Chuck Wendig

How did you become a writer?

That's always a strange question, because I feel like the answer should be, "I was bathed in gamma radiation," or, "I was bitten by a radioactive Harlan Ellison." Really the answer is fairly straightforward: I wanted to become a writer, and so I worked to become one.

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

I read a lot as a child: Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis. I read a lot as a teenager: Robert McCammon, Christopher Moore. I read a lot in college: Joe Lansdale, James Joyce, Robin Hobb. I had a great professor in college, too -- Mike Kobre. Plus the standard gamut of great writing books by the likes of Lawrence Block and Stephen King.

Oh! And life. Life is the biggest writing influence of them all.

When and where do you write?

Anywhere and anywhere I have to, really, but the more common answer day to day is, I get up at 6AM and write until I'm done for the day (which is a swiftly moving target, this word "done"). I write in my office, which overlooks a forest so thick I can see nothing but that forest.

What are you working on now?

Writing BAIT DOG. Outlining the next Miriam Black book and also BEYOND DINOCALYPSE.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Mmmnope.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Finish what you started. You can't move forward until you finish something. Though, to be clear, I dispense a great heaping helping of dubious writing wisdom over at my blog, terribleminds.com, which is strongly writer-focused.

Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He's the author of DOUBLE DEAD, BLACKBIRDS, and DINOCALYPSE NOW, and is co-writer of the short film PANDEMIC, the film HiM, and the Emmy-nominated digital narrative COLLAPSUS. He lives in Pennsylvania with wife, taco terrier, and tiny human.

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