Caryl Avery

How did you become a writer?

I became a writer by default. De fault was my mother’s. Well, partly.

I always loved writing, even as a kid. I started writing parodies and light verse (which I’m pretty sure back then I called “funny poems”) when I was around 10, and stopped when I was 11 or 12. Because whenever I wrote something that my mother found amusing, she would say, “Ca, go get your poem and read it to Mrs. Pianin,” the neighbor four houses down. I’d be mortified, but the more I protested, the more she insisted. Out of self-protection, I hung up my yellow No. 2 pencil.

Although writing always came naturally to me, I never contemplated it as a career until I had to: After throwing in the towel on art history (too low paying) and on practicing psychotherapy (too depressing), I realized I needed a job that would be “just right.” When I asked myself what I could do, the only thing I could think of was write.

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

Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, e. e. cummings, Don Marquis, W. S. Gilbert, Tom Lehrer, Franklin P. Adams, E. B. White, Edward Lear, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, Noel Coward, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Anonymous.

While flirting with the idea of becoming a writer, I had the good fortune to discover On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which in 1976 had just been published. I was so stunned that a book on writing could be so engaging that I instantly knew that was the career for me. With each expanded edition, I seized the occasion to reread it beginning to end, and each time it was like running into an old love. If you haven’t read it, you’re in for a treat. You might want to follow it with The Writer Who Stayed, a compilation of Zinsser’s weekly essays published on the website of The American Scholar. (“Zinsser on Friday” won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Digital Commentary. He was 87.)

In addition to William Zinsser (with whom I had the pleasure of spending an hour last fall), four other teachers—who couldn’t have been more different—helped make me the writer I am: Miss Dillback, my seventh grade English teacher at Valley Stream South High School, who was scary strict but who hammered grammar into my head so I’d never forget it. Sandra Berwind, Professor Emeritus of English at Bryn Mawr College, who as my Freshman Comp instructor introduced the concept of critical thinking. (She was the toughest and most generous teacher I ever had.) My former boss and medical editor at the Globe (yup, the supermarket tabloid—we all start somewhere), who did the same for not thinking when you have to research and write two medical stories a day. (He: “Caryl, what are you doing?” Me: “I’m thinking.” He: “In this business, you don’t think; you write.”) And the late, great Phyllis Starr Wilson, founder of Self Magazine, who taught me as an editor and writer how to let go of articles: (“Remember, 90 percent of people read this stuff sitting on the toilet.”)

When and where do you write?

I write mostly in my head, often on the bus. Then when I get to my office, I transcribe these noodlings—quick, before they disappear. If ideas or turns of phrase pop into my mind as I’m trying to fall asleep, I force myself to get out of bed to write them down (usually as notes on my iPhone). Otherwise, forget sleeping.

What are you working on now?

I’m adding some finishing touches to Eggs Benedict Arnold, a book of culinary light verse, and putting together a team of investors and producers for CUTS: An Uplifting Musical, an irreverent parody revue that skewers plastic surgery and our national obsession with looking young and beautiful. A developmental production recently played to sold-out houses at The York Theatre in New York. For a sneak peek at four songs from the show’s initial presentation, visit www.carylavery.com, click on CUTS, then Preview. Or Google “Joan Rivers from CUTS” to see international singing sensation Christina Bianco’s version of the song.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I’ve experienced it, sure, but it hasn’t made me suffer. Writer’s block is a writer’s best friend; it tells you you don’t know where you’re going. (“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) Once you figure that out, you’re home free. Writer’s block simply saves you the trouble of writing until you do.

What’s your advice to new writers?

1. Write with your ear.

2. Run your work by a few people you trust who are smarter than you.

3. Pay attention to criticisms, but not to proposed solutions.

4. Remember that the urge to edit other people’s copy is greater than the urge to procreate. Your work is your baby. Don’t sell it down the river.

5. Make sure that everything you write has one elegant sentence.

6. Evolve. Try new forms.

7. Don’t write near a refrigerator.

Caryl Avery (www.carylavery.com) has been an award-winning journalist, magazine editor, advertising copywriter, poet, and creative writer for over 30 years. In addition to an eight-year stint as senior editor/psychology director at Self Magazine, she has written extensively for more than 20 consumer magazines, including Self, Glamour, Vogue, Ladies Home Journal, New York Magazine, American Health, Psychology Today, and Reader’s Digest, as well as for such websites as Women’s Voices for Change.  In recent years she has put her experience as psychologist, writer, and editor to work as a creative marketer/advertising copywriter in the cosmetic industry. After a decade as Executive Editor at Clinique, where she wrote national advertising for more than 75 countries, she set up shop in New York where she provides marketing direction, branding, advertising and website copy to a variety of consumer product companies and ad agencies.

In addition, she has returned to two old loves—light verse and lyric writing. Her poems have been featured in Light Quarterly, Alimentum, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, The Classical Outlook, womensvoicesforchange.org, and anthologized in More Women’s Wicked Wit. Plus, she is nearing completion of Eggs Benedict Arnold, a book of culinary light verse. Her parody revue CUTS: An Uplifting Musical about plastic surgery and everything else we do to look young and beautiful has had a successful developmental run in New York and is gearing up for a commercial production.

Amy Klein

How did you become a writer?

I was an avid reader as a kid, always sneaking books under my desk in school. For my 12th birthday, I got a subscription to "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine," and loved the tight short stories. (While my friends were reading "Seventeen.")

But I didn't know one could "be" a writer -- it wasn't a profession ever discussed in my conservative community (Doctor, lawyer, accountant, were). In high school, I wrote a lot of humorous essays, and was the humor editor of my yearbook. I started journaling in college, where my English professor was a "real" writer. I became an English major with a creative writing concentration. But I was not familiar with memoir and personal essays, so I kept trying to write fiction that was really thinly-veiled memoir. At age 25 I took a job with a newspaper, and have been a journalist ever since, although my favorite form is the personal essay. 

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

I think books were my biggest influences in life. As a kid I devoured every series from Nancy Drew to The Three Investigators to Lois Duncan's science fiction, then embarassingly, Sweet Dreams, before moving on to Ludlum and Follett. I was always enamored of humor writing, like Mad Magazine, Mark Leyner and Dave Barry.

I only discovered memoir writing later in life -- even though that's what I am. I did an MFA at Antioch University and fell in love with non-traditional memoirs and essay collections like Girl Walks Into a Bar, Safekeeping, Lying, Seasons of the Body, The Bill From My Father, and later, I Was Told There'd Be Cake and of course, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed.

There is one book I wish I'd written: The Big Love by Sarah Dunn, a seemingly light love story that really gets into the mind of someone raised religious.

When and where do you write?

I write every weekday, although I'm not very disciplined on my own stuff but I usuallly have a deadline for someone, as I make my living as a freelance writer. I really love to work at cafes around the city. There's something about the bustle around me I find stimulating. I seem to be the only writer in the world without a Mac, so maybe I'm undercover? I like to meet up with writer friends and work together but separately. I still hope to find that "magic schedule" that writers like Stephen King talk about -- with his 2000-a--word day minimum, but I'm much more willy nilly.

What are you working on now?

Right now I am hoping to turn my Fertility Diary column at the Times into a memoir, although I'm waiting for my happy baby ending. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I suffer a unique form of writer's block: working on too many things at once. When I get nervous about something I'm writing, I just start something else, or pitch another article somewhere else. As a journalist, it really works in my favor, because I can publish a lot of different pieces on a lot of different subjects. But it's not so helpful for longform, which requires more discipline. 

When I do get real writer's block -- i.e., I'm sitting in front of the computer and don't know where to go with the piece, I think it means I've gone off in the wrong direction. As I humorously wrote in my Draft piece about "Kill Your Darlings," your darlings might just be that amazing lede in an article or a great scene that's just sending to a dead end. That kind of writer's block usually works itself out if you take a step back and ask what's really wrong. If you backtrack, you'll figure it out.

What’s your advice to new writers?

As a journalist, I would tell you to pick a field you love and focus on it -- I wrote about religion for many years but then I realized I didn't care about it so much anymore, so I started writing about health, arts and culture.

If you are writing memoir or essay, I would really advise people to write in journals. There is something about taking great notes on your life that later on helps provide the details for a great story. 

Inasmuch that I was kidding about writer's workshops in my New York Times piece (and not everyone got that I was joking), I've been in workshops for the last decade and find them invaluable. It helps to hear your work read aloud, it helps to have critiques, and it helps to keep rewriting. One of my MFA teachers said, "Novels are not written, they're rewritten."

Bio: I've been a journalist and essayist for the last 20 years, and today mostly write about health, arts & culture and travel. I write the "Fertility Diary" column for The New York Times Motherlode blog. My work has been published in Slate, Salon, NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers and other places.

My Website: www.KleinsLines.com. Follow: @amydklein.

Ted Trautman

How did you become a writer?

It’s easy to look backward today and point to all the childhood traits and habits that steered me toward writing, but that arc wasn’t visible to me until I was about 25. I’ve always loved reading, especially if it was under the covers with a flashlight after my bedtime, or behind a stack of boxes in the warehouse of the patio furniture store where I worked in high school. When it came time to head off to college, though, it was very hard for me to let go of science and particularly math. My dad, who has a very utilitarian view of education, encouraged me to study patent law. But my mom’s more romantic take on academia, which emphasized the reading of paperbacks in the shade and the irresistible sex appeal of beret-wearing philosophers, seemed truer to me at the time. I ended up majoring in English and philosophy.

In the philosophy department, I gravitated toward the subject of ethics in the context of international economic development. By the time I graduated, a career in literary writing was the farthest thing from my mind. It seemed to me that all the world’s endeavors -- art, science, entertainment, etc. -- were petty personal projects so long as a single person suffered from extreme poverty or a preventable disease, which is why after college I shipped out to Kyrgyzstan for a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. If they’d sent me to a warmer country, or at least a nicer one, I might be digging wells or distributing mosquito nets this very minute. But I was lonely in my village and insufficiently prepared for my job. When I was robbed twice in one day -- first by a Bishkek teenager, then by the police I’d turned to for help -- I decided it was time to reconsider my career path.

I had more free time in Kyrgyzstan than I’ve ever had before or since, and I spent that time reading and writing. It didn’t occur to me in those days to try and publish anything, which I now regret, but I assiduously documented every detail of my life in lengthy emails I sent to just about everyone I’d ever met. And when the power went out, as it did most nights, at the hour of some corrupt hydroelectric dam manager’s choosing, I closed my laptop and read by candlelight. On top of the books I was reading -- nearly two a week, on average -- I borrowed stacks of old New Yorkers and Harper’s from a local university’s English department, and in that way fell in love with long-form journalism. I spent my last month in Kyrgyzstan frenetically working on an application to intern at Harper’s, which is where I ended up after Peace Corps.

A lot of former Harper’s interns head straight into the world of freelance writing, and a lot of them have thrived. By the time my internship ended, however, I’d become a pretty solid fact-checker but had absolutely no idea how to go about pitching or writing a story myself. After pouring coffee for a few months at a Starbucks in Harlem, I headed out to California to pursue a master’s in journalism at UC Berkeley. I was frequently distracted by all the twenty-first century bells whistles in the school’s curriculum -- web design, video editing, etc. -- but I did end up learning a few things about writing and, just as crucially, I came out of the program having met a few friendly editors willing to read my pitches. I’d call this a happy ending, but it’s really just the beginning. The end will come when I pay off my massive student debt.

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

I have a deep love of science fiction, and I tip my hat to any writer who breaks down the barrier between supposedly superior “literary fiction” and conversely inferior “genre fiction.” Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, and Joss Whedon are champions in this arena.

Other favorite writers include Bill Cotter (especially in Fever Chart), for his insane-yet-rational characters; Tom Bissell and Robert Ashley for treating video games like the art form they are; Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) for steering a pretentious philosophy major back to the real world; Jon Mooallem (Wild Ones) for seeing the sublime in the goofy and the goofy in the sublime; and Randall Munroe (of the comic strip xkcd) for his infinite curiosity and perfect sense of humor. “99% Invisible” host Roman Mars has so far stuck to radio, but if he ever writes a book I’ll buy every copy and read each one separately.

My first significant lesson in writing came in the fourth grade, from a woman whose name I can’t remember -- I’ll explain my debt to her below, under the question about writer’s block. As an adult, though, my first lessons came from Wittenberg University’s English Department, particularly from D’Arcy Fallon and Kent Dixon. At Berkeley, I benefited infinitely from the attention of Cynthia Gorney and Kara Platoni, as well as that of Eric Simons, Jennifer Kahn, Edwin Dobb, and Michael Pollan.

When and where do you write?

I write almost exclusively at the dining room table in my apartment, mostly because I work best in silence, but also because the snacks in my refrigerator are cheaper than the ones at the café and I can go the bathroom without worrying that a stranger will steal my offensively expensive computer. Also I’ve been suffering from some unexplained lower back pain for the better (or rather, obviously the worse) part of the past year, which requires me to rotate between sitting and standing positions while I work. There are not a lot of public venues where this is feasible. The main downside to working at home is that it’s surprisingly easy to go several days without leaving the apartment, provided the kitchen is well provisioned. The Boy Scout in me believes a day spent inside is a day wasted, which is an unfortunate view to hold when your job(s) mostly requires sitting in front of a computer.

As for when I write: I work full-time as a contributing editor at Circa, which is a “mobile-first” news organization (a little bit more on this below). That job involves a lot of writing, and in my case a fair amount of copy editing, but it’s a collaborative publication without bylines. The freelance writing that bears my name I usually work on in the evenings and on the weekends. Although it’s an unhealthy habit, it’s not uncommon for me to work straight through the night, which is not wholly unrelated to my relationship with writer’s block, which I address below.

What are you working on now?

As I mentioned, I’m a contributing editor at Circa, which takes up the lion’s share of my time. A Silicon Valley startup is the last place I would have imagined myself when I first entered journalism school, but it’s been very interesting to approach and, if we are successful, “reimagine” journalism through the eyes of several bright tech entrepreneurs.

As time allows, I also contribute periodically to the New Yorker’s Currency blog, and here and there to other magazines and websites. Lately I’ve been particularly interested in the business and culture of video games. I’m also working on a short radio piece about the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships for The Organist, which is a show produced jointly by McSweeney’s and KCRW in Los Angeles.

Oh, and I’m just starting to look into writing a book. All I should probably say at the moment is that it will be a journalistic, non-fiction book best shelved in the business section, stemming from several pieces I’ve done for the New Yorker.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I sometimes find it very difficult to start a piece -- once I have a little momentum it’s easy to keep going, but I like to write my intros first and it’s hard for me to move on until their tone is just right. When I’m particularly desperate, though, I do have a strategy for pushing through that I picked up from the nameless teacher I mentioned above. In the fourth grade I participated in a contest called “Written and Illustrated By…”, which is pretty much what it sounds like -- a bunch of kids writing and illustrating (and binding) their own books. The woman coaching us through the process, who in fact was probably not a teacher but an outside volunteer, suggested by way of analogy that the best way to start a painting, to overcome the intimidating perfection of the spotless canvas and its infinite potential, was to swipe the brush at random across the surface -- to “destroy the power of the white.” In addition to being an excellent slogan for the Black Power movement, this proved to be excellent advice in its creative sense, at least for me. The strategy may be obvious to writers with cooler heads than mine, but if I truly can’t think of anything worth writing, I just tap out a string of random words -- usually curse words. Occasionally I forget to delete them.

What’s your advice to new writers?

It’s always worth reiterating that you don’t need to publish to write, the implication being that there is literally nothing stopping anyone from becoming a writer. But that notion comes with an obvious caveat: it’s no fun to write if no one reads your stuff. At least that’s how it is for me -- in the Peace Corps my audience was my family and friends. I’m not exactly sure who reads the things I write these days -- my mom and my girlfriend, at least, and presumably also the folks enumerating my work’s failings on Twitter, although you never really know.

But anyway, if my point is that writing is a lot more satisfying when there’s somebody waiting around to read it when it’s done, then the good news is that there are more places to publish, and more literate humans reading these publications, than ever in the history of humanity. The bad news is that most of them pay little or nothing. So hold on to your day job unless you have some outstanding reason not to, but don’t interpret a lack of lucrative work as a lack of creative achievement.

Unfortunately I’m also obliged to say that if your goal is to publish in “prestigious” publications, set aside some time for that dreaded but necessary pastime: networking. It’s not as cynical as it sounds -- there’s a vast pool of writers competing for limited space in our favorite magazines and bookstores, and editors are disinclined to sit around waiting for the writers they haven’t heard of to prove themselves when there’s plenty of great work flowing from the pens of the ones they have. One published piece of writing can lead to another, just as one friendly cup of coffee can lead to another. The writing is, of course, the most important thing, but it never hurts to tell someone what you’re working on.

Ted Trautman has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Slate, Wired, and others. When he manages to leave the house he is reminded that he lives in Puebla, Mexico. But more importantly, he’s an Eagle Scout, a Trekkie, and a Minnesotan.