Diane Anderson-Minshall has been writing as long as she’s been reading. Her first work, published when she was eight years old, was printed in Highlights magazine. It was about a circus. Since then she’s covered everything from the mundane (regional dog shows and Egyptian irrigation procedures) to the sensational (Hollywood’s A-list and female serial killers). The executive editor of Curve magazine and the founder and former editor of Girlfriends and Alice magazines, Diane’s writing has appeared in dozens of magazines including Passport, Bust, Bitch, Venus, Utne, Seventeen and more. A journalist since she was 13 (her first job was covering the school beat for the Independent Enterprise in Payette, Idaho), Diane has received a handful of honors for her work including a 1998 Visa Versa award for her celebrity journalism, a finalist for the Women in Periodical Publishing’s Woman of the Year Award in 2000, and Power Up’s Ten Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz Award in 2006. Some day she hopes to write true crime novel that looks at infamous lesbian murders and a pulpy novel as sensational as her three favorites: Punish Me With Kisses, The Grounding of Group Six, and Fear of Flying.

Jacob Anderson-Minshall has been many things: farm boy, carny, artist, activist, park ranger and lesbian. He grew up on a small farm in southeastern Idaho where his mother fostered his love of reading and mystery with bedtime stories like Edgar Allen Poe’s Pit and the Pendulum, and 5,000 piece puzzles obscuring the dinner table for weeks at a time. His grandmother, a librarian, sent boxes of books, which he consumed during long winter months huddling under blankets in a freezing house that was (poorly) warmed by a wood stove. Books also helped him survive years without television. For nearly four decades Jacob was a girl named Susannah. During that time he received a M.A. in Rhetorical Criticism, co-founded Idaho State University’s LGBT student association, ran for homecoming king, co-founded the lesbian magazine Girlfriends, and began his life’s romance with his wife Diane, who has been his partner for 17 years. Jacob writes the syndicated weekly column TransNation that runs in queer publications from San Francisco to Boston, and is a frequent contributor to Bitch magazine. As a former park ranger, and law enforcement officer Jacob is familiar with both the parks and open spaces of the San Francisco Bay Area and the procedures involved in enforcement duties. His interest in crime was intensified with the 2000 murder of his brother-in-law, Tom Sherwood, in Pocatello, Idaho. To this date the case remains unsolved.

Where did both of your respective interest in writing fiction develop?
Jacob: My mother used to read to my older sister and I she introduced me to my favorite authors like Edgar Allen Poe. She also wrote us children stories when we were young. My grandmother (mother’s mother) was a librarian and used to ship us boxes of musty books. I loved them. My addiction to fiction was furthered by the fact my parents gave up television when I was seven and we moved to a small farm.
By high school I’d decided I wanted to be a famous author. I wrote my first novel (unpublished) my freshman year of college. During the next five years I wrote the beginnings of another four or five stories. I wrote everywhere. I started one story while working at a convenience store in Northampton, Mass. I never seemed to have paper available so I wrote on what I did have—the backs of cigarette cartons. I’d take them home and shuffle them like playing cards.
Four years ago I was working as an open space ranger in the Santa Cruz Mountains when I was injured on the job and unable to work. I spent my days lying on the floor. I borrowed a laptop and started writing again. Diane and I accepted the National Novel Writers Month’s challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. The story we wrote that November became Blind Curves.

Diane: Gosh, it sounds so lame but that’s such a hard question to answer actually. I started writing when I was in elementary school. My first poem was published when I was 8 years old in the children’s magazine Highlights. Most of my early years were spent in southern California as a (mostly failed) child actor—chasing TV walk-ons and working in community theater—because I loved fantasy and storytelling. I’d spin fantasies all day long in my head (not a good thing for a school kid but typical of writers). When I was 12, I moved to my family home in Idaho, where there was no television or film industry. Instead, I discovered the local newspaper and by 13 I was writing regularly for them.
I was immediately hooked. I knew from then on that I’d spend my life in publishing. Although I was writing non-fiction at the time, there’s a degree of storytelling that happens even in the mundane. There’s a saying that journalism is just literature in a hurry and I really believe that.
It wasn’t long before I also started writing short stories and novels. I penned a dozen half-written novels in high school. I remember when the film Red Dawn came out, I was convinced someone had stolen my novel and turned it into a screenplay.

You both have extensive backgrounds in non-fiction writing -- what major differences come too mind when comparing your experiences in the magazine industry to that of creative writing?
Diane: Like I said, journalism is just literature in a hurry. Magazines have a particular brand of creative non-fiction that’s different from newspapers (it’s more colloquial and allows for freedoms that newspapers can’t afford such as, abandoning the inverted pyramid style of storytelling). I think magazines help writers develop their own style, tone and cadence, which they then apply to fiction. Also for mysteries, thrillers and crime procedurals, you expand your knowledge of evidence, characters, and locations from writing non-fiction.
With magazines, you tell the story and only have a 3-month lead-time and then it’s done, it’s out and everyone can see it. With a book you can spend a year writing it, 3 months editing, another 9 months before it’s out and that’s if you’re with a publisher on a speedy timetable. That kind of wait is excruciating if you’ve gotten used to seeing a finished product sooner. Also, with books I think there’s a tendency to keep retooling and retooling until it’s just right. With magazines, you edit, wrap, print and move on.

Jacob: Absolutely. Compared to writing a weekly column, the writing and editing process for the novel—especially that first one—seemed to take forever. Originally the writing was just for us because it wasn’t being written on assignment. That was quite different from what we were used to. There is a particular joy to writing when it isn’t constrained by the requirements of assignment.

Diane: I agree. Starting the book is always the best time for me too. We allow ourselves to have this of just writing whatever you want, period of no editing. It’s very nice.

Jacob: On the other hand, I also like some structure, so I’ve found writing our second and third books to be much easier.

How did the decision come about that the two of you wanted to co-author a book?
Jacob: It came about around the National Novel Writers Month. When we talked about accepting the challenge to write a novel in a month, we realized we were both writing a mystery and decided to team up. Unlike a lot of couples we’ve never been too worried about losing our individual identities as a couple.
We’ve enjoyed working together in the past, like when the two of us co-founded Girlfriends magazine with Heather Findlay and Bonnie Simon. At the time, the two of us lived in a tiny little camping trailer on a horse farm an hour outside of San Francisco. For the first year everyone worked from home, which meant Diane and I would work 12 to 14 hour days every day in the same small room. Somehow we never seemed to get sick of each other.

Diane: That’s true. In fact ever since Jacob left Girlfriends, we’ve missed working together, so this is a great opportunity. Plus, we share so many of the same interests. It’s not like Jacob goes wild game hunting while I knit pillows or something divergent like that. We’re both obsessed with queer literature, criminality and crime solving so it was an easy match for the Blind Eye series.
In 2000, a family member of Jacob’s was murdered; it’s never been solved and at that time we were frustrated that we didn’t see more done (by police and media) about the murder and the investigation (both because we were so far away and because it’s still unsolved) so I think the Blind Eye series let us play detectives and successfully solve crimes in a way that often doesn’t happen in real life.

Tell us a bit about the process of working together; how do you reconcile your different styles/viewpoints/narrative voice when you’re working on a project?
Diane: We take turns writing because we’re both more skilled in different areas and with different characters’ voices. We do have some ground rules but one thing that’s really interesting, I think, is that whoever has book at any point can take it any direction they like. So if I have the time or Jacob has the time, each of us can basically hijack it. Whoever is working on the book that day has the ability to take the story in a completely different direction and it will usually be accepted as the storyline.

Jacob: But before we write, we get together and talk about what is going to happen. We agree on the ‘bones’ of the story, the key elements like who gets killed and how and possible suspects. Then we just write and find out what is going to happen. I think it helps that we are writing books with ensemble casts, because there are some characters that Diane writes better and some I do. I seem to have an easier time writing dialogue; Diane’s better at descriptive narrative. So again, our styles seem to work best in dovetail. After years and years of editing each other’s work, we’ve also developed thick skins when it comes to each other’s criticisms.

Diane: Not that we haven’t occasionally had little temper tantrums where one of us (ok, it was me) screamed, “You hate my writing, don’t you?”

Your first book Blind Curves will be released in March 2007. How long did you work on the book, from first draft to finish?
Jacob: The esoteric answer: Blind Curves spanned a lifetime. In the time it took, we got married twice, once as a lesbian couple and once as a queer but het-looking one. When we started writing the story I was a park ranger named Susannah, and when we finished I was a writer named Jacob.

Diane: We’re very proud that the bones only took a month. A few of our friends joined us on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which challenges you to finish a 50,000 word book in 30 days. Most dropped out the first week but one of ours friends, Kathleen Hildenbrand, finished her first self-published novel, Heart Breaker, and had it in our hands within months. That was inspiring.

Jacob: Meanwhile here’s our timeline: We wrote our first draft in November 2004 (in one month) and it will be released in March 2007. There were actually two different story lines in that first draft: the essence of Blind Curves and the bones of what will be our fourth or fifth book (it’s called Blind Sided). After we finished the first draft we did a couple of really leisurely rounds of edits between us while working on other projects.

Diane: That’s true. The rewrite took much longer than I’d expected—in part because as the editor of Curve magazine I already work 24/7 on the magazine and just can’t seem to keep up with Jacob, who has more time with the book every day. I try to write from 5 am to 6 am every morning and then an hour or two at night and more on weekends but some nights I get home from meetings at 9 o’clock and I’m practically catatonic. So I think if Jacob were writing solo this book would probably be out a year earlier.

Jacob: I don’t know about that. But, it was nearly a year after we completed the first draft when we finally submitted the manuscript to Bold Strokes. They (rightfully) sent it back for a rewrite, asking us to split the two stories and focus on one now, one later, plus fix some of the narrative structure. Three months later they got the revised work and signed us for a series. Between then and December 2006 we did a couple of additional rounds of editing.

Are you both fans of the detective/mystery genre?
Diane: Yes, we both read everything from old-school stuff like Dash Hammet and Raymond Chandler to modern mainstream mystery thrillers like Patricia Cornwell and lesbian mystery writers like Rose Beecham.

Jacob: And we love crime dramas. We watch everything from Law & Order to The Shield and The Wire. Our favorite series is definitely the British show Wire in the Blood, based on novels by lesbian writer Val McDermid. Diane has been a huge fan of true crime since she was a kid, and we watch forensic shows on Discovery and are fascinated by what drives people to kill. My interest has certainly been impacted by the still-unsolved 2000 murder of my brother-in-law.

Diane: My dad got me hooked on hard news—which really is almost always about crime—when I was just a little girl and he really encouraged me to think critically about what I was seeing and reading. I think that helped me develop a keen interest in mystery. And a strange sense of paranoia I can channel into fiction.
Then when I came out at 18, I fell in love with all these talented lesbian mystery writers like Jaye Maiman, Pat Welch and early Katherine Forrest. In fact, I just re-read Katherine’s Murder at the Nightwood Bar—you know it was one of the first lesbian novels ever optioned for film and Mary Louise Parker was attached to it for years even though it never happened—and it still holds up amazingly well today. Right now I’m really loving Tami Hoag (I don’t know if she’s gay but she sure can add queer elements and characters to otherwise heteronormative stories), Greg Herron (Mardi Gras Mambo was a great gay crime book), and Rose Beecham (Grave Silence was one of the best lesbian mysteries I’ve ever read and I don’t say that lightly. It had that that great combination of lesbian issue knowledge and ripped-from-the-headlines feel. You just know that took a ton of research, and she never dumbed it down for readers the way some authors do).

Blind Leap, the second book in the Blind Eye mystery series will follow in October 2007. Did you write the two books back to back?
Jacob: Although it was originally planned for our third release, we had started writing on Blind Leap while we were waiting for another round of Blind Curves edits. But we didn’t really get into the story until after Blind Curves wrapped. So it has been pretty much back to back.

Diane: Yeah, and we did that thing again where we had two competing storylines in one book so as soon as our editor saw our preliminary notes on Blind Leap she asked us to hold the other storyline for the next book. We’re definitely still learning how not to pack a book with so much it’s overwhelming to readers.

What are you currently working on?
Jacob: We’re actually still finishing Blind Leap and then will be doing edits. Simultaneously, we have been working on the next Blind Eye book, Blind Faith and we recently signed a contract for a book about our relationship and the increasing intersections between the lesbian and transgender communities, so we’re working on that project, too.

Diane: Our next two books are going to be really excited because I think we have some of that ripped-from-the-headlines feel (hopefully not in a cliché way) and one of our characters comes out as transgender and another may get killed. We’re on pins and needles ourselves.

What's your initial outlay like when you're starting a new book? Do you each approach the story from the same or different angles?
Jacob: Neither of us is much into developing outlines, even though we see the purpose of them. I often don’t know what I’m going to say until I’ve said it.
The first thing we do is talk the story through in conversations that generally begin with “What if?” We collect ideas all the time for elements of crimes or details of particular characters

Diane: Also, since we conceived of this as a series from the get go, it’s really let us toss out a lot of “what ifs” to each other. What if Velvet discovered something? How would Yoshi react if this happened? More clinically, we might debate about whether certain types of poison would always be detected and use that “what if” scenario will spur a few hours research.

Jacob: As the editor in the family, Diane knows the publishing industry inside and out so she’s our technical advisor when it comes to our character Velvet who is an investigative reporter. As a former park ranger I’ve got a background in law enforcement and I went through a pretty intensive academy where I learned defensive driving, hand-to-hand combat, specific laws, and firing weapons. I’ve also worked with other law enforcement and emergency personnel, fought fires, and provided medical aid to crash victims. So I have a pretty good sense of those technical elements.

Diane: We do have a lot of going back and forth, too. Our early drafts are filled with notes to each other and we do volley back and forth over certain elements. Then there are times when we’ll have a revelation late in the game and we’ll say something like, “Oh my God, Yoshi would never do that.” We’ve discovered that Yoshi is much more proper and sophisticated than the other women, while Velvet is from a working class background and she sometimes has the mouth of a trucker.

What is the best and worst thing about being a writer?
Diane: The best is so cliché: you get to do what you love, you daydream and someone actually pays you to do that, you work out a lot of your demons in print. For example, we have a possible suicide in one of our books; is it suicide or is it murder. For us that was a chance for us to work through the baggage around having two friends kill themselves.
When someone commits suicide you spend an exorbitant amount of time doing the what if game, sometimes to a very bizarre degree. What if it was really an accident? What if she were murdered? What if she’s really alive and just doesn’t want to be my friend any more? After a fellow writer died in a drug overdose, I spent months convincing myself that it just wasn’t real, that I’d turn the corner and see her, and that this whole charade was just some weird lesbian drama played out to escape her friends. We used some of that angst in our second book.
The worst part: making so very little money. If you’re a lesbian writer and you’re not Patricia Cornwell, I guarantee you aren’t getting rich off your work. A few probably have healthy incomes but I know even prolific lesbian writers who have healthy sales who still have to have fulltime jobs to stay afloat. It’s the same for lesbian writers in all industries; too, not just book publishing but those in LGBT magazines, newspapers, and at websites also face economic hardship.

Jacob: Best has to be, like Diane says, about fiction is being able to slip back into those wonderful daydreams we had as kids. It’s being able to create a world that runs the way it should rather than it does. In mysteries especially, the wronged not only seek but also find justice. In the real world I face so many situations where I’m powerless—especially being disabled and dealing with social services. Now when I get pissed as some injustice in the world, I try to soothe myself with the thought that I can off whoever’s responsible in our next book. In fiction, there can be exactly the kind of resolutions that elude us in reality. What I like about writing my column, TransNation is interviewing and profiling trans people. I find other people far more interesting to talk about than myself
The worst: after the low pay: having to write about things on assignment that don’t interest you, having to write on whatever is on deadline even when you’d rather be working on that other pet project. Having well meaning editors cut the heart out of your work. Not getting health insurance. It seems like a lot of our trans and lesbian writers have paid for the lack of health insurance with their lives.

Who are some of the authors who serve as inspiration to you both?
Diane: Gee I think I mentioned all mine above but I’d add a few: Judy Blume, Erica Jong and William Bayer, all three got me through junior high. Jong and Blume are two of the greatest female writers of all time but will never get the recognition they deserve because of the genres they wrote or write in but were both so pivotal in the lives of thousands of women and girls. And Bayer, who also wrote a book under a pseudonym and won a Lambda Award, inspired me too. His book “Punish Me With Kisses,” was a psycho-sexual thriller that I probably read far too young. Oh, and Lee Lynch and Patrick Califia; I loved their work in the ‘90s; both can write circles around me.

Jacob: Val McDermid, Patricia Cromwell, Lee Lynch, Shelia Ortiz Taylor (Faultline), Les Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues), Edgar Allen Poe, Hemingway (don’t tell Diane) and Jack London (Call of the Wild), Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey (Dragon Riders of Pern series) and Romain Gary (The Roots of Heaven)

Has there been major conflict with one another as writers because you disagreed on where a particular plot point/character should be developed into?
Diane: Sure, but after 17 years we know how to negotiate around things.

Jacob: I totally have to disagree. I don’t think we’ve had a “major conflict” about any aspect of the books we’ve been working on. As Diane said earlier, we share a lot of the same interests, values, etc. This means we’re more often than not on the same place.

Diane: True enough. I think we each have a character we’re the de facto authority on so if we have a disagreement about what that character would do we defer to the authority. The others we just talk out. We definitely have had some back and forth over motivation (e.g. is that worth killing for?) and we both mull it over on our own and then have endless middle of the night, lying in bed, should be sleeping discussions about it. Generally we’re both not too fixated on things so far. We also try to have nightly chats about what happened that day or night with the characters so that the next person doesn’t always have to read over the last 20 pages when they start writing.

What happens when one of you gets struck by a case of writer's block?
Diane: We just keep writing. Sometimes as I’m writing or as Jacob is writing, we’ll get to a scene we’re not interested in writing or feel the other person would be better to tell that story or more wedded to seeing it in a particular fashion. In those cases we just put bracketed info like [write scene with blackmail attempt] and then when the next person is uninspired they can go to those brackets and write individual scenes out of order. It helps if we just move along, even if we aren’t inspired. Particularly for me, I can also go in and edit the manuscript if I’m bored with writing and we can both always do research (since we like to have as much real-world info in the books as we can like actually forensics reports, ballistics, and so on).

Jacob: In addition to researching or writing other elements, since we’ve got multiple projects, some times when we can’t think what to write in one manuscript, we’ll flip over to the next one. Mostly I tend to build off of one scene, imagining what would happen next and writing that. Sometimes that can mean I’ll write 20 pages that will eventually get edited out, just because that’s how my brain works. If two days have passed between scenes, it’s likely I’ve worked out exactly what occurred in that time passage—even if it’s not in the book.

Do you think ‘lesbian fiction’ pigeonholes itself by identifying as such?
Diane: I hear a number of queer writers say that a lot but I think it’s bullshit. Yeah, as writers we want as many readers as possible, and we want to tell a story that is interesting to as many people as possible. LGBT writers often say they don’t want to be “pigeonholed” but really that’s disrespectful to the genre. It’s no less important a genre than mainstream police fiction and you don’t hear Joseph Wambaugh worry about being pigeonholed because he almost always writes about white, middle age cops. We know dykes, we like writing about their lives, and we hope lesbians find themselves reflected in our pages. Period. I could care less about the possibility of being pigeonholed.
With that said, I think lesbian fiction is expanding and reinventing itself all the time, so much so that we have themes within the genre that make it hard to classify as purely lesbian. I like that. I think folks like T Cooper, who straddles lines on sexual orientation, gender identity and literary genre, are good for fiction altogether. And I think lesbian fiction is a growing field with strong subgenres (from romance to mystery to literary fiction) responsible for a lot of great work.

Jacob: I absolutely agree that there are queer writers who are pushing the literary envelope. I also believe that anytime you write characters that primarily exist in a subculture of society you risk being pigeonholed. The same way country music usually only sells on country music charts but occasionally crosses over; sometimes a work about a minority community will catch on with mainstream readers because it conveys universal themes. I think the minute we decided to focus on queer characters we were self-limiting our audience. Being writers who value and respect that audience, we aren’t bothered by that, though. We’d both rather be big fish in the queer world than little fish in the straight one.

Diane: And trust me, I can name a dozen lesbian fiction writers who are better than Nevada Barr—even if their sales are only one percent of hers.

If you were a book, what would the title be?
Diane: “How’s That Working Out For You?” I was at my 20th high school reunion last summer and no less than 12 people asked me that same phrase after I described the changes I’ve undergone in recent years.

Jacob: I always liked “She’s Not There” and I think it expresses the FTM condition more than the MTF one of the title’s author Jennifer Finney Boylan. With that taken, I’ll go with “Dude looks like a lady.”

Diane: No, you should use “40 Year Old Dude Looks Like 14 year Old Boy.”

Diane – were you aware of the whole Jenny Schecter/Curve Magazine storyline in the current season of The L Word?
Diane: Yes, we worked with them on the script actually. I had to approve the script and we worked with their production team to help reproduce the office a bit in Vancouver. We were thrilled actually. Anytime you’re on TV it just helps boost your visibility so even though I could pick apart a few flaws, I simply wouldn’t because we’re honored to be on the show. And, when they first called me and told me what they were thinking about the scene, I told them you know, I have no doubt if Jenny did write her first novel, it would be a self-indulgent piece of claptrap. Thank god, they didn’t ask if we could badmouth Shane, though.

What’s your take, overall, on season 4 of the show so far?
Diane: I love Papi; Janina Gavankar is just a doll and having her on the show breaths some new life into it. I think season four is doing a little better with Max. Season three was infuriating around the transgender issue; I just felt like they got that all wrong and that was so disappointing because Daniela Sea is such a remarkable person. So I’m encouraged this season that there’s some turnaround there. Just having some talk about female masculinity is nice, too, as is even a glimmer of hope that Pam Grier gets to experiment with the Sapphic side. She’s the hottest woman on the show. I think it’s a thankless task having to be all things to all people as the first lesbian drama so it’s not a surprise if the show doesn’t please me all the time. On the other hand, Jacob--like so many other trans guys we hear from—was so disappointed with the Max storylines that he stopped watching altogether.

Tell us something about yourselves no-one else knows…
Diane: I’ve written about myself almost as self-indulgently as Jenny Schecter so there are very few things nobody else knows about me. I stole a car when I was 18 with my now-ex girlfriend and one of my best guy friends. Us girls got off with a slap on the wrist. He went to prison for a decade. It was a very costly mistake, emotionally, for all of us. It cost him more: due to inherent sexism of the courts. It permanently altered his life.

Jacob: I’ve written less about myself but I used to be the kind of person who’d tell their life-story to strangers. The biggest secret of my life was that I wanted to be a boy. And I thought wanting that made me sound—at the least—crazy. (At the most, a gender trader and soon to be single lesbian.) Now that that secret’s out…what else is there?
Plus we’re working on our memoirs and anything truly shocking will have to wait for our kiss and tell. Here are a few fun facts: One summer I worked on a small traveling carnival in New Mexico, I threw my knee out dancing in an Isreali bomb shelter, my parents told me for years that I had been born a monkey and they shaved off my hair and cut off my tail, I once lit singer Ferron’s cigarette (and I was so obsessed with her music at the time I would have followed her around the northern hemisphere with a Zippo at the ready).

Diane: Ferron smokes? That’s a shocker.

Is the publishing industry as unforgiving and demanding as everyone makes it out to be?
Diane: Yes. It’s definitely a lifestyle, not a job. If you don’t know if you want to be in publishing, you don’t and you shouldn’t. Most books never recoup their costs, over 90 percent of all magazines fold within the first 5 years, there are far too many writers than there are paying jobs. When I was 17, the summer between graduation and my first semester of college, I was working at a newspaper in Ontario, Oregon and my mentor there was a lovely female editor who 15 years later became mayor of my tiny hometown of Payette, Idaho. Anyway, while I was at the paper the lifestyle editor had to leave suddenly and I got her job and I thought it was so wonderful—career success, already—that I considered then not going to college, not leaving the paper, just moving up the ranks. And she pulled me aside and told me I had to go—so that I really understood the sacrifice. And, she said, that I needed to really give long hard thought to whether I ever wanted to make more than $12,000 a year—and if so, I should leave publishing now. I think that was very sage advice and I tell that story to interns who are struggling with whether this is the right field for them or not. Most of my friends from the early 90s left this field and make a lot more money and thus have found a lot more time for family and friends.

Jacob: On the other hand, it can be a lot easier for beginning writers to get published than it’s made out to be. Small independent magazine and regional publications are often on the look out for interesting pieces, and book and music reviewers. If you can write and you don’t need to get paid, you can get published.

Diane: Yeah, but we all need to eat. It’s hard to write in a homeless shelter no matter how wonderful a byline feels.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Diane: Just write. Seriously. Don’t spend a of time reading about how to write or listening to people tell you about writing, or even in writers groups discussing how or what you wrote. Just write as often as you can. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that writing letters to your friends or writing in your journal is the equivalent of writing novels or short stories or essays because it’s not and unless you’re going to write Girl, Interrupted, your diary entries are useless. There’s a huge multi-million dollar industry around teaching people to write, but it’s almost as exploitive as the weight loss industry. I think the best advice to writers are to read prolifically, especially writers in genres you want to be in, so you teach yourself what’s good and what’s not, and then write any spare chance you get.

Jacob: If you can write and, especially if you don’t need to get paid to begin with, almost anyone can get published. It may have to be in a small publication or for an online site, but each and every one of those will be one more notch on your belt and will—if you keep building your skills and sending your material out—lead to paying gigs. Sometimes it may take a whole lot of submissions (if it takes 100 resumes to get one job, it will probably take at least a dozen well researched and targeted submissions to get a piece published).
Now maybe my perspective is skewed because I’ve had the advantage of insider information and I’ve always written well, but sometimes I am amazed at what makes it into print. It leads me to believe that it’s more about persistence and presentation than about sheer talent. That being said—everyone gets edited. If you can’t accept that someone else is going to change your work you will not get published unless you intend to pay for the press time yourself. Just because you’re enamored with a particular phrase does not mean an editor will be. If an editor gives you advice: take it. And don’t ever, ever submit your work with a note saying something to the effect that everyone will love this work because “my mother, aunt, friend, lover, child or whatever thinks it’s fabulous”.

Diane: Or, don’t send a note that’s really informal with a list of links that says, “Check me out.” At the magazine I literally get thousands of emails every day. I don’t have time to go hunting writers down to see if they’re good. I need stuff in front of me.

A happy writer is…
Diane: Usually an alcoholic.

Jacob: Hmm, I’m happy most of the time I’m writing and I no longer drink.

Diane: Or on prescription pain killers.

Jacob: Well, excuse me! To me, a happy writer is someone who is writing a piece purely for pleasure. Especially if it could just happens to become a critically acclaimed best seller.

Diane: OK, then you become an alcoholic. Too many greats were big boozehounds. There must be some cause and effect here.