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Writer in a Jar: AJ Jacobs A.J. Jacobs -- 11/29/2004  Writer in a Jar: Interview with A.J. Jacobs. A.J. Jacobs is the editor of What It Feels Like and the author of The Two Kings: Jesus and Elvis and America Off-Line. He is the senior editor of Esquire and has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, New York magazine, New York Observer, and other publications. His most recent book is The Know It All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Guy in the World, for which he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. (For anyone who’s wondering, that’s 44 million words, 33,000 pages, 75,000 articles, and 128 pounds of knowledge.) Luckily for Salt, A.J. had enough brain power left to answer questions from Catherine in this latest installment of Writer in a Jar, Salt’s series of email interviews with authors, in which we stick a writer in a jar like a bug and then look at them real close. How and when did you realize that you wanted to be a writer? Well, I majored in philosophy in college. Sadly, when I graduated, there weren’t a lot of philosophy jobs open at Fortune 500 companies, so that career wasn’t working out. The only thing I could sort of do was string a few sentences together, so that’s what I started to do. What was the first thing you ever wrote? The first thing you ever had published? First thing I wrote: A story about bug-land when I was five. I like to think Pixar stole my idea and made Bug’s Life. But I never got any money out of the deal. First thing I had published: I wrote a piece for Dental Economics Magazine. That’s one of the top five magazines catering to dentists looking to invest their money. Maybe one of the top three. What was the progression from “Huh, I think I want to be a writer/editor” to reaching your current job as Senior Editor at Esquire? I worked at a tiny newspaper in a small town in California. I was supposed to cover all topics, but somehow most of my assignments had to do with sewage systems, septic tanks, and the like. In between articles on scatological matters, I wrote a book called The Two Kings about the eerie similarities between the king of kings and the king of rock-and-roll. That landed me a job as a fact-checker at the New York Observer, which landed me a job at Entertainment Weekly, which then segued nicely into my job at Esquire. In your day-to-day life, what’s the balance between editing and writing? Which do you prefer? Right now I’m only working part-time at Esquire. I went part-time because I’m writing the screenplay for a movie based on my book (it was optioned by Radar Pictures and director Barry Sonnenfeld. It’s going to be 90 minutes of a guy in a room reading the encyclopedia. Box office gold! Well, actually, it’s more of a romantic comedy between me and my wife). So I’m doing more writing than editing now. I’d say 70 percent writing and 30 percent editing. end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ] |
