Sarah Hepola is a writer, blogger, and former English teacher. (I discovered her through "Broadsheet.")
Q: What is your preferred environment for writing?
A: I mean, ideally, it's in Jon Stewart's bedroom after a bout of fantastic sex. But realistically, well—I used to love writing in bed, under the covers. It's like my whole body disappears, and I'm only engaged with words. But these days, my laptop gets overheated if I write like that. So I'm just at my sloppy, cluttered, totally un-ergonomic desk right now, which is fine with me. I don't write well in coffee shops. I get distracted. I can't write outside. I can only listen to music if it's an album I know really, really well. Otherwise, I find the noise distracting.
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: The semicolon; it's eccentric.
Q: What punctuation, style, grammar, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: When people spell "a lot" as one word, it's like cat claws on a chalkboard to me. I had a seventh-grade teacher who would literally flunk us if we spelled "a lot" as one word, and so it's deeply ingrained. Also, when people say, "I feel badly," instead of "I feel bad." Oprah did this for years. I can't believe I didn't write her a letter about it with several stern semicolons. Oh, I'm also amazed at how often the word "bemused" is used incorrectly. It means confused, but people are convinced it means "lightly amused." I don't find that as irritating as much as I find it remarkable, when a word's incorrect meaning is more pervasive than its correct meaning.
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: Hmm, I would probably be an English teacher. Hopefully one of the wacky ones, who wore earrings as big as jawbreakers and crazy purple wraps. But if I could do anything else—which is a different question—I would love to be a documentary filmmaker. A filmmaker of any kind, really.
Q: What drove you to write?
A: I don't really know. I was a lonely kid, and I suppose telling myself stories was a way to comfort and amuse myself. I used to tell stories into tape recorders, too. I wrote novelizations of movies I saw. I mean, we didn't have cable! I just needed distraction. And then, somehow, I became pretty good at it, and so I got adulation in school for it, and once you start getting positive feedback for something, you want to do it more often. These days, I do it because it's the best way for me to make money. I'm not kidding you. Because I'll go through these agonizing bouts of writer's block and withering insecurity and think, "Screw this, I'll do something else." But I have no other bankable talent, really. I can teach, and I can write, and writing pays more for me right now.
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