenty of stuff to show him. And when he gave me my first paying gig, I already had enough experience to not be intimidated and forge right ahead.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Every writer has a thousand unconscious influences. Douglas Adams was my first conscious one. Later, though, I came to realize that I was more strongly influenced by P.G. Wodehouse and Monty Python _via_ Douglas Adams. I'm still in awe of Wodehouse...his ability to hone a sentence to perfection and make all of the segments of an intricate plot just click right together as though there was no other way for this story to develop.

There's a book of Wodehouse's collected correspondence with a friend and fellow novelist. The whole book is about his interest in the cricket and football teams of the school they both went to, AND his philosophies and methods for breaking and developing a story. I bet I re-read "Performing Flea" six times a year...it's packed with practical advice and powerful inspiration. As if the fact that he wrote 100 novels and kept writing nearly until the end of his century on this planet isn't inspiring enough!

It's out of print but it's easy to find from secondhand sellers via Amazon.

From Monty Python, I learned two things: no idea is too wild...but it's the execution of the idea that really matters.

Other than those? Two awesome newspaper columnists: Ernie Pyle and Roger Ebert.

When and where do you write?

I chop my entire waking day into three sessions, and I usually work during 1 or 2 of those sessions. My most productive time is usually from after dinnertime until bedtime.

Real writing requires a desk and a chair. I used to be able write like a hobo. Now, for whatever reason, I value a chair and a desk.

That said, I love grabbing my iPad and my bluetooth keyboard and setting off for a different writing environment. I get a little extra energy from being in a crowded space. Plus, being in a library or a coffeeshop gives you a real deadline to work against. They'll kick me out of the Panera at 10 PM, so I need to get SOMEthing done by then or else I feel like a poser.

What are you working on now?

I've always got my tech columns but I'm also working on two specific fiction projects that I'll be self-publishing later in the year.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No. There have been times when I haven't been confident about what I was writing; times when I've had no clue about how to continue something; certainly there've been days when I haven't felt like writing and even a few days when I've felt like I'd already written my last thing, ever.

These are all tangible problems with workable solutions. I can deal with tangible problems. If I were to believe in "Writer's Block" I'd be taking a fear that I haven't explored and I'd be amplifying its paralytic power by giving it a name.

No, no, no. You don't have "Writer's Block." You're bored with what you're writing right now. So write something else! You think what you're writing stinks. You're probably right; well, keep working and make it better! You don't know how to continue? This means that you've encountered a problem and the problem won't just resolve itself so you should just keep hammering at it. 

You don't feel like writing? Don't beat yourself up. Read something. Or admit to yourself that there's more to your life than just writing. Take the day off. It'll be fine.

And if you ever find yourself moaning that you feel like you'll never write again...oh, please. Stop being a baby and write something, already.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Build your whole workflow around the "vomit draft." When you create a blank document, empty your mind of any expectations or aspirations. Just start typing. Never edit anything. Just get it all out of you and into the document. Type, type, type until you get to the end. The results will be horrible, but the hardest work is done: you'll have taken a nebulous idea out of your head and created something that really exists. Then you fix, fix, fix.

I learned this lesson stupid-late. I became paralyzed when writing fiction. Finally, I used a gimmick: I ditched my word processor and wrote the first draft in longhand. When you're writing with a pen, there's no reverse gear: you have no choice but to forge ahead and fix later. And thus, the novella that I'd been starting and stopping for months spilled out in just a few weeks.

The first draft of anything is going to be horrible. That's okay. Writing is a linear process by which you keep taking pass after pass after pass over the material until you find that miraculously the thing you're reading is somewhere inside the ballpark of what you hoped it'd be.

So don't get hung up on that first draft. Get right to work. You have to finish, or else it doesn't count. If you keep waiting for The Perfect Idea or continually restart the first eight pages of something, you'll never ever finish it. Puke it all out and then work from there. You can always lie to your editor about how effortless the writing process is for you. But only if you're handing in a finished piece.

Second advice: write outlines for anything longer than a few thousand words. If you proceed without a plan, it'll show in the final work...and you'll be making much, much more work for yourself later on.  

Besides, outlines are a wonderful scam. All you need to do is write your story in the form of a paragraph. Then you develop that one idea into a page of ideas, then several pages, expanding and shuffling and trimming as you go. Within a few weeks, you'll have the whole thing mapped out as a series of easily-manageable scenes and you can't wait to get going. And it all started with a few sentences that you tapped up as a note on your iPhone.

Third advice: Progress is your most important product. "Some days, you're just trying to keep moving the cursor to the right." The screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie said that in a podcast interview and it's stuck with me ever since. If all you managed to do today was sit down at the keyboard and push the cursor to the right...you did OK. Writing is a muscle that responds to exercise and atrophies in its absence.

Bio: I've been writing about technology professionally for 20 years, and writing fiction for fun for longer than that.

Dan Jenkins

How did you become a writer?

You can blame the movies. As a kid, all I wanted to be was a wise-cracking newspaper guy. Clark Gable in It Happened One Night or Cary Grant (or even Rosalind Russell) in His Girl Friday, the classic remake of The Front Page. My folks gave me a typewriter when I was 10 or 11 and I used to copy stories out of the local paper and play-like I wrote them. Then one day I started to RE-WRITE them. Then I knew I had the disease, no doctor could cut it out, and I would WRITE. Something. Somewhere.

Name your writing influences.

The humorists first. S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker. Then John Lardner, the greatest sportswriter who ever touched a keyboard, although he was actually an essayist. Ring's son. I live by some things people said. I was accidentally thinking it before Elmore said "If it sounds like writing, I re-write it." I was agreeing with Dottie Parker before she said, "Wit has truth in it. Jokes are simply calisthenics with words." And an old New York driniking pal, Freddy Finkelhoffe (wrote Brother Rat, the play and movie), once told me, "There's only one rule in fiction. Get 'em up a tree, throw rocks at 'em, get 'em down again."

Today I read strictly for pleasure, and that means the good story-tellers and crime and terrorist busters—Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Vince Flynn, John Sandford, Grisham, Margolin. That crowd. But I've never had more fun that reading Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War and Remembrance back to back. It gives War and Peace 2-up a side. And the early Le Carré was great. I've studied him and I still don't know how he leads me in and out of flashbacks without me realizing it and without interrupting the narrative. I guess you call it talent. No teacher in college ever taught me shit about writing.

When and where do you write?

At home. In my office at home. This was also true while I wrote in newspaper and magazine offices.

What are working on now?

I'm calling it a "journalism memoir," and it's a pain in the ass, although fun. Fiction, you don't have to ask anybody anything. Just let your fingers outdistance your brain, or maybe it's the other way around. But non-fiction? Christ, you have try to be accurate, and that takes time.

Have you ever suffered writers block?

No. Too busy earning a living. Always on deadline. Learned it on newspapers. As a wise old man once said, "The first obligation of a daily paper is to come out every day."

What's your advice to new writers?

If they think that's what they want to be, do it, don't just fucking talk about it. Get a job on a paper, if any still exist. Read the Great Books. Read "successful" authors and find out what you don't like. Personally, I like the old Barnes & Noble first 3 pages test. Something better happen or I toss the dude. If you prefer brooding, introspective writing, better see another guy.

Dan Jenkins was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attended Texas Christian University (TCU) and played on the varsity golf team. Jenkins has written for various publications including the Fort Worth Press, Dallas Times Herald, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated. In 1972, Jenkins wrote his first novel, Semi-Tough. In 1985 he began writing books full-time, though he maintains a monthly column in Golf Digest magazine. His new book is Jenkins at the Majors. Jenkins was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in the Lifetime Achievement Category and will be inducted in May 2012. 

Al Martinez

How did you become a writer?

I didn’t actually become a writer; I always was one. At whatever age in childhood one learns to use words I began writing story-letters to a favorite uncle, incorporating whatever I heard on the radio, like the Lone Ranger, injecting myself into the plots of their stories. I did this and drew pictures to illustrate the stories for as long as I can remember. In junior high school, teachers began noticing that I could write, especially one named Calla Monlux.  It was during the depression. There wasn’t enough to eat, my father had taken off, an angry, hostile step-father ruled over a dysfunctional family. A laborer kicked out of the Navy for fighting, he couldn’t find work. There was never money in the house, we moved it seemed whenever the rent came due, we sat in houses without food, lights or heat. Literally, there were times when there was not food in the house to take for lunch at school. It was a terrible time.

Name your writing influences.

Calla Monlux was about 5 feet tall, short hair, long dresses; a classic old maid at the time. I remember her expression was a slight, secret smile, as though she knew something the rest of us didn’t know. Anyhow, I stuttered badly back then and when forced to stand in front of class as an assignment to tell what we had done during the summer, I stammered uncontrollably and was humiliated by the laughter of the class seeing me trying to talk. I swore I would never get up there again. When it became clear to Monlux that I meant it, she assigned me to write three “themes” we called them then; short essays. This was near the start of WW2. I remember lying on a hillside near our East Oakland home one evening when there was a blackout. Sirens sounded and the lights of the city blinked off one by one, which made the stars seem brighter. I wrote about it: man may turn out the lights of the city but God controls the lights of the stars. She was blown away not only by the idea but my words. She saw the writer in me and kept me after school, had me close my eyes and read me Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils.” She kept insisting that I see in my “mind’s eye” what he had written about; golden fields of yellow flowers, gleaming in the sun, swaying in a warm wind. This went on for weeks and then one day I experienced a kind of epiphany. I could not only see the golden flowers but could feel the warmth of the sun and the gentle touch of the summer wind. When I told her this she replied, “You have learned what every writer must learn: how to visualize, how to recreate in words what you see and what you feel.” It was a kind of go forth and write. And I have ever since.  Word seemed to spread among the teachers in junior high and high school and they paid me special attention. I discovered books and fell in love with the rhythms and cadences of Edgar Allen Poe. I found Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote and Shakespeare and so many, many others. I bought “Elements of Style” and experimented with writing, i.e., short fiction and poetry. During the war, the man who was to become my brother in law was drafted and I accompanied my sister Emily at 4 in the morning to see him off at a train station. A hundred or so draftees were there and so were newspaper reporters and photographers, stirring a mood of excitement and destiny. I think at that point I wanted to be what they were: a journalist.

When and where do you write?

I write at home after many years of writing in newspaper offices. I began with a small Bay Area newspaper, the Richmond Independent, and moved on after three years when I won a SF Press Club award; I stayed at the Oakland Tribune for 16 years, 10 of them as a columnist, and was summoned south to the L.A. Times by Otis Chandler in a golden era. I stayed there for 38 years, 25 as a columnist, writing both in the office and in my home office in Topanga.  I write anytime: early morning, mid afternoon, late at night, depending on what I’m working on and what deadlines I’m facing.

What are you working on now?

I’ve begun several writing projects and have settled on my memoirs, covering my life from depression to recession, while observing a slow decline in print journalism for the length of my 60-year career. I lived through an era of front page journalism in the 1950s to modern, electronic journalism in the 2000s, observing pathetic efforts by newspaper owners and editors trying to figure out in which direction they ought to be going. Confusion reigns on the print journalism scene with embarrassing projects like “the Huffington Post” making it, and the NY Times, LA Times and other great newspapers in the country slowly sliding into oblivion. I’m not with them anymore, so the cluttered little home office I had created, a womb of comfort and creation, is my writing den now.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve had moments of writer’s block, I guess, but I have so many projects going at the same time that when I can’t seem to push on through a blockage in one, I go to another and then return to the first one later. I’m never without the facility to write. Writing defines me, my life and my physiology. I am a writer. Period. It’s the only me that exists, ergo I cannot tolerate writer’s blocks.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I created the Topanga Writer’s Workshop when I left the Times about 3 years ago. I tell those who want to write to read, to observe and finally to reach down into their souls where answers lie and to bring them to the surface. I tell them about Calla Monlux and tell them to visualize. I recite a short verse she gave me from Alexander Pope: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learned to dance; Tis not enough, no harshness gives offence, the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

Bio: Born in Oakland, California, schooled there, three years of college at SF State where I worked on the paper and met my wife Joanne, who is still my wife, activated as a Marine Reservist to fight in the Korean War, finished up my education at UC Berkeley. Began newspapering at the Richmond Independent in 1952, to the Oakland Tribune in 1955, to the L.A. Times in 1972. Worked as a national feature writer for the Times, became a columnist in 1984 and left the Times in 2009. A part of three teams that won Pulitzers, and individually won many, many national awards. I have written a dozen books, hundreds of magazine stories and essays, dozens of short stories and dozens of movies, pilots and episodes for television. My papers are being collected by the Huntington Museum and will be exhibited in March, 2012.