Author Birthday – 26 October – Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Happy Birthday, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, born on 26 October 1975.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner Quotes

1. When I was interviewing authors, one of the questions I always had [for them] was, ‘Which character are you?’ And they always looked at me with pity. I thought they were being defensive, but now I really know it doesn’t work that way. Actually, it’s worse. They’re all you.
2. The thing that’s actually being asked of [younger writers] is too much. It’s to be a celebrity, and also to write like nobody knows who you are. And that’s not fair.
3. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to give you six months to write this. You won’t give it one more day than six months. But you have to do it, because clearly there’s something in you that needs to be put to rest.’ I had to find out if my screenwriting teachers were correct, that I am not a good creative writer.
4. I would lock myself in a room and I would say, ‘What is the book that I see myself writing? What is the point that I need to make?’ A great thing to have is a goal. A goal should be a word count because some of your writing is spent thinking, pacing, picking your nose, cooking, or scrolling through Twitter while you’re figuring it out. I wrote that book in six months. I wrote the first 30 pages in one month.
5. I don’t believe in writer’s block. …This is a profession and you have to treat it professionally. At its heart, writer’s block is the act of thinking about writing instead of doing it. And if you just remember that, you can always know that you could just write the next sentence. It might not be very good, but the one after that probably will be.
6. If I’m confused about a section, I will sometimes read it backward—the last sentence, the second to last sentence, the third to last sentence. That was actually something I learned at my New York Times orientation. If you’ve read something so many times, you can just read it backward and see if the sentences make sense.
7. You don’t get to the good sentences if you don’t write the bad ones first

Source for quotes 1-2: Elle and 3-7: Slate

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is an American journalist and novelist who writes literary fiction and contemporary social satire. She is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, where her celebrity profiles have earned her a New York Press Club Award and a Mirror Award. She is the author of Fleishman Is in Trouble and Long Island Compromise. Fleishman Is in Trouble was longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and adapted into a seven-time Emmy-nominated miniseries, which Brodesser-Akner also wrote. Her work explores marriage, family, wealth, social status, gender roles, and the pressures of modern life. She uses sharp humour to examine relationships and the gap between how people present themselves and how they really feel. You can follow her on X and Threads.

Source for photograph: Random House/Emil Cohen

by Amanda Patterson
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