Hernan Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author, despite the fact that he says  he has met with universal and enthusiastic rejection about his writing for most of his life.

Diaz was in conversation with Ananda Lima, herself an award-winning author of poetry, who also has had real writing published.

Lima was excellent at eliciting interesting conversation, including her perspectives, but Diaz was the star of the program with his unique, entertaining articulations.

He’s all about words, saying that a book is only as good as its worst sentence. He calls his books syntactical events, He likes to write longhand, describing his typing as reminiscent of a praying mantis, and preferring not to be constrained by layout designs dictated by Bill Gates.

Trust, his second book, is four novels in one, each written from a different perspective, based on four style guides he fashioned in advance, creating what he called a stratified, polyphonic structure.

His mention of that led him to tell us that his procrastination time is spent looking at the Chicago Manual of Style, where he loves taking their quizzes. I bet he’s fun at parties.

What he doesn’t do, is research. He says that term should be limited to the sciences, where emotion isn’t allowed. He prefers to say he reads.

He describes genre as writing’s built-in device to help form a meeting of the minds between the author and the reader and a reason why he doesn’t worry about whether readers will “get it”, as he also assumes the readers are smarter than he is, which is a cause of his constant state of writing terror, the state of mind, not the genre.