Steven Pinker

How did you become a writer?

An editor at the university press that published my second scholarly book said, "You don't write like an academic." He meant it as a compliment.

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

In graduate school I devoured style manuals, including Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and Theodore Bernstein's The Careful Writer. My advisor, the great psycholinguist Roger Brown, was a graceful and witty writer, and I have long enjoyed the writing of other stylish psychologists such as George Miller, Herbert Simon, and of course William James. I have also enjoyed the writings of the many evolutionary biologists who mastered the art of writing, including John Maynard Smith, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins.

When and where do you write?

When I work on a book I write maniacally -- night and day, seven days a week, for blocks of time as long as my academic schedule allows. I write everywhere, including planes, trains, and automobiles, but my favorite location is the house I share with Rebecca Goldstein in Truro, Cape Cod. 

What are you working on now?

My next book will be called The Sense of Style: A Manual for the 21st Century. It will translate discoveries from linguistics and cognitive science into advice on style, clarity, and usage.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Only when I am on a tight deadline to write an op-ed for a newspaper, never when I work on a long book. As Pascal wrote, "If I had more time, I'd make it shorter."

What’s your advice to new writers?

Learn a bit of linguistics. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers by showing drafts to people who are like your readers. Write many drafts, separated by a long enough interval so that your writing will seem strange to yourself. Savor passages of writing you like and try to reverse-engineer them, figuring out how the writer made the passage so good. And after 2014, buy and read The Sense of Style: A Manual for the 21st Century.

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, which has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the American Psychological Association, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received several teaching awards and many prizes for his eight books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and has been listed among Foreign Policy magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is currently Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other publications. His most recent book is The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

Joel Stein

How did you become a writer?

First I became a fact checker, which sucked. I thought my clips from my college paper – where I wrote a humor column that is just like my column in Time is now, only far more popular – would get me a writing job. That plus my impressive internships at a small newspaper and then Newsweek. I was wrong. I was two years into fact checking with no end in sight and starting to think about law school, when Time Out NY started and my friend (who worked on the production side at Martha Stewart Living when I was fact checking there) told me that I could probably get the job as the sports editor since the two women starting the magazine didn't care about sports, or know about it, and I could fool them. They were right. In fact, it worked so well that less than a year into my next job, at Time magazine, when the sports editor quit, the editor of Time - who knew and cared nothing about sports - made me the sports writer at Time.

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

I was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye. Some of us don't become assassins. We become something nearly as bad: People who only know how to write in the first person.

When and where do you write?

It's 1 a.m., I'm in bed, my wife is asleep next to me and I'm almost out of battery life. So, anywhere. But usually at night. And this isn't writing. But you get the idea. Late. When it's quiet. Usually in my office, but sometimes in a hotel. My best writing gets done on a plane. I never buy the internet service. Ever.

What are you working on now?

I finished my first book, so I'm mostly working on begging people to read it, which is the first thing I've found that's more humiliating than writing. I got into writing specifically to avoid sales. But no one avoids sales.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No, thanks to deadlines. The few times I didn't have a deadline and a promised paycheck, I guess I had writers block. But it was really just laziness.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Never accept the first amount the editor offers to pay you without first asking for more.

Joel Stein writes a weekly column for Time magazine. His first book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, is out now, right here: http://ow.ly/aH44K

Judith Freeman

How did you become a writer?

In my late teens I took a literature class from a man named Roger Blakely at Macalester College. It was the only literature class I’ve ever taken, and in it I made my first real discovery of books (I didn’t read much as a child, nor was I read to, there were few books in the house where I grew up and reading wasn’t emphasized). At that moment, in Roger Blakely’s class, I fell so in love with fiction I realized this is what I want to do: I want to tell stories, to write books. I taught myself to write by reading and studying various authors in an attempt to learn how to put together a story. Like Chandler, I believe you learn to write by studying and emulating other authors. It took twenty years of working odd jobs and trying to write in my spare time, but I finally published by first book, a collection of stories, when I was 39 years old. 

Name your writing influences.

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles thrilled me when I first read it---that sense of landscape, those deep moral/religious questions, his well-drawn characters, the portrayal of the rural world as a kind of “character” itself. In his work I could see all the complexities of the human condition, how there were no easy answers, how novelists work the gray areas, how important it was to set a scene and draw a reader into another world. Willa Cather was important to me also, she wrote about what I felt was my landscape---the West. Ditto Stegner. William Trevor, Alice Munro, and Joy Williams are my short story masters. Muriel Spark early on, later Virgina Woolf. I admire Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s stories very much. Cormac McCarthy is someone I continue to learn from.  

When and where do you write?

I write in the mornings, for three or four hours, sitting in an Eames chair in the living room of my apartment in L.A., working with a Mont Blanc fountain pen and spiral notebooks. I wrote my first four books directly onto the computer: the last two have been written in long hand for a first draft. I like the way my brain and hand seem so directly connected when I write in longhand, how the story seems to flow forward like the ink flowing onto the paper. I feel I descend into some deeper imaginative space without the Machine. I love going to the computer later and entering what I’ve written.  I tend to write a few chapters in long hand and then enter them into the computer, then go back to moving the story forward in long hand, but I try not to change too much when I put the work into the computer. I’ve found sometimes “first is best,” and I like having that original draft to work with. I also write at a ranch my husband and I own in Idaho, in a little two-room schoolhouse that’s been converted into my study: I can write equally well in the city or the country. All I need is to be settled in my own space, and the quiet and dedicated time to focus. I don’t write in hotel rooms or on airplanes.

What are you working on now?

Some short stories. Also revising a non-fiction book on jazz and noir that came out of my interest in Raymond Chandler and L.A.

Have you ever suffered from writing block? 

No. Just a lot of uncertainty!

What’s your advice to new writers?

Understand that it takes a lot of time and dedication to write anything good. The most important thing is to just keep writing. Study and emulate writers you admire. Write what you really want to write. Don’t get too fancy with the language, be clear and true. Remember there are many subjects other than yourself you can draw on: you don’t have to write what you know, you can write what you’re passionate about. The life of Chekov can make a novel, as well as your own experience. Research can be a writer’s best friend.

Judith Freeman is the author of a collection of short stories (Family Attractions), four novels (including The Chinchilla Farm and Red Water), and one work of non-fiction, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, named one of the ten best books of 2007 by Newsweek magazine. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 1996, and for the last ten years has taught in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.