Bryan A. Garner

How did you become a writer?

By becoming a serious reader. At the age of 9, I was taking books seriously—spending a lot of time poring over taxonomical books on snakes and dinosaurs and an alphabetically arranged book on composers’ lives. By the age of 15, I had accumulated a library of 40 or so volumes, many on language and writing. At 16 I encountered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1940), a book I found impossible to put down. By 18 I had memorized most of that book and of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2d ed. 1965)—as well as of Follett’s Modern American Usage (1966). So when, at the age of 22, I started writing what would become my Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (1987)—I was a first‑year law student at the beginning—my preoccupation seemed like an entirely normal and natural activity. Meanwhile, my library grew and grew: it now stands at 34,000 volumes, a third of which are about language and writing.

Name your writing influences.

Authors: H.W. Fowler, Eric Partridge, Wilson Follett, Theodore M. Bernstein, Bertrand Russell. Teachers: Christopher Ricks, John W. Velz, Gayatri Spivak, Charles Alan Wright.

When and where do you write?

You can write anytime people will leave you alone for a few minutes—and I do. But most of my books have been written at home between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. And on airplanes.

What are you working on now?

Now that I have a few more than 20 books in print, many of them being instructional books and reference works, I find that I’m constantly working on new editions of them all. My reading is utilitarian, so everything I read is with an eye to enriching one of my own books in one way or another—even if that just means citing a misused word in Garner’s Modern American Usage. Unfortunately, I lost the ability to engage in pure pleasure reading many years ago.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

For an evening or two, yes. But never in a serious way.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Write purposefully, as if for publication—every single day. (Many will tell you just the opposite.) Constant practice is essential. And read much more during the day than you write.

Bryan A. Garner is the author of more than 20 books on legal writing and language in general. His magnum opus is the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage, published by Oxford University Press. He is best known as editor in chief of the venerable Black’s Law Dictionary, now in its ninth edition. Since 1991, he has taught more than 120,000 lawyers, judges, and paralegals in continuing-legal-education seminars throughout the U.S. and abroad. His company, LawProse, Inc. of Dallas, is the country’s largest provider of legal-writing and -drafting CLEs. The late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, writing in Harper’s, called Garner “a genius, though of a rather particular kind... . He’s both a lawyer and a lexicographer (which seems a bit like being both a narcotics dealer and a DEA agent).”

Dave Hill

How did you become a writer?

My sister, Miriam Hill, is a journalist. Way back in the late nineties, I lived at her house in Cleveland. She had just gotten the Internet and for some reason we failed to understand that you could have more than one e-mail address—we figured an e-mail address was kind of like a landline telephone where you just had one for the whole house and everyone shared it. As a result, she regularly saw my e-mails and began reading them for entertainment (It didn’t feel like snooping because I didn’t have nearly as many secrets back then as I do now). Eventually, she suggested I try freelancing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where she was working at the time. I began writing human interest pieces, reporting on neighborhood bars and stuff like that. Once I got a few articles under my belt, I began approaching other places about doing some writing and started writing pieces for Salon, the New York Times, and whatever magazines would have me. I even wrote a few pieces for XXL, a hip-hop magazine, even though I haven’t paid much attention to hip-hop since the early nineties, when I was still street.

Also—backing things up a bit—I am proud to report that I totally have my very own e-mail address now. I’ve come a long way.

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

As far as teachers go, I learned a lot from my sister, who read a lot of my early writing and really encouraged and pushed me to get it right (or at least as close to right as I was capable). Two of my high school English teachers, James Toman and Art Thomas at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, were really great too. I learned the basics of composition from them and it’s been a huge help to this day.

Whenever possible, I try to avoid thinking about other writers when I write because otherwise I’m afraid I would just quit altogether. That said, I’ve probably tried to steal from people like Calvin Trillin, Oscar Wilde, David Rakoff, Joan Didion, Gore Vidal, Woody Allen, David Sedaris, Truman Capote, and Jack Handey the most. Most of the time, though, I find reading stuff that I enjoy pushes me to try to be myself as much as I can. For example, someone like David Rakoff, who was a close friend, was such a linguistic acrobat and so unique in his perspective that I knew I could never approach the kind of stuff he did. I’m a bit of a knucklehead in comparison, so I instead of fighting that I try to just embrace it and be the best Dave I can be, profanity-laced tirades and all.

As for books, I enjoy writing essays and shorter form pieces (at least so far, anyway) the most so those sorts of books, especially by the people mentioned above, probably influenced me the most. I tend to like writing that feels like conversation. Once something veers into elaborate descriptions of clouds and things, stuff no one would ever say out loud, I tend to lose interest.

When and where do you write?

I write at home usually, though occasionally I’ll go sit in a coffee shop if it’s not too loud or crowded, just to mix things up a bit. I prefer quiet and isolation, though. If Coldplay or some other music I don’t like comes on at the coffee shop, my concentration is completely shattered and I just spend the whole time thinking about giving the finger to whomever I perceive to be in charge of the iPod. I write in the late morning the most but pretty much any time before about 7pm is fair game. After that, my head gets too blurry.

I used to lock myself in my apartment all day and try to get as much writing done as possible only to find most of the time was spent checking e-mail, screwing around on the Internet, playing the guitar, or fighting the urge to go back to sleep. Then one day I asked (Warning: namedropping alert) Malcolm Gladwell, who is a friend and lives in the neighborhood, how much time he spends writing each day. I would see him writing in coffee shops and restaurants all the time so I just assumed he wrote twelve hours a day or something. But then he told me he writes just two hours a day because it forces him to really focus and make the most of that two hours. Hearing that was a relief and let me off the hook a bit. I started doing that pretty strictly—two hours of writing with no Internet, no phone, no guitar, no anything- and found that I got a lot more done in those two focused hours than when I would sit there all day mostly just pretending to write. I started to feel like I was achieving something each day that way too—like if I got my two hours in I had done my job for the day and didn’t need to feel so guilty and worthless. It made me stress out less, which, of course, also helped me write more and better. If I’m feeling good, sometimes I’ll go longer than two hours, but I try to stick to just two as it seems to really work for me.

Getting back to the namedropping, Malcolm also told me about another writer whose name I can’t remember who writes exactly 1500 words a day. As a result, he usually found himself finishing in mid-sentence each day. This might sound a bit stressful, but the reality (for him anyway) is that he can just pick up where he left off the day before, kind of like stopping a ball in mid-air and then just taking a swing at it right where you left it the next day.

What are you working on now?

There has been some interest from the show business types in developing my book, Tasteful Nudes, into a television show, so I’ve been noodling with that a bit. We’ll see. I’m also finishing a screenplay that’d been gathering virtual dust, and trying to get in the swing of writing some new essays. Also, my book comes out in the UK in October, so I’m gearing up to go over there and tour/beg everyone to buy it. I’m excited because the cover for the UK version will be a bit different, something special for just over there. Also, I had to add the letter “u” to some words. It feels exotic. I’m hoping my book comes out in Germany some day. That way I can get crazy with the umlauts, which would be great for me.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not too much. I might have a bad day or two here and there, but nothing too crippling. About nine years ago, I got into the practice of filling at least a page in Word each morning as a sort of exercise to just get me writing. I’ll write about anything—what I had for breakfast, something I watched on TV the night before, those damn cops, or whatever else comes to mind. I found once I got into the habit of doing that, it took away the stress and anxiety of writing since I didn’t worry about what I was writing—it was the act of writing itself that mattered. And I often find that just sitting down to write whatever comes to mind can lead to new ideas that I am excited to explore a bit further.

What’s your advice to new writers?

I’m guessing this is what everyone says, but I think writing every day—or at least close to every day—is a great thing to do. It keeps you in good writing shape and lessens the stress of staring at a blank page. And, of course, reading a lot is good too. It keeps your brain working and reminds you of some of the other words out there that you might not have in your arsenal yet, like dystopian, for example. I’ve yet to use that one, but dammit I can feel it coming on strong. It could be any day now, really.

Other than that, I think it’s important to just be yourself, “find your voice,” and just say what you want to say. It’s easy early on to get caught up in just imitating other things you’ve read, but the more you write, the more quickly you can get away from that. It’s kind of like drawing—if you want to draw your hand, for example, it’s easy to make the mistake of just drawing what you think a hand is supposed to look like instead of drawing what’s really in front of you. Over time, you learn to draw what you are really seeing—your hand instead of a hand.

And about the whole “finding your voice” thing—the truth, I find, is that your voice is staring right at you. It can just take a while sometimes to clear out all the weeds and all that so you can finally make use of what’s been there all along. You just gotta keep at it, as they say, and get in touch with your inner weed whacker. Or something like that anyway.

Dave Hill is a comedian, writer, and musician. His first book, Tasteful Nudes, was published by St. Martin’s Press on May 22, 2012. Dave has written for The New York Times, Salon, and The Huffington Post among others and is a regular contributor to public radio’s This American Life. He has also appeared on Comedy Central, BBC America, MTV and is a regular host on HBO and Cinemax. Dave has his own variety show, The Dave Hill Explosion, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres in NY and Los Angeles, and London. Dave plays in several rock bands and is so good at the guitar that most people can’t even handle it. He also smells really nice. Ask anyone.

Sonia Taitz

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer right about the time when my childhood ended. I was about to turn thirteen. My father was European, the old fashioned type of father, the suit and tie type, to whom no back-talk was even remotely acceptable. My brother and I would jump up to greet him formally at the door when he came home from work. My father’s days were hard. He had come over to America the worst way – as a survivor of the Holocaust death camps, arriving here with no English, no money, and no family. He needed all his strength to build a new life, and his home was to be his sanctuary. Beseeching, opinionated American children did not fit into this picture. If we had something interesting to share, fine. Something we had learned in school, a grade to make him proud. But we were never to presume to question him as equals.

The day came when I really needed to open up and challenge my father. I was a now a teenager, with a teenager’s necessary hubris. Despite my new status (as I alone saw it), my father remained strict, almost autocratic. So I broached the subject of his treating me more like an adult. Like a peer. He demanded respect (his tragic life had denied him this over and again); I wanted some too. But even as I began to open the subject, my father’s face reddened and his eyes flared. I saw that he was on the brink of losing his temper. His anger was dangerous on all scores: He would explode in volcanic rages that I feared would kill him, or give my brother and me long silent treatments that made us feel annihilated.

I took the middle ground between my own rage and silence. I began to write. I wrote my feelings out, my dreamed-of conversations, my arguments logical and my arguments whimsical. “I’m a person,” I wrote, “and I’ll say what I think from now on.”

And from that time, I have said – and written – what I thought.

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

My first influence was a high school English teacher, Mrs. Edith Schrank. Her motto was, “fall in love with words.” She trilled the imperative so passionately, I remember, that her curls shook. Some of the kids made fun of her – a middle-aged woman in a kind of artistic ecstasy -- and mocked her catchphrase. But Mrs. Schrank opened a door inside of me. Increasingly, I saw language as the most essential human gift – allowing us to connect not only to each other but through time.

Since my parents were immigrants to whom English was not a first language (I think it was their fifth), I’d always seen the relativity of words. By the time I was five, I spoke European Yiddish, the American English I heard on TV, and Hebrew, which I started to learn at my Jewish Day School. It was a great blend, and knowing that each idea could be said in at least three ways was fun and inspiring.

Years later, in college, I read verbally acrobatic authors like Joyce and Nabokov. My sense of possibilities grew exponentially. Both were exiles with agile, connective minds; both were geniuses who inspired me with their linguistic play and versatility.   

When and where do you write?

Unlike those worthies who write by the light of the rising sun, I rarely start before mid-morning, and I write, even then, in bursts. Sometimes, I write late into the night, and others, I peter out and feel utterly stranded. It’s wonderful to write something with scope -- a novel or play – something to which I can return. It gives my days a continuity of purpose. Before a project ends, too, I try to think of a new one, so that I can get started soon after. Otherwise, there is a sense of bereavement along with the joy of completion.

As for location, I need a quiet place, a corner in which I can be completely alone. I need solitude and silence, no music, no background hum. Having that, I can write facing the wall or facing the window, on a wooden desk or a bland piece of formica. I used to write longhand, but now compose on a keyboard, which seems versatile, quick, and forgiving. A pen and notebook come outside with me, and I jot ideas on them. Sometimes, I’ll draft out chapters on index cards. But the computer is my closest creative ally, and I like to disappear into it. That’s my room with a view.

What are you working on now?

I am currently revising my next novel, which tells the imagined story of an anti-Semitic movie star, suggesting how he got that way. Was he besotted, long ago, by an unattainable Jewish woman, and does he still want her? The working title is DOWN UNDER, alluding to the secrets of the heart as well as to this celebrity’s Australian background.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t get “writer’s block” as much as I get “broken heart.”  When manuscripts are rejected, or books reviewed harshly, I want to retreat into a corner of a soft bed, my head barely visible among the pillows and the aptly named comforter over the rest of me. Even critical success has emotional battery in it – the wistful way writers peek to see if their book is on the shelf, or on its way to disappearing. Come to think of it, the shelves and stores themselves are disappearing! But powerful words never really disappear. The fact that writers put them together in the first place is the true and enduring miracle.

What’s your advice to new writers?

My advice to new writers is to read, both fiction and nonfiction – in as many different styles as they can find. They should also take the time to observe, think about, and respond to the world around them. Do they have something urgent to say about it? Is their command of language such that they can say it? Once all that is in place, pour it out on the page without regard to any result. Edit ruthlessly when that is done. Put it away. And if you can stand to read yourself after a break of a few weeks, share it with someone kind whose taste you admire. Only listen to those who understand your voice and what you are attempting to say or do.

Remember that no one can take writing away from you. You don’t need permission.  When you’re ready to write, consider that impulse to be permission granted. And there is no time limit. Great books have been written by elders. Writing gains by practice, and experience often buffs and shines our words and lives into wisdom.

Be patient and modest. You’re lucky if, in a lifetime, 1,000 people love your words. Each reader is an invaluable friend – someone who has taken the time to see your vision, to hear your voice. There is no higher compliment. If you can touch someone else — if your creative impulse transmits through your words — you know you have come to deserve the title of writer.

Sonia Taitz is a playwright, essayist, and author of MOTHERING HEIGHTS, IN THE KING’S ARMS (nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize), and THE WATCHMAKER’S DAUGHTER (nominated for an ALA Medal).  Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and The New York Observer, and she has been quoted by PBS, O: The Oprah Magazine, and ABC’s Nightline. Her books have earned praise from The New York Times Book Review, People, ForeWord, The Jewish Book World, and Kirkus.

Her website is www.soniataitz.com; follow on Twitter @soniataitz.