Join me in this live, two-hour conversation with Matthew Zapruder and discover the Five Things I Learned about Creativity – or the five things I’d thought I’d learned, until life and experience suggested otherwise.

Hello, my name is Daniel Handler. I’ve written the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and Bottle Grove.  Under the name Lemony Snicket, I’ve written far too many books for children, including the 13-volume sequence A Series of Unfortunate Eventsand the four-volume sequence All The Wrong Questions.  I’ve written a few picture books for young children, and some collaborative books with visual artists for whomever likes those.  I’ve also written a few plays, and adapted my own work for film, stage and television, along with a few other movie scripts and some journalism and criticism here and there.  I play a little music as well, most visibly with the pop group The Magnetic Fields.  It is hard to write this sort of thing without sounding braggy.  My most recent book is And Then?  And Then?  What Else? which is a memoir and a book about the creative process, for lack of a less mortifying term.

I grew up comfortably in San Francisco, where I played piano and went to the library a lot.  I spent an awful lot of time in my room reading and spacing out.  I went to college in Connecticut, and had some really good mentors there, especially in writing, who disabused me of various silly mythologies about being a writer and taught me to learn and steal from the writers I admired most.  I thought I was a poet for a few years–or, I guess I was a poet for a few years, but it didn’t take, although I still read a lot of it.

I enjoy my work very much.  When I’m not writing I take a lot of walks and listen to a lot of music.  I swim in the San Francisco Bay most mornings, and I enjoy cooking and I read voraciously, all kinds of things.  I’m Jewish, which can be tricky.

I’m wrong almost all the time, about all sorts of things, and I’ve learned to enjoy that somewhat, at least most of the time.  I like where being wrong leads me, and I keep a notebook and a mind full of scraps of things I can’t stop thinking about.  I make my books from these things.

Recently I spent a year at Oxford University, mucking about in their beautiful libraries.  Every morning I walked across the same meadow and swam in the Thames, which contains swans.  You can’t eat the swans; they belong to the king.  Right now I am working on a big project about sculpture and some other theatrical and musical efforts too. I am married to Lisa Brown, an illustrator, and I like collaborating with her on books and dinner parties and raising a child and other nonsense.  We watch a lot of old movies and laugh a whole lot, especially before bed.

I really like Matthew Zapruder’s poetry, and I always love talking to him, so when we talk about Five Things I’ve Learned About Creativity – That Turn Out To Be Wrong the two of us will have a grand old time.  Please join us, and you will likely have the same, and if you don’t – well, I told you I was wrong all the time.

– Daniel Handler