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محمد ﷺ |
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اللہ |
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بسم اللہ الرحمان الرحیم لا الہ الااللہ محمدرسول اللہ |
For Me & You,Every One
Researched & Compiled by
Mujahid Ali
Institute of Research Promotion
Lahore-Pakistan
mujahid.riceplus@gmail.com
Gift of Knowledge
A wonderful link was shared by great personality belonging to .All credit goest to Nancy from Writing.Please remember her in your speical prayers as she deserves .She is a beautiful personality although i have not seen here but i am sure she is beautiful in that sense that she just shared these best information with me.This link shares expeirnces of every person in their respective field.How they developed themselves in writing and how they are adopting these tips techniques in their daily writing for their projects.These are easy to use.These are fantastic inspirations for all of us.
We need to use these informaiton for our socity /mankind.Allah(GOD) have bestowed very brilliant brain as a gift .A precious gift for every one ,that is why it is on TOP SIDE .Brain is king and king is always on Top,that is why it is precious and it does wonders.We all need to use our brain for positive purposes as a result we can think wisely ,Negative thoughts damage our brain and body.
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
Our Quran (Book of ALLAH) advises us regarding Iqra that means read.It was very first verse by ALLAH bestowed to our great prophet Hazrat Mohamamd محمدﷺ
So first we need to write for reading ,a great message that we can we depict from QURAN.So in this way Quran is blessing for all people belong to any religion/sects.We all need to learn about Holy Quran.
Thanks again for NANCY
Always get super information on www regarding writing
نئے اور آزمودہ کار لکھنے والوں کے لئے رہنما ہدایات!
درج ذیل معلومات نئے لکھنے والوں کے لئے مشعل راہ ہیں۔اگرآپ کچھ لکھنا چاہتے ہیں یا اپنی تحاریر کو بہتر کرنا چاہتے ہیں تو ان کو پڑھیں۔یہ تمام تجربات مشاہدات ٹپس اور ٹیکنیکس تمام نوعمر اور پروفیشنل ادباء کی طرف سے دی گئی ہیں آپ ان کے تجربات سے فائدہ اٹھائیں۔اس میں شاعر اور ادیب یہ بھی سیکھتے ہیں کہ وہ لکھنے کے لئے مواد کیسے تیار کرسکتے ہیں اس میں ہر کسی نے اپنے مشاہدات اور تجربات شئیر کئے ہیں۔
آپ اپنے تخلیقی وجدان اور شعور کی بڑھوتری کیسے کرسکتے ہیں یہ تمام اجزاء بیان کئے گئے ہیں۔
تمام شعرا موسیقار ادیبوں صحافیوں نے اپنے اپنے تجربات اور معلومات انتھائی مختصر لیکن جامع انداز میں شئیر کی ہیں اور ایسی معلومات ہیں کہ بہت جلد سیکھی جاسکتی ہیں ۔ایک مختصر کتاب پرنٹ کی جاسکتی ہے اس سلسلے میں ایک مختصر کتابچہ حاضر خدمت ہے امید ہے تمام افراد اور احباب اس سے کماحقہ فائدہ اٹھائیں گے اور اپنی ہر قسم کی تحاریر کو مذید بہتر کرسکیں گے
انسان کو ہمیشہ طالب علم رہنا چاہئے تاکہ ہروقت کچھ نہ کچھ سیکھتا رہے اس مختصر کتابچہ میں سیکھنے کے لئے بہت کچھ مواد شامل کیا جارہا ہے اور اس سسلسلے میں راہنما ہدایات کا کام دے گی۔
ہم میں سے مجھ سمعیت ہر کوئی لکھنا سیکھنا چاہتا ہے اور شروع ہے ہمیں لکھنا سکھایا جاتا ہے لیکن ایک خاص سٹیج پر آکر ہمیں سیکھنے کے حوالے سے مذید اور مواد کی ضرورت ہوتی ہے تاوقتیکہ کہ لوگ ماننے لگیں کہ ہم کچھ اچھا لکھ پارہے ہیں
یہ تمام تجربات سوچیں ترکیبیں ہر اس کامیاب افراد کی ہیں جنھوں نے خود لکھنا سیکھا اور سیکھنے کے حوالے سے مختلف سوچیں مشاہدات تجربات کئے ہمیں یہ فائدہ ہے کہ ہمیں بیٹھے بٹھائے تمام چیزیں ایک جگہ مل گئی ہیں۔
انٹرنیٹ چونکہ ایک نعمت ہے اس نعمت کا بھرپور استعمال کرتے ہوئے اور اللہ کا شکر اداکرتے ہوئے یہ تمام معلومات آپ سے شئیر کی جارہی ہیں ہوسکتا ہے کہ کچھ معلومات آپ کے پاس پہلے ہی سے ہوں اور کچھ نئی بھی ہوں یہ صدقہ جاریہ ہے سب سے شیر کریں۔
اگر آپ کے پاس اس سے ملتی جلتی معلومات ہوں کوئی فائل ہو یا کوئی انتہائی زبردست لنک ہو تو لازمی شئیر کریں۔
Let us learn from their experiences,Observations,Share your experiences on this website.
آئیے ہم سب لکھنا سیکھیں لوگوں کے تجربات مشاہدات سے سیکھیں فائدہ اٹھائیں!
posted 1.14.16
“I
believe in fair trade. When I need inspiration I start giving more time and
attention to the world around me. I write an e-mail to someone I miss. I make a
mix of the best songs ever for where you are in your life right now. Or I set
myself a challenge: I have to be kissed three times before an ending comes to
me. Then I start chasing my children and my wife around the house. I have a
little gang of coffee mugs I think of as my work friends; one of them generally
sits around with me through the day and helps out when it can. I don’t just
drink from them; I whisper into them too. ‘If you help me get this paragraph to
a neat ending, I’ll wash you with incredible care and treat you like a grail.’
It’s old magic. The reason I feel lost is because I forgot to leave an offering
at some crucial shrine along the way. Maybe it’s a thank-you note I’ve been
neglecting, or a handful of change in the cup holder of the car that wants to
meet people on the side of the road. When the gods gave up on us they shattered
their omnipotence and hid little bits and pieces of it all over creation.”
—Kirk Lynn, author of Rules for Werewolves (Melville
House, 2015)
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posted 1.07.16
“Write
first drafts on paper. This cancels self-criticism immediately; unless you have
truly ugly, banged-up handwriting, everything you write will be visually and
stylistically unified by ink. Better still, in an age of Internet-rehab apps
like Freedom and SelfControl, nothing approaches the uncluttered nondigital
quiet of a page. Take confidence in the fact that much of our canon was
composed on paper. But mostly, when you achieve a flow, you're much less likely
to break it on the page than on a screen—you'll be less tempted to double
backwards into revision, checking e-mail, opening a tab. I found this to be
true when I wrote the first complete draft of my second novel, The
Association of Small Bombs. For years I'd been struggling to make progress,
only to lapse back into revision. The minute I committed to paper, the story
ribboned forward, inventing itself. I had never felt anything like it.”
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs (Viking,
2016)
posted 12.23.15
"My
working methods, I suspect, are too peculiar and old-fashioned to be
instructive. Nevertheless, I don't make outlines. I don't do drafts—or not
intentionally—not as such. I just obey the emotional impulse, always emotional,
toward a novel or an essay and start writing (on a legal pad, then typing on an
old Hermes 3000) with the expectation that diligence and fear will see me
through to the discovery and prosecution of my duty. And with the result that I
will find myself, more often in the process than I'd like, completely baffled,
sort of gazing over the cliff with no idea how I arrived or where to go. For
which there's nothing but some quiet time in the evening and a bottle of triple
stout. A glass of wine is too complacent and polite. It can't go frothy, like
the ocean or the weather, and return you to the earth the way a good strong
stout will do. Then in the morning, should I find the path I've taken back to
truth seems maybe a little too elaborate or contrived, there is a test. A
universal test for narrative or expository truth—or, more precisely, for its
absence. All you do is read aloud the passage in question in the voice of Rod
Serling introducing an episode of The Twilight Zone. Practice. It's not hard. And if it fits, if it sounds right
like that, you're screwed. Back up the cliff. Another day. Another
bottle."
—David Searcy, author of Shame and Wonder (Random
House, 2016)
posted 12.17.15
"Music
was my first love, and it's still the source for me even though I haven't
touched a piano or guitar in years. It continues to teach me about phrasing,
pitch, shifts in rhythm, shifts in tonal register—all of the qualities I value
in writing. I try to listen to a range of work, but every so often I go back to
Joni Mitchell, whom I need to take breaks from as she already feels like my
inner life. I'm not talking Blue, as pure as the album is,
but Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, which is admittedly a mess,
but a gorgeous mess. I don't think there's ever a moment when five things
aren't going on emotionally. Each measure is dense with animation. It goes down
like inquiry, a mind at work. It's richer for the fact that it makes mistakes,
even dares to make mistakes, as if Mitchell's stretching out the membrane of
what a song could do. The form is entirely its own, and not a bit sounds
packaged for the marketplace. The album is neither old nor new, but outside of
time. Its bravery is an animal. I want to hold it."
—Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door (Graywolf
Press, 2016)
posted 12.10.15
“I
write in periods of forty-five minutes using my cell phone timer, and take
fifteen-minute breaks between each session. I repeat this until I’m done for
the day. I am amazed how much gets done in just three of these sessions, versus
days of unstructured writing, which often lead to irregular breaks, rampant
Internet usage, and end with me in a fetal ball of self-loathing. It turns out
that no matter how much I am theoretically dying to write, I need structure and
limits to get it done. I started this practice when I was writing a
dissertation, getting together with other people to work this way. We
‘dissertated’ in forty-five-minute periods using an egg timer, and shared
snacks and gossips during the breaks. Back then, the forty-five-minute time
period made writing a dissertation bearable. Writing fiction is more satisfying
for me, but now life is more hectic with kids/job/house. These little sessions
make it seem like I can do it all. It also helps to use one of the more Zen
sound settings to signal the end of a session. Truth be told, the egg timer
sound got to be a little traumatic.”
—Asali Solomon, author of Disgruntled (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2015)
posted 12.03.15
“When
I was in the thick of writing my novel, Juventud, I took dance
classes two or three times a week. This provided obvious physical benefits,
prying me from the long day otherwise spent on the couch, pecking away on
laptop keys until my neck and back ached. Any style of dance would do—modern,
ballet, jazz, Bollywood, Polynesian, Middle Eastern. I chose the latter, or
maybe it ended up choosing me; the studio was only a fifteen-minute drive from
home, the lesson package affordable. Rules of thumb if you try a dance class:
Find a style that won’t frustrate you too much, because this is supposed to be
an invigorating break, not another means to bang your head against the wall.
Let that hour yank you from the world of words and bring you back into the
body, into the senses. Like yoga, dance offers its own kind of meditation.
Learning choreography—even simple combinations—will keep your brain sharp, the
synapses firing. My dance practice led me to figure out strategies for scenes
left stuck, and elusive plot points snapped to clarity.”
—Vanessa Blakeslee, author of Juventud (Curbside
Splendor, 2015)
posted 11.25.15
“When
in doubt, go further, deeper, weirder. Take the elements that make your story
unique and double down on them. There's a tendency in writing classes and craft
essays to suggest that writers work on their weaknesses and round out their
skills. If you're great at dialogue and structure, you should put your efforts
into character and plot. And certainly that can help. But if instead you work
on using the dialogue and structure to your advantage and emphasize them even
more, you might come up with something original. Not every shape needs to be
round. Often what makes great writers great is not doing everything well, but
doing a few things in exciting, original ways. Franz Kafka, Flannery O'Connor,
Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Thomas Bernhard—we remember these writers
for their unique qualities, for the way they pushed their art into strange new
shapes.”
—Lincoln Michel, author of Upright Beasts (Coffee House
Press, 2015)
posted 11.19.15
“Like
most writers, I prefer to write in silence, but I’m not always free to enable
it. Sometimes circumstances pull you on the road, out of the house or apartment
into a library or coffee shop, or even stuck within a home buzzing with life
that you’re otherwise grateful for and deeply enjoy. In those instances, I
reach for a playlist of ambient, downtempo, and contemporary minimalist music.
I used to be an ambient music deejay back in college at WNUR-FM in Evanston,
Illinois, and I’ve continued to add to my collection ever since. If you’re like
me and you’re looking for some quiet to drown out the noise, I’ve been writing
to these ten songs for years: 1. ‘Rhubarb’
by Aphex Twin; 2. ‘Suspended’ by Lucinda Chua; 3. ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ by Brian Eno; 4. ‘Tippy’s Demise’
by Stars of the Lid; 5. ‘Pulse, Pause, Repeat’ by Harold Budd, Ruben Garcia, and Daniel Lentz; 6. ‘Warmed by the Drift’ by Biosphere; 7. ‘Oil’
by Jonny Greenwood; 8. ‘The Sinking of the Titanic, Hymn IV’ by the Gavin Bryars Ensemble;
9. ‘Brittle’
by Loscil; and 10. ‘Glassworks: Opening’ by Philip Glass. Often the ways
to drown out the noise of the world needs to be as varied as the noise itself,
but to me, there’s no substitute for these genres.”
—J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest (Pamela
Dorman Books, 2015)
posted 11.12.15
“Often
when two of my characters are in a room together, they’ll reach a point at
which neither wants to converse with the other anymore. They’ve talked and
talked, and though they can’t advance the dialogue, they are forced to remain
in the same space. Maybe it’s a home or a job or an airplane. The problem
arises when I’m not sure how to make the story run without the characters
speaking. Yet if you’ve ever watched a film on mute, you know that when
language is stripped away, you read the movements. You remember the awkward
ballet of two angry people trying to cook in a New York City kitchen, how
bitterly one can jerk the top off of a pickle jar. When I’m jammed up, I look
for the story to work outside of dialogue. I look for the emotional grammar in
silences, where the things that seem unspeakable live. The gesture can
sometimes speak to a reader, even if the characters fail to register its
significance. My work as a writer then becomes evocative choreography. It is an
impulse born of remembering that even fictional people have bodies.”
—Tracy O’Neill, author of The Hopeful (Ig Publishing,
2015)
posted 11.05.15
“I
write best from a place of stillness and quiet. I also live in New York City, a
place known for neither of those things. That means I tend do a lot of writing
in the middle of the night. It’s the closest thing to silence I can find in the
city. The rest of the time, I collect. I’m always taking notes. I pick up
pieces from magazine articles, news stories, radio, television, movies, from
conversations with strangers, from eavesdropping on the world. Then, in the
quiet, I take stock. I pick out the most compelling pieces and wait for them to
speak. I translate and rearrange. Sometimes, I’m out of ideas. I think I have
something. Then I don’t. I take a break until it’s quiet again. I do this over
and over until the idea takes shape, until I start to understand why these
fragments called out to me, what the words mean. It takes a while. Sometimes I
wish it didn’t. I get stuck, I get frustrated. But I’m learning, or trying to
learn, to allow myself the time. The important thing for me is to keep my mind
fed and alive, to always be open, always be listening, and to keep coming back
and putting the words down, trying to make sense of what I hear.”
—Camille Rankine, author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper
Canyon Press, 2015)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 10.29.15
“Begin
with bleakness. Bring yourself to the bare room. Voices will assail you,
reminding you how many times you’ve been hit on the head, hard, reminding you
of the bad genes, the narrow valley in Bohemia where your ancestors left their
lives as factory hands, as milk maids, with their natural and legitimate
children in tow, and walked to Trieste and boarded ‘the big boat’ right out of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, out of history, out of the looming world war to
give up their names at Ellis Island and live many long years, long enough for
the mutation to work its will. Forget that. It has nothing to do with what you
face. Your sirens will begin to sing electronically; your digital imps will
call you personally, offer something you’ve never had and always wanted. Ignore
them. The house is a shambles, your potted plants are parched, your Queen
Charlotte violets cannot go another minute, the cat wants attention. Shine ’em
on. Begin again with bleakness, with the bare room. You need stimulants, you
need caffeinated beverages. This is totally allowed. Mr. Coffee is your only
servant, your only friend. Bring yourself again to the bare room. Be prepared
to stay.”
—Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night (BOA
Editions, 2015)
posted 10.22.15
“The
solution to being stuck almost always lies outside the writing itself.
Creativity arises from playfulness, not from relentless concentration. It’s
more powerful to look at a problem askance than head-on. Insight will arrive
during a walk or a shower or a tumble on the floor with my kids; while I’m
scrubbing the toilet or strolling around the visible storage gallery at the
Brooklyn Museum or reading a science article or going through airport security.
When I’m in an idea drought, I try to experience as many random things as
possible. I want unfamiliar scenes and sounds clattering around in my head. I
want to be catapulted out of my own clichés. I want to have a sense of myself
more as a human than as a writer. Being in a situation that interferes with my
writing time often breeds ideas. I’ll be visiting extended family for a week,
forgoing my writing hours, and that’s when the ideas start to hit. I’ll have
epic dreams every night, and I’ll become desperate to get back to writing, to
play around freely in the mud; I’ll feel again that old urgency that is the
basis of any good writing I’ve ever done.”
—Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Henry
Holt, 2015)
posted 10.15.15
“I
am in debt. I owe the world an unpayable sum, and yet each morning at my desk
with the sun rising in the long distance—some mornings it blazes and on others
it is a distant bulb barely able to raise smoke from the cold black tar of the
roof—I sit down to repay that debt. My debt is simple. It is the poems of
Elizabeth Bishop and Larry Levis. The prose of Norman Maclean and Michael
Ondaatje. Derek Walcott and Wallace Stevens. Henry Thoreau and Ed Abbey. Naomi
Shihab Nye and Terrance Hayes. Jack Gilbert. The list goes on and on. Some are
my friends and some are people I know only in their words. But they have—each
and every one—given me their language and their syntax. They have each offered
me a gift—a fragment, story, a song, a glimpse of the sun streaming through
their world. You want to know what keeps me going? I have no choice. The words
are theirs and I owe the vigorish. It is all I can do to keep up the payments.”
—Jeffrey Thomson, author of Fragile (Red Mountain
Press, 2015)
posted 10.08.15
“I
am fascinated by two types of characters: those who are deeply flawed—the
morally ambiguous character who is looking for redemption or spiraling into a
deeper chaos, and those who are on the brink of a life-altering epiphany. When
I first began writing, I only wrote short stories. As my collection grew and my
stories were published, I began relying on the same characters to make cameo
appearances or take center stage in a story. Now I have a family, so to speak,
that I draw upon depending on the crisis: a young girl in a dead-end
relationship with a man she loves, a husband who realizes his marriage and
children were a result of his wife’s manipulations, a little girl enchanted
into her young brother’s world during his early stages of schizophrenia, and...
secrets. All of my stories have secrets that are not always unveiled. Whether
or not those truths surface isn’t as important as how my characters grapple
with the secrets they hold. What keeps me going is the thrill in unraveling
those moments.”
—Aida Zilelian, author of The Legacy of Lost Things (Bleeding
Heart Publications, 2015)
posted 10.01.15
“I’m
fortunate that I don’t often feel stuck, but I have plenty of days—most
days—when I don’t feel like writing. Something always happens
on the page if I can make myself sit in the chair and weather the ten minutes
of terror as every excuse not to write darts through my head and I watch the
cursor blink back at me. Two things that bookend my writing sessions help me
stay in the chair, stay inspired, and stay motivated to do it all over again.
The first, of course, is reading. While I’m primarily a fiction writer, before
sitting down to work on short stories or a novel, I read poetry. Right now that
happens to be Daniel Khalastchi’s incredible book Tradition (McSweeney’s,
2015). The absolute concentration on language is palate cleansing and
invigorating. The second thing is to work out. As writers we spend so much time
in our heads that it’s good to remember we have bodies as well. Doing something
physical after a long writing stretch helps me recharge so that I can summon
the will to sit down at the desk the next day.”
—Andrew Malan Milward, author of I Was a Revolutionary (Harper,
2015)
posted 9.24.15
“First,
I put down the pen and paper or step away from the computer screen and go for a
walk. The dog helps. She gets me up and out and away from myself. Once moving,
I focus on what it is that’s been spinning around in me. Generally, there is a
phrase or an image that I keep returning to. Sometimes, it’s just a reoccurring
image in a dream: a cat stuck in the middle of a raging creek, a whale knocking
a boat over, and so on. Mostly it’s language, a phrase that keeps coming back:
‘I’m sorry,’ ‘Give me this,’ ‘Let me tell you something,’ ‘Listen,’ ‘Help’ to
name a few. With that phrase in the back of my mind (where it lives), I then
try to compose a poem in my head. Composing without pen and paper or recording
device is good for me because it makes the sounds so important. I end up
repeating things, or rhyming, or using interesting phrasing because it’s only
me and the words, with no false filter between us. I’ll say as much of the poem
as I can out loud and then write it down as soon as I’m inside. These walking
poems aren’t always successful, but they often break some new and necessary
ground.”
—Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things (Milkweed
Editions, 2015)
posted 9.17.15
“I
take my cue from visual artists, who can spend an entire career consumed by a
singular shape, or color, or a set of strokes, meticulously working through
‘the problem’ canvas by canvas with no or very little or only very subtle
changes. Think of Rothko, as example. Think Glenn Ligon’s textual paintings.
Think Jay DeFeo’s ‘The Rose.’ This is a way of saying that
visual art taught me to trust my obsessions. First, that it was fine to have
them, to be preoccupied or even haunted by them. Second, that it was perhaps
even healthiest to admit that they do have presence. Lastly, that I could use these
obsessions, again and again, in my work, reinterrogating their meanings and
histories. This isn’t license to write the same poem ad infinitum—heaven
forbid! But it is permission to allow myself the pleasure/burden of their
company, of remaining alert to the handful of themes or topics or images that
truly arrest me and don’t give way to easy conclusions. Desire; the fact of the
(gendered) body; the dark; the assault of history; water; race; our failures and
triumphs of the imagination: all these are subjects that will always be there
spiraling in my head, and who knows why. They are ideas that I can at least
remember are there at those anxious moments I’m
willing to believe in a thing like ‘writer’s block.’ But writer’s block, simply
speaking, doesn’t exist if one’s willing to look back at all she’s done
and—realizing knowledge is always limited—thinks, ‘Nope, I
need to try this again.’”
—Rickey Laurentiis, author of Boy With Thorn (University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)
posted 9.10.15
“A
mess. I need an absolute, total, tsunami-like mess on my desk to be productive.
I cannot be creative when things are neat and tidy. Oddly enough, my work does
not fit any sort of neat and tidy structure. I avoid pre-planning by figuring a
book out as I go along and groom all the wreckage into shape later. Currently
on my small maple desk is a laptop; three paintings my three-year-old son made
at summer camp; a giraffe sculpture he also made; eight children's books; a
biography of children's author Ellen Raskin; five novels for grownups—including
a copy of my latest, Fake Fruit Factory, with its front cover blown off
by M-80 firecrackers (a casualty of the book trailer filming); a faux Tiffany
lamp that is not plugged in; a picture frame and a print of a cat wearing 3-D
glasses I intended to put together and give to my friend, MacKenzie, at
Christmas eight months ago; a Breathe Right strip still in its package; stacks
of notes and notepads; some CDs; and a book called Magic Tricks &
Card Tricks. My wife hates this salvage yard of an office I have carved
out, but I love it. I feel comfortable amongst all this information and history
and strangeness. When I feel comfortable, I can work. And when I work, I am
less of a grouch. Thank you, mess!”
—Patrick Wensink, author of Fake Fruit Factory (Curbside
Splendor, 2015)
posted 9.03.15
“I
have an insatiable appetite for movies—they were my gateway to the creative
world when I was a kid, long before books were. Books, I can’t live without
books, but movies help my brain wrap around an idea, help me put it all into
pictures that I can translate into words. When I’m starting a new manuscript I
find a movie, something that speaks to the general feeling or atmosphere of
what I’m going to be exploring (for Mesilla I was inspired byAll
Is Lost and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford). I write down scenes, copy them verbatim, and study the pacing
of the language. I examine how long the shots are held and what they’re showing
us, the viewer. And then I root around and find a soundtrack for my writing,
something that I will listen to incessantly and that will immediately bring me
back into the writing—I hear that music, I remember the visuals, and zoom, I’m
off. Movies and music ultimately supply my writing with a tangibility that
makes the process, the ideas, that much more real, even at the very early
stages of drafting and character mapping.”
—Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla (Dock Street
Press, 2015)
posted 8.27.15
“When
I’m feeling stuck, on a chapter, on a character’s next move, I’ll have a
destination in mind to clear my head. It’s usually the waterfront around
sunset. But I always take a roundabout way, on some sort of open-ended
scavenger hunt. Sometimes I’ll take photos on my phone, or collect found
objects for my desk. It depends on whether I’m feeling visual or more tactile.
I’ll bring a journal to record interesting details: a biker’s shadow on the
side of a bridge, milkweed bursting out of an abandoned lot, spray painted
rocks, the different languages I’m hearing. I’m very multimedia as a visual
artist, and writing is no different for me. I’ll collage photos in my journal,
arrange the found objects on my writing desk, and create a visual catalog of
inspiration when crafting a story. By forcing myself to observe and be intimate
with my everyday surroundings, I witness the familiar in a new way. By the time
I get to the waterfront, I have a whole bevy of images to get me back into my
work. I can meditate and see the city staring back at me, muted by the sunlit
water.”
—Tanwi Nandini Islam, author of Bright Lines (Penguin
Books, 2015)
posted 8.20.15
“I
haven’t found any particular thing to be a consistently reliable source of
inspiration. If there’s any consistency, it’s that it’s always something
different. With Gainesville (Atticus Books, 2013), I listened
to “Honey Hi”
by Fleetwood Mac on repeat. I wrote every word of that story to that song. WithHaints Stay,
it was the band Earth and the soundtrack to There Will Be Blood.
With the book I’m working on now, I’ve been watching scenes fromPunch Drunk
Love out of order, and—but in order—An Autumn Afternoon directed
by Yasujirō Ozu. When I find something that works, I stay with it until it
stops working. But if something works for a particular project, I can’t ever
return to it—it becomes too closely associated with that project. I don’t want
any of my books to feel too much like any other, so I force myself to accept
the frustration and fear of not knowing what’s going to click when. That might
be the thing I revisit the most: a voice in my head (or a recording, or an
alarm clock) programmed to remind me to be patient, no matter how many times I
fail.”
—Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay (Two Dollar
Radio, 2015)
posted 8.06.15
“I
went to see the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel The Hours (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) in
2002. Sitting alone in the dark, I heard the opening notes of Philip Glass
while I followed Virginia Woolf to the river, and I wept, not at Woolf’s
urgency, but at the score. In the liner notes of the soundtrack Cunningham explains, ‘Glass
and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether
literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly
delineated, and more true to life.’ He continues, ‘For me, Glass can find in
three repeated notes something of the strange rapture of sameness.… We are
creatures who repeat ourselves, we humans, and if we refuse to embrace
repetition—if we balk at art that seeks to praise its textures and rhythms, its
endless subtle variations—we ignore much of what we mean by life itself.’ These
qualities—continuation, meditation, and repetition—are all qualities I work
toward in my writing and the reason I often write to the soundtrack of The
Hours. The compression and articulation of those three notes churning, ever
churning, helps me to play such variations in my essays, so much so that I feel
I write best when I write inside Glass’s notes.”
—Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t (Soft Skull
Press, 2015)
posted 7.30.15
“While
finishing Summerlong, I found myself in perhaps the bleakest
emotional landscape of my life, negotiating a blindsiding divorce with my wife
of seventeen years. While my therapist and well-intentioned friends suggested I
do happy things, I knew my work-in-progress required me to go into the darkness
that self-help wisdom told me to avoid. Always exhausted and sleep-deprived,
and on more than one occasion hung over, I would wake up from terrible
nightmares each morning, get the kids off to school, then get the dog from his
kennel, and wander the timber and pastures behind my house. In those months, I
listened to one song on perpetual repeat, “RE: Stacks,”
off of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. Very often tears fell down
my face when Justin Veron’s plaintive falsetto finally asked, “Whatever could
it be. That has brought me to this loss?” Every morning that song destroyed me
a little more than I was already destroyed, and put me even deeper into the
terrifying darkness. I would come back to the empty house, feed the dog, brew
the coffee, and with lines like, “This is not the sound of a new man or crispy
realization,” echoing in my head, I could stay in that sad space until well after
lunch, working at my desk, reworking a book that had become unintentionally
autobiographical. Somehow, it made a huge difference to me that another artist,
also in the deepening cold of the rural Midwest, had felt the same kind of
heartbreak I was feeling and had made something beautiful out of it.”
—Dean Bakopoulos, author of Summerlong (Ecco, 2015)
posted 7.23.15
“The
logistical aspects of writing—figuring out how a character gets from point A to
point B, or how two plotlines intersect—can spur anxiousness in me that leads
to hours of avoidance. When I get to sections like these, I try to cook or bake
something. I was not a frequent cook before beginning my novel The
Turner House, a book with multiple storylines and over a dozen characters,
but cooking has now become integral to me staying sane while working out the
nuts and bolts of a narrative. When I’m deep into a writing problem with no
easy solution, making a meal is a way for me to guarantee that I complete at
least one task from start to finish each day. The improvisation that comes with
making a sauce or substituting ingredients ensures that I’m still using the
creative parts of my brain. On the other hand, I enjoy baking because of its
precision: I plug in the right ingredients, set the oven to the right
temperature, and magic happens (usually) without fail. I can knead dough and
think about my characters, whip eggs and work out point of view shifts. Eating
is also a happy bonus.”
—Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)
posted 7.16.15
“The
great chess and martial arts champion Josh Waitzkin talks about ‘stress and
recovery’ in his book The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal
Performance (Free Press, 2007). I think this theory of balance can
help a writer as much as it helps an athlete. I tried to convert the ‘stress’
phase of writing into a ritual: wake up at eight, drink a cup of coffee, eat a
bowl of yogurt, start working. I found the experience of being in the
middle of a novel so uncomfortable—so much like treading water halfway across a
river—I wanted to get to the other shore as fast as possible. So I wrote a
thousand words a day. Keeping this pace helped me finish a draft which
gave me something I could hold on to and show people for comments, and then
rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I needed to embrace the stress of the work, so
that I could get something done, but equally essential was embracing recovery.
That’s where delight comes in handy. It’s crucial to know what brings you
delight: whether it’s the view out a certain window, a Ciara music video, gooey
pizza, or exchanging bitmojis with a friend. Take care of yourself, so you can
stare down the next day's stress. That's the only way the cycle works.”
—Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night (Bloomsbury,
2015)
posted 7.09.15
“I
am a cultural carnivore, a dually satisfying and frustrating way to be in New
York City, where a clone would be useful to see all the art, plays, films,
music, and dance that I would otherwise miss. A brief but eye-opening stint
working at the Studio Museum in Harlem exposed me to the work of artists from
around the African diaspora. I’ve had the good fortune of working with an
incredible crew of visual artists recently. Sheena Rose is
the dynamic Barbadian artist whose work appears on the cover of
my debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill. I am working on a
screenplay adaptation of my short story, 'Ladies,' in collaboration with
Barbadian filmmaker Lisa Harewood. Simone Leigh is
a sculptor whose Tilton Gallery show, 'Moulting,' still haunts me. I wrote an
essay for Waiting Room magazine as part of Leigh’s Creative
Time project, the Free People’s Medical Clinic. I loved appearing in Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s performance art piece in Austin, Texas, one hundred
black women, one hundred actions; I regularly look to Ogunji’s gorgeous,
ethereal works on paper for inspiration. My partner,Lola Flash,
aside from being a renowned portrait photographer featured in the film Through
a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of the People,
captured my headshot as well as my book launch—she is the only photographer who
can get me to smile when I don’t feel like it. When the writing is
going slowly (or even when it’s going well), I recommend getting your head out
of a book and into another art form.”
—Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill (Penguin
Press, 2015)
posted 7.02.15
“Whenever
I get stuck writing a scene I like to talk it out with someone. Sitting alone
for too long with a plot problem or character issue can drive you crazy. But if
you talk about it with a friend, any friend—they don't have to be a writer or a
reader—and say, ‘Here's where I'm at. What do you think if I do this?’ I find
it helps. They might not have the perfect solution or suggestion, but the
process of talking about it often makes you think about the issue in a
different way. Sometimes they share a great anecdote about something else that
applies. When I was working on The Lovers (Ecco, 2010), I was
talking to a friend of a friend, and this friend shared an anecdote that I
immediately knew I wanted to use in the book. As soon as he'd finished relaying
it to me I asked him, ‘Are you a writer?’ ‘Oh God, no,’ he said. And I said,
‘Good. Because I'm totally going to use what you just told me in a scene.’ So I
guess my recommendation boils down to this: Don't spend too much time alone.”
—Vendela Vida, author of The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (Harper
Collins, 2015)
posted 6.25.15
“Write
hungry. This is not to say that writing while full can't be its own version of
wonderful, your body so saturated with almond paste cookies, bourbon, or love
that the words fall from you like overripe fruit. But on my best writing days,
I come to the page as soon as I wake, uncluttered by the business of living,
unburdened by Facebook or e-mail or even oatmeal. I get a cup of coffee and sit
before my laptop. This simple act transforms my body into a receptive vessel,
one tuned into the scent of coffee and the thoughts and images pooling just
under the surface of things. If you’re a channel when you write (and you are),
emptiness can clear the static. And it need not be the gut that's empty. Listen
to a song from high school. Remember a place that was once home. Look into the
face of an old photograph. Hunger. I spend most of my life avoiding it, but for
writing, it has a place. Not so much that it distracts, but enough so that my
senses are sharpened and space is made for the words to come, simple and true.”
—Sonja Livingston, author of Queen of the Fall (University
of Nebraska Press, 2015)
posted 6.18.15
“It
starts with a step. Followed by another. I am running, and I am caught up in my
creaky knee, sore lower back and the detritus of the day—check requests, press
releases, my children, dumb fights, and bills. Much of the time when I am
running it is along the lakefront in Chicago, enjoying the headwind that runs
both north and south, and doing so year-round—some days with small chunks of
ice clinging to my eyebrows, and other days melting in the mid-day heat.
Sometimes I've been flying late the evening before, working all day without a
break, or my kids haven't been sleeping, and I'm just not sure I'm into it. But
soon, there is that first step. Then another. All the detritus from the day
starts to slip away. There is inspiration, flow and words. The night sky might
speak to me as I find myself wondering what's out there and what I might say
about it. Or, I'm reminded of a trip with my family, and I will recall a snatch
of conversation, an argument, something about my father or a memory from
childhood. Maybe my achy knee prompts me to ruminate on pain, and aging, and
the lack of grace that accompanies it. With each step I begin to sort things
out. I see the kernels of a story connect, and unwrap, and build upon
themselves. I picture the characters. I feel their confusion. I hear their
dialogue. And then at some point I stop, and I write, and it is
glorious.”
—Ben Tanzer, author of The New York Stories (Chicago
Center for Literature and Photography, 2015)
posted 6.11.15
“Most
of my friends know—and enjoy mocking me about the fact—that I’m a Mets baseball
fan. There is something about baseball I find very conducive to creative
thinking—it occupies the eyes but not the mind, its slow pace leaving plenty of
room for daydreaming. Back when I used to have a television, I’d sometimes turn
on a baseball game and sit on the couch to write. Now that I live in Queens,
I’ve occasionally taken the 7 train out to Citi Field, where I’ve sat with a
notebook in my lap and watched the game. I’ve written a little, but thought a
lot, and find that the more I can organize a story in my head, the less
writer’s block I encounter when I finally do put pen to paper. Even when I’m
just writing at the library, I often wear my Mets cap (a writing buddy calls it
my ‘thinking cap’) as a way of channeling the feeling of being at the ballpark.
I've also been known to wander my apartment with a baseball mitt, dropping ball
into glove absentmindedly—the mind is, of course, somewhere else, and that’s
the best part.”
—Sara Nović, author of Girl at War (Random
House, 2015)
posted 6.04.15
“Above
all else, I consider writing to be an active art of questioning, and so any
sense of ‘stuckness’ I might experience generally means I haven’t yet
identified the heart of what I’m exploring. Recently, I had the opportunity to
hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak, and he encouraged a whole room full of people to
push harder on the conclusions they’ve drawn, no matter how careful their
considerations. Ask why, he implored: why he did that, why she
said that, why a whole group of people feels or acts or thinks that way. Trace
causation one level further. He was speaking specifically to the Baltimore
riots, but speaking, as well, to process, to intent, to the larger goals we lay
out for ourselves when we go about our work. When I feel stuck, I invigorate
that sense of inquiry through immersion into a world that is markedly not my
own—I navigate to the Feynman Series’ ‘Beauty’ episode. Just three minutes long, and
yet this clip—pulled from Richard Feynman’s ‘Doubt and Ask’ lecture—renews this
sense of the universe’s bigness, of my own woeful smallness, of the importance
of doubting, of asking. ‘I can live,’ he states beautifully, ‘with doubt and
uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not
knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers,
and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different
things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I
don’t know anything about.’ That reminder, to me, necessitates frequency.”
—Amy Butcher, author of Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship
and Murder (Blue Rider Press, 2015)
posted 5.28.15
“My
dog—a fifty pound wiggle machine of a rescued pit bull named Gracie—is the
thing that keeps me from losing it when I run into rough patches where the
words stop flowing or the open document starts to look like a mess of
hieroglyphs. There is something amazing about being responsible for the care of
an animal that gives back nothing but love without any kind of ask in return.
Gracie helps me manage my day: early walk before I even turn on the computer,
mid-day walk around the time I am starting to wonder if I even know how to
construct a cogent sentence, early evening walk when the words are all starting
to blur and I know it’s time to save whatever I am working on and go be a part
of the world. Sometimes when things get really hairy and I can’t articulate
anything at all, I like to get down on the floor with her and put my head on
her ribs to listen to her heart and feel her breathing. It’s an auto-reset for
me.”
—Sean H. Doyle, author of This Must Be the Place (Civil
Coping Mechanisms, 2015)
posted 5.21.15
“I
recommend overstimulation. If it’s too quiet, I find it’s hard to hear my
voice. When I write, I overwhelm myself: The TV’s on in the background playing
a movie or a reality show, I’m listening to music, I’m texting five friends,
the window’s open and I’m eavesdropping on the conversations and arguments on my
Bed-Stuy street below, the coffee table is stacked with books—art books, poetry
collections, essays. Because I don’t know what stimulus will jumpstart a poem,
which voice or atmosphere will turn me on, I douse myself in all of them at
once. I’m endlessly curious (read: nosy), and approach my writing as an
ethnographer: observing the behaviors, languages, impulses, and rituals of
other people and myself. I take furious notes wherever I am, recording
observations and thoughts. I hoard and collect. That’s how I compose
poems—getting full on everything. Revision and rewriting I do in silence and
without distraction. That’s when I read the poem out loud to find its music,
sift through the other voices and tongues to find the poem’s original voice: a
kind of collaged Frankenstein or melting pot. The poem’s energy comes from
outside stimuli, allowing its own voice to be thrust up to the surface.”
—Morgan Parker, author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me up at
Night (Switchback Books, 2015)
posted 5.14.15
"Troop
117, Verdugo Hills Council, Southern California: We were a uniforms untucked,
let’s-see-what-else-we-can-burn bunch. And so we had a lot of trouble on
multi-day hikes. Someone would start breakfast, someone would kick it over, a
tent would collapse, and then it was 10:00 AM with the day’s worst heat rising,
and we had made no progress. So we developed a new system: up early, strike
camp, no breakfast until an hour up the trail. The important thing—more
important than being entirely ready or even sure of your destination—is to get
underway. I relearned this, years later, as a writer. Early on, I realized my
first novel, The Cloud Atlas (Delacorte Press, 2004), would
require a lot of research. But the more I did, the fewer pages I wrote, and I
thought: I need to get underway. (I also thought about burning what I had, but
that’s a less helpful scouting lesson.) So I wrote as much as I could, then
stopped, researched, and wrote more, stopping again whenever I ran out of fuel.
It’s not a foolproof method for scouts or writers: You forget things when you’re
moving fast; you occasionally stumble. But it can work, and for me, it’s
necessary. I need to see the pages pile up behind me, whether it’s a novel, or
most recently, stories. Unlike my scouting days, I know I can go back later and
fix what went wrong. Also unlike my scouting days, and necessary: coffee."
—Liam Callanan, author of Listen & Other Stories (Four
Way Books, 2015)
posted 5.07.15
“I’m
a big believer in snacking for inspiration. When I’m really struggling with a
piece of writing, I get up and make myself a snack. I don’t mean something
healthy or practical. I mean a treat that is pleasurable. Like a tablespoon of
almond butter with a teaspoon of raspberry jam dropped on top, eaten off the
spoon. While I’m standing in my kitchen, relishing my little morsel, I
seriously apply myself to solving my current writing quandary. Away from the
hard edges of my desk and my computer, and the lines of prose on the page, I
get caught up by the pleasure of problem solving, which for me is also the
pleasure of writing. Often enough to justify my indulgence, I solve my problem
in these moments, or at least find a solution I can try out. After more than
two decades of workshops and classes, and reading essays and books on writing,
seeking secrets and tips related to the craft, I find myself more often these
days considering my favorite writers’ habits. And as I do, I wonder: ‘But what
do they snack on when they write?’”
—Sarah Tomlinson, author of Good Girl (Gallery Books,
2015)
posted 4.30.15
“Writing
things down can be dangerous. If I sit at the desk without a clear idea of what
I want to say, I can get into all sorts of trouble. I love the physical act of
writing, like a kid who's just learned to whistle loves whistling, and before I
know it, I can generate pages of prose. Hours (days) can be wasted on a story
that ends up trying to beat a path through an increasingly thick jungle of
possibilities, dead ends, and pitfalls. I've learned it's better to stalk the
story down in my head first. Over a period of months, often longer, I try to
build the story block by block until it feels right. Then I write it down as if
I'm remembering it. That process is quick and intense. It's about getting the
story onto the page as clearly and strongly as I can. The balancing and testing
of that initial writing happens afterwards, and I try to trust the instinct
that made me put the words down in the first place. The process as a whole
takes a long time, even if the actual 'writing down' itself doesn't. I've
learned to have patience with the process, and to be patient when the writing
is only happening in my head.”
—Cynan Jones, author of The Dig (Coffee House
Press, 2015)
posted 4.23.15
“I
think the most valuable resource for writing is confidence, since everything
from the vagaries of publishing to writing itself can wear you down. When you
are writing, you are so in your own head that it can be hard to know if the
work is brilliant or a failure, but you have to put aside those doubts. One of
my secrets to maintaining confidence is a yearly viewing of Tim Burton’s 1994
biopic Ed Wood. As a director in the 1950s, Ed Wood was the
ultimate outsider. He made movies with zero budgets that were deeply personal,
strange, and completely ignored. But his films last, even beyond camp value,
because his lunatic bravery comes through every badly framed scene. Ed
Wood is my Rocky and damn if the scene where Johnny
Depp takes control of a film set while wearing an angora sweater isn’t more
stirring than Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art. Deluding yourself is part of finishing a novel and if ever you have
doubt, remember Ed Wood at the premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space:
‘This is the one. This is the one I’ll be remembered for.’”
—Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes (Thomas Dunne
Books, 2015)
posted 4.15.15
“I’ve
told my students in the past that writing is 90 percent procrastination. Very
little of it involves actually sitting at a computer or scratching letters into
a notebook; the thinking part comprises the majority of the work. Embracing
that principle has kept me from going cross-eyed while frowning into the blue
screen of an empty Microsoft Word document at 4:00 AM in an attempt to will
some compelling character or situation to leap into life. It always helps to
have a plan before you sit down and wrack your brain. But if you find yourself
in such a jam, go do anything else. Take a walk. Exercise. Go sit in a café and
watch people. Sketch. Write longhand on paper if you normally use a computer,
and vice versa. If you become particularly blocked, consider doing something
you would never do. Not something you hate, just choose an activity
that you wouldn’t normally think to try: Go to an event you wouldn’t usually
bother with. Get outside of yourself and your routine a little. In the
past, I’ve taken a commuter train to a town I’d never visited before, and I
once went on a birdwatching tour of New York’s East River in a ferry. From the
water, I saw the city utterly transformed, full of new possibilities.”
—James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods (Little,
Brown, 2015)
posted 4.09.15
“Temperamentally,
I set great store by orderliness for inspiration. I like a clean kitchen, a
well-made bed, and a tidy desk before I start writing. Sometimes the
orderliness gets sinister—not only because of the oft-made charge of
procrastination, but also because once everything is collected, clean, and
cheerful, a space suddenly appears for the spirit to wilt, the intelligence to
become disenchanted. But philosophically, I tend to hold to it. As Gustave
Flaubert advises: ‘Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a
bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.’ I write in
bursts, and the rest of the time I’m filling the well. I read widely, deeply,
and indiscriminately. I watch lots of movies, I clean, I feel at the mercy of
my longings (though I take notes), I listen to music, I daydream, I make lists,
but mostly I read. Suddenly I’ll want to be clear about something, and then I
know I’m itching to write. Part of being well-ordered for me is simply to wake
up very early, make the coffee (I enjoy this so much), and stay at my desk
until I feel a little freedom from vagueness.”
—Sandra Lim, author of The Wilderness (Norton, 2014)
posted 4.02.15
“Look,
I’m far from military material. Undisciplined, hate authority, my
ethics—perverted. But there is one military tenant I can and do get behind
every time I sit down to write, and you probably know it already: ‘Embrace the
suck.’ It’s going to suck, you guys. Big time. The sooner you accept that and
get on with it anyway, the sooner you’re done. Why prolong your own suffering?
Instead, treat it like a job. And that is trick number one: Buy a time clock.
Although a bit noisy, I like the old school ones with the punch cards. Put your
hours in. Two or three hours a day, whether you feel like it or not. And now
that I’ve got you working, do what I do when I’m working: avoid working. Kind
of. For whatever reason, writing a personal e-mail is infinitely less
intimidating than a page of prose. Sometimes—when I get and stay stuck—I take
some pressure off by opening up an e-mail window and writing in there instead.
It helps me to think there’s less at stake. If that doesn’t do it, I change locations:
desk to kitchen table, kitchen table to couch, couch to closet. I really like a
dark, enclosed space. Something about it lends itself to daydreaming.”
—Matt Sumell, author of Making Nice (Henry Holt, 2015)
ocess.
posted 3.26.15
“If
you were to glance over the chaos across my desk—inkless pens, paperbacks, an
infant toothbrush—you might miss the object I count most valuable: a plastic
rainbow-colored slinky. For years, whenever I found myself blocked, I’d pick up
the slinky and toss it from hand to hand while walking in circles around my room.
Maybe it’s the repetition of the sound, the shuffling of springs, but my mind
burrows inside the world I’m building, unobliged to form an elegant sentence. I
like elegant sentences, but my initial attempts are almost always doomed. So
instead, I begin by thinking about characters, moving with them through a maze
of what-ifs. Situations unfold, a left turn takes me by
surprise. I don’t enjoy the same focus when I go for a walk outside; my
imagination seems to work better within tighter physical boundaries. I realize
that my attachment to the slinky is two parts Pavlovian and one part
superstition, but there’s a whole lot of mystery where writing is concerned.
Maybe engaging in a certain kind of physical activity—meditative, yet
constrained—helps to quiet the traffic moving round my brain, to open a way
forward. Or maybe it’s the magic of the slinky.”
—Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf,
2015)
posted 3.19.15
“Above
my desk, some talismans: ‘The Floor Scrapers’ by Gustave Caillebotte. I saw
it when I was fourteen at the Musee D’Dorsay. The play of light on the floor
got my attention, then it kept opening: What are the two on the right saying?
Whose apartment is it, and will the people who live there feel the presence of
this work when it’s done? Regardless, here are occupied bodies on a given day.
Here is sweat and companionship, craftsmanship, dedication, destruction,
rehabilitation. Attention to detail. Getting the job done. Next, an old
photograph of anonymous huddled masses, disembarking from steerage in New York
City in the early-twentieth century. Ancestors are like celebrities: They don’t
know me, can only imagine me, but I know them, or want to think I do. My
existence is in conversation with theirs. Then, a drawing from Orli Auslander’s
‘I Feel Bad’ series: ‘I Insist It’s Not PMS,’ which reminds me to laugh at
myself, because if you can laugh at yourself, life and work will be joyful.
Finally, a picture of my husband holding our son. Stare at these things for a
while, or fail to see them because they’re always there. Some days, recognition
and renewal. Some days, blindness. Regardless, onward: I have work to do. Lucky
me.”
—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2015)
posted 3.12.15
“My
reality consists of full-time work, parenting, family, friends, and a laptop
full of clients. When to write? One shift I made was to identify my ‘golden
hour,’ the most conducive time of day for creative risk-taking, making, and
doing. My husband is a night owl, but for me, it’s 4:00 AM to 6:00 AM.
Everyone’s asleep, I’m freshly energized and not yet cluttered with the day’s
noise. I make a list of no more than three goals to focus on so I can hit the
ground running and make the most of it. I safeguard it from distraction or
external requests, and show up adequately fed, with childcare covered. Outside
of the ‘golden hour,’ I feed my writing with weekly self-care (zumba and yoga) and
centering practices like chanting and meditation to help me prioritize playful
messy progress over perfection. I obsessively watch modern dance (Pina)
and choreography videos (Yanis Marshall, Jabbawockeez!)
to observe how ordinary movements are deconstructed and reinterpreted into
deliberate forms and primal gestures. But nothing beats the act of encouraging
another human being: picking up the phone, or even better, meeting face to face
over tea and cookies. Encouraging someone is how we exercise our most important
assets: paying attention, listening, telling stories, braving the front lines
of human struggle, and participating in shared vulnerability.”
—Monica Ong, author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press,
2015)
posted 3.05.15
“Years
ago, a friend told me that she thinks of writer’s block as ‘fallow time,’ the
season the farmer leaves the field unsown so that crops can grow more
productively (I’m a city girl; I had to look it up). I’ve had some long fallow
seasons—months, years—when I haven’t been able to start the story that’s
burning inside of me. In retrospect, I realize that I wasn’t ready. But a
writer has to write. So how do you start again after an extended dormant
period? These strategies have worked for me: Try this prompt. Have
your character reveal a secret she’s never told anybody before. The two-page
secret I wrote a year ago won’t be in my book, but it got me started; I’m three
hundred pages in. Invent deadlines. Mine have included: I must
finish this essay by four o’clock today; I’ve promised to send a new piece to
my writers group next week. Go out and be with nature. I live in
New York City, where we are chronically nature-deprived. I’m lucky to live near
Central Park. I have a favorite spot, overlooking the lake. It looks like the
Adirondacks, with loads of wildlife and no traffic noise. Being there wakes up
my imagination and makes me happy. Squelch your inner critic. If
you have trouble, read and reread Anne Lamott’sBird by Bird (Anchor,
1995), for her profound and hilariously funny take on doing battle with that
self-judging voice. I keep the book permanently on my bedside table.”
—Alice Eve Cohen, author of The Year My Mother Came Back (Algonquin,
2015)
posted 2.26.15
“At
some point I realized that I’m incapable of writing poems unless someone forces
me to do it. Revising is easier for me; it can happen even against my better
judgment as soon as I open a document. But someone’s got to make me do
that first act of writing—I have to feel accountable to real, meat-and-blood
people other than myself to make it happen. So I write most of my first drafts
as part of a poem-a-day challenge. Once in the winter and once in the summer, I
send an e-mail to about a hundred poets I know—some old classmates, some former
students, some colleagues, some
people-I-got-drunk-with-once-and-am-pretty-sure-I-might-have-liked—and I
convince about twenty of them to try to write a poem every day for a month.
Then they must send that daily poem to every other participant,
silently-yet-relentlessly pass judgment on everyone who misses a day, and
adhere to the following set of absurdly rigid rules: 1. First drafts only! The
entire poem needs to have been written that day. 2. No disclaimers! Just send
the poem and don’t qualify or apologize for it. This isn’t about writing ‘good’
poems, it’s just about getting it done. 3. For the same reason, no commenting!
Positive, negative, it doesn’t matter—you can’t say one damn word about anyone
else’s poem, ever. 4. No pre-writing! You can’t say, ‘Here’s my poem for today
and for tomorrow, too!’ And that’s how it goes. Half of us quit halfway
through, but we all write more poems than we would have otherwise, and that’s
all that matters.”
—Sean Bishop, author of The Night We’re Not Sleeping in (Sarabande
Books, 2014)
posted 2.19.15
“In
order to start writing, I need to put myself in a receptive state of mind,
which isn't easy when you're busy: ‘Stop, look, and listen,’ as they used to
tell school kids crossing the street. It might just mean sitting in a different
place, taking my notebook out into my garden or to a street café. The trick
(for me) is to be patiently receptive without turning off my critical
faculties. Sometimes I take a more active approach and turn to reading for
stimulation. In that case, I tend to prefer certain kinds of nonfiction. Right
now I'm reading Life on the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology (Bantam
Press, 2014). Three new poems have begun with something I drew from that book
in the last month. I'll read other poets, too, but generally only when I'm
revising.”
—Rae Armantrout, author of Itself (Wesleyan University
Press, 2015)
posted 2.12.15
“I
find that I generate new material via a two-step process. In the morning, I
will sit my butt in the chair as close to 9:00 AM as possible. I’ve even
contemplated purchasing one of those old punch clocks. Showing up every day is
key. I’ll usually bang away all morning. When I’m working on a first draft,
what I call 'fresh tracks,' the writing is inevitably bad. I used to be
horrified by this and would immediately go back and try to improve it. I’ve
learned over time to just let it lie, to be comfortable with the messiness.
When I get hungry enough that I can’t see out of my left eye, I’ll go make myself
a sandwich. Then comes the most important part of the day: I’ll take a run in
the afternoon, around 4:00 PM. I won’t bring my headphones. And it is during
the course of that run—as I move across the landscape, as I breathe, as the
blood moves through my veins, as my muscles contract, as the pores open—that I
begin to digest what I threw down on the canvas in the morning. I don’t try too
hard. I just let my brain marinate on it. The Japanese call this kind of
movement and reflection a 'brain bath.' These little connections begin to form
and often about twenty minutes in, I’ll stumble upon some revelation and
realize what I was actually trying to say. And I’ll run straight back to my
office and make some notes. The next morning, I rake the soil and start again.”
—Reif Larsen, author of I Am Radar (Penguin Press,
2015)
posted 2.05.15
"Though
it may seem counterintuitive, I find that one way to keep from getting stuck or
to find inspiration and new directions for my essays is to write with handcuffs
on. Not real handcuffs. That would be weird. But I give myself constraints or
limits, and in the case of several of my essays inUltrasonic, these took
the form of language, or specific words that served to narrow the focus of my
writing. Focus, for me, is always a challenge, and these constraints became a
way to harness my mind's tendency to ramble and digress. I have one essay where
every section is either about 'blue' or 'noise' in some way, and another where
each section is either about 'crown' or 'shoulder.' Every time I sat down to
write, the constraint gave me a starting place and an assignment, a challenge
to try and find a new way of looking at or thinking about the subject. I found
that this led to all sorts of exciting discoveries—in terms of etymology,
history, and metaphorical resonance—and for personal material that had
otherwise been buried."
—Steven Church, author of Ultrasonic (Lavender Ink,
2014)
posted 1.29.15
“When
I’m feeling dazed and spent, and perhaps even a bit self-pitying, I turn my
attention to the gleeful nihilism of E. M. Cioran. Romanian by birth, and a
philosopher who wrote in French by choice, Cioran’s short paragraphs (he started
writing in short bursts after he quit smoking) are instant jolts out of the
narrowness of my own perceptions. He had a grand view of the senselessness and
absurdity we encounter every day of our lives. At the same time, there is a
dark humor bubbling around his writings, like a raging man who can’t stop
himself from laughing. My favorite passage in all of his writings is a section
in The Trouble With Being Born, where he tells us a story about
Pope Innocent IX who, while still healthy, commissioned a portrait of himself
on his deathbed. The Pope would look at the portrait of his dying self whenever
he was about to make an important decision. Cioran reminds us that there’s a
certain prickly solace in knowing it’s all going to end, and if we dig deeply
enough into the true meaning of it all, we can’t help but laugh.”
—Todd Colby, author of Splash State (The Song Cave,
2014)
posted 1.22.15
“I
will try anything to break through my own perfectionism and dull
literal-mindedness, my need to explain everything, my need to defend. I can be
a very slow writer, prone to fidgetiness and second-guesses. What I’ve found
helpful recently is to give myself the writing equivalent of stress tests. I’ve
never done NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but two summers ago I
attempted to write a novel in a week, aiming for 50,000 words and managing
35,000. This past Labor Day weekend, I tried to write a novel, a novella
really, one hundred pages or so, in three days, and succeeded. Results vary in
terms of the content thereby produced: I’m revising my three-day novella and
have generally positive feelings towards it, but I haven’t done anything
further with the 35,000-word draft from my week-long novel and don’t really
plan to. Regardless, after writing 10,000 words in a day, 2,000 becomes a much
calmer and more manageable thing. It helps to remind yourself that ultimately
you are only putting words on a page.”
—James Tadd Adcox, author of Does Not Love (Curbside
Splendor, 2014)
posted 1.15.15
“When
in doubt, channel your inner Fran Lebowitz. Obviously there’s a certain irony
in suggesting that the cure for writer’s block is to channel the person who’s
known for being among the most famously blocked writers of our time. But for
me, Fran Lebowitz is not just a personal cultural and literary hero. She’s a
kind of pacemaker for the brain. Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words or
ideas, I type her name into YouTube and select any one of dozens of videos in
which she holds forth on some subject or another. There’s Fran on young writers
(‘I have no interest in them.’), Fran on Jane Austen (‘I don’t think she’s
popular for the right reasons.’), Fran on work ethics (‘I am the most slothful
person you’ll probably ever meet.’) There are clips from the wonderful
documentary Martin Scorsese made about her in 2010 and from interviews with David
Letterman dating back as far as 1978. When I say Fran is a pacemaker, what I
mean is that she speaks with such total authority—with such an absence
of apology or hesitation or equivocation—that her voice lodges into my
head and helps me to stop apologizing and hesitating. Her confidence is
infectious. She reminds us that an author’s task, quite literally, is to
exercise authority. Of course, the ‘inner Fran Lebowitz’ doesn’t literally have
to be Fran Lebowitz. Everyone, if they’re lucky, has their own version of Fran,
someone whose voice and pulse are strong enough to jumpstart their own. The key
is in remembering to seek it out when you need it—in other words, giving
yourself permission to do something other than write. Which Fran, for one,
would approve of.”
—Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects
of Discussion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
posted 1.08.15
“Not
long ago, I chanced on an interview with Raymond Carver in which this early
hero of mine said: ‘I think it's important that a writer change... so when I
finish a book, I don't write anything for six months.’ The statement seemed
casual enough, matter of fact—minimalist, even. But after a lifetime of being
told that a real writer writes every day, no matter what, its effect on me was
maximal. I thought about the long unhappy period of not writing that followed a
novel I'd spent two years writing—working on it every day, no matter what—only
to have it go absolutely nowhere. When I finally began writing again, after far
more than Carver's six months, everything had changed—my tone, my language, my
intentions, even my process. Now, rather than working on the novel every day,
no matter what, I would work on it only when I knew I had the entire day to do
nothing else. Which is one reason it took me six years to finish it, because
there weren't a lot of those days. But I did finish, and the novel is unlike
anything I've written before—and I know that both of these outcomes are the
result of that long period of not writing. Leading me to wonder, more or less
calmly, as another day of not writing slips by: What kind of writer am I
becoming now?”
—Tim Johnston, author of Descent (Algonquin Books,
2015)
posted 12.30.14
“‘What
kind of beast would turn its life into words?’ Adrienne Rich asks inTwenty-One
Love Poems, referring to the being/observing duality of a writer’s life—the
persistent possibility of remove that turns the lived moment into ‘material.’ I
also think of this quotation as a direct challenge about the time allotted to
writing. If I spend hours fine-tuning phrases, reading and mulling and
assigning myself difficult exercises, or if I am going to wile away mornings,
evenings, and afternoons scribbling out my life, then I had better make the
absolute most of writing time—those moments hammering on keys or etching ink
across the page. Our duty and best possibility, I think, is to try. Edward
Hirsch—responding to a question about partisanship in the contemporary poetry
scene—once told me, ‘We need all of our poetries.’ I believe that assertion and
apply it both to my reading (Mary Ruefle, François Rabelais, C. D. Wright,
Countee Cullen, and Dante; books published by Wave, Copper Canyon, Bloof, and
Alice Blue) and my listening (Blue Oyster Cult, Blondie, Bob Marley, and Bach)
while struggling over sentences. I think that it’s best not to
know where a poem or essay might come from and, of course, not to anticipate
the next sudden swerve of where it might go. Cultivate possibility through a
willed variety of influences.”
—Tod Marshall, author of Bugle (Canarium Books, 2014)
posted 12.23.14
“I
often turn to poetry when I get stuck writing. Not far from where I write is an
at-hand stack of slim volumes that includes Olena Kalytiak Davis’s And
Her Soul Out of Nothing, Dana Levin’s In the Surgical Theatre,
Cynthia Cruz’s The Glimmering Room, August Kleinzahler’s Green
Sees Things in Waves, Christian Hawkey’s The Book of Funnels,
and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’sThe Orchard. I’ll open to a random poem and
more often than not—with these poets in particular—I have the sensation of
falling, and the thrill of that helps me stop overthinking my own writing. Sometimes
just one line or stanza will unlock a frozen idea in my mind. Honestly, The
Absolution of Robert Acestes Laing would have existed in a much more
broken form if it weren’t for these lines from Dana Levin’s poem ‘Silo’: ‘Will
you be pricked? Will you awake? / And move from this place / where the silo
dwarfs you, the years inside / its tyrannous shadow.’ Levin’s book falls open
to that poem, which carried me through the storm of dark thoughts that I willed
into existence, so that I could write the novel.”
—Nicholas Rombes, author of The Absolution of Robert Acestes
Laing (Two Dollar Radio, 2014)
posted 12.18.14
“I
never read when I get stuck, it doesn’t leave enough room to let the devil slip
in. Instead, I look to other forms for the methods to resolve art’s various
conundrums. Often music helps but, increasingly, I’m interested in photography
and the work of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, particularly. From
subversive beginnings, in pictures filled with explicit vulnerability and heady
life—I find the beautiful 'The Cock (kiss)' from 2002 intensely
affecting and often stare at it when grappling with problems connected to youth
and desire—to the silent concentration of his still lifes, the poignancy of his
airplanes and their vapor trails contrasting with the agoraphobia-inducing
astronomy pictures, the portraits which seem to offer the very essence of their
subject while somehow remaining private and impenetrable. The provocatively
humane work for homeless and AIDS charities, the abstract experiments with
light and color, as well as some of his more recent work which challenges and
interrogates the physical object of the photograph itself. The journey of
Tillmans’s work reminds me of James Joyce and his literary voyage from the
streets of Dublin to the dark heart of the world but, and most importantly, it
opens the gateways of understanding, as only great art can.”
—Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Coffee
House Press, 2014)
posted 12.11.14
“I
think poetry is—or should be—a staple of any fiction writer’s reading diet. It
doesn’t matter whether you ever intend to write any poems yourself. And it
doesn’t matter (much) whether you prefer classics, or contemporary, or
traditional, or experimental, or if you have no particular preference and can’t
tell the difference. Any poetry, more or less, will do. Poetry invites you to
read slowly and unpack all the different ways a sentence, or phrase, or single
word, can have meaning. And of course, those lessons are transferrable to every
other aspect of the writing life: the writing part, the prose-reading part, the
self-editing part, the teaching-of-writing part (also the pleasure and
edification parts). Lately I’ve been reading poetry in the morning, right after
I get up, while the water boils in the kettle, and then again while the coffee
steeps. There’s about ten, maybe twelve minutes of free time that accumulates
around those two parts of the coffee-making process that’s enough time to get
through two or three poems, or the same poem two or three times over. The
poems—and the smell of the coffee, and eventually the coffee itself—are my
bridge into wakefulness. In effect, the poems constitute the morning’s first
experience or event, and I find that this sets a salutary standard from which
to attempt the rest of my day. I read Derek Walcott’s White Egrets this
way, and swaths of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, which is a
phonebook—you’d never toss it in a backpack to take on the subway. So I leave
it out on the dining room table, and then every morning when I go out there,
there it is.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Flings (Harper Collins, 2014)
posted 12.05.14
“Show
up: at your desk, on the page. Show up often, show up with an open heart, show
up all hardcore and ready to work. But when you don't show up, when it's been
days and weeks and months and you haven't shown up, take a bath. By which I
mean: be kind, be gentle. Whatever you do, don't be an asshole to yourself.
Screaming at yourself will—at best—carry you through an hour, a day of work.
Ultimately, artistic journeys are about truth and self-discovery, and we can't
be truthful or discover ourselves when someone is yelling at us, even if (or
especially if) the yelling is taking place inside our own heads. But here's the
thing: We all live with an inner asshole and he isn't going anywhere. Which
means, we kind of have to learn how to become best friends. Take your inner
asshole out on a date. Go to your favorite gallery, spend two hours at a coffee
shop with a book, visit a spa—whichever act of kindness can shock your system.
When the date is over, ask, Hey, what do you need? Say, I'm
trying to write this story, this essay, this novel; is there
anything I can do that would make it possible to work tomorrow morning? Ask,
how can we do this together? When we're truly kind, something shifts
in us.”
—Shelly Oria, author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2014)
posted 11.26.14
“Choose
several literary rivals. These should be people you know. They should be people
you like, respect, and admire. They should be people who write at least a
little bit like you do. They should be more talented and successful than you
are. You probably already have some candidates in mind. You need to read each
thing they publish, find their weaknesses, and make a plan to succeed where
they fail. Find out what you can do that they can’t; build on that. Support
them, be their best readers, promote their work at every opportunity. Write
them fan mail. Start friendly arguments. Most important, never tell them that
you are their competitor. (If it’s working, they’ll know what you’re doing.
They’ll start doing it, too.) Work as hard as you can to supersede them, to
write something so beautiful that they become unnecessary. Who are my rivals?
They are my friends. They are the kindest people I know. Someday, I hope to
destroy them. Or failing that, to write a book that makes them weep.”
—Mike Meginnis, author of Fat Man and Little Boy (Black
Balloon Publishing, 2014)
posted 11.20.14
"I've
led a good life, but I've definitely not led a regretless life. There are
plenty of things I stopped myself from doing, people I stopped myself from
meeting, things I didn’t let myself say. But I made a promise when I started
writing my own fiction: I won't ever stop myself from writing something down.
And so, when I'm drafting, I always say, 'yes' to what my brain comes up with.
I cast aside nervousness. I never tell myself, 'Oh no, don't say that or say it
that way, that isn't smart/serious/good enough.' I just say it. Worrying about
that stuff—saying, 'no' to things—is for revision. And that is useful, too. But
drafting is the time for saying, 'yes.' It’s like hitching a ride with a tall,
dark, possibly dangerous stranger called your brain. And your brain drives the
car into a dense, dark wood with one road (you think) and the weak headlights
only illuminate what is right in front. You're alert and white knuckled in an
exhilarating way. The road turns and twists and roads appear on the left or
right and your brain follows them with a quick jerk, and then you're on a new
bumpy, dark road with only possibility in front of you. You just don't know
what is coming next and so you become a part of it. You let go and let your
brain surprise you. For me, that is what makes writing so alluring. The
realization that if I give up some control, I can go places I didn’t know
existed."
—Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature (Harper Collins,
2014)
posted 11.13.14
“When
I feel stuck, despondent, bored of my writing, I watch Richard Linklater and
Noah Baumbach movie trailers. Growing up, I despised movies. You could not get
me to sit down and watch a movie, commitment-phobe was I. But in the past few
years, I’ve become slowly obsessed with film. I’ve recently had a couple
friends tell me they hate movie trailers and don’t watch them. I understand
why—they can spoil the movie, they can be cheesy. But what I find fascinating
about movie trailers is how and why particular moments are chosen for them. I
like studying the way short scenes and small details are strung together, and a
certain tone is being evoked in a few, brief minutes. I’ll watch Baumbach’s
trailers for Frances Ha, The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg,
and Margot at the Wedding. Or I watch Linklater’s trailers
for Boyhood, Before Sunset, and Before
Sunrise. The trailers remind me how important microdetails, dialogue, and
tone are. They remind me that every single thing you put into your creative
work matters. That dialogue is incredibly powerful. Though I also
keep a stack of special books on my desk and read from them for inspiration, I
find it’s nice to take a break from the written word and watch writing come to
life through film. Plus, who doesn’t like to fantasize about their words coming
alive through film?”
—Chloe Caldwell, author of Women (Short Flight/Long
Drive Books, 2014)
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 11.06.14
“When
I was younger, it was dangerous to read fiction while writing it myself: Too
easily, I found myself slipping into other people's voices. I readThe Virgin
Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and wrote eighty pages of a terrible
knock-off. I adored Alice Munro's Open Secrets so much that I
set a story in northern Ontario, a place I had never been and knew little
about. I inhaled Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and promptly produced my own
version, complete with a visiting character who was deaf instead of blind.
Though I look back at these pieces with embarrassment, I also know each of them
had something to teach me. I learned through imitation, but it was only when I
followed—or found—my own voice that I was able to derive a different kind of
inspiration from reading fiction, something subtler and more expansive. Today,
when I reach a wall in my own work, I turn to authors I love to remind myself
what is possible: that sentence, that structure,
that daring twist of plot. Now that I have a surer sense of my own style and
interests, reading does not confine me to a particular approach. Instead, it
enlarges my understanding of what's possible, helping me to see beyond my own
habits. Reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
reminded me that a narrative arc can be made from smaller, impressionistic
pieces, that every stop on a character's journey need not be addressed. Tana
French's mysteries have shown me that language can be as propulsive as plot,
and Alice Munro's stories continue to widen my understanding of the way that
time can be handled within a short story—even if I no longer set my own in
Ontario."
—Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams (Atria
Books, 2014)
posted 10.30.14
“There's
a bit of hubris inherent in writing fiction—no one that I know of has ever been
plucked out of a math lecture and told, "No, no. You really should devote
more time to your writing. The world needs your impressions of thunderstorms."
So after you've announced your intentions to friends and family, there's a
moment of pause when you think: Maybe I'm... not vast; maybe I don't contain
multitudes. To me, this fear comes from that scoop of bad advice doled out to
every aspiring writer: Write about what you know. For some people that
works—there are some stories that just need to get out. Not surprisingly, this
writing often veers toward autobiography. But if you’re the kind of person who
rarely checks in with herself, who notices how everyone else in
the room is feeling rather than dwelling on self-analysis, this adage will mess
with you. My advice is to write about something you know nothing about,
and then get to know it intimately. Ten years ago I knew this novel involved
the Olympics, Ancient Greek, conceptual art, and Iceland—all things that I knew
absolutely nothing about. But I knew intuitively that this was the book. So I
took up a new sport, learned a dead language, sculpted a piece for the New
Museum, and traversed Iceland for two months. My writing begins by trusting
intuition fully, especially if it's intuition into something I know nothing
about. Learning excites me and pulls me through those rough early drafts. From
there, it's a lot of reading and whenever possible, doing the things I'm
writing about. Once I've actually re-enacted parts of the story, I can do the
fine-tuning necessary for a final draft.”
—Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (Harper,
2014)
posted 10.23.14
"After
a day of work in the grey cubicle farm on Michigan Avenue, coming home to work
on a novel can feel like an indulgence. It takes practice and patience to tune
out the snotty e-mail from a coworker that sent the office atwitter, or to
forget about the cockroaches that appeared one morning some months ago, first
in the hallway, then in the break room under the toaster. (How many times have
you toasted a bagel in that toaster?) The stresses multiply, and over time so
do the bugs. To write, I recommend a long walk or a hot shower. Boring tasks
activate the mind. Do the dishes. Deprive your body of external sensory
distractions, and let the mind wander. Stare at a blank wall. It can feel like
an indulgence to let go of the everyday shit show of your life, but sometimes
you've got to tune out to tune in to the practice of writing."
—Susan Hope Lanier, author of The Game We Play (Curbside
Splendor, 2014)
posted 10.16.14
"I
had to stop myself from reading 'Writing Habits of Famous Authors' articles.
Such glamorized routines create unrealistic expectations the same way beauty
magazines do for young women. The practice I'd recommend is refusing to compare
yourself to some manic pixie dream writer who is getting piles of rainbow
manuscript magic completed every day. Focus instead on the little victories:
Being willing to slog through hours and hours of research and writing without
much effect, only to have a burst of fantastic connection while in the shower.
Managing to stay off social media for a two hour stretch. Being kind to
yourself, without lying to yourself. Doing the work, without over-identifying
with the work. (I learned this last one through my day job as a mortician: If I
become emotionally involved with every dead body, every story, every family,
I’d be paralyzed and unable to do my job. This same concept applies to writing.
Don’t let yourself get too caught up.) If I’m able to accomplish any two, hell,
any one of these goals a day, I feel like I did all right...
even if no one will ever write a glowing viral article on my routines."
—Caitlin Doughty, author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other
Lessons From the Crematory(Norton, 2014)
posted 10.09.14
“The
balled up, impossible-to-unkink tangle of pain and joy that is family fuels a
great deal of my writing. The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz reminds us:
“When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” I never want my
writing to finish anything. Rather, I want it to start things. Engage. Power
conversations and questions. When I ignite the family drama in my poetry, I am
aware of its ability to burn. That danger is exciting and terrifying for me—a
challenge arises to see the poem form without censor, to be raw in the impulse
to polish it down. When I am in the space where I truly feel vulnerable and
surrender to the poem, the voice rises up.”
—Thomas Dooley, author of Trespass (Harper Perennial,
2014)
posted 10.02.14
"Reading,
at its best, is about getting inside someone else’s skin. Writing, for me, is
about getting further into mine. The novelist Max Frisch said of his own
writing: “What shocks me is rather the discovery that I have been concealing my
life from myself.” I write for that same discovery and it requires a sort of
soul-spelunking not always readily accessible. Sometimes the way is blocked.
When this happens I stop writing, and turn to music. I pick one record, put on
headphones, close my eyes, and listen. I do not pause. The fact that this seems
radical to some shows how distracted we are—forty-five minutes? Alone? No
computer? How frightening. Lately, my choice is John Coltrane’s Crescent,
from 1964, the studio record he made just before A Love Supreme. In
comparison, I find it a more ruminative record, and darker, more show than
tell. It does not come with a prayer, as does A Love Supreme. Not
that there’s anything wrong with prayer. In fact, it seems as good a word as
any to describeCrescent, which never fails to take me outside of
myself, even as I delve deeper, to those quiet, forgotten, foundational places
I forget about. Crescent is both guide and pack mule on a long
narrow road to the interior."
—Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles (Henry
Holt, 2014)
posted 9.25.14
“I’ll
write ten more then go to the falcon. The falcon is my code name for
Millennium Park in Chicago. I work across the street from it, and hide in it
regularly. I write product copy for a large retailer. I write about power tools
and mattresses, sometimes luggage. The volume is vast and comforting: an ocean
of words, bold headlines lapping placidly at the sand. It’s different from the
fiction I write, but not a competing force. They leak into each other at times,
and that’s okay. My visits to the falcon are a reward for pounding out volume,
but also a way to get out of my head—to stop using words to define and start
letting them radiate. An endless stream of people and languages filter through
the grounds. Clips of conversations and pregnant glances surround me. Toddlers
charge through Crown Fountain’s thin sluice, police officers on Segways whir
around sculptures, couples hold hands or look bored. All of this penetrates
through me and allows me to pull up more from within.”
—Ryan Kenealy, author of Animals in Peril (Curbside
Splendor, 2014)
posted 9.18.14
"Writing
is about getting to a place of deep mediation. The writer’s job is, at a
fundamental level, all about finding the habits that will get you
there—somehow. Human beings are, fortunately, trainable animals. We can train
ourselves, through habit, to access the parts of the mind that lead to great
creative work. Here are my three most repeated, most consistent writing
secrets: 1. Get dressed. This may seem obvious or unimportant (especially if
you work at home). And yet, what you wear is a statement of intention. If you
have lucky clothes, go put them on. Grab that pink bathrobe. Don your hat with
the moth holes and the bright, red feathers. You’re a writer. You’re encouraged
to look eccentric. 2. Return to your lucky place. When I have a good writing
day, I try to replicate it. Like a dog returning, again and again, to the place
where it’s been fed, I go back to the same coffee shops where I’ve had success.
Let your environment do some of the work for you. 3. Treat yourself. Yes, your
back hurts because you are sitting in a chair. Yes, writing can create great
cycles of angst in your life, and questions about money and art and time. But
remember, you are a trainable animal. You like treats. So maybe you can have
that eleven dollar kale salad, or that stack of sugar packets in your coffee,
or that long, solitary walk through the rain. Bribery works, so use it. And a
cautionary note: Since I don’t work at home, I often have to deal with
table-takers and delays. Sometimes rude people set up camp in my lucky chair or
at my lucky table. I have to glare at them with the steely eye of
disapprobation. But then I remember: Often times, this is exactly how a new
table is christened, and a new habit is born."
—Peyton Marshall, author of Goodhouse: A Novel (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2014)
posted 9.11.14
“I
recommend taking advice with a grain of low-sodium salt (better for your
heart), and being suspicious of anyone who makes writing seem too easy, too
hard, or too sexy. The reality is usually in the boring, nougat middle. Done
correctly, writing looks like a person staring at a table. Many instructors
advise to ‘sit in the chair’ each day. Remember the ‘chair’ can be the commuter
train or the washing machine as your kid’s clothes dry. Or a doorpost you’re
leaning against in the break room, smoking a Marlboro Light while counting
tips, which is how I thought of the superheroes in my story ‘Great, Wondrous.’
In hindsight, I guess that was pretty sexy. I recommend
rereading a work you think is perfect. I recommend going outside. I recommend
going easy on yourself. Everyone worth their (low-sodium) salt has days when
they think they’re doing it wrong. Please remember there are as many different
ways to be a writer as there are writers.”
—Marie-Helene Bertino, author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas (Crown,
2014)
posted 9.04.14
“First
of all, it's okay not to write. Most writers are highly
disciplined, equipped with a demanding, inner CEO. We tie our identities, our
sense of worth, and our happiness to writing well. Not writing
feels terrible, unless you consider that it too is part of the process. The
muse is sly. Sometimes she goes into hiding. I've learned to accept that
silence can be a kind of productivity. Loaf with yourself, to
paraphrase Whitman. If you cannot relax, move on to another project or another
genre. Teach yourself how to simply play with words; it’s time
for recess and no one's grading. When writing essays, I juggle several pieces
at once. There's the mountain essay, the water essay, the one about wind. I
keep all three windows open on my computer and dash between them. In poetry, I
start with description, plant my chair on the lawn, taking in what’s there. Or
if nothing comes, my never-fail exercise is what I call “negative inversions.”
First, copy out a short, simple poem on the left side of your blank book.
Charles Simic, Kay Ryan, W. S. Merwin, all work well for this. Then, on the
right page, write the rough opposite of the first line, then the second, and so
on. Sky may become earth, earth may translate to moon, lime to fire red.
Gradually, I’ll find my poem, hidden inside the original.”
—Sarah Gorham, author of Study in Perfect (University
of Georgia Press, 2014)
process.
posted 8.28.14
“I’m
a doodler. This has never gone over well. In high school, it convinced teachers
I wasn’t really listening, and in my various jobs over the years, it has
convinced bosses that some part of me is still in high school. Which is true,
obviously, but that’s hardly the point. The point is knowing what works for
you. The thing is, I think better when I’m dragging a pencil across the paper.
I always have. And with fiction, doodling is my way back into the story.
Sometimes when I’m stuck with words, I’ll start fixating on something small
that I know is somewhere in the scene at hand: a key ring, a toy car, a
crumpled phone number written on a wrapper. I will shade and erase and refine,
and I know it is working when I start seeing the lines before I’ve drawn them—a
light trace on top of the paper that I know can’t really be there but I follow
like faith. Soon enough, the words will start coming: snatches of dialogue, a
single sentence that has to be written down. And even if it’s just the smallest
bit, I know that it’s something I can come back to and fill in, something that will
get clearer and more defined with every pass.”
—Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random
House, 2014)
posted 8.21.14
“Over
the last seven years, as I have worked to write and revise my first book and
then claw a second one out of my gut, I’ve heard too many times that any
successful writing practice will involve a minimum daily word count, good and
round, or a slavish devotion to page and screen, no matter the quality of what
comes. This advice used to make me insecure about my own practice, which, early
in my book-building process, included stretches as long as a summer without
writing. I have learned that there are plenty of ways to show up at one’s work:
incessant contemplation, research, and the unconscious mapping of structure
that might come as the body moves in the world. For a while, I tried to forgive
myself for not writing every day, but now that the work of my first memoir is
complete, I realize that taking long breaks, pacing my work, and allowing for
retreat is nothing that needs forgiveness: My brain was protecting itself as it
turned traumatic memory into crafted prose. An unflagging commitment to output
might have gutted me. Now, with patience, I write when I feel that the work has
begun to make itself inside of me.”
—Elissa Washuta, author of My Body Is a Book of Rules (Red
Hen Press, 2014)
posted 8.14.14
“As a research tool, the Internet is the best thing to happen to writers since the invention of the modern library. On the other hand, it can be a colossal time-suck and an addictive distraction for many writers—myself included. One of our most important challenges, then, is negotiating the use of technology in our daily writing practice. My creative nonfiction explores the intersections between personal history, cultural history, and ecology. The Internet makes research so easy—with a few keystrokes I can access endless information about, say, whaling, or early twentieth century mining accidents. The problem, as we all know, is how easily we get sucked down the rabbit hole of research. It's more than that, though—we now believe we can know everything via Google. But those habitual Google searches foster a superficial kind of knowing that kills one of the most essential aspects of writing and creating: allowing ourselves to rest in profound uncertainty. It's from this primordial darkness of unknowing that some of our best work comes alive on the page.
"What
works for me lately is to head for the coffee shop first thing in the morning.
I leave my cell phone at home. I write standing up at a tall countertop. As a
firm rule, I stay 100 percent clear of e-mail and social media. I try to get
comfortable with the uncertainty, puzzling together strands of research and
personal narrative, filling out scenes, speculating, and hoping to find
unexpected resonance between the personal and the historical. I save my online
research and correspondence for later in the afternoon, when my creativity
tends to wane. Once I've done my creative work for the day, some time on the
Internet feels less like a compulsive habit, and more like a deliberate element
of my overall practice.”
—Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the
Wonderworld: A Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2014)
posted 8.08.14
“What
works to drive me to write is probably so idiosyncratic that it might not be
generally useful, but it’s been my way of finding the motivation and the
passion to put pen to paper. Sure, I like the hot afternoon walks in the hills
of Altadena with my dog or even desperately trying to keep up with my
marathon-training wife, but when I’m physically enduring, I’m not thinking of
writing. I think of writing when I’m doing mindless yard work—raking and
trimming trees and bushes. Or when I’m organizing my papers and books and
endless stacks of comics; a task so stultifying that my imagination takes over
and useful glimmers of where I might want to go with a project come to me.
Sometimes while digging holes to plant or dragging fat bags of compost, buzzed
by relentless flies, I get shards of dialogue. But by far what works best is
when I recall a slight by a reviewer or editor—that's when the fires burn
bright. A condescending statement about my inability to write authentic Black
dialogue, for instance, will come back to me from decades ago, while I was in a
workshop in the MFA program at the University of California in Irvine, and I’ll
be driven anew to start work on the memoir or explore an idea for a new novel
or biography. Seemingly, what most motivates me to write is drudgery or the
venal and vindictive. It’s gotten me this far, being a maladjusted but
productive writer.”
—Jervey Tervalon, author of Monster’s Chef (Amistad,
2014)
posted 7.31.14
“My
cures for writer’s block are alarmingly pragmatic and physical. So pragmatic
that they arrange themselves in list form! To wit: 1. Get up and walk around. A
few years ago, I realized that the solutions to most of my writing problems
would come to me in the bathroom. It wasn’t the bathroom itself, of course,
that was magic, but the act of getting up from my desk and walking there,
getting the blood flowing, and tearing my eyes away from the computer screen.
So now, when I’m staring down a huge plot problem, I take a long walk—without a
notepad. It’s nearly always solved by the time I get back. 2. Vitamin B. It’s
better than caffeine. It makes you both calmer and smarter. I keep a bottle on
my desk. 3. If you can, sleep late. That last cycle of sleep is when the weird
dreams come, the ones you’ll actually remember. (And how great is it to say, “I
have to sleep late for work?”) 4. Yoga. My point with all of these being:
Writing isn’t entirely mental. You’re a physical being, and sometimes when your
writing is broken, it’s your body that needs attention, not your mind.”
—Rebecca Makkai, author of The Hundred-Year House (Viking/Penguin,
2014)
posted 7.24.14
“The
very worst times in my life have been marked by silence: times when I wasn’t
allowed to write, or couldn’t write, or when language completely failed me. I
didn’t write a word, beyond e-mails or Facebook status updates, for nearly two
years after I finished graduate school. After I had finished each of my two
books, I spent at least six months casting around, writing nothing
new. Each time, what finally got me off the block was digging for its
root: It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t think of anything new to say, it was
that I believed what I had thought of wasn’t any good. I realized that when I
approached the page, I brought with me a ruthless, internal critic who
killed words, lines, and whole essays before giving them a chance to breathe.
Now I’m in the practice of writing nearly every day, and it’s because I learned
to silence the voice of that ruthless critic, especially when starting
something new. I type whatever comes to me, and do so with curiosity, not
judgment. If I bring anyone to the page these days, she’s an adventurer, not a
critic. She says only one thing: Let’s see where this goes."
—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Other Side (Tin
House Books, 2014)
posted 7.17.14
“I
do various things to keep the muse going, but mostly, I read, read, read! I
make myself the ‘expert’ of the particular form I am attempting. I am a big
poetry nerd and proud of it! The history of literature is rich and various. The
more rigorous we are in our practice, the more interesting our poems will be.
For instance, in my latest book of poems, Hard Love Province, I
prepped myself by reading thousands of quatrains from different traditions:
from the Chinese jueju ‘cut verse’ tradition of the High Tang poets
of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei to western ballads written by anonymous
songsters (the ‘Unquiet Grave’ is a chilling ballad); from Auden's work and
Dickinson’s weird hymns to children’s nonsense verse and even that reviled
form, the limerick. The quatrain and the ballad are versatile and beloved forms
that are here to stay. I listened to folk songs from all over the world, work
songs, blues songs, and rap. And that Nicki Minaj is nasty! I love her. I’m
researching hard, but I’m also having fun learning about my genre. It’s about
loving and honoring my art. It’s about appreciating the work that came before
us. It’s about adding and talking back to the tradition and passing on the good
news.”
—Marilyn Chin, author of Hard Love Province (Norton,
2014)
posted 7.10.14
“In
the morning when I walk to work, I try to think up stories for everything I see
along the way. Three birds sitting on a bag of trash behind the used record
store. A waterlogged ball cap in a parking lot. A turtle gliding past
sun-bleached beer cans in the stream that winds its way through downtown. Each
has enough story in it to fuel an entire writing career. There are stories upon
stories in the peeling paint of an empty storefront’s façade: the lives of the
people who painted it, the store owner’s excitement when opening the front door
of the new enterprise for the first time, the joy of children hiding in the
racks while parents shop, the landlord noting the declining condition of the
building as he stops by to serve an eviction notice. My morning walk—without
music, without computer—is a chance for me to remove myself from the landscape
and to see everything—bugs, gravel, garbage—with compassion and interest,
especially those things that I usually ignore. The goal isn't to think of a
story and to tell it, but to remove myself enough to see the story that is
already there and to help it surface. I want to relinquish control—of the
story, of the sentences, of the sounds—and to serve the work, to be the
instrument and not the song. A morning walk is an opportunity to find the innumerable
stories within each fallen thing.”
—David Connerley Nahm, author of Ancient Oceans of Central
Kentucky (Two Dollar Radio, 2014)
posted 7.03.14
"Before Knockemstiff made
him famous, my friend Donald Ray Pollock came home from work at the paper mill,
rolled a page into his typewriter, and began to copy, word by word, passages by
writers he admired. One day Raymond Carver, the next day Cormac McCarthy, the
next day Dawn Powell, the next day Larry Brown. This, he told me, was the bulk
of his writerly education. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by
paragraph, painstakingly slow, a process not dissimilar to what literary
translators do when they bring a work from Japanese into English. I thought I’d
give it a try, and almost every week of my life since, I’ve done it a little or
more than a little. If I’m reading something and it makes me feel something, I
want to know why, so I slow down, and I copy it out, word by word, sentence by
sentence, paragraph by paragraph, savoring the pleasures, and doing my
damnedest to uncover the secrets. This evening, I’m at a stopping point in the
novel I’m writing, and I have a beautiful book on my tabletop. The
Virgins, by Pamela Erens. It does a thing with first person I’m dying to
try—a thing Philip Roth and Alice Munro have done, too—and The Virgins is
waiting there, ready to teach me how."
—Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk (Sarabande Books,
2014)
posted 6.26.14
“Earlier
this year while I was finishing my novel, I was reading Dani Shapiro’s
wonderful book, Still Writing. I swear every page was like
another delicious choice in an intellectual, emotional, and creative buffet. I
especially love the section on 'Shimmer,' which is what Shapiro calls the
unmistakable, indelible epiphany a writer has when she discovers her subject
matter. Shapiro says: ‘We must learn to watch for these moments. To not
discount them. To take note: I’ll have to write about this.’ When
I’ve been fortunate enough to experience this kind of creative energy, I’ll
pluck the spark from wherever it comes: a song lyric, a situation or moment or
character that takes root in my mind, a minor detail someone has shared with me
in a completely different context than where I put it in my work. At my
luckiest, I feel mostly like a harried but devoted transcriptionist, following
my characters around so as not to miss anything they say or do. But when that
energy, that magic, is absent, I have a very tough time writing. More than once
I’ve resorted to staying in the chair for a specific and painful amount of time
only to write very exaggerated, purple, really lamentable prose. In the end, it
makes me laugh, and forces me to cut myself a break and realize that although
it may be a purposely false start, it’s a start nonetheless.”
—Polly Dugan, author of So Much a Part of You (Little,
Brown and Company, 2014)
posted 6.19.14
"As
both a poet and clinical psychologist with a therapy practice, I tend to lose
time in a very cerebral world. Concrete, really physical activities help me
emerge from a more linear modality toward an enlivened creativity. I try to
immerse myself in things like digging in the garden, exercise, cooking, or art
projects like collage. I believe that if we give ourselves over to something
wholeheartedly, we enable our art to emerge. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has
written about creative jumpstarts from the psychological construct of flow:
I highly recommend his books. I also find my voice by letting go of it for a
while. I love to go to museums, galleries, even coffee shops to watch and
listen to other people—not simply for observation but for empathy. I really think
when we step outside of ourselves to connect with others, we connect more
deeply with our own humanity. I also believe in doing hard things for
inspiration. The hardest for me is visiting with my brain-injured sister who
lives in a locked facility for people with dementia. Every time I am there, I
think about our common desire for self-expression and validation, no matter how
diminished one's 'faculties' are. After those visits, I can't wait to get to my
desk and write my heart out."
—Lisa C. Krueger, author of Talisman (Red Hen Press,
2014)
posted 6.12.14
"Sometimes
I do this thing where I convince myself that writing is really hard. I bang my
head on the desk. I suffer and moan. When I am being silly and insufferable
like this, the only remedy is to listen to the Band. More specifically: to
listen to Levon Helm, a man I think of as a kind of patron saint for my writing
life. Levon Helm sang 'Ophelia.' He sang a cover of 'Atlantic City' that is
better than the Boss's (don't argue, you know it's true). He played the drums
like no one's business and a mean mandolin. And he was grinning the whole time
he did it. The best part of listening to Levon play is this: You can hear him
enjoying doing what he does best. So, when I catch myself thinking that
'writing is hard,' I put my headphones on. I remember the night I saw
Levon play at the Ramble where he sang harmonies with his daughter and cracked
jokes and let us all pet his dog. I remember to write because I love it. And
because a book or a song can make an excellent vessel for joy."
—CJ Hauser, author of The From-Aways (William Morrow,
2014)
posted 6.05.14
"At
a hotel in West Papua, New Guinea, above my bed in room 104, there hangs
a painting. Three horses—cream, chestnut,
and honey brown—gallop through pinkish-orange shallows. The sky—of a warmer,
flooded world?—is goldenrod. Each horse, though wingless, looks as if it might
take flight, especially the white one, who rears up with a pained expression in
his eyes and bares his baby teeth. All three have steeled themselves, are
focused—on what? What lies ahead? Will they ever find sanctuary? Distracted and
anxious for weeks, I’ve written almost nothing; hoping to be shocked into
inspiration, tomorrow I leave for Raja Ampat, an archipelago comprised of more
than fifteen hundred remote karst islands, where I will dive among the world’s
most biodiverse reefs. Their coral, their longnose hawkfish, will be dead soon:
the pH of the oceans is falling. On such a planet, why live a writing life?
Civilization can’t last much longer—my poems and essays aren’t for posterity.
But neither should they be solely self-stimulating. Beauty, discovering it for
oneself and sharing it with others, is as essential for the soul as glucose is
for the brain. My room’s A/C rattles. It stirs the peeling wallpaper, which is
actually gift wrap. The painting above my bed, signed only by the name 'Putra,'
is both warning and inspiration. It is a Tarot card: Fear Death by Water, it
says. The cosmic ocean never ends."
—Greg Wrenn, author of Centaur (University of Wisconsin
Press, 2013)
posted 5.23.14
"Whenever
I get stuck—when the sentences close in on themselves or the characters don’t
make sense or I just get that awful feeling of WTF STORY I HATE YOU I HATE
YOU—I close the laptop and tell it out loud. Sometimes this means talking to
myself in coffee shops or on the L train, folks nearby giving me the side eye.
Sometimes it means having a drink or two or five with a friend, saying, “You’ll
never believe what happened!” and then trusting how I naturally tell the story;
how the words tangle together, how they connect with this particular audience,
how they grab her, grip her, hold her. Sometimes it means asking my husband to
listen—he is patient, and honest, and knew up front what he was getting himself
in to. But mostly, it means finding a live show. In Chicago, there are several;
storytelling events and curated performances and open mics in theaters,
festivals, and bars. They’re happening every night, sometimes three or four a
night, and there’s something magical about standing in front of those fifty or
hundred or five hundred people and trusting the story; grabbing, gripping,
holding. Their faces are the most immediate form of feedback. Are they
laughing? Crying? Is the silence so heavy you could slice it? When did I lose
them, what did I do to get them back, and—here is the important part—how does
all of this translate to literary craft: pacing, structure, movement, tense,
point of view, character, character, character? When I’m off the mike and back
in my seat, I make notes—what did I learn from this performance and how will it
influence my rewriting process? Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; I’m writing to
share, and these moments of audience connection are everything—all of us
face-to-face, eye-to-eye, on the edge of our seats and living the experience
together."
—Megan Stielstra, author of Once I Was Cool (Curbside
Splendor, 2014)
posted 5.16.14
"Inspiration
surfaces when I work with my hands. I garden. I rake until my arms ache. I tug
ivy vines and roots rise with explosions of dirt, and with them, a revelation
about my novel-in-progress rises in my silent labor-occupied mind. I knit baby
blanket after baby blanket, the click-clacking of the knitting needles a
metronome keeping time with my thoughts. As a child, I kept my mind busy with
books and television. I read in math class. At the dinner table. On the school
bus. My parents believed TV was educational and so the set was on all day.
These mind-occupying distractions provided a respite from the what ifs that
cycled through my mind—the irrational fears that accompany the
obsessive-compulsive disorder I’d be diagnosed with as an adult. Writing became
a delicious diversion only because it afforded the ultimate escape from my
relentless worries—“the trance.” Now, as a mother, writer, and workshop
director, it’s challenging to find quiet time, but busy-ness is how we obsessives survive.
I’ve spent most of my life seeking distraction to escape the silent mind, but
it is necessary to a writer’s vision. I have to work, literally, to accept the
quietude my writer’s mind craves. Gardening. Knitting. Cleaning up my
children’s Legos. Vacuuming—the whirr of the motor meditative. Even scrubbing
the kitchen sink divulges. The mystery of a character’s motivation is revealed,
and I drop the sponge and run to my desk to jot down a few notes."
—Julia Fierro, author of Cutting Teeth (St. Martin’s
Press, 2014)
posted 5.05.14
"I
write with my whole body. It's best if I'm alone because surely I look like a
maniac. Forget coffee shops. Librarians have eyed me warily. Even though I
don't write longhand, I still have a physical relationship to the process of
writing. I tap, sway, and chew through sentences. (Gum is handy; otherwise I'll
gnaw through pen caps.) I stand up, pace, sit, dither, and bounce. I bob my
head. I open doors and windows. My tongue is always out. It is not a solemn
process. It is not graceful or serene or pretty. Writing is wild. Frenetic.
Maybe I am forcing blood to the brain. Maybe I am pulling images from air.
Maybe it's my way of finding and harnessing rhythm. In any case, there must be
something to it because I can't write in any other way. Moving my body keeps my
brain focused and awake. I think I must look the way small children do—all that
uncontrollable energy sending them into spasms. I don't generally move through
the world like this, thankfully, but I suspect it helps me tap into something
more primal and unkempt, which resonates with the gut love I have for this
work."
—Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of If Only You People
Could Follow Directions(Counterpoint Press, 2014)
posted 4.21.14
"Whenever
I’m feeling stuck or stale in my writing, I find that the proverbial walk in
the woods offers everything from relief to inspiration. When my subject is too
raw, I’m soothed by the solitude of the forest—solitude meaning alone without
the page staring me in the face. When I feel like my writing is lacking texture
or isn’t visual enough, I get outside and try to run through all my senses—what
scents are in the air? What sounds? Getting my legs moving, feeling the
prickerbushes rip at my arms, the sharp glare of the sun or snap of wind in my
face all offer a physicality that jolts me out of the rote rhythm of writing,
that computer cocoon. My husband, Mark Milroy, is an artist and I also like to
look at his landscapes for this same awakening effect. I call him a nonfiction
painter and I know firsthand most of the views where he paints his landscapes.
Yet I am always astounded by what he sees. His work has changed the way I
see—the layering of hills, the purple of a field, the strange rectangular angle
of an oncoming ocean wave. His skies are never simply blue, his grass never
simply green. It took me a while to realize the same is true in real life—a
fundamental realization for a nonfiction writer!"
—Kelly McMasters is the author of Welcome to Shirley: A
Memoir from an Atomic Town(PublicAffairs, 2008)
posted 4.09.14
"I’m
not so much interested in things like plot and character and pacing and all
that other literary nonsense, but rather the discrete quanta with which those
things are built: Words. I like that the little music in a single word can, by
its placement, or its very presence, beautify or corrupt the sentence that
bears it; that the resulting sentence can test the truth of its paragraph, the
paragraph of its page, the page of its chapter, and so on, until the success of
an entire work seems to hinge on the single word by which the writer was
originally seduced. Okay, maybe that’s a little melodramatic. But you see where
I’m going with this. A punchy gem found in, say, a dictionary of
eighteenth-century maritime slang can be as inspiring for me as the rhythms
in The Waste Land can inspire other writers; a fun new
word—something like 'mimp' or 'pourparlers'—can even pull me out of the
oblivion of a long stretch of writer’s block, and make a blank sheet of paper
seem no longer infinite and forbidding, but bright, open, and
invitational."
—Bill Cotter, author of The Parallel Apartments (McSweeney's
Books, 2014)
posted 4.01.14
"I’ve
actually found Twitter to be a strange and exciting writing device. I love the
way it makes me think about text without context, content in spite of intent,
form without formality. As a writer who likes to experiment with words (because
otherwise what would be the point?), the sentences Twitter helps me to generate
feel weirdly impactful. I resisted Twitter for so long because I thought it was
nothing but meaningless promotion, and yes, that can be distracting, especially
when I’m wondering how many people will get excited about a post that declares
'ONLY MEN HAVE FACES,' but I suppose only time will tell."
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The End of San Francisco (City
Lights, 2013)
posted 3.11.14
"Most
of the poetry I’ve written since 2008 has been written to the music of the band
The Be Good Tanyas, specifically the album Hello Love and more
specifically the song “Human Thing.” This song gets me into the clear-eyed and
serious yet also kind of woozy/dreamy headspace I need to be in to write my
poems. I can play that song on repeat for three hours and never get tired of
it, its lazy downshifts and slow building pleasure. The entire album is truly
amazing, bluesy and folksy and very deeply felt. It has been a big part of my
creative process for almost six years now. It's a writing ritual I
treasure."
—Carrie Murphy, author of Pretty Tilt (Keyhole Press,
2012) and Fat Daisies, forthcoming in December from Big Lucks
Books.
.
posted 2.18.14
“In
addition to reading, I generate narrative nonfiction by wandering around. I
stroll downtown and through populated neighborhoods in search of an interesting
person, a dramatic event, an unexpected interaction, a surprise sighting. I’m
not searching for a scoop. I want something that fascinates me so much that it
demands further exploration and documentation. What are people saying? What are
people doing? This is the world at this moment in human history. How does it
look? The idea sounds so simple, but to recognize the familiar as fertile, it
helps to suspend our resident identity and re-enter our hometown as a visitor.”
—Aaron Gilbreath, author of A Secondary Landscape (Future
Tense Books, 2013)
posted 2.11.14
“Like
many writers, I spend a lot of time by myself, so I sometimes get stuck in the
echo chamber of my own brain. The best remedy I’ve found, and the fastest way
to inject new energy into my work, is eavesdropping on others. I go to a cafe,
settle down with some tea, and listen to the conversations around me. My
favorite coffee shop has a group of elderly regulars whose discussions range
from the hilarious to the profound: one day, they may rehash poignant memories
of their childhoods; another day, I might hear, ‘You don’t hear much about
Princess Diana these days, do you?’ ‘Er—Princess Diana died.’ ‘Did she? What a
pity. Recently?’ Sometimes I hear actual material to use in stories, but more
often, the act of eavesdropping itself is transformative. Whether the topic is
politics, the state of someone’s marriage, or the new sandwich guy with the
facial tattoo, listening to others talk gets me focused on people again: their
myriad and idiosyncratic interests, their biases and blind spots, all that they
conceal and reveal—on purpose and accidentally—as they gossip and confide and
debate. People and their relationships are the root of fiction, and an hour
quietly listening is often just what I need to get myself going again.”
—Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You (Penguin
Press, 2013)
posted 2.04.14
“When
I’m stuck, it’s usually because I’ve been overwriting. That’s when I take a
break and watch clips of stand-up comedians. Essayists and comedians are, in my
opinion, doing pretty much the same work, but most of the time comedians do it
better. I watch a lot of Louis C. K. and a lot of Patrice O’Neal. There’s one
Richard Pryor bit where he talks about setting himself on fire while freebasing
that is so stunningly open and vulnerable. It’s the best personal essay I’ve
ever encountered, without trying to be. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with this
joke that Mo’Nique did during a performance at a women’s prison. It involves
fellatio and grape soda and it’s just perfect. She’s a brilliant writer, but it
feels like she doesn’t care at all if anybody notices that fact. She makes me
remember how fun language is and that makes me want to try again, even if I’ll
just get frustrated and have to redo the routine three more times before
lunch.”
—Lucas Mann, author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of
Everywhere (Pantheon, 2013)
posted 1.28.14
“I
tend to work in bursts where I’ll write a lot of fairly polished work in a
short amount of time. When I’m not in that mode, I use a notebook all the time
to record what I see, read, think; to work out structural problems that are
keeping me from writing; to take down ideas for future work. I also use these
notebooks to collect objects—plant matter, stickers, scraps of paper or
fabric—that accumulate in my daily life. Later, when I come back to the
notebooks during a dry spell, I’m reminded vividly of where I was and what was
happening when I made these observations or affixed those dried leaves to a
page. The notebook makes me remember (on my best days) that writing isn’t just
the thing that happens at the computer when I finally make a story or poem:
it’s an ongoing process made up of many, many small gestures that accumulate
over time to make the work.”
—Éireann Lorsung, author of Her book (Milkweed
Editions, 2013)
posted 1.21.14
“I have been preoccupied lately, to an alarming degree, by the creative process of collage. I spend most of my free time cutting out words from newspaper headlines and pictures from fifty-year-old magazines. Combining the stern, authoritative tone of ‘the News’ and the wholesome and charmingly hopeful images of fifties and sixties advertising (or that era’s glamorous photojournalism) makes for a jarring and often hilarious piece of art. I created a designated workspace in our kitchen that is now cluttered with all these cut-out things along with glue stick, old magazines I haven’t even looked at yet (I prefer copies ofLife magazine bought at a place here in Portland, Oregon, called Periodical Paradise), X-ACTO knives, and other cutting utensils. Who knows how long I'll indulge myself with this creative outlet.
“For
a long time, I’ve loved various kinds of disjointed art: anything that
surprises the reader, the viewer, the listener. It could be the poetry of
Zachary Schomburg, Rachel Glaser, and Ben Mirov, or the journals of Leonard
Michaels (I highly recommend Time Out of Mind, published by
Riverhead Books in 1999). The uncategorical writing of people like Chelsea
Martin, Myriam Gurba, and Leni Zumas always blows me away. A great book on
collage art is The Age of Collage. The films of Spike Jonze and
Michel Gondry push my mind through spectacular wormholes. The music of Sebadoh,
Pavement, or Guided By Voices (note their collage-y cover art by Rob Pollard).
All of these things are inspirations and comforts. I say ‘comforts’ because
sometime I wonder if my own writing is too disjointed or too jump-cut (two
books in a row of super-short chapters and shifting tones). So visual/textual
collage is my newest passion. I think it’s important to follow your whims
sometimes, even if you’re not sure what it will turn into.”
—Kevin Sampsell, author of This Is Between Us (Tin
House Books, 2013)
posted 1.14.14
“Ideas
come to me through my ear. I will hear a character’s voice before I can see her
face or know anything about her circumstances. As long as the voice is talking,
I am writing. But inevitably that voice starts to wane, and with it my ability
to put words on the page. To combat this, I make sure to have a companion book
that I am reading with a voice that is similar in some way to my protagonist.
When I was working on Dear Lucy, I read The Sound and the
Fury three times. Anytime my characters weren’t speaking to me, I
turned to Faulkner’s characters that sounded close enough to my own to activate
the auditory memory of their voices. The way being dropped in a foreign country
whose language you studied in school will bring back years of vocabulary you
were certain you had forgotten for good, reading a book with a similar voice,
no matter how similar the content, will get my characters talking to me again.”
—Julie Sarkissian, author of Dear Lucy (Simon &
Schuster, 2013)
posted 1.08.14
“When
I’m not working on a specific project, I write two hours before bed and I spend
two hours in the morning trying to make at least one decent paragraph out of
the mess I wrote before bed. I’ve become obsessed with paragraphs in my old
age. I try to create one dope paragraph every other week and trust myself to
organize those somewhat dope paragraphs into a revelatory piece that means
something to someone somewhere. I listen to a lot of Jay Electronica, Janelle
Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar. I hear and see their verses in paragraphs. I love to
imagine myself in a paragraph contest with those three. I published about
twenty thousand paragraphs last year and maybe fourteen of them were on par
with the best paragraphs Monáe, Electronica, and Kendrick routinely produce.
This year, I’m going for fifteen. I think I can do that.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division (Agate Bolden,
2013)
posted 12.31.13
“For
inspiration I've found that doing something unrelated to writing serves me
well, like viewing documentaries or people watching on a bus or train. Or, for
example, I'll assemble a book case, go for a walk, or do mundane chores around
the house. These types of tasks give my brain quiet time to construct lines and
make necessary associations before I ever get any words on paper. Putting my
mind in a fallow state allows it to absorb the art that feeds my writing. I
also, of course, find enjoying art and literature helpful, which means I attend
readings or read books on various subjects in multiple genres, go to exhibits
and museums, view films, listen to music, or attend performances. It’s all part
of the process of building unexpected links within my mind and therefore my
writing.”
—Tara Betts, author of Arc & Hue (Willow Books,
2009)
posted 12.17.13
“I
have an almost religious belief that nonfiction is built from careful
observation, which reveals that almost anything—from the tree outside the
window, to a horrible sandwich, to a devastating life event—has some kind of
meaningful system, or structure, to it. Sometimes that structure is defined by
entropy, or resembles a Greek play, or is purely Freudian in nature. I feel
like I have remarkable things happening to me all of the time, probably because
I’m always looking at everything so carefully and analyzing its structure. When
I’m really stuck, or muddled because I've confused myself, I turn to something
that has a really obvious banal architecture, like long-running TV shows. Buffy
the Vampire Slayer works very well, so does Alias.”
—Minna Proctor, author of Do You Hear What I Hear (Viking,
2005)
posted 12.10.13
“By
10 AM I’ve been writing for a few hours, and my mind’s muddled with sentences,
so I go jogging. Like most people, I don’t enjoy exercising, and I welcome
anything that distracts me from the fact that I’m breathing hard and my muscles
hurt. I don’t think about individual sentences, but more the overall shape of
the text I’m making. I don’t think about the hill looming ahead, and how much
it will suck running up it. I think about my character, and how I’m going to
get him where he needs to be. Soon I’ve jogged back to the desk after four
miles have passed, and I’m ready to work through the sentences that so muddled
me earlier that morning.”
—Jamie Iredell, author of I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School
Insomniac (Future Tense
posted 12.03.13
“I
reread constantly for inspiration. Seek: Reports From the Edges of
America and Beyond by Denis Johnson stokes my curiosity. Lidia
Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water reminds me to own my
fierceness, to conjure it onto the page. I also look for synchronicities and
act on them in my writing and in my life. The car radio becomes an oracle: What
is this song asking me to write today? I consult my astrological chart or
notebooks I organize according to particular themes such as loss, terrorism,
and archetypes, among others. One notebook is entirely comprised of dialogues I
have with different parts of myself. The more I poke and prod the material I'm
working on with creative ideas, the more sparks shoot up.”
—Wendy C. Ortiz, author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future
Tense Books, 2014) and Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press,
2014)
posted 11.26.13
"When I’m stuck or feeling unmotivated, I turn to the drawers near my writing desk. They contain notes from past English classes and old spiral-bound journals. Reading the passionate scribbles of the student I used to be reminds me of the hunger that drove me to literature and writing in the first place. Sometimes, I also pull out an old paperback and revisit my notes in the margins, the underlines I made, the stars I jotted down, and the dog-eared pages. These stories belonged to me as well as the authors. I’m reminded that when we write, we don’t write for ourselves. Our work will eventually belong to others so that they, too, can mark the pages of our stories. Thinking of writing in this interactive sense makes the process less lonely and lets me turn to the keyboard again. I remember that I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m simply joining a conversation that has already been started, adding a drop or two to the river of literature."—Marjan Kamali, author of Together Tea (Ecco, 2013)
posted 11.19.13
“I
have a good old-fashioned muse—a brilliant friend who finds me music. His taste
is exquisite and he takes the time to discover unknown artists, or rare,
forgotten albums from long ago. I’m always hitting him up for new stuff and
it’s never disappointing. Sometimes he sends a choppy track sung by two kids in
Kenya. Sometimes it’s a well-known weirdo folk song, or a guitar piece from a
Caracas slum, or an improvised ten minutes on jazz piano, or a bluesy,
scratchy, whiskey-soaked dirge from some forgotten dive in Tennessee, a
Rastaman with lyrics so good your mouth waters, your vocabulary suddenly
altered, or a R&B track so sexy it makes you blush all the way down to your
navel. Whatever he sends, it always works to put me in that place, the creative
center where I’m at my best. I like to arrive at my favorite café, order a
cappuccino, put on whatever song I’m obsessed with that week (right now it’s
“The Werewolf Song” by Michael Hurley and “Não Existe Amor em São Paulo” by
Criolo), and let my mind travel. I waste hours like this before I get to work.
It’s a luxury of living a writing life, to wander so far from the physical
world, and to soak in someone else’s art, taking the time to make it your
entire sensory experience for a few minutes. When I listen to music and when I
write stories I feel like I’ve finally stopped wasting my life, that I’m
renewed every day, crackling and bursting with creative energy.”
—Dina Nayeri, author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (Riverhead,
2013)
posted 11.12.13
“I
sit down in front of my computer with my first cup of coffee before I’m fully
awake. I hope that something exciting will come out of these liminal moments
before I’m aware of the expectancy and stress of writing. The moment I hit a
roadblock, I take a shower. I want to move as far away from my computer as
possible so I don’t over-think the problem I’ve encountered and undermine the
joy of writing so early in my day. I stay in the shower longer than is
necessary, shocking my body into awareness, and calming my mind with the
knowledge that I’m not forcing it to work at the moment. Soon that first
problem will resolve itself and I’ll have to dash out of the bathroom still
damp and rush to my desk. As my writing session draws to a close, usually
because I’ve bumped up against some fresh obstacle, I usually want to take
another inspirational shower. But that seems weird. So I go for a drive. I live
in Los Angeles, so I’m always driving somewhere. Again, I try to get as far
away from my work as possible, into a place where it’s impossible to work.
That’s when my ideas usually take shape. I don’t listen to music in the car,
but let my mind wander and often it stumbles across a way to untangle whatever
mess tripped me up and ended my writing day.”
—Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street (Dennis
Lehane Books, 2013)
posted 11.05.13
“I
am writing a serialized novel in the form of a Korean drama right now. If you
aren’t familiar with them, Korean dramas are sort of all the rage in Asia.
They’re melodramatic. They’re romantic. They have end points and clear arcs.
When they are working well, they’re like watching sixteen-hour movies.
Sometimes, I feel as if they are the perfect length to adapt a novel. I am
doing the opposite. I am writing a book that will appear in sixteen episodes,
twice per week, on the schedule these shows usually run, with illustrations. So
far, writing this way has made me wish I could write for actors, for
hundred-million-dollar budgets. It has been a process of limitations. But
limitations have always bred creativity, in my opinion. Limitations are why
these Korean dramas seem so much more satisfying to me than American TV shows,
which often have one good season and then stretch on ad nauseum. I am inspired
by what we can do if we’re told we have to stop. Here’s a quick list of Korean
TV dramas if you’re interested: Secret Garden, Coffee
Prince, The Greatest Love, and City Hunter.”
—Matthew Salesses, author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil
Coping Mechanisms, 2013)
posted 10.29.13
“Each
of my novels has been unlocked by a song. Early on in the first draft I’ll hear
a song—often one I’ve already known for a while—and there’ll be a sort of
clicking into place, a physical sensation, and just like that I’ll have a much
deeper understanding of a character or of the book as a whole. ForThe
Revolution of Every Day it was “Stevie Nix” by The Hold Steady. For my
new one, it’s “This Tornado Loves You” by Neko Case. I love that, the way art
feeds art. A conversation, all of us in it together.”
—Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day (Tin
House Books, 2013)
posted 10.22.13
“German
composer Hauschka, a.k.a Volker Bertelmann, is a practitioner of the ‘prepared
piano,’ a technique where the player places objects on the strings of the piano
so as to alter the sound. Hauschka will wrap the piano hammers in aluminum
foil, for example, or attach binder clips to certain strings. For some
performances, he tops the strings with ping-pong balls, which pop and bounce
within the hollow of the piano. On later albums, Hauschka has increasingly
included additional instrumentation (often violin and cello, as on his
excellent Ferndorf record), but most often I come back to his
earlier ones (Substantial, The Prepared Piano) where the
technique is more clearly on display. While the preparations are meticulous,
there is always an unpredictability to how the objects will react to the struck
note, and this is what I admire about the technique: the surrendering of
control. It is something I try to emulate in my own writing process, a
willingness to listen to how the words and images are bouncing off one another
on the page in ways I couldn’t have foreseen.”
—Ian Stansel, author of Everybody's Irish (Five
Chapters, 2013)
posted 10.16.13
“I have lots of writing rituals, but the most important time for me is late at night, when I have no business being up. Night is when the children are asleep and only insomniacs are sending e-mails. I turn on Self-Control, so I can’t compulsively check e-mail, and I listen to electronic music. Every Boards of Canada album has been a backdrop to every book I’ve ever written, but I also really like the IDM channel on Pandora. Burial or Disclsoure on Spotify—music drowns out the crazy voices in my head that try and derail me.
“I have a giant handmade notebook that I write into only with very sharpened pencils, and I let myself write whatever comes into my head, even if it’s crazy, inappropriate, or bad, whatever that means because in my mind, revising is writing. This preliminary work is like mixing the materials to make the clay.
“I
write in bed, too, which is probably shortening my life, but is the only place
I can write. I surround myself with books that serve as muses and talismans,
voices to guide me.”
—Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth (University
of Arizona Press, 2013)
posted 10.08.13
“I’ll
sometimes sit at my writing table and watch the trees outside—the play of
sunlight and shade in their leaves. It instantly takes me back. Back to
afternoons as a kid, walking home from school down a leafy street. Back to the
half-year I spent in the Oregon woods in my twenties. And somehow that
momentary plunge into memory puts me in touch with the mystery that compels me
to write in the first place. I feel ready. Receptive. What words do I want to
send tumbling down through the years like sunlight in a red maple?”
—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry (University
of Nebraska Press, 2010)
posted 10.02.13
“I’ve
had numerous writing rituals over the years. They’ve tended to change as my
life circumstances have changed, but they always revolve around two key
ingredients: silence and geography. I cannot hear my own voice when my mind is
cluttered, and what constitutes clutter could fill a small book. It includes,
at its most basic, people, dogs, telephones, televisions, construction
equipment, sirens, and the Internet (by which I mean the whole
mind-numbing-soul-sucking-time-wasting thing). I’ve also learned that I have a
much easier time dropping into that quiet place when I am in certain specific
locations or doing certain things. When I’m writing poetry, and the weather
permits, my preferred spot is my front stoop, where I can stare off into the
middle distance to my heart’s content, risking only the occasional questioning
stare of a mystified neighbor. When writing fiction, or forced inside by the
elements, I often start my day by re-reading what I’ve written the day before,
then closing my eyes and drifting into that limbo between sleep and
wakefulness. Other generally foolproof kick-starters: long drives and long
showers—neither of which is good for the environment but both of which have
paid for themselves in killer first lines.”
—Kim Triedman, author of The Other Room (Owl Canyon
Press, 2013)
posted 12.03.13
“I
reread constantly for inspiration. Seek: Reports From the Edges of
America and Beyond by Denis Johnson stokes my curiosity. Lidia
Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water reminds me to own my
fierceness, to conjure it onto the page. I also look for synchronicities and
act on them in my writing and in my life. The car radio becomes an oracle: What
is this song asking me to write today? I consult my astrological chart or
notebooks I organize according to particular themes such as loss, terrorism,
and archetypes, among others. One notebook is entirely comprised of dialogues I
have with different parts of myself. The more I poke and prod the material I'm
working on with creative ideas, the more sparks shoot up.”
—Wendy C. Ortiz, author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future
Tense Books, 2014) and Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press,
2014)
posted 11.26.13
"When I’m stuck or feeling unmotivated, I turn to the drawers near my writing desk. They contain notes from past English classes and old spiral-bound journals. Reading the passionate scribbles of the student I used to be reminds me of the hunger that drove me to literature and writing in the first place. Sometimes, I also pull out an old paperback and revisit my notes in the margins, the underlines I made, the stars I jotted down, and the dog-eared pages. These stories belonged to me as well as the authors. I’m reminded that when we write, we don’t write for ourselves. Our work will eventually belong to others so that they, too, can mark the pages of our stories. Thinking of writing in this interactive sense makes the process less lonely and lets me turn to the keyboard again. I remember that I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m simply joining a conversation that has already been started, adding a drop or two to the river of literature."—Marjan Kamali, author of Together Tea (Ecco, 2013)
posted 11.19.13
“I
have a good old-fashioned muse—a brilliant friend who finds me music. His taste
is exquisite and he takes the time to discover unknown artists, or rare,
forgotten albums from long ago. I’m always hitting him up for new stuff and
it’s never disappointing. Sometimes he sends a choppy track sung by two kids in
Kenya. Sometimes it’s a well-known weirdo folk song, or a guitar piece from a
Caracas slum, or an improvised ten minutes on jazz piano, or a bluesy,
scratchy, whiskey-soaked dirge from some forgotten dive in Tennessee, a
Rastaman with lyrics so good your mouth waters, your vocabulary suddenly
altered, or a R&B track so sexy it makes you blush all the way down to your
navel. Whatever he sends, it always works to put me in that place, the creative
center where I’m at my best. I like to arrive at my favorite café, order a
cappuccino, put on whatever song I’m obsessed with that week (right now it’s
“The Werewolf Song” by Michael Hurley and “Não Existe Amor em São Paulo” by
Criolo), and let my mind travel. I waste hours like this before I get to work.
It’s a luxury of living a writing life, to wander so far from the physical world,
and to soak in someone else’s art, taking the time to make it your entire
sensory experience for a few minutes. When I listen to music and when I write
stories I feel like I’ve finally stopped wasting my life, that I’m renewed
every day, crackling and bursting with creative energy.”
—Dina Nayeri, author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (Riverhead,
2013)
posted 11.12.13
“I
sit down in front of my computer with my first cup of coffee before I’m fully
awake. I hope that something exciting will come out of these liminal moments
before I’m aware of the expectancy and stress of writing. The moment I hit a
roadblock, I take a shower. I want to move as far away from my computer as
possible so I don’t over-think the problem I’ve encountered and undermine the
joy of writing so early in my day. I stay in the shower longer than is
necessary, shocking my body into awareness, and calming my mind with the
knowledge that I’m not forcing it to work at the moment. Soon that first
problem will resolve itself and I’ll have to dash out of the bathroom still
damp and rush to my desk. As my writing session draws to a close, usually
because I’ve bumped up against some fresh obstacle, I usually want to take
another inspirational shower. But that seems weird. So I go for a drive. I live
in Los Angeles, so I’m always driving somewhere. Again, I try to get as far
away from my work as possible, into a place where it’s impossible to work.
That’s when my ideas usually take shape. I don’t listen to music in the car,
but let my mind wander and often it stumbles across a way to untangle whatever
mess tripped me up and ended my writing day.”
—Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street (Dennis
Lehane Books, 2013)
posted 11.05.13
“I
am writing a serialized novel in the form of a Korean drama right now. If you
aren’t familiar with them, Korean dramas are sort of all the rage in Asia.
They’re melodramatic. They’re romantic. They have end points and clear arcs.
When they are working well, they’re like watching sixteen-hour movies.
Sometimes, I feel as if they are the perfect length to adapt a novel. I am
doing the opposite. I am writing a book that will appear in sixteen episodes,
twice per week, on the schedule these shows usually run, with illustrations. So
far, writing this way has made me wish I could write for actors, for
hundred-million-dollar budgets. It has been a process of limitations. But
limitations have always bred creativity, in my opinion. Limitations are why
these Korean dramas seem so much more satisfying to me than American TV shows,
which often have one good season and then stretch on ad nauseum. I am inspired
by what we can do if we’re told we have to stop. Here’s a quick list of Korean
TV dramas if you’re interested: Secret Garden, Coffee
Prince, The Greatest Love, and City Hunter.”
—Matthew Salesses, author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil
Coping Mechanisms, 2013)
posted 10.29.13
“Each
of my novels has been unlocked by a song. Early on in the first draft I’ll hear
a song—often one I’ve already known for a while—and there’ll be a sort of
clicking into place, a physical sensation, and just like that I’ll have a much
deeper understanding of a character or of the book as a whole. ForThe
Revolution of Every Day it was “Stevie Nix” by The Hold Steady. For my
new one, it’s “This Tornado Loves You” by Neko Case. I love that, the way art
feeds art. A conversation, all of us in it together.”
—Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day (Tin
House Books, 2013)
posted 10.22.13
“German
composer Hauschka, a.k.a Volker Bertelmann, is a practitioner of the ‘prepared
piano,’ a technique where the player places objects on the strings of the piano
so as to alter the sound. Hauschka will wrap the piano hammers in aluminum
foil, for example, or attach binder clips to certain strings. For some
performances, he tops the strings with ping-pong balls, which pop and bounce
within the hollow of the piano. On later albums, Hauschka has increasingly
included additional instrumentation (often violin and cello, as on his
excellent Ferndorf record), but most often I come back to his
earlier ones (Substantial, The Prepared Piano) where the
technique is more clearly on display. While the preparations are meticulous,
there is always an unpredictability to how the objects will react to the struck
note, and this is what I admire about the technique: the surrendering of
control. It is something I try to emulate in my own writing process, a
willingness to listen to how the words and images are bouncing off one another
on the page in ways I couldn’t have foreseen.”
—Ian Stansel, author of Everybody's Irish (Five
Chapters, 2013)
posted 10.16.13
“I have lots of writing rituals, but the most important time for me is late at night, when I have no business being up. Night is when the children are asleep and only insomniacs are sending e-mails. I turn on Self-Control, so I can’t compulsively check e-mail, and I listen to electronic music. Every Boards of Canada album has been a backdrop to every book I’ve ever written, but I also really like the IDM channel on Pandora. Burial or Disclsoure on Spotify—music drowns out the crazy voices in my head that try and derail me.
“I have a giant handmade notebook that I write into only with very sharpened pencils, and I let myself write whatever comes into my head, even if it’s crazy, inappropriate, or bad, whatever that means because in my mind, revising is writing. This preliminary work is like mixing the materials to make the clay.
“I
write in bed, too, which is probably shortening my life, but is the only place
I can write. I surround myself with books that serve as muses and talismans,
voices to guide me.”
—Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth (University
of Arizona Press, 2013)
posted 10.08.13
“I’ll
sometimes sit at my writing table and watch the trees outside—the play of
sunlight and shade in their leaves. It instantly takes me back. Back to
afternoons as a kid, walking home from school down a leafy street. Back to the
half-year I spent in the Oregon woods in my twenties. And somehow that
momentary plunge into memory puts me in touch with the mystery that compels me
to write in the first place. I feel ready. Receptive. What words do I want to
send tumbling down through the years like sunlight in a red maple?”
—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry (University
of Nebraska Press, 2010)
posted 10.02.13
“I’ve
had numerous writing rituals over the years. They’ve tended to change as my
life circumstances have changed, but they always revolve around two key
ingredients: silence and geography. I cannot hear my own voice when my mind is
cluttered, and what constitutes clutter could fill a small book. It includes,
at its most basic, people, dogs, telephones, televisions, construction
equipment, sirens, and the Internet (by which I mean the whole
mind-numbing-soul-sucking-time-wasting thing). I’ve also learned that I have a
much easier time dropping into that quiet place when I am in certain specific
locations or doing certain things. When I’m writing poetry, and the weather
permits, my preferred spot is my front stoop, where I can stare off into the
middle distance to my heart’s content, risking only the occasional questioning
stare of a mystified neighbor. When writing fiction, or forced inside by the
elements, I often start my day by re-reading what I’ve written the day before,
then closing my eyes and drifting into that limbo between sleep and
wakefulness. Other generally foolproof kick-starters: long drives and long
showers—neither of which is good for the environment but both of which have
paid for themselves in killer first lines.”
—Kim Triedman, author of The Other Room (Owl Canyon
Press, 2013)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 9.25.13
“When I’m stuck, I paint or I draw. Or I cook. Or I garden—or I redecorate a room. I get away from words, but not away from creativity. It’s a way to keep those energies moving and alive, without the particular worries about content that writing can carry. And also, because none of those activities are my profession, they help me relocate the playfulness and pleasure that disappear when I feel creatively anxious or empty.
I
also always keep a note nearby: No one has to read a word I write. It’s
important to combat self-censoring whenever possible.”
—Robin Black, author of Life Drawing, A Novel (Random
House, 2014)
posted 9.17.13
“Nothing
helps my writing, or makes me want to write, more than driving alone on lonely
roads. That’s when I turn up the music—radio, scanning the stations for the
surprise of what might get played. Something about this combination, the
driving, the music, the landscape, feels generative. I’m currently working on
my second nonfiction book and I’m pretty sure it started in the car, Howard
Jones singing ‘No One Is to Blame,’ bringing me back, like it or not, to the
sorrows of seventh grade. Songs, like food, like movies—signposts of culture,
aspiration, childhood—seem always to find themselves in my work. Recent inspirations
include Cyndi Lauper, ‘Time After Time,’ REO Speedwagon, ‘Keep on Lovin’ You,”
Fleetwood Mac, ‘Never Going Back Again,” Poison, ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn,”
Mark Morrison, ‘Return of the Mack,’ When in Rome, ‘The Promise,’ Prince,
‘Purple Rain.’”
—Bich Minh Nguyen, author of Pioneer Girl (Viking
Penguin, 2014)
posted 9.10.13
“When
I need to reach that pool of possibility within, I get something cold to drink
and sit next to an open window—no matter the season. Listening to instrumental
acid jazz from the late 60s and 70s gets me in a good zone—Freddie
Hubbard’s Red Clay Suite, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage,
Pharaoh Sanders, and many others (I can’t listen to singers or vocalists
because I surrender to their soaring). The melodies and chord progressions
soothe and challenge me at once—the moody, surprising forays and improvisations
that the musicians make encourage me to riff off the scale of what I aim to
write, freeing me up to travel wherever I’m moved to go stylistically,
psychically, emotionally. Poet Lucille Clifton often said, ‘Something in me
knows how to write poetry better than I do.’ I’m very clear that whatever I'm
writing is always a collaboration between the self that forgot we were out of
toilet paper on the way home last night, and the self that recalls blood
memories from generations ago in dreams. As the years pass, I’m learning to
trust this alchemy.”
—Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of She Has a Name (Four Way
Books, 2013)
posted 9.03.13
“‘If
you don’t stir your soul with a stick every day, you’ll freeze solid.’ Rutger
Kopland, the Dutch poet, uses this sentence from Gerrit Krol as an epigraph to
one of his books. I often read poems as my chosen stick in preparing to write:
usually poems from earlier generations, or poems in translation or from other
languages and historical periods. I want quiet voices and the perspective of
distance, avoiding the flash-bang of current poetics and contending fashions. I
open the books of poets I love and honor: the Tang poets; the Spaniards Machado
and Jimenez; Italy’s Sinisgalli and Pavese; Rolf Jacobsen; yes, Kopland and so
many others who have written with such hard-won clarity and intimate
simplicity. It’s a stick I need. Not a wand. Not a divining rod. Not a baton.
Not a tool for whipping. A simple unadorned stick; one can be found almost
anywhere, even underfoot.”
—Peter Everwine, author of Listening Long and Late (University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)
posted 8.27.13
“Years
ago when I was traveling in India, I found a junk shop in Cochin that was
filled with random things. In one corner were stacks and stacks of old
photographs from a photography studio that had long since closed. There were
photos of families posed stiffly in their best clothes, brides and grooms with
grim expressions, and photos of children—so many children. Many of them were
posing in the odd sets of the photography studio—an oversized paper moon, a
large cut-out boat. I bought several photographs and keep them near me when I
write. I always wonder what the story is behind each photo; who were these
people? Even in thrift stores here in the United States, I always buy old
photos. It seems sad that they have been abandoned, and I find the faces of the
unknown a good talisman for writing characters I sometimes find equally
unknowable.”
—Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters
Books, 2013)
posted 8.19.13
“I
had an unfettered year to work on my memoir. No excuses. Terrifying. So I
watched bad TV and learned six new ways to cook chicken. My house was spotless;
my chapters unwritten. Classical music saved me—Erik Satie by Jean-Yves
Thibaudet, Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach cello suites, and the Schubert Ensemble of London’s
beautiful piano quintets by Ernő Dohnányi. Each became an hourglass, pacing
drafting sessions. I listened over and over. Months later, behind on major
edits, I realized I’d forgotten the music. I cued up Satie’sGnossiennes and,
in a scene worthy of Pavlov, finally got back to work.”
—Sandra Beasley, author of Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (Crown,
2011)
posted 8.14.13
“I
spend ten minutes reading poetry before trying to write fiction. Poetry drags
my lazy brain toward focus: on language, precision, rhythm. It’s like pushing
in the clutch before I can start the engine. I also use an idea box. I scribble
notes on scraps and throw them into a Payless shoebox and forget them. Most
contain just a few words. If I’m stuck I pull out a few scraps and force them
into a story. ‘Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,’ the first story in Hana Sasaki,
came from: ‘appliance with a superpower,’ ‘Jehova’s Witnesses’ and ‘so much
beer.’”
—Kelly Luce, author of Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki
Grows a Tail (A Strange Object, 2013)
posted 8.07.13
“Read the news. There are some strange things happening in the world.The New York Times is a huge part of my writing process. I rip out articles; I circle phrases from the science section, the business section, and sometimes (dare I say) the book review. I recently wrote a poem that came from an article Teddy Wayne wrote about Justin Bieber.
“Steal. Steal from the writers you like and the writers you don’t. Share their vocabulary and syntax. It’s good to shake up your nouns and verbs. (All poets steal.) Many of my poems have been appropriated from other writers like: T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nabokov, and Rebecca Solnit.
“Join
a workshop. It doesn’t matter if they are informal, or formal. Being around
other writers, and getting feedback, is the best fuel to spark your creative
process.”
—Leah Umansky, author of Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVOX,
2013)
posted 7.31.13
“I
have a little metal pebble with the word 'success' on it that I slip into my
bra (left side) when I go to a literary event, embark on a new novel, or start
a new chapter. I always forget about it and at the end of the day it clunks
onto the floor as I change into my pajamas, like a bullet that didn’t kill me.
I write for teenagers and what that means is I write for the teenager in all of
us. On the surface I am an adult. I am married. I have two kids. I have bills
and difficult parents and the number 11 wrinkled between my eyes but underneath
all that the sixteen-year-old romantic smartass in me always has something to
say. I think of her as my true self, my best voice and I access her through
music from my post-punk youth, lots of coffee, and fearless passionate
remembering.”
—Arlaina Tibensky, author of And Then Things Fall Apart (Simon
Pulse, 2011)
posted 7.24.13
“Sometimes
even returning to the favorite books doesn’t work. There’s no inspiration to be
found in the pages of Hopscotch, Pale Fire, or My
Loose Thread. Words just seem stifling. Reminders of what I can’t seem to
do. That’s when I turn to my photography books, cracking open their oversized
spines and staring at images that stare blankly back at me. Something happens
the longer I look at the static ghostly fashion photographs of Deborah
Turbeville, the shadow-swallowed teenagers of Bill Henson, the colorful coke
bottles, shower tiles, and oven interiors of William Eggleston. Shards of
narrative rise to the surface. Gestures begin to suggest movement and character.
It’s a world awaiting syllables that haven’t already been soiled.”
—Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora (Two Dollar
Radio, 2013)
.
posted 7.17.13
“I
write fiction but I find inspiration in stray facts, mostly when I’m not
looking for it. I wander in books, in magazines; I go to odd exhibits and
miscellaneous lectures; I try to stay open and curious. I learned about Isaac
the Jew from a book that caught my eye in some library stacks: in 801 C.E. he
transported an elephant from Baghdad to the emperor Charlemagne, passing a
winter in Vercelli because snow kept him from crossing the Alps. How absurd!
How interesting! How lonely. He became a character in one of my favorite
stories. I learned about the unreadable Voynich manuscript in my alumni
magazine (!)—how cool is that, an unreadable manuscript? The
Voynich became a major element in my forthcoming novel, A Highly
Unlikely Scenario. I file these oddities in my brain or in a notebook,
where they amuse me even if I don’t end up using them.”
—Rachel Cantor, author of A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a
Neetsa-Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World (Melville House,
2014)
posted 7.10.13
“When
I lived in NYC, my writing ritual was to ride the city bus. My favorite was the
M104, which had both an uptown and a crosstown leg. Sometimes I’d ride all the
way to the end of the line and back. I loved being on a journey to nowhere, a
little higher than the other cars and pedestrians, completely free of the usual
to-do-list urgencies. I think it gave me a sense of timelessness. Also, it
helped me see the world with a child’s eyes (when is one more purely a
passenger than in childhood?). I pay a lot of attention to beauty and
musicality when I write, but I also like plot—stories where something
actually happens—and I think I borrowed energy from the act of
moving through space. It was funny, though, because I enjoyed it so much that
sometimes I’d be out with people, see a bus go by, and think: “I want to be on
it.” Now that I’ve moved upstate, writing in a moving car isn’t as easy (or as
cheap), but my ever-present tape recorder helps. I also escape pedestrian life
with Smith Magazine and their wonderful six-word stories—the
narrative equivalent of the world flashing by your bus window—where I’ve placed
my own six-word memoir of the writing life: ‘Turned my struggle into my song.’”
—Alethea Black, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely (Broadway
Books, 2011)
posted 7.03.13
“When
the well is dry, for me, it’s usually more about attitude than inspiration or
lack of inspiration. It seems to me so much of writing is about courage,
writing something so raw you don’t want to say it aloud. That’s how I felt
writing unmotherly thoughts in my first novel, and feel now writing about
desperation in my second. The key to moving forward is breaking through
whatever is holding me back, which is usually being a Good Girl, lined up in a
multigenerational kick line with Good Daughter and Good Mother. I need to
remind myself that being the mother of five in the suburbs might mean being
responsible and routinized in a million small ways, but it doesn’t have to
define me to the core. The antidote is being a badass in some small way, like
sitting up on our pitched roof at night, or listening to “Jane Says” in the
elementary-school car line. I have three leather bracelets, black and grey
bands that wind around my right forearm, and when I put them on it feels like
channeling superpowers. It’s important to find a small way to go off the
reservation, even in the car line. Especially in the car line.”
—Nichole Bernier, author of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. (Crown,
2012)
posted 6.26.13
“This
does not count as writing time: e-mail, Facebook, ordering another J. Crew
cardigan, watching YouTube videos of that cute heavy metal band of
eleven-year-old kids in New York, or anything involving cat pictures. This does
count as writing time: lying on the floor of your office listening to Elliott
Smith's Either/Or. Poetic, hypnotic, massively screwed-up and beautiful—this
album reminds us that even with the most despairing work, creation itself is a
light in the darkness. Handle with care because Either/Or stirs
up the deepest kind of mojo. I never listen to it when I'm actually writing,
because I find the lyrics distracting. For a soundtrack, I prefer Phillip
Glass's Etudes for Piano. Try it. Wear your glasses. You'll feel
smart!”
—Jillian Lauren, author of Pretty (Plume, 2011)
posted 6.19.13
“I
read aloud. This can make writing anywhere besides at home nearly impossible. I
envy those who write in cafés, but each time I try it myself, I only eavesdrop.
Reading aloud, I become more emotionally invested in the moment I’m trying to
create; I feel present in the dialogue, so I’m more likely to hear the response
to something a character has said, rather than force it. I read aloud slowly
and deliberately. If I have a particularly productive morning writing, I’ll
often have a slightly sore throat in the afternoon from all that talking to
myself. When hearing fragments from something I’m working on doesn’t help guide
me, I read aloud the work of writers I admire—Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore,
Italo Calvino, George Saunders, Roberto Bolaño, Joan Didion—writers whose
language offers a kind of borrowed rhythm to embrace and articulate for a
while. And when that doesn’t work, I go for a walk, a run, a bike ride—some
outside activity, preferably in the sun and surrounded by the movement of other
people, and I try again the next day.”
—Sarah Bruni, author of The Night Gwen Stacy Died (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)
posted 6.12.13
“I
grew up on New York’s derelict Lower East Side in the early ’90s when it was
still a neighborhood full of dangerous beauty. Hydrants blasted jets of water
into the streets in summer heat and rap music pumped from project windows. I
fell in love, but was also scared by the rugged poetry of hip hop. As one of
the only white, Jewish bookworms in my elementary school classes I found I
could impress my classmates with poems and drawings. My father was an artist
turned social worker and I learned early that art and writing was about
thrilling escape. Memories of cars blasting bass-heavy beats into the wild
downtown nights never left me. Those violently longing, lounging, laughing
lyrics about making your own luck the hard way infused my early short stories.
Rap like Mobb Deep, Nas and 50 Cent still inspires me. The hustle, intensity,
and ferocity of these New York ghetto heroes who have made their lives into
myths are constant reminders to me to take no prisoners with my words.”
—Royal Young, author of Fame Shark (Heliotrope Books,
2013)
posted 6.05.13
“I
recommend writing in libraries, and I highly recommend changing the table,
reading room, and even library you’re working in often. Change of venue is a
powerful and perhaps under-appreciated creative force. I don’t know why it
should be this way, but if I’m stuck on a project I find that if I pick myself
up and work somewhere new, the words begin to flow again. I’ll work in one
place for a long time—for two years I worked on the 8th floor of Bobst Library
overlooking Washington Square Park; I finished and edited my first novel there.
I loved that space and knew everything about its moods and shifts of light
during those years. But now that room is entirely associated with my novel and
I’m much happier these days on the first floor near the reference desk, or in a
different place all together. I read once that John Updike had a room for
writing fiction and a different room for writing nonfiction. I suppose what I
do is a version of that, but I don’t have enough space in my apartment. I make
due with public spaces and whether it is the different walk to get there or the
different people I see and overhear along the way, I find the change of venue
always refreshes and inspires me.”
—Jessica Francis Kane, author of This Close (Graywolf
Press, 2013)
posted 5.29.13
“I
don’t actually look for inspiration. I look for ways to recoup the joy of
writing when that joy is lost to me. Whenever I find myself stuck or just
without any ideas, it’s because I seem to have forgotten how incredibly fun it
is to mess around with words. So to remind myself, I read. But not just
anything. I have to read fiction that is exuberant—not in content but style.
Writers who howl on the page so loudly, you can hear them for miles. Barry
Hannah and Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor and Angela Carter. Jose Saramago and
Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy. Faulkner. Joy Williams. Annie Proulx and
Nicholson Baker. Writers whose work feels alive and fresh and a little nuts, so
that before long, I'll start to feel more alive, too. Alive to possibility,
which is generally when I start typing.”
—Fiona Maazel, author of Woke Up Lonely (Graywolf
Press, 2013)
posted 5.22.13
“Prominently
displayed on my writing desk is an index card on which I’ve written a quote by
my dear friend, and boss at the Nervous Breakdown, Brad Listi. Some
years ago, when I was at a creative low point—allowing the criticism of others
to question my abilities as a writer—Brad told me: “Refuse to be denied or
broken.” I often return to those words. They remind me that to be a poet or
writer is not a passive act. Every day we must break through walls of
self-doubt and denial. Stand our ground. Let our voices be heard. Not so much
to challenge the caustic critics, but to tell a damn good story, write a
heart-seizing poem. And in the process, perhaps battle and tame a few of our
demons along the way.”
—Rich Ferguson, author of 8th & Agony (Punk Hostage
Press, 2013)
posted 5.15.13
“I’m
pretty much a workhorse. I write everyday whether I’m inspired or not. Getting
started is never the problem; it’s getting finished. When I get stuck mid story
or essay (a regular occurrence), I put on my running shoes and head out. I’m a
terrible runner—awkward, slow, and sweaty. But I run my guts out, as fast as I
can for a far as I can. During this very labored experience, I picture
something from childhood: My dad used to practice bow and arrow in the
backyard. He felt I had to know how to do this too, so I spent a not
insignificant amount of Alaskan summer evenings trying to manage a compound bow
sufficiently enough to hit a bullseye nailed to a bale of hay by the shed. As I
run and run, that old childhood arrow shuttles though my mind and hits the
target with a satisfying thunk. I have no idea what this daydream/memory does
or what it cleans out, but usually when I come back to the story or essay, I
have some idea that will permit me to avoid the boring, embarrassing path I was
about to take before leaving the desk.”
—Leigh Newman, author of Still Points North (Dial
Press, 2013)
posted 5.08.13
“The
other day I saw a headline that suggested climate change meant the end of
coffee, and I had to close my laptop and do some deep breathing. Coffee! Each
morning my kids vie to scoop grinds into my Melita filter cone. This is not
about civic duty, this is about survival. I write at my local coffee shop,
where the coffee is Stumptown and the children can’t find me. After two (or
THREE!) cups my brain is clear and alert and focused and brimming with ideas.
But if a coffee famine is indeed imminent, I will have to find another
profession. Or, possibly, sleep more.”
—Amy Shearn, author of The Mermaid of Brooklyn (Touchstone,
2013)
posted 5.01.13
“I
once had a blind friend ask me to close my eyes and describe a restaurant for
him. I tried descriptions from memory, using only my sense of sight. With my
eyes closed, though, I could describe fork metal scraping against teeth,
crunching paper napkins and snippets of conversation in the room. I realized my
entire life has a soundtrack with layers of sound. It's the same as when I see
any Romare Bearden collage or witness the building tensions at a dinner table.
Everything—poem, story, character, conflict, silence—has its own sound. You
sometimes have to close your eyes to hear it. Then write to get it out of your
head.”
—Cherryl Floyd-Miller, author of Exquisite Heats (Salt
Publishing, 2008)
posted 4.24.13
“Write
toward your fear. That memory or worry or idea buried inside, that truth about
you that you hope no one discovers. The thing you wish you could forget about
yourself. Write directly to that. Repression, sublimation, fear, denial. These
are creative energies, but they feed only cruel creations: Writer’s block, thin
writing, clichéd ideas, and self-criticism. Hiding your painful truth is a wall
without mortar. It takes work to maintain. Hold the stones in place, it might
not fall. But good luck, and don’t forget to worry worry worry. That effort
saps all others. Let the wall go. Rush at the painful secret, write toward it,
then through it. Rein the energy, direct it, feed yourself. Your work will show
the vigor of it, and the revelation of the secret pain will turn into something
better than simply a story. It will become acceptance and salvation.”
—Sean Ferrell, author of Man in the Empty Suit (Soho
Press, 2013)
posted 4.17.13
“Whenever
I’m in a rut, there are a few women writers whose voices I return to: Lorrie
Moore and Anne Lamott come to mind first, but I know there are others. It
doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or nonfiction, the tone must be wry and honest,
which in turn (hopefully) inspires me to be wry and honest. I find I am
sharpest in the first two hours of the early morning after a strong cup of
coffee. If I’m writing fiction and I’ve found myself in a plot cul-de-sac, the
only way for me to get out of it is to go for a longish run outside. The
treadmill just doesn’t cut it.”
—Jessica Grose, author of Sad Desk Salad (William Morrow,
2012)
posted 4.10.13
“Here
are two things that have helped me when I feel depleted or confused, which is
often. One: I find that ideas like to come when they’re most inconvenient. So I
daydream my way through situations where writing is impossible. In the shower.
While dog-walking. On the subway. I don’t rush out of that situation to write
anything down—I just let my mind go, fabricating and wandering, until the end
of the day, when I make a record of where my thoughts have gone. It gives me
material to start with the next morning. Two: When I’m in direst need of
inspiration, I do what I call ‘sentence stealing.’ I find a sentence from a
writer I admire and write it down. ‘In the beginning I left messages in the
street.’ Or, ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Then I
write my own version of the sentence, focusing only on its rhythms: by which I
mean, replacing a noun with a noun, a verb with a verb. What’s left is a
ghostly echo of the original sentence with no relationship to its actual
content. And I follow that new sentence wherever it takes me, down the road to
an unfolding story.”
—Alix Ohlin, author of Inside (Knopf, 2012)
posted 4.02.13
“There
are all the usual catalytic suspects—music, especially—but once in a while I
hit upon a new comedic genius who makes me want to duplicate his or her efforts
somehow. Recently, I was tipped off to Comedy Central’sKroll Show. It’s an intertextual
sketch-comedy show in which comedian Nick Kroll plays a wide range of
characters who star on different (fictional) reality shows, from the Jersey
Shore-like Bobby Bottleservice to Liz, one of two
publicists named Liz on “Publizity.”
His impersonations (and the production values of the fake shows) are
pitch-perfect, but so is the insight into class and gender through the filter
of one of our most vapid and addicting mainstream art forms, the reality show.
I’m interested in literary ventriloquism, in articulating yourself—and a
cultural critique—through wildly disparate voices, and Kroll does it as well as
anyone. If there’s any justice in the world, this show will get many more
seasons and Nick Kroll will get to do whatever he wants creatively.”
—Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Free
Press, 2013)
posted 3.26.13
“I
affectionately refer to my writer’s-little-helper as ‘the green book,’ but it’s
actually called The Modern Library’s Writer’s Workshop. I've gifted
this wonder of a book, which is less a writing manual and more of a spirit
guide, to many of my writer friends and they’ve all been equally captivated and
enriched by the author’s wise, old soul voice. Written by Stephen Koch, former
chair of Columbia University’s graduate writing program, the book details the
writing experiences of many of the greats—from Gustave Flaubert’s one-draft
manuscripts to Philip Roth’s constant redrafting and tinkering style—in an
effort to galvanize your own process. This book made me feel so much less alone
and aided me through the darkest moments of writing Brain on Fire.
In short, Stephen Koch is my hero.”
—Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire (Free
Press, 2012)
posted 3.20.13
“I
recommend dipping salted almonds (not smokehouse almonds, just dried, salted
almonds) into Nutella hazelnut spread and eating them like that. I tried this
for the first time yesterday, and it was delicious. My best friend from growing
up is Sicilian, and his grandmother used to tell him that he should eat three
almonds every day—exactly three, no-more-no-less—because it would make him
smarter. (I picture her covering one eye and spitting at the ground.) I know it
sounds nuts. (Sorry.) I would have liked to use this very writing exercise to
try to test the theory scientifically, but there was no way, considering the
addictive combination of salty and sweet and chocolate and umami, that I would
have been able to eat only three. So here we are. I do think that inspiration
can come from anything and everything in the world around us. So that good
writing, or any kind of art, is as likely to be sparked by sensual perception
as by other good writing or art. Jeez. That sounds like a boneheaded
combination of Proust and Jim Morrison, doesn’t it? I should have stopped at
three.”
—Dave Bry, author of Public Apology (Grand Central,
2013)
posted 3.13.13
“I
keep going back to Flannery O’Connor’s quote: ‘The beginning of human knowledge
is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception
begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses
with abstractions.’ An exercise that I often give my fiction students (because
it works for me) is to jot down the five senses on a piece of paper, then go
for a walk and collect as many details as I can that correspond to sight,
smell, taste, touch, and sound. The second part of the assignment is that
during this walk, there’s no talking allowed. Great writers are really great
noticers of life. You can’t come up with beautiful words and sentences if they
aren’t somehow rooted in the kind of detail that can only be gleaned from life
by becoming incredibly still and focused. It’s a state of being in the world
that’s become increasingly rare and hard to achieve, but not impossible.”
—Aaron Hamburger, author of Faith for Beginners (Random
House, 2006)
posted 3.07.13
“I write in the mornings. Pre-breakfast, post-sending kids off to school. Just me and my computer on the porch, a cup of instant coffee and sad to say, the odd cigarette. I’m very particular about the mug I choose for my coffee—it seems to forecast the writing mood I’m in that day. Some favorites are my ‘Write Like a Motherfucker,’ ordered from the Rumpus, or the mustard yellow one with ‘Dagmara’ painted on it, which I bought in Poland, or a ceramic one I made for my husband when we first started dating.
"No music. No people. Just me and my mug.
"Most
other inspiration lies in my past, and, like most first-time novelists, I write
what I know. Or what I remember. And when I’m stuck, when my own memory fails
to ignite anything worthy, I mine old photographs. Black-and-white family
photos. My grandmother leaning on a telephone pole next to a dapper gentleman
who I know was not my grandfather, her wavy hair falling lazily over one eye.
Cobblestones in the background. That kind of thing. Each photo becomes a
mystery to unravel, a launching pad, a kernel of an idea. Sometimes I look at
photos of myself as a kid, buckteeth and shy smile, the unfortunate zigzag set
of my bangs across my forehead. I imagine that girl as someone other than
myself, and sometimes if I’m lucky, a story unfolds.”
—Dagmara Dominczyk, author of The Lullaby of Polish Girls (Spiegel
& Grau, 2013)
.
posted 2.27.13
“This
is going to sound very meta, but when I need a kick in the pants I like to read
author interviews. There’s nothing more inspiring to me than eavesdropping on
another writer talking shop. Writing books is oftentimes a solitary, lonely
process. Authors discussing their own processes gives me a sense of
connectedness to a larger community that extends hundreds of years into the
past. It’s helpful to know you’re not alone. I’m particularly fond of
book-length conversations, such as David Lipsky’s portrait of David Foster
Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and Lady
Blessington’s Conversations With Lord Byron. In fact, the longer
the interview, the longer I can procrastinate from returning to my
work-in-progress. Speaking of which…”
—Andrew Shaffer, author of Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History
of Wayward Authors (Harper Perennial, 2013)
posted 2.20.13
“I
feel very boring admitting that my biggest inspiration for writing novels is
reading…novels. I spent four and a half years working on what will be my first
published (and second completed) novel. During that time, I developed a habit
of turning to Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and The
Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I could flip to any page of either
for evidence of what makes them so terrific—the sheer density of smart
observations (ideas that another writer would hang a whole chapter on a single
one, in these books, follow each other in crackling succession), the deft
prose, the intelligence, perspective and humor that is brought to bear on
almost every character, no matter how mercilessly dissected. (Well, humor is in
short supply in Revolutionary Road, but that lack is
counterbalanced by Yates’s terrifically exacting eye for self-deception and
affectation.) I keep both books on my desk always, along with Middlemarch.”
—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (Henry
Holt, 2013)
posted 2.13.13
“Is
it old fashioned to recommend love as a writing prescription? I could say a lot
about the mind-quieting effects of long-distance running, regular meditation,
and a well-crafted soundtrack, but what about the mind-blooming madness of
love? I’m talking about the crazy kind, not the long-suffering wife who
silently delivers tea to your desk and keeps your calendar. I’m talking about a
heart torn open, in falling, in breaking, in longing, in pining, in mid-swoon
mania. A little mania has always done wonders for artists, in work if not in
life. If we met our characters with the endless curiosity we bring to our
lovers’ bodies, we could hardly fail to conjure them in all dimensions. If we
could direct love’s inexhaustible obsession, its hunger for possession to our
language, how could we not hammer it to perfection? Passion is the desire to
consume what we cannot, not completely. And writing is the effort to name what
we cannot, not exactly. The agony of their impossibility is what drives us, so
why not drive one into the other? So long as I’m not driven to distraction, I
find they make an industrious pair.”
—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart (Thomas Dunne
Books, 2011)
posted 2.06.13
"I'm
an extrovert. I talk to strangers at Target, to telemarketers too. When I can't
find an actual person I turn to Twitter. When the Wi-Fi’s down, I watch TV. I
live for voices. Of course, as a writer I need silence, so I impose it on
myself. I take long walks, aimless drives. But when the walk turns into a
neighborly chat or the drive ends in a flat tire, I come home and shower until
the water runs out. And that is where I do my best work, where I puzzle out
characters and timelines. Where nothing can reach me, no phone, no e-mail. A
shower is, in this technological world, the only place I can force myself to be
truly alone."
—Laurel Snyder, author of The Myth of the Simple Machines (No
Tell Books, 2007)
posted 1.30.13
"While,
like most writers, I gain all kinds of inspiration from reading and movies and
art and music, what often inspires me most is silence and a dark room. I love
to sit in a dark room, especially late at night, with nothing to distract me. I
wait to see where my imagination might take me. With nothing to distract—no
television, no online procrastination—with only my imagination and a still,
quiet room, I tend to find the answers to problems I might be having in a given
story or essay. I find new ways of thinking about how to tell a story. I learn
new things about the characters I'm writing and the places I put them in. We
really underestimate how much creative inspiration can be found in
ourselves."
—Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State (Grove/Atlantic,
2014)
posted 1.22.13
"Like
lots of fiction writers, I rely on research to reduce the odds of embarrassing
myself. I don’t want to, say, have the wrong flowers in bloom at the wrong time
in the wrong place or get everything wrong about whales or guano harvesting or
France. Even one lonely mistake can ruin the reader’s willingness to
participate in the illusion of fiction, and I’m not into making things harder
for myself. That said, I might be galloping along, churning out the pages (or,
okay, sentences), when an uncertainty arises and suddenly I'm wallowing in a
Wikipedia bog that gets deeper and wider the further in I go. Links lead to
other links lead to actual books. I wade out toward the edge of the Internet; I
consult my ever more crowded shelf of odd, specialized reference volumes; I
might go to the library. Research slows down writing, but sometimes a little
drag is a good thing. Often while looking up the answer to one question, I
stumble across an unrelated detail or a chronological coincidence that changes
the course of my story and gives it new life. Research gives you the chance to
be a magpie, spotting those irresistibly shiny bits and pieces. Grab what you
need and then grab what strikes your fancy; take it all back to your nest; get
back to work."
—Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements (Knopf,
2012)
posted 1.16.13
"I'm
a city girl. I was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and I've spent my
entire adult life living in cities (Moscow, London, Amsterdam, New York, and
now Washington again). I love big cities for the energy, the people-watching,
the access to art and culture, the ability to feel anonymous. But I also need a
daily 'forest bath,' as the Japanese call it. I take a long walk in the woods
almost every day to clear my head. (In Moscow, I walked in wooded parks; in
London, I went to Hampstead Heath; in Amsterdam, I walked in the Amsterdamse
Bos; in Brooklyn, I was in Prospect Park every day; now my daily walk is in
Rock Creek Park.) I've been doing this for years. There is something about
being on the trails, in the silence, under all those trees that does wonders
for my brain. (A couple of years ago, The New York Times noted
the health benefits of 'forest bathing': apparently time spent among
trees and plants reduces stress and boosts immune function.) I take my dog with
me and sometimes I sort out character and plot problems on my walks. But more
often than not, the walk is just a way to let go—of anxiety, of ego—and recharge
my creative batteries. I always work better after I've been in the woods."
—Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them (The Penguin
Press, 2013)
posted 1.09.13
"On
Saturdays I go look at art, partly because I wish I had become a visual artist.
I’m not looking for narrative work, just powerful images that will push me out
of my storytelling head. Abstract artists like Thomas Nozkowski and Jorge Pardo
make me happy, while Georg Baselitz and Ida Applebroog hint that I shouldn’t
envy their vocation. I think they want to tell stories, too. On nights before I
write I absorb some great sentences that I’ll rearrange or just steal when I
write the next day. I look at Isaac Babel’s short stories, or Leonard Michaels’
short stories, or pages from RK Narayan’s novels, especially Waiting
for the Mahatma. I also look at this fiction because I’m always trying to
regain access to what made me want to be a writer—the emotional curiosity part,
not the full-of-rage part. And then when I sit down to write I listen to
country music that’s really storytelling, like anything by Tom T. Hall and
Waylon Jennings. I love their songs but as I work, I’m looking forward to the
moment when I don’t hear the words anymore."
—Ben Schrank, author of Love Is a Canoe (Sarah Crichton
Books, 2013)
posted 1.02.13
"My
list of creativity-stimulators is long. It includes coffee, meditation, a giant
hula-hoop, a standing desk, Salter, Duras, Eliot (George), Milton, Carson,
Robinson, Hazzard, Gardam, Bishop, Munro, Arvo Pärt, Bach, Tristan und Isolde,
baby-hugs, my gigantic compendium of Shakepeare's plays, dogs (when I have
one), weeping, naps, and gratitude. But the motivator that surprises me with
its potency and general infallibility is exercise, mostly of the long, slow,
outdoor variety. After half an hour of semi-vigorous swimming or running, the
paradox takes hold: The body falls away and you are left only with your mind,
your characters, your words. The deeper I go into a project, the fitter I get.
The converse is true, too: I wear my writing on my body. The flabbier I am, the
more you can bet that I'm writing poorly, and the very best thing you can do
for my work-in-progress is to buy me a pair of running shoes, dammit! As with
everything else in life, energy in one area breeds energy in other areas."
—Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia (Hyperion, 2012)
posted 12.26.12
"I
recommend getting to know the time of day when you write best and guard it as
zealously as possible. If you can, work day jobs that keep that time free. If
that isn’t possible, which it often isn’t, try to carry a small notebook and
get a couple of five-minute stretches for idea generation—if that’s impossible
memorize a few lines or write on your hand. Often all we need is a few words to
key in on our imagination. When you are writing I recommend stopping midthought
or at a point where you know what the next move or few lines will be. I find
when I do that I can start writing very quickly the next day because it gives
me a way in, whereas returning to where I am stuck over and over becomes
demoralizing. When refining, try reading your work in nonsensical Charlie Brown
adult voice (wa, wawa, wa wawawa). It’s a good way to listen for
repetitive rhythms and breath."
—Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen (Red Lemonade, 2011)
posted 12.19.12
"Mary
Shelley and Louise Bourgeois. All I have to do, and I could do this every day
of my writing life for the rest of my life, is open up Frankenstein to
any page, or open up my book of Louise Bourgeois drawings, and my
gut-heart-strum is activated. I've used single lines to enter whole territories
of story, single images to chase characters. Endlessly. I turn to their work
like a woman who gave herself permission to create a new lineage, a
motherline-motherload lineage, where other women writers and artists and
musicians make up a second world, body first. Where language and the image and
the body are no longer divided from one another. A little bit I literally leave
and step into their worlds, but don't tell anyone or it'll make me sound kooky.
Just trust me: 'I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine
and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one,
I will indulge the other.'"
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne
Books, 2012)
posted 12.12.12
"Viewing
visual art—works that deal with ripping off the polite skin of
society—stimulates me. When in that process of discovery I return again and
again to the paintings of Francis Bacon, de Kooning’s women, the portraiture of
the South African painter Marlene Dumas, the works of Louise Bourgeois. In
recent memory, the retrospective of Glenn Ligon at the Whitney moved me—his
appropriation of texts and popular culture as well as the political
consciousness of his work, which is akin to one of my favorite radical writers
Kathy Acker. I often wish to be stirred up, agitated, when fomenting projects,
but when actually writing I need to be calm—listening to the same Haydn piano
sonatas or Arvo Pärt’s choral works over and over, or being in complete
silence, drinking two glasses of silver needle white tea in the AM, walking the
dog, eating regular strict vegetarian meals, practicing yoga."
—Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines (Semiotext(e), 2012)
posted 12.05.12
"Before
I was a writer, I was a traveler; as it turned out, almost all of my stories
(and unfinished novels, and bad poems, and personal essays) evolved from
journeying away from home. A misunderstanding on an oppressively hot, chaotic
Bangkok street; a hurried descent from the high-altitude salt plains of the
Atacama desert; a tequila- and sweat-soaked salsa party in the courtyard of a
Yucatan peninsula hostel; and an impromptu fly-fishing lesson in a remote,
swollen Montana river have all made their way into stories. Sometimes a scrap
of overheard dialogue is the spark; often it’s a character based on someone
I’ve met—the driver of that Jeep in the Atacama desert, or the irate Thai
police officer trying to tug the camera out of my hand. My novel, The
Movement of Stars, began when I picked up a tourist flyer on the Nantucket
ferry in 1996 (“Come and see the home of the famous girl astronomer from
Nantucket!”). Her small, grey-shingled house; the sandy street; the image of a
girl, in a grey dress, on her roof, every night, searching for something
elusive in the night sky, something that would change her life: They held me in
thrall for fifteen years, until the story was told. Parenthood has pretty much
grounded all my flights these days, but the well of places that inspire me has
yet to run dry."
—Amy Brill, author of The Movement of Stars (Riverhead,
2013)
posted 11.28.12
"I
listen to music (with lyrics!) when I write, and I often need coffee and
chocolate to get me into the chair. There’s all that, yes. But at the risk of
sounding like an Om-loving yoga teacher, I have to admit that, lately, what’s
inspired me to write is feeling grateful. Grateful for my family, for my
friends, for my health, for this apartment, for this desk, for the washing
machine churning in the other room, for this cup of coffee growing cold next to
me. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to write. Grateful that writing is a
thing at all. Grateful that sentences can do what they do—produce meaning,
offer me beauty, wisdom, tension, make me laugh. I mean, wow, right?"
—Edan Lepucki, author of If You’re Not Yet Like Me (Nouvella,
2010)
posted 11.20.12
“When
it comes to inspiration, I’m an omnivore, an art whore: I’ll take it wherever I
can get it. I come from a previous incarnation as a visual artist, so I see
writing not as some sort of alchemy apart but as just another way of telling
stories: of finding truths, of cutting through the quotidian, of—to blatantly
steal from Joni Mitchell—“touching souls.” Yes, I know she was referring to
love, but I’ve always experienced the best art, in whatever medium, as acts of
simultaneous aggression and love. (There’s a reason Matthew Barney called his
series The Cremaster Cycle, okay?) A random sampling of my most
recent couplings: I saw Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities and
couldn’t move for ten minutes after the audience filed out; I read Edward St.
Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels and wandered around bereft,
as if in mourning, when I was done; I went to a concert by The National and
felt what I imagine others feel for Jesus; I randomly came into contact with
four of Richard Rogers’ buildings over the course of three days (the Pompidou,
the River Café, his house, and Heathrow’s Terminal 5) and felt permanently
transformed; I downloaded Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz followed
by Lena Dunham’s Girls followed by Tig Notaro’s Tig
Notaro Live—legally! I paid for them! People, you must pay for your art or
you want have any more of it—and wanted to reach through my iPad to hug them
all; I keep Robert Frank’s The Americans easily accessible
next to my dining room table, in case I need to commune with him over
breakfast. Ditto for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. If I’m
feeling frisky, I’ll play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” or Radiohead’s “Reckoner” or
U2’s “One” or Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” as I’m drowning my Cheerios in milk.
Works and artists like these set the bar for me. They say to me, 'Here’s what’s
possible, lowly cereal muncher. Now sit your ass down and contribute.’”
—Deborah Copaken Kogan, author of The Red Book (Hyperion,
2012)
posted 11.14.12
"I
go surfing, which isn't so much an inspiration as something that clears away
the many impediments to inspiration. I don't think about writing while I'm in
the water. I give myself over completely to the sublunary experience of
weather, water, and waves. It's often cold—the best season here is winter—and
the ocean is not always hospitable. In real surf you confront your fears and
recognize your limits. Your awareness is total and local; you can only ride the
wave you're on, not the many wave-pictures you carry around in your head. I
never come out of the water with an idea for a story or a solution for a
narrative problem. Surfing is useless that way. But what it does for me—and
this part is invaluable—is clean my mental clock. In essence, it reminds me,
down to my bones, that I'm only a single human being on the planet earth, a
link in a human chain, itself an infinitesimal link in the great chain-mail
fabric of the universe. My many anxieties about time and significance dissolve,
and I can get to work."
—Antoine Wilson, author of Panorama City (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
posted 11.07.12
"I
never go searching for inspiration to write, especially when it comes to short
stories; if I’m not moved to write I create in some other way, like drawing or
painting or designing botanical arrangements. When I feel that smack that
says write, these visual creations often inform my descriptions,
characters, and topics. Years ago I was thrilled to learn that one of my
favorite writers, Elizabeth Bishop, had also painted, and I received a book of
these paintings titled Exchanging Hats. They are spirited, loving
homages to scenes and spaces of her life, including a whimsical 'E. Bishop’s
Patented Slot Machine' that makes me giggle every time I look at it and reminds
me to try to add a bit of play into everything I create."
—Kate Hill Cantrill, author of Walk Back From Monkey School,
(Press 53, 2012)
posted 10.18.12
"My
writing influences are mainly photographs and music and they always convey a
somewhat dark mood. I stare at landscape photographs byMichael Light or David Maisel just
to let my brain settle and prepare to write. Once I clear away the debris from
the day, I can start channeling the voices of my characters. I also listen to
music while I'm writing and almost always one album on repeat for an entire
night. Usually I'm listening to my fiancé Jon DeRosa's ambient/drone project
"Aarktica," because it's not lyric-heavy and I can get lost in it. I
recommend his album In Sea. I also listen to Rachel's for the same
reason. Their albumMusic for Egon Schiele is great to write to and
on heavy rotation at my house. It's moody music with strings, but isn't
obtrusive to the writing process at all. It's really interesting to see how
different songs and albums on repeat influence the outcome of my
chapters."
—Karolina Waclawiak, author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms (Two
Dollar Radio, 2012)
posted 9.18.12
"All
my good writing comes out of vulnerability. The other stuff, the stuff that
came from cleverness or vanity—I wish I could throw it all out. I am terribly
vulnerable to nature and I love to fish. I have a favorite creek in western
Colorado. There is so much excitement and loss—sometimes for the fish, if he is
pan-sized; for me when he gets away. And the loss of the day as evening
settles, and the quietness that allows many other losses to be remembered and
felt. And beauty. And gratitude. And focus. Intense focus on moving water,
which swirls and silvers and blackens and moves back on itself. On wind. As I
focus on those, the circle of awareness somehow expands outward to take in the
steep banks of dark spruce, their smell, a kingfisher, the flags of Spanish
moss, the shoulders of the mountain upstream. Then I crack open. The whole
world is in the circle with all of its heartbreak and beauty and I have cried
while I fished and never been happier. Go figure. If I can’t fish I read the
poets of the late Tang—Li Po, Wang Wei, Li Shang Yin. They can put me there in
a moment, knee-deep in a stream, up in the tearing clouds of the mountains.
They are aficionados of loss, and they make me feel vulnerable and stricken and
full of joy. That is a good place to write from."
—Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars (Knopf, 2012)
posted 8.15.12
"Once
upon a time, I had no habit for writing, and I waited to feel like writing.
Recalling the advice of my college psych professor, I decided to invent an
association to teach myself to feel like writing. I settled on sound, because I
am a stickler for total psychological privacy. At first it was a fan; now, I
use the free White Noise Lite app on my iPhone. I set it
to the sound of airplane travel––a steady, polyphonous static––and I put on my
admittedly oversized headphones, and my brain begins to think: I should be
writing. If I find myself distracted, I turn off the sound so that I can keep
the habit strong. It’s ingrained now––I am both Pavlov and his dog."
—Hanna Pylväinen, author of We Sinners (Henry
Holt, 2012)
posted 8.08.12
"Film
is very different from fiction—I’m always reminding my graduate students of
this—but every so often a movie comes along that captures with full force what
you’re trying to do as a novelist. Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on
Me is just such a movie. Quiet and character-driven, it made me want
to sit down and write when I first saw it twelve years ago, and it still does
that to me. My friend Joel Lovell wrote about it recently
in the New York Times Magazine, which made me go back and watch
it again. The scene Lovell quotes, when the character 'Terry' is talking to his
young nephew, reminds me of what good fiction does, and how so much good
fiction captures adults behaving like children and children, therefore, forced
to behave like adults. In any case, it’s a movie that reminds me of why I’m a
writer, that makes me want to get back to work, and get back to work, and get
back to work some more."
—Joshua Henkin, author of The World Without You: A Novel (Pantheon,
2012)
posted 8.01.12
"There
are two visual artists, diametrically opposed in their intent, who I look to
for inspiration. First is the photographer Gregory Crewdson. His extravagantly staged photos are mysterious and dark and
often suggest relationships or the very recent loss of relationships. Crewdson,
the son of a psychiatrist, has said in an interview that his work is driven by
a need to imagine and understand what his father was talking to patients about
in his basement office. The people in his photos appear so closed off, tight-lipped.
They seem to be struggling with submerged emotions. Faced with a Crewdson
image, I find myself looking for the story. On the other end of the
spectrum is one of my favorite painters, Mark Rothko,
who famously said that the subject of painting is painting. His colorscapes
offer me a place of ease. I don’t question and wonder and strive to make a
story when I stand in front of a Rothko, I just absorb and rest."
—Natalie Serber, author of Shout Her Lovely Name (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
posted 7.25.12
"Lately,
I have been drawing much of the inspiration for my poems from my reading
of psychological case studies. I'm speaking mostly about textbooks and
other source material that contain actual dialoguebetween patient and
therapist. Some examples from my current reading are Danny Wedding's 'Case
Studies in Psychotherapy,' Oltmanns's 'Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology,'
and Freud's 'The Wolfman and Other Cases.' Besides being utterly
fascinating, they give me a deep insight into the mind of some everyday
and not so everyday people. I have been composing dialogue poems, which
end up reading more like tiny plays. I have also been using them
as inspiration for 'dream' poems. I see these case studies as being a
great tool for both poets and fiction writers alike."
—M. A. Vizsolyi, author of The Lamp With Wings: Love Sonnets (Harper
Perennial, 2011)
posted 7.18.12
"For
years, I've found inspiration by going to museums by myself. Going solo is key.
When I'm with other people I'm always wondering whether they're having a good
time, and whether I'm lingering too long in a gallery. One of the first poems I
ever published was inspired by seeingGustav Klimt's portrait of Mäda Primavesi at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art,
when I was nineteen and nearly friendless in New York City. I have another poem
sparked by Marc Chagall's 'The Birthday' at the MoMA. I love the Art Institute of Chicago and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I
rarely ever bring a camera, but I always bring a notebook."
—Leigh Stein, author of Dispatch From the Future (Melville
Books, 2012)
posted 7.11.12
"I
write while I run; music and my pounding feet lull me into a self-hypnosis,
allowing my mind to wander and compose on its own. A good running route is
scenic enough to inspire but not distract, and the music has to fit your mental
labors. For The Long Walk, I listened to a lot of jangly '60s rock
(The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival) and their modern equivalents (The
Black Angels). The prep before the run is just as important: coffee, breakfast,
and a truly good book the night before. I try to be very selective about what I
read, and feed myself a steady diet of quality writing as creative food. I’ve
started to avoid the newspaper, bad magazine copy, and throw-away novels during
heavy writing bouts. I’m easily influenced, and I only want the best to
percolate to the surface during my runs."
—Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk (Doubleday,
2012)
posted 6.20.12
“It
is my wife’s good graces that allow me to do this work at all, since my writing
time saddles her with parenting our five boys. So when I do write—and in a good
week I write every day—I want to make sure the writing comes easy. The music
of Boxhead Ensemble, a loose confederation of improvisational musicians under the
leadership of Michael Krassner, takes me into whatever liminal space writing
comes from, when it comes best: Put your headphones on. Press play. Feel the
pull of the outer dark? I’d tell you this is what I’m talking about, but you
can no longer hear me. That sound is the slow hiss of your words tumbling out
of the sky.”
—Christian Kiefer, author of The Infinite Tides (Bloomsbury
USA, 2012)
posted 6.13.12
“Any
story I’m working on begins with a mood—a tone, an atmosphere for the story to
grow out of—and that mood, for me, is always informed by music. So, very early
on, I settle on a soundtrack. For instance, with Radio Iris, I
wanted a haunting, echoing mood that immediately aligned itself with pop
oldies: Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, and other voices from the past,
simple songs of love and longing that are touched by the tragic fates of their
singers, and feel as though they’re trapped behind frosted glass. Before I
start working, I’ll listen to the music I associate with the story to get the
right feel. That’s the first part. The second part is walking. I like to write
at cafés, not only for the caffeine and soothing background patter—though those
things are important too—but for the walk to get there. Watching the
neighborhood go by while songs rattle around my head puts me in the right mood
to let a story unfurl.”
—Anne-Marie Kinney, author of Radio Iris (Two Dollar
Radio, 2012)
posted 6.06.12
"The
thing that inspires me in my writing is chatting with my friends about family
relationships. I’ve relished many conversations, over time, with two filmmaker
friends: Kim Longinotto and Clio Barnard. We’ve had long chats, like winding
rivers with many tributaries. I find myself compelled by the bizarre and
terrible stories at the heart of families, and this theme features recurrently
in our chats together. Kim’s documentaries, novelistic stories about the
injustices suffered by women around the world, often carry the tang of her own
deep history, yet somehow transcend any personal agenda. Clio’s drama
documentary, The Arbor, layers a familial tragedy percolating
through a generation. Her insights about families shine like a beam throughout
her work. Chatting to them both, and seeing how their personal histories inform
their work without overshadowing it, is a source of inspiration to me."
—Rosie Dastgir, author of A Small Fortune (Riverhead Books, 2012)
posted 5.30.12
"I
draw a lot of inspiration from visual art. One of the early and ongoing
inspirations for me is a painter (and happily, a friend) named Michael Brophy whose ironic yet romantic
images of western clear-cuts, slash piles, stumps, and domesticated forest
scapes opened a whole new way of seeing my own backyard (the Northwest).
I really can't overestimate what a gift Brophy's work is—the
histories it suggests, the sense impressions it implies—to the degree that I
can honestly say it has led in some way to all my fictive projects. There are a
lot of other artists who've had influences on my work, too, some through their
conceptual frameworks and others through very specific little details I've
stolen—a coiled garden hose or a cursive tire tread that becomes part of a
scene. There's something about a visual image that both focuses the mind and
frees it to wander, and the artists who help me most—people likeRobert Adams, Ed Ruscha,
and Chris Johanson, to name a few—guide me into
landscapes of thought and feeling I might not find on my own."
—Jon Raymond, author of Rain Dragon (Bloomsbury, 2012)
posted 5.23.12
"The
majority of us start off asking our peers and our instructors, How can I
improve my prose/poetry? How can I become 'publishable'? These are necessary
and essential questions. Equally essential, yet often neglected, is the
question, How can I assist other writers? In my classes, and in my own writing
life, I pursue the idea that one of the greatest inspirations for producing our
own best work is by promoting and being inspired by other writers. These are
coequal concerns. For me this manifests itself in a number of ways: attending
readings, consuming work at a retail level, using the public library, writing
editors about work I've most appreciated, etcetera. Experience has taught me
the more one contemplates how one might assist other writers, the more one's
own writing benefits. It's almost too simple a concept to advertise."
—Brian Leung, author of Take Me Home (Harper, 2010)
posted 5.16.12
"My yoga and meditation practices have become such an integral
part of my writing life that I can't imagine what it would be like to sit down
to write without knowing that, at some point in the day, I will be able to
unroll my mat and quiet my mind. Quieting the mind is, for me, the biggest
challenge. We live in an age of distraction, and the very instrument on which I
write is also a portal into the outside world: The Internet is addictive and I
have a hard time shutting it down. During the day I ping around—from my work to
a quick e-mail check, back to my work, back online to look something up,
something that could really wait until later—and before I know it,
even if I've gotten work done, my mind feels like that old commercial about
drugs. Do you remember the one? We see an egg. This is your mind. Then the egg
is cracked against a hot griddle. This
is your mind on drugs. My mind on the Internet needs soothing. It needs
silence. It needs space, and when I unroll my mat, I am guaranteed that silence
and space. Afterward, when I return to my desk, it is with that ironed, clean,
smooth clarity, as if I'm starting my day all over again."
—Dani
Shapiro, author of Devotion (HarperCollins, 2010)
posted 5.04.12
"For almost three years now I’ve been obsessed with the
work of South African photographer Roger Ballen. His photos act as a propeller for me in my writing. There is a
spookiness to his work that invigorates me. He has a somewhat consistent
vocabulary of objects in his photographs: small animals, primitive or childlike
wall drawings, smudged human beings that seem to be the embodiment of contrast,
discarded and broken down household items. I often start a story or chapter
with one of his photographs and allow that image to set the tone for what I’m
working on. I let those objects show up and even reoccur. I try to get into the
head of the subject and imagine it a new context. I can’t imagine what my
writing would look like right now without his images in my head."
—Jac Jemc,
author of My Only
Wife (Dzanc Books,
2012)
posted 5.02.12
“From the moment a writer is attached to a story, said
Saul Bellow, he or she suddenly has ‘feelers all over the place.’ So once I’m
attached, I draw inspiration from what I think the character in question would
read or consume. My first novel is about a fashion designer starting his own
label, and through a turn of events he winds up a suspected terrorist in
post-9/11 New York City. I didn’t know squat about fashion design, so I read Coco Chanel’s biography by Edmond
Charles-Roux from 1975. Then came The Beautiful Fall about
the rivalry between Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Those texts inspired
an alternate persona that I took on when sitting down to write. My ‘feelers’
were up, and a real person began to take shape. Once my hero was labeled an
enemy combatant and sent to Guantanamo Bay, I read the only book he would be
allowed, the Koran. You could call all this ‘research,’ but I don't. I find it
to be more mystical than that.”
—Alex Gilvarry, author of From
the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Viking,
2012)
posted 4.25.12
“Because I am an American and often worry about many things, I
seek out consolation before beginning to write, and little in this world
consoles me more than the male falsetto: Skip James, Jónsi Birgisson, Pepe Núñez, Roscoe Holcomb, Antony Hegarty and company. A great falsetto contains everything—vulnerability, artifice,
control, tenderness, breath, hoot, indirect sexuality, finitude—but most
important, it is constrained by, and therefore expresses, a sort of
transgression or otherness. The male falsetto reminds me that tension among all
these things is exquisite and vital—in fact, I often try to ‘hear’ my poems
sung this way—and grants me permission to move beyond my usual range.”
—Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of My Love Is a Dead Arctic
Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012)
posted 4.18.12
“Pandit Pran Nath was a conduit for an understanding of Indian
classical singing, and a major influence on American minimalism, whose
disciples included Lamonte Young and Terry Riley. His two recordings of the deep, meditative Raga Malkauns are among the most extraordinary pieces of vocal music I’ve ever
heard. Pran Nath’s voice is vast, raw, chthonic—as if granite had learned to
sing. Sometimes I write listening to this music. Sometimes I have to switch it
off, as I forget to type.”
—Hari
Kunzru, author of Gods
Without Men (Knopf, 2012)
posted 4.11.12
"When I’m in the thick of a project, the most important
sources of inspiration are those that help me open the gates of reverie, that
make me descend into that nonverbal realm from which potent fiction
paradoxically springs. These forms of inspiration are everywhere. I listen to
music. I read. I re-read, especially Faulkner, Woolf, Morrison, Lispector,
Saramago, Borges, Melville, Rilke, Whitman, and many others, roving the pages
with more than my conscious mind, trusting the masterful prose to push my own
work open. I also take walks, and tune in to the light as it spills into trees
and sparks in the gutters. The infinite complexity of light on the varied
surfaces of the world is a remarkable thing. It is constantly taking place all
around us, and a lifetime of writing would not exhaust it. I don’t know why
this works, why listening to the interplay of light and things while walking on
a street or trail is so damn good for the writing, but I always come back to my
writing desk with more to give the page than I had before."
—Carolina
De Robertis, author of Perla (Knopf, 2012)
posted 4.04.12
“Often I thumb through animal books—the National Audubon Society’s field
guides to birds and fish almost always shake something
loose. For instance my poem 'Parts of a Feather' in Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press, 2009) was
inspired by, and depends heavily on, such bird facts. While taking notes for Pot Farm (on site at a California medical
marijuana farm), I paged through my eastern birds field guide, reading about
the birds I would never see out West. This cleared my head, prepared me to
revise my notes and cobble them together into something readable. There’s
something about birds and fish in glossy books—their skeletal diagrams, their
oddball mating habits—that set me to jotting something down. Right now, I’m
motivated by the giant squid. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately
after having seen a photo of one in the Smithsonian. Travel also inspires. Last year, my wife and I
traveled through India. The car-horn culture there is interesting, and
infuriating. There are no rules of the road, at least none that we could
detect. Cars shared space with rickshaws; tiny mopeds bearing families of
eight, the two infants propped up on the handlebars; oxen; goats; dogs; and
pedestrians. Drivers had to sound their horns constantly—not in a ‘get out
of my way’ or ‘hurry up’ sort of construct, but as if to declare, feebly and
succinctly amid the chaos, ‘I’m here! I’m here!’—as some kind of
reminder, reassurance. In writing, I think I’m beeping that horn.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Pot
Farm (University of Nebraska
Press, 2012)
posted 3.28.12
"I don’t intentionally scrapbook for inspiration, but that
always ends up happening. I will see a graphic or image, or hear a song on the
radio, and start to collect them for characters whose perspectives I am about
to inhabit. Because I work in text, I find my emotional motivation within these
other media. For Kim, in my story collection, We
Should Never Meet (St.
Martin’s Press, 2004), it was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 'American Girl.' For Cam, a character in my
novel, The
Reeducation of Cherry Truong (St.
Martin’s Press, 2012), it was A Fine Frenzy’s 'Almost Lover.' When I was in France over the
summer, I found these writing journals with these gorgeous graphic women on the
covers. I bought one for each new character in my next project. With so much of
my writing up in a digital cloud, it’s nice to have these tangible elements
where I can root my characters."
—Aimee
Phan, author of The
Reeducation of Cherry Truong
posted 3.21.12
“Lately I’ve been going to the symphony for inspiration. I don’t
know classical music well, so most of what happens surprises me. The long
segments of developing sounds break me out of my tight verbal boxes of thought.
I listen for the emotions, rhythms, and phrasing, and think about how to do
this with words. Occasionally a work leaves me stunned, like Arvo Pärt’s "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten." A single chime repeats throughout and silence is
written in, reminding me to let my writing breathe. When the string sections intersect
and descend through dissonance, I am carried from the announcement of death
through grief to acceptance. When the last bell rings, there is clarity, as
when the sky suddenly clears after a storm, and I rush home and begin to
write.”
—Mark
Liebenow, author of Mountains
of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
posted 3.14.12
“A common statement, I know, but the best stimulant for writing
is reading. When it's prose, I'll turn to rich sentences from Nabokov or F.
Scott Fitzgerald. If poetry, I start with the Eastern Europeans (especially
Zbigniew Herbert). Otherwise, I often begin with a simple exercise I call
‘negative inversions.’ Find a one-page poem with relatively short lines. In the
right-hand margin, invert each line to its opposite. I stumbled down a
kudzu-choked ravine becomes I picked my way over the
talislope to higher ground. Or: They bloom and loom in
cities and no one notices becomes It shrivels and cowers under
the tiniest shrub and somehow everyone knows. A half-dozen lines in, the poem takes
off on its own and you can abandon the exercise.”
—Sarah
Gorham, author of Bad
Daughter (Four Way
Books, 2011)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 2.29.12
"I am inspired by love, which sounds simplistic and dreamy,
but in my case is brutally real. My son, Ronan, is nearly two years old and has
Tay-Sachs, a disease that is always fatal and results in a slow regression into
a vegetative state before death by age three. The kind of love that inspires me
is the one that acknowledges the great loss that comes with it—that you can’t have
one without the other. This love requires a daily acknowledgment of
death-in-life that so many of us try to avoid and that now, as a writer, I face
full on, every day. Living with anticipatory grief has made me a more authentic
writer, a writer who understands that all the neurotic, spinning thoughts that
used to plague me about process, character, plot, and career, pale in
comparison to the directive that Ronan has given me: to write like my life
depends on it, because his, in fact, does. I am writing the myth of his life,
and I’m writing it while looking right at him. So I write in love, but not in
romantic love or in puppy love or in the love of bunnies and hearts, but in a
blaze of fury and euphoria and necessity."
—Emily
Rapp, author of Poster
Child (Bloomsbury,
2007)
posted 2.22.12
“When I'm stuck, I daydream my way back to a place that still holds a great deal of emotion for me, and a ritual that used to take place there, lingering on the objects that vibrate and glow with some hidden, deeper meaningI have yet to discover. (To get myself in the right frame of mind, I tend to reread work by Bruno Schulz.) Once I have recreated the ritual on the page, I think about what might happen to threaten or disrupt it.
“I got a much-needed start on my
first novel by daydreaming my way back to an idyllic June afternoon in the pool
at my family’s hotel. Various stories and essays have been inspired by my deep
emotional attachment to the Dictaphone belts and Magic Carbons of the crazy
insurance company where I used to work, the rarely used but totally intriguing
pop-out cigarette lighter on my parents’ old Pontiac, the heavy double-edged
chrome Gillette razor with which I gave my father fake shaves. Sometimes, I
focus on a ritual that frightens or disturbs me. But if I haven’t been writing
for a while, I’m usually in a foul mood, so I much prefer to daydream myself
back a place and time I once loved.”
—Eileen
Pollack, author of Breaking
and Entering (Four
Way Books, 2012)
posted 2.15.12
“Whenever I finish writing a novel, I feel bereft of the
characters. I also believe I’ve expended everything I know and have even
exhausted my vocabulary. Reading other authors' works—fiction, poetry,
essays—helps to replenish my language and jump-start my imagination. Still,
facing the blank page or screen is always intimidating, so I try to ‘write’ in
my head as long as I can before putting words down. This requires memorizing
long blocks of prose until there’s enough to begin with a little confidence.
But aging has strained my memory, so I find myself jotting down words on
whatever’s handy: my checkbook, the margins of the newspaper, and even the palm
of my hand. I really know I’m ready to go when a new set of characters starts
lounging in my head like squatters.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, author of An
Available Man (Ballantine,
2012)
posted 2.08.12
“Usually when I need to work something out in a poem or a piece of fiction, I go on a walk. If I’m at home I go to one of the parks—Riverside or Central Park. But, walking—and interior conversations in general—can only accomplish so much, so when I’m seeking literary inspiration, I turn to my heroes, one of whom is Mavis Gallant. I read and reread her fiction for the clean, precise, astounding concision of her storytelling, which captures both the vivid atmosphere of the places she’s been, and the bare, grim, beautiful human experience that takes place within them. Sometimes her writing can feel prim and distanced, but she can be very funny, and there is an overarching wisdom in her voice that is at once soothing and dauntingly assured. When she drapes the inevitable shadows, which fall on all her character’s lives, it’s with a gentle and aching grace that leaves you feeling both gutted and gifted. No matter the position of her narration, she always gives the reader everything they need to know in the most astonishing ways, and never with the expectation of applause. She is an intelligent writer who teaches me about economy, humanity, and a female’s view of the world.
“From ‘The Legacy: ‘They stared
out of the car at brick façades, seemingly neither moved nor offended by the
stunning ugliness of the streets that had held their childhood. Sometimes one
of them sighed, the comfortable respiration of one who has wept.’”
—Nathaniel
Bellows, author of Why
Speak? (Norton,
2007)
posted 2.01.12
"This is going to sound pretty awful, but I'm inspired by
humiliation. My own, mostly, but also what I see in the world at large.There's
an entire TV industry devoted to humiliation at this point, though I try not to
get sucked too deeply into that. Humiliation is such a raw and pervasive human
experience. And it's one we're constantly taught to avoid, or at least avoid
disclosing. My stories (whether fictionalized or not) are mostly about pushing
people into humiliation and seeing them through it. The reason I write 'funny'
so much of the time is because the comic impulse is how we forgive our
humiliations."
—Steve
Almond, author of God
Bless America (Lookout,
2011)
posted 12.16.11
"I am currently surrounded
by diapers, squeaky toys, and crayons scattered at my feet. This is the life of
a working writer/mother. So how does one find inspiration in all of this? A
good majority of my time is spent tending to the delicate, magical, maddening,
profound needs of my children, both under the age of two and a half years.
After the day is done, after the children are asleep, and after I have eaten my
one good meal of the day, I take a few deep breaths and I say to myself, 'Put
on your shoes.' If I can put on my shoes and my coat, I can then walk the three
blocks to the office I rent down the street. If I can note the change in the
air, the moon that has decided to appear between the branches hanging sweetly
overhead, the hipsters laughing with abandon in front of the bodega; if I can
turn the key to my office door, and pour myself a cup of tea; if I can sit
myself down at my desk, I’m most of the way there. If I then begin typing, I
hear the sweet sounds of the keys and know I’m that much closer to writing a
poem. Maybe most of it will be discarded. Maybe some of it will be rescued by
the gods."
—Tina
Chang, author of Of Gods
& Strangers (Four
Way Books, 2011)
posted 12.14.11
"Inspiration? A sleepless night helps, when my mind has
nothing to do but wander. I'm also inspired by stories—hearing, seeing,
remembering—by events that get stuck in my head. When the muse is quiet,
however, I give myself permission to 'write badly' (so badly that anything I
write has to be incinerated). Throwing internal editors aside, I write. Like
building a fire with a few twigs and a single match, it takes a while, but
eventually there's smoke and maybe a flame. This writing leads to more writing,
which leads to inspiration."
—Janice N. Harrington, author of The
Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (BOA Editions, 2011)
posted 12.07.11
"I'd like to recommend the
great and criminally undersung novelist Wright Morris. In spite of winning the
National Book Award twice, Morris, a Nebraskan who spent much of his life in
the Bay Area, remains unknown to too many readers. Last year was the hundredth
anniversary of his birth. Among his many novels, three have been really
essential to me: The
Field of Vision, Ceremony
in Lone Tree, and Plains
Song. Morris took incredible narrative risks, and each time I
reread his books I am more astounded by the things he is able to get away with.
Each year I reread Plains
Song, and each year
my heart gets broken again. And why is having your heart broken so inspiring?
I'm not sure, but I find this so."
—Peter
Orner, author of Love and
Shame and Love (Little,
Brown, 2011)
posted 11.30.11
"I’m obsessed with windows. How they organize the world by
cutting away most of it. Then let some in. How light is refracted through an
old bottle on a windowsill. How a screen pixilates autumn. The framing. I write
to tug at the edges, to mess with right angles. What is just beyond what is
seen? Just below? To write is to unravel the rectangle. To disbelieve it. Live
performances—especially dance—are a way to attune myself to what is happening
outside the house of language. Stages can be windows. The idea of training the
body to try the impossible thrills me. To translate what most people assume to
be nonverbal through language, that’s thrilling too. I want to write something
you can’t write...that you aren’t supposed to be able to write. A book is a
window. Windows are all the beautiful rules I want to break."
—Kirsten Kaschock, author of Sleight (Coffee House Press, 2011)
posted 11.23.11
“A writer far more experienced
than I once said to me something like, ‘You’ve got to bushwhack past the first
million or so rotten words to get at the good stuff.’ That was twenty years
ago. Since then I’ve bushwhacked my way through three million words—yet with
the assumption that the formula is infinitely renewable. Each time I sit down
to write I approach my task in that spirit: that of bushwhacking toward a
clearing where a masterpiece waits.”
—Peter Selgin, author of Confessions
of a Left-Handed Man (University
of Iowa Press)
posted 11.16.11
"For me, the best novels have a never-ending quality.
Nothing is tied up neatly by the last page. You continue to ache, dream and
wonder about the characters’ lives. And the thing that has helped me the most
to achieve this in my work are movies. I live by Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass. In the last scene, Warren
Beatty and Natalie Wood are together after years apart. They belong together,
but they have other relationships, and what was, can’t be anymore. It’s
heartbreakingly subtle—and it inspires me to use gesture and subtext—and
open-ended moral choices—in my work."
—Caroline
Leavitt, author of Pictures
of You (Algonquin
Books, 2011)
posted 11.09.11
"Looking back and reflecting on my life, I realize how
accident prone I have been in these eighty years. Apart from three car
accidents, however, all have been for the good. The single book I have written
was because I was fortunate enough to fall into a career as a civil servant in
Pakistan, which happened to harmonize with my deep emotional interest in the
tribal system, an interest that germinated in my schooldays and grew stronger
with the passage of years. I never set out to be a writer. It started with this
interest, a feeling, and resulted in my first book—published thirty years after
I'd written it—finding an audience. That this effort has not ended as 'loves
labor lost' is the most recent, and perhaps the best, accident."
—Jamil
Ahmad, author of The
Wandering Falcon (Riverhead
Books, 2011)
posted 11.02.11
“Merrill Garbus, who performs under the moniker tUnE-YArDs, recorded her first album using a handheld voice recorder and distributed it on recycled cassette tape. Listening to BiRd-BrAiNs—a collage of experimental rhythms, odd instrumentations, and found sounds—you never forget that this is something made. The songs are sturdy and bold, but also transparent—they contain unlikely pauses, trips and turnarounds on their way to surprising and beautiful crescendos. In a recent interview, Tom Waits compared the pop song to a bagel; these bagels are oddly shaped, multicolored, and glazed with mud or candy or spare buttons.
“At the forefront of these songs is Garbus’s voice, which she
often pushes—yodeling, shouting, screaming. She frequently sings on multiple
tracks, too, which creates a sort of dialogue—Garbus versus Garbus. As I hear
the songs, one Garbus dares the other to go further, to find more joy, to have
more fun. For me, BiRd-BrAiNs serves as a meditation on the
creative process, and a reminder of the possibilities of art. I listen to this
album in thirty-second or one-minute bursts, and then I carry that reminder,
like food to a nest, back to my writing: have more fun, have more fun.”
—Christopher Boucher, author of How to Keep Your
Volkswagen Alive (Melville House Books, 2011)
posted 10.25.11
"Rāg Lalit by Hariprasad Chaurasia, the flutist, inspires me as a writer.
It is a predawn raga that evokes the hour in India when the sun is yet to burn
away the mist that hangs over the fields. I have played this raga every morning
for years because I believe its pace mirrors the pace of the mind, still sodden
with sleep, still in a semi-dream state, beginning to process the first
thoughts of the day. Rāg Lalit is one hour, nine minutes, and two
seconds long and by the time it has reached its climax—and what a climax it
is!—the day, with all the noise and suddenness with which it breaks in India,
is upon the listener."
—Aatish
Taseer, author of Noon (Faber and Faber, 2011)
posted 10.19.11
"Typically my writing prompt is nothing fancy—just your
basic same old, same old. Fear of death. Every now and then another impression
does filter in. Recently I’ve noticed the mostly abstract paintings of Dimitri Kozyrev, a Russian American who lives
near me in Arizona. Several things are to like in his work: its lack of doubt,
its power of mood, its perfect composition. Kozyrev is rigorous and I admire
rigor in all undertakings. He’s also subtle, and his work has the immovable but
infinitely possible quality of most great art: It’s definite but not defined,
might be one way to put it. It contains sadness, to me mostly through color,
but the sadness is a broad gesture, the sadness of multitudes. Looking at his
paintings makes me think and not think simultaneously, a state of being to
which I aspire. I consider the possibility of drawing conclusions from the
work, and I dismiss that possibility; happily this rejection has brought me
into the presence of the unsayable, and in the task of my own work it’s the
unsayable that wants to brim from everything.”
—Lydia Millet, author of Ghost
Lights (Norton, 2011)
posted 10.11.11
"I never try to write. If the work isn’t urgent enough to make me sit down and work, I don’t want it.
"I’m moved—and helped greatly, both spiritually and artistically—by the examples of other artists, often in different forms. Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, for example: I love the jagged fluency of it, the way sharpness and angularity combine with mellifluousness and lyricism. I love his formal innovation, and I love that he will not let that formal dexterity trump his feeling, his need to simply sing.
"Or Lee Bontecou. Her early pieces are huge,
gray, militaristic looking (often made out of cast-off military supplies), each
with a big actual and existential hole in it. They are emblems of great pain
and despair. Her late work, by contrast, is made of mobiles at once impossibly
complex and almost transparent. They seem pure spirit and pure joy—except that
each one has a hole in it. Her pain was not renounced but transformed, not
ameliorated but integrated into her art and (I’m guessing) into the life. A
great model for any artist, it seems to me."
—Christian
Wiman, author of Every
Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2010)
posted 10.05.11
"Maybe the one good thing about having ADD, as I do, is
that you tend to draw inspiration from whatever you are focused on at the
moment.You get so deeply absorbed in your various passions that the house could
fall down around you and you wouldn’t know it. In college I majored in art and
English, unable to decide between the two. I loved the nonverbal element of art
and found art making cathartic and less demanding than writing—there's
something so pure about not dealing in words. But mainly the one
was a source for the other. A hundred years later, I’m a writer and a gardener.
My garden strikes the balance I require. It's the perfect place for the writer
because it teaches patience and because it's always a work-in-progress. An hour
in the garden has a renewing effect, like meditation. Working the soil, my
distracted brain breathes deeply. Beneath the brim of a straw hat, I weed out
all the kinks in my plot."
—Christina
Shea, author ofSmuggled (Black Cat, 2011)
posted 9.28.11
"Without fail, I am inspired to start writing a story in
any hotel lobby, but particularly one with marble floors that is somewhat dim,
at around three o’clock in the afternoon. I go into the gift shop and buy a
bottle of soda, and then I sit down on a leather couch and stare at the several
clocks and art posters on the wall. No one bothers me, everyone thinks I am a guest,
waiting for my brother to finish up his call in the phone booth. There’s a
fellow sitting alone at the bar, watching golf, chewing on a piece of shrimp. I
take a piece of paper out of my pocket and jot down the first few lines of the
story, and then rush out through the revolving doors. I hit the street like an
idiot, and the hotel—once again—has been good to me."
—Joshua Baldwin, author of The
Wilshire Sun (Turtle Point
Press, 2011)
posted 9.21.11
"Humble labors help when my mind becomes overwrought, when
my thoughts stop being good company and start chasing each other’s tails. I
have learned then to turn to concrete tasks, the simpler the better: washing
dishes, mending clothes, paring apples, folding laundry, wiping crumbs, dusting
shelves, peeling garlic, emptying trash, stirring sauce, shoveling snow,
sweeping. Physical work returns me to the essential parameters of my body: its
limitations and its modest usefulness. I take solace in being reminded of my
own insignificance.
—Leah
Hager Cohen, author of The
Grief of Others (Riverhead
Books, 2011)
posted 9.14.11
"Sometimes inspiration comes from unpredictable sources that
I wish were more easily and predictably harnessed. A catalogue from an
exhibition of Norman Daly’s invented civilization of Lhuros gave rise to
thinking about what preconceived notions archeologists bring to excavations,
and how they bring their own stories to those buried foundations, totems, gods,
bits and pieces. I’ve always been interested in comics—from those written by
Windsor McKay to Alan
Moore's The
Watchmen to their explanations of microeconomics—because of
the way language and image are connected, and have to work together. Also,
newspaper articles, observations of people and situations in the city, science
writing, all get filed and turn out to be useful later on. I’m easily
distracted. A couple of masks brought back from Indonesia many years ago hang
near my desk. They aren’t overtly menacing, but just looking at them reminds me
to knock it off, and get back to work already."
—Susan
Daitch, author of Paper
Conspiracies (City Lights, 2011)
.
posted 9.07.11
"Before I was a writer, I tried to live like a writer and
that was my great adolescent mistake. As Zadie Smith says, 'There is no
writer's lifestyle.' Either you write or you don't. In one of his letters,
Flaubert wrote that we should be ordered and regular in our daily lives so that
we may be violent and original in our work. Nothing has changed or improved my
writing more than the establishment of that order, of calm. I write every
morning at the same place. I save the chaos and disarray for my stories."
—Alexander
Maksik, author of You
Deserve Nothing (Europa
Editions, 2011)
posted 8.31.11
"I honestly have no idea what it is that inspires me, but
there have definitely been days and even years when it seemed nowhere to be
found, because I was crowding it out.I am sorry for the things I’ve written and
occasionally published in such a state. Whatever kind of artist you may
consider yourself, I recommend welcoming this thing that inspires with a decent
place to be. Put water, vitamins, leafy greens into your body. Apples. Oats.
Get plenty of sleep. Some exercise. Keep the company of wise and more or less
sober people. Don’t smoke. Don’t watch TV. Do trust yourself. Especially when
you’re honest with yourself, forgive yourself. Listen to your heart. Consider
what it means to be an elder, then find one or two, and listen to them."
—Bonnie
Nadzam, author of Lamb (Other Press, 2011)
posted 8.24.11
“I treasure personal totems. The J. Geils Band’s album Bloodshot came out on red vinyl in 1973,
and when I slide that bright record out of the sleeve, it takes me back to when
I was a raw poet inspired by their R&B lyrics. Also, the greasy metal sign,
“COVER,” that I stole from the assembly line at Ford’s. It hung above my
machine while I welded covers onto axle housings. Also, birch bark cut from a
tree in Northern Michigan during a family vacation. I wrote my name on it when
I was a child. These magical objects take me back to those pivotal times and
places to which I sometimes need to return as a writer, and as a person.”
—Jim
Daniels, author of Trigger
Man: More Tales of the Motor City (Michigan
State University Press, 2011)
posted 8.17.11
“The raw honesty and the gritty lyricism of any song by Lucinda
Williams hotwires me to the ugly beauty of hearts in conflict. Although I don’t
listen to music while I’m writing, I listen to it a good deal when I’m done
with the page for the day. When I wrote my most recent novel, Break the Skin, I frequently
listened to Williams’s song, “World Without Tears.” That song doesn’t flinch in
the face of suffering—admits its necessity, even, while celebrating people’s
limitless capacity for hope. It took me to my characters and made me want to
respond with narrative. The right music often provides that sort of call and
response for me.”
—Lee
Martin, author of Break
the Skin (Crown,
2011)
posted 8.10.11
“I was ten years old before anyone figured out I needed eye
glasses. I relied on sounds and was good at memorizing stories and information.
When I was finally able to see that a tree was more than a green blob with a
brown trunk and branches, a whole new visual world opened up for me. However, I
still gain so much from listening to the sound of words and stories; listening
to people read their work aloud always inspires me. The writing can be from
beginners, children, or experienced authors who read their work with musical or
theatrical cadence. The act of hearing words is transformative. I find myself
writing down phrases that catch my attention. Hearing something familiar
described in a new way makes me want to be a better writer.”
—Melinda
Palacio, author of Ocotillo Dreams (Bilingual
Press, 2011)
posted 8.03.11
"Of all the myriad pronouncements on writing, the truest
one, for me, is something the poet Robert Kelly said: ‘Craft is perfected
attention.’
Only a poet could have written that, but it is just as applicable to writing
fiction. To pay attention, in the fullest sense, is the most exhilarating
activity I know of, an experience of total aliveness. Yet to sustain it for
more than short periods is very difficult, at least for me. And to attain
‘perfected attention’ usually requires endless rewriting (re-attending). I also
love Randall Jarrell's definition of a novel: ‘a prose narrative of a certain
length that has something wrong with it.’"
—Evelyn Toynton,
author of The Oriental Wife (Other
Press, 2011)
posted 7.27.11
“I find inspiration and solace in the wise proverbs of my
ancestors, the great and noble Bulgarians. Sadly, their wisdom does not
translate well. Meant to benefit our people alone, this wisdom is bound to our
Bulgarian language, inseparably. The moment you lift it out and plant it into
another tongue, this wisdom takes the shape of folly. “A dog that rushes its business,”
teaches us one such proverb, “in the end gives birth to blind pups.” Wiser
words were rarely spoken. So be careful then, not to hurry your writing. When
you’ve written something, rewrite it. Set it aside. Think about it, then about
other things. Then rewrite what you’ve written and rethink what you’ve thought.
When it comes to waiting, trust the ancient Bulgarians. Take your time. Don’t
condemn your pups to blindness.”
—Miroslav Penkov,
author of East of the West (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux)
posted 7.20.11
“I am thankful to be surrounded by lovely women—my wife, my
three daughters not yet grown, my mother, my wife's mother, and my Czech
American grandmother who we call the Great One. Our house is alive with
conversation and music and dance, and the daily run is a high-speed dash until
at last the house quiets and we whisper love to one another and the house
sleeps. This threshold of quietness is like a descent into darkness for me, a
powerful and intimate and abiding darkness in which the light emerges in words
and the rhythm of words and the poetry of sound that has as its melody the
breathing of my wife and three daughters as they fall into their dreams. I sit
at the desk and feel deeply loved because of the way my wife's face is
illumined by the light from the hall, and I remember when she spoke to me like
an angel earlier, how I pressed my face to hers and felt the bones of her cheek
against mine, the bones of her forehead and the orbital bones of her eyes, and
the kiss of her lips against the underside of my wrist. She kissed me to grant
me life, and to ward off death, and so the writing begins.”
—Shann Ray,
author of American
Masculine (Graywolf,
2011)
posted 7.13.11
“Who knows what prompts a person to write? Thank the gods it’s
mostly a mysterious process. When I sit down and confront the yawning white
screen, I usually allow myself to fall backward, away from it, into my own life
memories. I ruthlessly scrabble through all those extreme times—beautiful,
puzzling, grubby, fragmentary, terrifying, gut wrenching, shaming—and drag one
out into the daylight. Then I proceed to push it in any direction that feels
good to me. I might veer off sideways, or tell the story up to the point of my
memory, or use my memory as the launch pad. I ask myself what sort of person
would act in this nutty, usually ill advised, pumped up version of the truth.
Then I plunge in, and I’m off. Life is often much more weird and random than
fiction, but with fiction you can do something unspeakable, if you like, and
then press save and print. There’s no obvious mess to clear up. It’s
exhilarating; there
are no limits.”
—Deborah
Kay Davies, author of True
Things About Me (Faber
& Faber, 2011)
posted 7.07.11
“Music, of course, starting with late-1960s Bob Seger, but also the alt-country-trance music of Jesse Sykes, and Jon Dee Graham—anything with power and yearning to it. News clippings of derailed freight cars—aerial shots that mix disaster and beauty. A canning jar filled with blood-red and turquoise beads, because of the way they mix, and also the sound they make. After Catmandu, a collage by Andrea Maki, because it’s so complicated and fragile. A magazine photo of a woman with eyes that are stunned and crazy, for the same reason. The Color Acid Test blotter replica I bought from Zane Kesey. The novels of Robert Stone, especially certain sections of Dog Soldiers. Jim Harrison’s poetry. Standing close to a train and listening. My tree house as it gets dark, particularly the corners that don’t meet and boards that are uneven. Travel. And sleep. Turning off all the lights and going to bed—that almost always works for me.”
posted 6.29.11
“Here’s what I believe: The perfect writing you might do lies
already waiting for you like a sculpture inside. Your job is to subtract:
Subtract the ego, the chorus of censors and self-numbing devices, the greater
question of the indulgence of art or any distraction that fuzzes intention.
Your flavor is your subjectivity, your take on the mysterious world we live in,
and if you contribute it without overlay, you perform a service to others who
seek an articulated world. Be someone upon whom nothing is lost indeed. If you
have a certain threshold of calling and skill—a love of literature and its
redemptive powers, a fluency with words—the subtractive sculpture you create
offers refuge for others. One trick I like to use to get to the sculpture by
the back door is to use aleatory cues when I’m writing, letting chance work as
a Rohrshach: a café waiter’s delighted gesture, a random line of poetry, a
photography book opened on a bent page. In this way, chance becomes destiny
becomes your intention, honed to do its part in some bigger tarantella, the
mystery of chance as you are there, winded or not, offering it up to your readers.”
—Edie
Meidav, author of Lola,
California (forthcoming
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2011)
posted 6.22.11
“I swim. I’m a kid from the mountains of Pennsylvania, so I came
to swimming the scrappy way: ponds, lakes, creeks. But after my first year of
college I followed a friend down to Myrtle Beach and got a job as an ocean
lifeguard. There it was either go hard or go home, and I’ve been a
long-distance swimmer ever since. So, if I’m having trouble getting started at
the desk, or stuck on some key element of plot, I head off to the pool (close
by), and in the water, after minutes, after miles, everything comes clear.”
—Andrew
Krivak, author of The
Sojourn (Bellevue
Literary Press, 2011)
posted 6.15.11
“A friend sent me a link to this video of several poets reciting
their work at the White House. I’d been meaning to look for it myself, and
watch it, but I haven’t yet. I haven’t had a chance. It’s a long story why, but
basically it seems like whenever I get a link to some video from a friend, my
headphones are downstairs, and my child has just gone to sleep. His room, you
see, is right at the top of the stairs, and the floorboards squeak in ways that
my wife and I still can’t always predict or anticipate, even after three years
of trying. But anyway, in the still photo for this video, in that picture one
sees before one clicks “play,” the president is standing at a lectern about to
speak. In the background, off to the side a bit, a band of daylight peeks
through the drapes. It’s a brilliant stripe, all blues and greens and bright
whites. In fact, when I started to look, I noticed two more bands of daylight,
much thinner than the first, more like threads, really, a mere pixel’s width
perhaps. Someone must not have drawn the curtains all the way. And someone else
didn’t notice. Many someones, no doubt. What can I say, except that I like
those bands of daylight? The oversight, the tiny imperfection, they seem to me
immediately and achingly human.”
—Paul
Maliszewski, author of Prayer
and Parable (Fence
Books, 2011)
posted 6.08.11
“My scoreboard is my muse. When I was starting out—unpublished—and
sending my stories and novels far and wide, I kept a list taped to the wall
next to my desk, so I could keep track of what was where and when I’d made the
submission. One day, while typing out a new list—rejections and cross-outs had
made the list illegible—I hit the tab bar on my old Underwood, and typed in
odds—5000–1—that this particular story would be accepted by the magazine I was
sending it to. I did the same with the rest of the list. At the bottom of the
page, I put in a Best Bet, Long Shot, Sleeper, Daily Double, and Hopeful. I
also kept a running count: Them vs. Us. (By the time I sold my first short
story, I’d notched 576 rejections; by the time I sold my first book, over
2,000.) The odds generally related more to my state of mind—optimistic,
despairing—than to realities of the publishing world, and shrewd bettors could
have cleaned up on a few long shots along the way. I still keep a scoreboard
next to my desk, update it regularly, and whenever the writing, or the spirit,
flags, I look at it, consider the odds—sometimes alter the odds—and this keeps
me going, reminds me that the only real way to win is to keep writing.”
—Jay
Neugeboren, author of You Are
My Heart (Two
Dollar Radio, 2011).
posted 6.01.11
“I see a pigeon dying on my porch the day before Christmas, deer
up to their ears in snow, my father in his last bed, heart and lungs and liver
failing: I am learning how to love; I cannot save them. In the park, a woman
drags a drunken man into the grass, kisses her fingers and oh-so-tenderly touches
his face before she leaves him. A coyote howls across the arroyo, and in
delight, I answer. One-legged Clarence Purdy runs down a ditch to pull a
216-pound stranger out the window of his rolled truck as the battery sparks and
gas trickles, drags the stunned man up the bank seconds before flames burst
behind them. I don’t
know how. I can’t explain it. The photograph of Clarence Purdy
fills the front page of the paper, left pant leg split to the knee to expose
his prosthesis. Seventy-three years old, this savior. All these images come
from my ‘Book of Wonders,’ notebooks I’ve been keeping for more than twenty
years. Your book of miracle and mystery can contain anything! Be free! Be
joyful! Let your own delight, your awe and sorrow, your love of life, your
searing perceptions and silent astonishment guide you.”
—Melanie
Rae Thon, author of In This
Light (Graywolf
Press, 2011)
posted 5.25.11
“I like to clear my head as much as possible, usually via actual
cleaning. My favorite ideas have originated while folding clothes and scooping
up litter. Boring? Yes. But I may be the one writer in the world who is
uninspired by music or museum trips. Rather, I find them immensely inspiring
for life…but not for their potential impact on my writing. If I think I’m going
to a show specifically to get inspired, I get anxious,
thinking I should be writing instead. Yet when I scrub the floors, I never once
think my time could be put to better use.”
—Sloane
Crosley, author of How Did
You Get This Number (Riverhead
Books, 2010)
posted 5.18.11
“Travel. Of any kind. Whether to a country you'd have a hard
time finding on a map, or to the bead shop in your neighborhood you've never
set foot in. Get out of your head—your head is good at convincing you that what
is bouncing around inside is incredibly
important. Usually it's not. Travel to remind yourself that there
are six billion people on the planet and most of them live lives you could not
recognize, and the minutia and nuance of your own small concerns would be
unrecognizable to them. Stand in an airport—outside of time, bound to no
place—and let the crush of people, the flow of times and destinations on the
board, carry you out of yourself. Remember how big the world is, and how full
of trouble.”
—Andrew
Foster Altschul, author of Deus Ex
Machina (Counterpoint,
2011)
posted 5.11.11
“When I was working on my book, The Anti-Romantic Child, I created
a playlist that I listened to over and over again while writing. Some songs
transported me back to very specific moments or eras in my life, others evoked
moods or stirred emotions in me, and some simply galvanized or focused me.
Looking at the playlist now, I'm struck by what a motley assortment of music it
is—everything from Pete Seeger singing ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’ (in
the early days of my discovery that my son, Benj, had special needs, this would
both break my heart and hearten me) to Sufjan Stevens’s version of ‘Amazing
Grace,’ (a beautiful hymn of hope and thanksgiving), Neil Young's ‘Sugar
Mountain’ (a song of paradise lost that I sang at summer camp) to Peter
Gabriel's ‘Solsbury Hill’ (a song of my early romance with my ex-husband).
‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘Over the Rainbow,’ quintessential songs of my
childhood that I especially associate with my late father, Richard Gilman, and
‘Somewhere’ and ‘Tonight’ from West
Side Story, which I sang to my own children, are interspersed
with selections from Gerald Finzi's choral version of the great romantic poet
William Wordsworth's ‘Intimations of Immortality.’ But what invariably
puts me in the best frame of mind to write is singing with Benj himself while
he plays the guitar. Our duets on songs like ‘The Circle Game,’ ‘Box of
Rain,’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’ send me back to the computer sometimes elated,
sometimes pensive, but always deeply moved and ready to express my thoughts and
feelings expansively on the page.”
—Priscilla
Gilman, author of The
Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy (Harper, 2011)
posted 5.04.11
“I’m thinking about a quote I’ve seen attributed to Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry: 'If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to
collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to
long for the endless immensity of the sea.' I find that new waves are
constantly rolling into shore, carrying testimonies from far places, and letting
them rush over me as they arrive is what I find truly inspiring. Among the
great and bracing waves I’ve greeted recently—to name one each from the worlds
of literature, music, and film—are Mirror
Kingdoms: The Best of Peter
S. Beagle (short
stories), the double EP Rivers by Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and the
movie The Eclipse, directed by Conor
McPherson.”
—Kevin
Brockmeier, author of The
Illumination (Pantheon
Books, 2011)
posted 4.26.11
“The best reason to live in New York City is to discover the
endless hidden treasures in its many neighborhoods. Usually three times a week,
I drop by my local bookstore, St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I’ll visit old
inspirations and find new ones. My favorite walk, which I do about once every
two weeks, is a big crooked quadrangle. It spans three boroughs. I start in
Manhattan, walking down First Avenue, making a left on Delancey, and crossing
over the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Then it’s on through Williamsburg
and Greenpoint, over the Pulaski drawbridge to Long Island City, and up to the
Queensborough Bridge, then back home. I’ve done endless variations of this:
down over the Brooklyn Bridge through Brooklyn Heights, or up to Astoria,
Queens, over the Triborough Bridge and over Ward Island, then south. I complete
my walks in three or four hours with a head full of ideas and relaxed enough to
put them all down.”
—Arthur
Nersesian, author of Mesopotamia (Akashic Books, 2010)
.
posted 4.20.11
“Always tucked in a pocket of my purse is a Moleskine journal. I
try to write every day, no matter what, and I’ve pulled that Moleskine out
while waiting for my kids—doctor’s appointments, soccer practices, piano
lessons. In my Moleskine, I allow myself the freedom to write anything. No
matter the inanity—it has my full permission to go down uncensored. I doodle. I
make lists. I describe the waiting rooms, piano lessons, parents in the stands.
And if I lose my Moleskine, my name and phone number are displayed, with a
reward offered of one billion dollars.”
—Victoria
Patterson, author of This
Vacant Paradise (Counterpoint,
2011)
posted 4.13.11
“As with most fiction writers, I can be inspired by virtually
anything: a song, a kiss, a cup of coffee, an overheard conversation. And in
writing three short story collections, those and many other inspirations
sparked a rather diverse number of plots and characters. When I decided to move
from writing short stories to a full-length novel, I wanted to find an
overarching (or thematic) inspiration that would help me move forward in
completing the manuscript and, at the same time, allow me to revel in the
creative joy I experience when writing a short story. So, I first decided that
I needed to examine who I was and what types of stories I tended to write. My
fiction often revolves around my multiple identities as a Chicano (the grandson
of Mexican immigrants), a former Roman Catholic, a Jew-by-choice (I converted
in 1988; my wife is the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants), a husband,
father, and Los Angeles native. After a few weeks of pondering, it came to me:
My novel would be based on the Ten Commandments, with each chapter inspired by
a commandment. Once I decided upon this structure, I felt liberated to create
characters and plots that seemed to grow naturally out of the commandments.
Over the course of two years (in which I also wrote short stories, poetry,
essays, and book reviews), my novel grew until I had ten chapters I really
liked. After reading and editing it several times, I decided to add a
short prologue and epilogue. My novel eventually found a home and
received a very nice review in Publishers
Weekly. So, on March 24, 2011 (the official release date), I became
a novelist. If Moses only knew.…”
—Daniel
A. Olivas, author of The Book
of Want (University
of Arizona Press, 2011)
posted 4.06.11
“I walk around my apartment and read aloud from The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
There are a few favorites: Michael Drayton’s “Sonnet 61”: “Since there’s no help, come
let us kiss and part; / Nay, I have done, you get no more of me”; John Donne’s
“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day”: “Oft a flood / Have
we two wept, and so / Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did we grow / To be
two chaoses, when we did show / Care to aught else; and often absences /
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses”; and John Keats’s “This Living
Hand”: “See here it is— / I hold it towards you.” I’m a little like a character
from a Whit Stillman movie when I do this—remember the scene from Barcelona where the one guy puts on polka music
(or something similar) and dances around his apartment while he reads from the Bible?—but I know that a story
isn’t too far away when I reach for the Norton.”
—Hannah
Pittard, author
of The Fates Will Find Their Way (HarperCollins, 2011)
posted 3.30.11
“I’ve spent six or seven years reading The Man Without Qualities—sometimes
I read it all the way through and sometimes random excerpts of it. I’ve
returned to it many times. This book has proven to be an exercise in ambience
applied to reading. It exists, sporadically at times, in the various rooms that
I read it in, at different moments in my life. Each chapter resolves, if that
is the word for it, around an anecdote. This anecdote might be about the
weather, the occurrence of a love affair, a communications medium, or a note on
factory production, which is followed by a meditation or an essay. The essay is
not an interruption of the fictive armature because it is part of a work that
treats fiction as life.”
—Tan Lin,
author of Seven
Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking
(Wesleyan University Press, 2010)
posted 3.23.11
“I devour psychology books because they help me understand my
characters; I’m fascinated by the revolutionary ideas of social psychologist
Philip Zimbardo. If I’m having trouble writing a scene I examine scenes in
novels I’ve read in the past. It’s a confidence booster to see that a famous
author faced similar challenges and made good. I listen to poetry on my iPod;
Dorothy Barresi is a contemporary favorite of mine. I’m inspired by the poetics
of hip-hop artists like Mos Def and the Roots. But I can’t stick to any one
writing routine or ritual forever because if I get bored with the ritual, my
writing gets bored with me.”
—Margaux
Fragoso, author of Tiger,
Tiger (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2011)
posted 3.16.11
“As a teenager, I spent hours dreaming up plots for books. This
was something I felt was cooler than going to the mall, but not so cool that I
was willing to waste daylight at a desk with a pencil and notepad. To make it
cooler still, I would burn dozens of CDs (iPods not being in existence yet),
soundtracks that would serve as musical stand-ins for what I felt I would be
writing: mishmashes of rock and roll, classical music, and show tunes that, as
assemblages, had no significance for anyone but me. When played, they would
immediately transport me into the world I was devising, and I would walk,
sometimes for miles, around and around the neighborhood, while my Discman
churned in an effort I believed to be inextricably bound to my writing. I
assumed, because I never actually wrote any of what I dreamed up, that this
exercise was a failure. Then, many years later, I found myself in grad school
and subject to a similar compulsion—except now I had a car, and ostensibly a
brain, because the plots were actually making their way onto the page. I still
can’t listen to music while I’m writing—music is never just white
noise to me. But I would say that any writing time now begins with driving
around under the influence of carefully arranged playlists that call to mind
characters, plot points, or even the whole narrative arc of whatever it is I’m
working on. I’m generally in favor of anything that makes the world you’re
trying to create more real and accessible to you, so my advice is: Make a soundtrack
for your book!”
—Téa
Obreht, author of The
Tiger’s Wife (Random
House, 2011)
posted 3.02.11
“When I was eight years old my mother found me beneath my
younger brother's crib in the fetal position and sweating. I was sick with a
terrible fever. But, as she reports, I was also smiling. I learned, in that
fever-rich moment, how to move through space and time—unafraid,
untethered—toward some kind of surprise. That dance with surprise is why I
write. And the fever of dedicated drift has taught me much about how to push
through my writing. Breathe—in and out—levitate, trust. Sometimes, to get this
moment back, I would ask Daddy if I could stretch out in the curved back window
of his silver Buick 225. While he smoked and hummed in the front seat (and
never drove over twenty miles per hour), his Buick moved beneath oak and loblolly
pine, and I would stare up and stretch into the fusion of spirit and mind,
reentering the sweet cave of my imagination. Today one of the final acts of my
revision process, when I can't seem to work it out at the desk, is to grab my
poem, timer, pad, and pencil and head for my car. I place them in the passenger
seat. I set the timer, then head for the highway—a road not too big, not too
small, something steady and even, where I never have to think about stopping
for lights or breaking for traffic. I drive for one hour only. No music. Just
the air outside and the sound of the poem rambling about in my head, searching
for balance, ascension, the break of the fever. The forward movement of the car
is meditative and my final act of faith. One hour passes and the timer goes
off. I turn the car around. Usually, before I get back home, I have made some
decision about a line, phrase, title, or epigraph that I could not make while
sitting still.”
—Nikky
Finney, author of Head Off
& Split (TriQuarterly
Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011)
posted 2.23.11
“Every week, my mailbox explodes with magazines—National
Geographic, the New
Yorker, O,
and People.
My mental image of the characters in The Weird Sisters came from an
advertisement for a bank. One of the story lines was sparked by a personal
essay on being pregnant and dating. When I start a new project, I read
magazines, folding down corners and tearing out pages. Flipping back through
the clippings reminds me of where my ideas came from, and encourages me to
remain open to inspiration no matter the source.”
—Eleanor
Brown, author of The
Weird Sisters (Amy
Einhorn Books, 2011)
posted 2.16.11
“Don't take notes. This is counterintuitive, but bear with me.
You only get one shot at a first draft, and if you write yourself a note to
look at later then that's what your first draft was—a shorthand, cryptic,
half-baked fragment. When I am working full-time on a piece (story, novel,
review—whatever), I find it excruciating to be out somewhere and have some
relevant-seeming idea and not be able to add it to the manuscript right away.
It is very hard not to reach for the notebook, but the discipline is a great
teacher, and it quickly became a kind of game. I would spin out sentences and
paragraphs—entire scenes and chapters—in my head, then just let them go. I
learned that the important, useful stuff came back when I could sit down for a
proper work session, and that what stayed gone was the junk I would have cut
anyway. Whether it re-occurred to me or not became the first test of whether
the idea was worth exploring. I think I read somewhere that Marilynne Robinson
does this too, which, if it's true, is about as solid an endorsement as you
could ask for."
—Justin
Taylor, author of The
Gospel of Anarchy (HarperPerennial,
2011)
posted 2.09.11
“I love turning to field guides, old issues of National Geographic, or biology
textbooks to get a jump start when the writing comes slow. Just last week, I
read how the hagfish can produce a whole bucket’s worth of slime in minutes if
it gets agitated. Of all the magical plants and animals in the sea, the hagfish
is the most unpopular, the most disgusting—the one that makes children burst
into tears. And if that isn’t enough, it is the only fish without vertebrae, so
it can literally tie itself into a knot to bulge out and pop the small mouths
of fish that dare try to eat it. Don’t you admire the clever slip and wriggle?
Imagine that as you sit down. Now write.”
—Aimee
Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky
Fish (Tupelo Press,
2011)
posted 2.02.11
“The time I spend in the saddle on long bicycle tours—day after
day, with no clear sense of where I might camp or buy food or shower—influences
my writing process. To keep pedaling I have to stop thinking about how far I’ve
gone, or how fast I’m going, or what lies ahead. When I can do that in the
saddle, I can also do it at the computer. So, when I get stuck with my writing,
as I did this past summer between acts four and five of my new novel, I hit the
road. I write on rest days in coffee shops or diners or on campground picnic
tables. And when I get home, the benefits last awhile. I can sit for a few
hours and produce, without worrying about how many pages are behind or ahead.”
—Jacob
Paul, author of Sarah/Sara (Ig Publishing, 2010)
posted 1.26.11
“When I’m feeling a bit blue as a writer, I give myself an arts
assignment, one that often features ‘categorical’ elements. A few years ago,
for example, I decided to create a compilation of jump-blues music. I listened
to several thousand songs, and in the process, found the compilation—more than
120 recordings, more than 150 songs—expanding to a seventh compact disc. Jump
music rocks more than most rock music, reminding me to be entertaining, at the
very least, when I read in front of audiences, and the ordering of the songs
within the compilation reminded me how pieces—poems, stories—often need to
speak to each other, in collections. This is saying nothing of the mid-song
tenor sax jumps, guitar jumps, etcetera, as well as the lyrics that
brought many salty characters and situations to light. I will often play these
songs, like a jukebox, in my mind, and the rhythms creep into my language.”
—Dan
Gutstein, author of Non/Fiction (Edge Books, 2010)
posted 1.19.11
“The bath. Endlessly, luxuriously, the tub. I write almost every
morning and after an hour or two or three or (if I’m very lucky) four, I run
out of road. And then I know it’s time. I gather up my pages, a book or three
of poetry (lately Marianne Boruch, Shakespeare, James Tate, Hopkins, Emily
Dickinson), the New
Yorker (just
in case), some reliable crutches—the Paris
Review or Best
American anything—and a
couple of pens. And I set all that on the commode, which seems so wrong and
disorderly, but it’s perfect. Hot water, three drops of lavender oil, maybe
salts. No soap. Never soap. This isn’t about sanitation or cleansing. It’s
about sinking. It’s about depth and quietness and suspended animation.
It’s about a pristine and captured hour. I step into my steaming tub, read over
my pages. My glasses fog up. The pages puff and curl. I set them on the edge. I
read or don’t read. As I relax and melt, whatever stopped me in my tracks
earlier, up in the studio, might transform into something else. Sometimes
I don’t even look at any of the stuff I drag in there. It takes it’s own
parallel bath.”
—Heather
Sellers, author of You
Don't Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead
Books, 2010)
posted 1.12.11
"Dog
walks with no iPhone access force me to pay attention to San Francisco's
world-class characters, who are wonderfully weird and story provoking. I
recently saw a shirtless Jesus doppelgänger playing drums while riding a beach
cruiser uphill, which has already made it into my next novel. Also, there's
nothing like difficult, mindless stationary cycling for plot breakthroughs, and
loud heavy metal."
—Matt Stewart, author of The French Revolution (Soft Skull Press, 2010)
posted 1.04.11
“I have a small loft in my house where I write; I like being up
high with my laptop and a few books. For me, reading is the best way to get
excited about writing, but I love to read so much that it has to be something
I’ve read before, or something very short, or else I’ll spend all my working
time reading instead of writing. Just rereading part of a favorite story can
make me feel desperate to write.
“When I can’t make it to my loft because I’m working or because life gets in
the way, I’ll think of the end of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.” Not
the stunning last lines but the dates—1953–1954—marking the start and
completion of that story, the first she ever published (in 1955, at the age of
forty-three). Or I’ll remember Edward P. Jones’s matter-of-fact description of
the ten years in which The
Known World lived
only in his head while he worked at Tax
Notes. Thinking about the struggles of my favorite writers is
comforting, giving me permission to struggle a little in my own life and with
my work. But then I’ll reread their work, and the desire to write will be just
as urgent.”
—Belle
Boggs, author of Mattaponi
Queen (Graywolf
Press, 2010)
posted 12.22.10
"Listen to rap music. There's a certain level of surprise,
bright color, loudness, and just plain fun in artists like DOOM (who I mostly
listen to, and used to get me going on my last book) that can bleed into your
writing in interesting and creative ways. I also think rap culture can be
inspiring. I have the word DOLLAS written on a pink piece of paper above my
desk to remind me to keep working."
—Shane
Jones, author of Light
Boxes (Penguin, 2010)
posted 12.15.10
"Music has infiltrated my writing in all manner of
ways—most recently I’ve drawn on the ballad tradition (“Lamkin” Child No. 93,
and “The Three Ravens” Child Ballad No. 26), troubadour songs (Guillaume de
Machaut’s “Douce Dame”), and German lieder. Something about the
rhythms of refrains, their returns with a difference, has proven to be a
powerful resource for thinking about memory, repetition, and transformation.
Perhaps this is linked with other rhythmic practices I find incredibly
mind-clearing and mind-focusing—walking and swimming. Wordsworth and Coleridge
composed many of their poems while walking; I find a steady stride really does
move the mind along, and the work-in-progress forward."
—Maureen
N. McLane, author of World
Enough (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010)
posted 12.08.10
“I didn’t look forward to the long trek in the sun to my grandfather’s
farm which was at least a two mile walk. We typically started out early with
the dew still fresh on the leaves. On reaching the farm we dropped off a few
things in the farm hut and then off we went to work. Each person had an
apportioned area to weed. The sun shining, relentless, an occasional breeze
soothing. Someone would start a song, a work song. Another would take it up.
The song would fade…work, work, work. Meanwhile Grandfather had disappeared.
And then about midday the call from Grandpa. We made haste to the farm hut.
Spread out before us was a feast of roasted yams, roasted plantains, vegetable
sauce, boiled corn, pears, paw-paw, and clean, sweet water from the stream.
Food had never tasted so good. I inspire myself to write by setting up a reward
for myself. After the drudgery of writing, something to look forward to, some
delight awaiting me at the end of my labors.”
—E. C.
Osondu, author of Voice of
America (Harper,
2010)
posted 12.01.10
“I can consider many things that fill me up with writing—my
sense of place and personal history, the uncountable wonderful books that have
come before me, the love of language and all its sounds—but in the end I simply
come to the act itself, to working. I am in love with the work. I work mostly
in a small, skylit studio, messy with paper and books. I work on the keyboard
and in notebooks, large and tiny. I work in the long hours of the night, when I
am alone and it’s quiet, drinking immoderate amounts of coffee and guarded from
the shadows by a loyal and somewhat feral cat. I never have to worry about
subject or inspiration because I love the labor for itself. It is meditative
and redemptive and brings forth what is best in me, and it is its own
inimitable, unparalleled reward.”
—Frank X.
Gaspar, author of Stealing
Fatima (Counterpoint,
2009)
posted 11.17.10
“I read recently that if you were to add up the combined lengths
of rootlets and root hairs of a single rye plant, the resulting length could
stretch almost from the North to the South Pole (The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher
Bird). No wonder whiskey is so intoxicating: It tastes of something deeper than
anything we could snatch out of the air. The rye head is the realization of a vastly
coordinated underground system, not some rootless gift from the ether. I am not
recommending whiskey as liquid muse. I am recommending a prizing of the
chthonic, as opposed to the transcendent imagination.”
—Sarah
Gridley, author of Green is
the Orator (University
of California Press, 2010)
.
posted 11.10.10
“What inspires me? Running. Because there’s nothing like
having nothing except your own two feet, the sight of some far off point, and a
hard breath to keep you going. That’s what writing a novel is like for me—that
far off point. When the going is good, the time it takes to get from one place
to the next vanishes and you know you’ve gone somewhere. It’s a sweaty slog,
but I often wonder why people race to that finish line when they aren’t ready
to cross it. Just keep an even pace and enjoy the jog.”
—Michelle
Hoover, author of The
Quickening (Other
Press, 2010)
posted 11.03.10
“Place is important to my writing, and one of my best practices
is to get in the car and drive. Images from those drives—a janitor in a lighted
skyway at night, two cop cars in an empty parking lot, a woman dressed for the
office waiting at a bus stop in Frogtown—inspire scenes and form the whole
tactile underpinning of a piece. When I wanted to set part of my novel in
small-town Minnesota, I got out a map, picked an area that looked like it had
interesting landscape, and spent a day driving around that particular county,
taking notes on what was being farmed, the kinds of trees, church architecture,
area businesses, how long it took to drive from one town to another. A whole
section of the book grew out of that day’s drive.”
—John
Reimringer, author of Vestments (Milkweed Editions, 2010)
posted 10.27.10
“When I’m stumped, I often go to the library stacks and look at
old science treatises. The scientific language of the 1800s and early 1900s is
so filled with longing that I start imagining stories in just a few pages. For
some reason, educational films from the 1940s and 50s have the same effect on
me. The Internet Archive is a great resource for these (this film on the benefits and dangers of fire is one of my favorites).
Maybe it is the inherent tension of scientific discourse that enchants me—the
way it navigates that strange border between empiricism and awe.”
—Tina May
Hall, author of The
Physics of Imaginary Objects (University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)
posted 10.20.10
“When I push weights around, I push words around. I usually hit
the gym in the afternoon, and when I do, I think about the story or chapter I
was working on that morning. I rewrite sentences. I realize metaphors. I excise
characters, rearrange paragraphs. And sometimes I come up with what I’m going
to hammer out the next morning. Maybe I’m listening to the Avett Brothers or
maybe I’m listening to an audiobook, but inspiration always strikes, and when
it does, I hit pause, switch over to the notepad app on my iTouch and punch out
my idea.”
—Benjamin
Percy, author of The
Wilding (Graywolf,
2010)
posted 10.13.10
“On a narrow strip of cork board, among news clippings and
postcards, is a small vellum-colored paper square, printed by the artist Tom
Ashcraft, that has inspired me for many years. It has a black circle on it, and
inside that circle, curving around the diameter, are four words: ‘EXPLORE,’
‘EXAMINE,’ ‘DISCOVER,’ and ‘REPORT.’ One of the things that appeals to me about
this circle of words is that, like a wheel of fortune, you can start anywhere
on the loop and keep going round, but in a way that both disciplines and frees
the mind.”
—Carol
Moldaw, author of So Late,
So Soon (Etruscan
Press, 2010)
posted 10.06.10
"As a rule of comedy combining something cute with
something sinister is good for a laugh, and the logic is the same as the
real-life behavior—the cuter you are, the more you can get away with. I love
writing bratty little girls, between the ages of six and sixteen. Only very
recently some impulse from the Spiritus Mundi recalled my long-forgotten model: Rugrats, that old Nickelodeon
cartoon, and the character of Angelica Pickles who holds her parents hostage by
holding her breath (you’re hemorrhaging brain cells, Sweetie,
you’ll never make Harvard!). And it’s immensely gratifying to know
that all those hours in front of the TV set weren’t wasted."
—Jacob
Ritari, author of Taroko
Gorge (Unbridled
Books, 2010)
posted 9.29.10
“Rules. I'm a big believer in structure, and the idea that
creativity loosens up when constrained a bit. I like to set a firm time for my
writing; you could make a word count limit, (250 words today and I cannot leave
the computer until it is done!) or set a timer and write for thirty minutes, or
make a rule that you can only write from 8 to 8:30 and you must stop at 8:30.
No email. No Internet. No getting the phone. No snacks. No working on that
other piece of writing that is for work and not related to your
fiction/poetry/memoir. No yoga. Take an hour and just sit there and it may be
so uncomfortable that something will eventually happen. I often have to sit
through a lot of restlessness to get to the work, but the restlessness, in my
mind, can be a clue that there's something interesting and unknown up ahead,
something unfamiliar. Or as Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, has said:
Boredom is just the process of waiting for oneself. The rules are arbitrary but
they must hold firm. I find this incredibly helpful.”
—Aimee
Bender, author of The
Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Doubleday,
2010)
posted 9.22.10
“Never start writing in a bad mood—makes it too easy to quit
before you get going. A former writing instructor told me, ‘No fun for the
writer, no fun for the reader.’ What she meant was if you aren’t enjoying
yourself while you’re writing, your readers won’t enjoy the finished work. But
I take this one step further: To ensure your head's in the best place possible,
do something for five minutes that puts you in a good mood. It can be listening
to a song, watching a silly YouTube clip, reading a passage from a book that
makes you smile in admiration (or bite your lip in envy, if that works better
for you). When the five minutes are up, sit down and start writing. Of
course, writing itself may put you in a good mood, but I find that feeling
often comes at the end of a session, not the start of it.”
—Brando
Skyhorse, author of The
Madonnas of Echo Park (Free
Press, 2010)
posted 9.15.10
"I've been reading the journals of Albert Camus since I was
thirteen years old and his words have become my most faithful and intimate
companions. I return to them during and between projects, whenever I feel I'm
losing my way in my work, in my life, or when I'm simply struggling with the
solitude of writing. I particularly love his early journals from 1935–1942 and
his collected Youthful
Writings from which I
learned one of my first and favorite literary lessons: 'Art does not tolerate
Reason.'"
—Patricia
Engel, author of Vida (Black Cat, 2010)
posted 9.08.10
“I take inspiration from the subtle daily forecasting of death.
This should be impetus for anyone to get off his ass. Work is why we're here,
and to waste an hour of any day, fretting or worrying or procrastinating, is to
release into the air the odor of death. Emerson said, ‘To fill the hour—that is
happiness.’ I try to fill the hour. And by filling the hour, the ones that
follow come easier. Inspiration, then, is its own inspiration. But I must
beware of why I work. ‘You have the right to work,’ it’s written in the
Bhagavad Gita, ‘but for the work's sake only.’ And a little later: ‘Those who
work selfishly for results are miserable.’ Here's inspiration, and good advice
as well. And should the greatest fear come to pass, that I die in the middle of
writing a novel? For that I have the comfort of Rabbi Tarphon's advice in the
Saying of the Fathers: ‘It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but
neither are you free to desist from it.’”
—Joshua
Ferris, author of The
Unnamed (Arthur
Books, 2010)
.
posted 9.01.10
"Sometimes typos can be helpful. Looking at a poem in a
language you can't read, and working from the sounds. Taping poems on the wall
and leaving them there for days—maybe something will come, just from looking at
them, over time. Words from a dream. Within the last few months I heard:
‘Will it solve itself?' And the answer: ‘When you are gone.' I took
this to mean: When the ‘I' who is trying to solve it (whatever ‘it' is)
backs off."
—Jean Valentine, author of Break
the Glass (Copper Canyon
Press, 2010)
posted 8.25.10
“As Jerome Washington wrote, 'The blues is our
antidote.’ So I listen. Blues doctors like Neal Pattman inspire something in a
writer’s blood. Anyone who can play harmonica like he can, with one arm no
less, will get me going. And inevitably my sons will hear 'Momma Whoopin’
Blues’ and start asking questions. I show them the CD cover and they ask more
questions and I explain how he lost his arm in a wagon wheel accident as a boy
and they ask even more questions. Our give-and-take reveals my sons to be
beautifully strange, loving, and profound little fellows, even if they are six
years old and younger. The blues is my antidote. The mind of a child is
everything else.”
—Glenn Taylor, author of The
Marrowbone Marble Company (Ecco,
2010)
posted 8.18.10
"To get my mind ready for writing, I try to sit quietly and
stare at nothing for ten minutes. It clears away the Salt-n-Pepa lyrics and
staircase wit that have been clogging up the channels. After the silence, if
I'm at a critical juncture, I then listen to records from Sublime Frequencies—a
label specializing in a kind of post-field recording ethnomusicology—and try to
transcribe what I hear. This doesn't often result in work for the ages, but
it's a good reminder that the best writing comes from outside."
—Travis Nichols, author of Off
We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee
House Press, 2010)
posted 8.11.10
“José Martí wrote, ‘In the world there must be certain degrees
of honor just as there must be certain degrees of light. When there are many
men without honor, there are always others who bear in themselves the honor of
many men.’ What inspires me are the men and women who bear in themselves the
‘honor’ of survival—men like the brothers I taught at Graterford Prison,
reconnoitering their lives after having fought in Vietnam; young mothers
dragging their children around corners of fatigue at the end of the day,
looking neither left nor right. What inspires me is how we make one another see
ourselves as we rise up to tell our stories. And survive. What inspires me, I
guess, are women—from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, South
America, the Middle East, Europe, America. So listen to our talk, walk,
accents, smiles, silences, songs.”
—Sonia Sanchez, author of Morning
Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010)
posted 6.23.10
"I've figured out things that were stonewalling me during
cross-country drives, and usually when I'm trying to pull an all-nighter to
avoid traffic and get there in less time—maybe it's all the caffeine and the
mesmerizing white lines in the middle of the road. I keep a recorder or a
yellow pad on the passenger seat and I talk into the recorder or write on the
pad with one hand in big letters because I'm not looking at the pad and want to
be sure I can read what I wrote later on. (This is not exactly safe, but it has
worked.) In day-to-day writing, I also keep a pad and, lately, lots of index
cards on hand so that when I remember something or something hits me I can
write it down and take it home to the story I'm working on. I like to write whole
scenes longhand for instant momentum—with no blank page or screen, you can roll
right in."
—Brad Watson, author of Aliens
in the Prime of Their Lives (Norton,
2010)
posted 6.14.10
"Nothing inspires me like the imagination in a vacuum. I
always pick the most closet-like, even coffin-like, space in the house for my
writing room. No windows, no photos, no 'stuff.' I never play any music, I
don't have an inspiration board, I disable the internet, and the cell is always
off. The outside world is far too tempting. If I go out for a run, suddenly the
body is of paramount concern; if I listen to my favorite music, I won't be able
to shake the imprints out of my head; if I watch a great movie, I'm seduced by
images. I have to stay put with my project when I'm with-project. Fortunately,
my projects always require little research and much imagination work—maybe
memory excavation at best. But if you're going to ask kids to finger paint, you
don't put Van Gogh's ‘Sunflowers' before them. They don't need Erik Satie. They
don't need a long jog. They don't require a Quote of the Day from Rilke. There
is no need to warm up. What made me fall in love with writing in the first
place was that we have all the equipment we need in us—we don't need anything
else."
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons
and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic,
2007)
posted 6.02.10
"More and more my foremost, abiding desire is to write
books of a surpassing strangeness, and to do this I've had to hold closely to
Joyce's famous adage of silence, cunning, and exile every day. This means I
have to show up at the desk each day before dawn, and so I do like a poor man
showing up for a rather mysterious handout, lighting a candle in his tattered
cardigan as he sits over an illuminated screen, aware the entire time that this
love of language is the deepest and most consistently astonishing thing he
knows."
—Robert Vivian, author of Lamb
Bright Saviors (University of
Nebraska Press, 2010)
posted 5.18.10
"These are the things that make me want to be a better
writer: the desert sky, the dust storms, the smell of rain, the river that is
no longer a river but a border—my entire landscape; the violence that is
killing the city of Juárez; opening William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! and finding a passage, then reading it
aloud; rereading Gabriel García Márquez's Love
in the Time of Cholera; reading anything by C. D. Wright, C. K. Williams,
Juan Felipe Herrera, or Alberto Álvaro Ríos; listening to the pain and the
humor in a Frank O'Hara poem; listening to the music of Nina Simone, Kurt
Elling, or Billie Holiday; listening to Paul McCartney's 'The Long and Winding
Road' over and over and over; listening to the quiet on a Sunday morning."
—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of The
Book of What Remains (Copper
Canyon Press, 2010)
posted 5.11.10
"For inspiration, I love to go to old, junky antique shops—which there are a lot of here in the South, thankfully—and hunt for a box of old postcards and photos. The messages that people wrote to each other in that fancy handwriting no one has anymore are often so weird or sad or funny. Handmade things are also inspiring to me, so I love to find an old carving or a crappy painting and think about the person who may have made it.
"Writing is a solitary art, sure, but what comes before the
writing is not: all of the discussion, observation, interaction, chance
encounters, and random bits—it all requires the writer to be out in the world.
It's hard to force myself out sometimes, but doing so always gets me writing,
eventually."
—Molly Brodak, author of A
Little Middle of the Night (University
of Iowa Press, 2010)
posted 5.04.10
"I write to solo piano music (recently I've been listening
to Edvard Grieg'sLyric Pieces). Then I pick up something close to hand
and see what strikes me. For instance, 'At Wallace Stevens' Grave' was sparked
by a detail in Paul Veyne's History
of Private Life describing
ancient Romans chatting about what they'd like on their own funerary
bas-reliefs, and by other reading about early motion pictures and about Wallace
Stevens's last years. All three strands melded into a poem. You can't force
such serendipitous alignments, but you can find a desk, close the door, and put
on beautiful music."
—Brian Culhane, author of The
King's Question (Graywolf
Press, 2008)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 12.03.09
"I've been inspired by a whole host of
music and writing, as is evident especially in my short stories. A few are
retakes on classic stories, such as 'The Overcoat II' or 'The Devil and Irv
Cherniske' or my sequel to For Whom the Bell Tolls, ‘Me Cago en la Leche
(Robert Jordan in Nicaragua).' As for music, there is my story inspired by
Robert Johnson's life, 'Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail,' which
provides the final, absolute, and definitive version of how he died (he was
poisoned by a woman he done wrong), and perhaps my best-known (or certainly the
most anthologized) story, 'Greasy Lake,' which takes off from a line in Bruce
Springsteen's 'Spirit in the Night' ('It's about a mile down on the dark side
of Route 88' serves as the story's epigraph). And, in a more general way, I
never sit down to write without music playing in the background. It opens me
up. It thrills me. It sets me afire with rhythm and joy."
—T. C. Boyle, author of Wild Child (Viking, forthcoming in January
2010)
posted 11.24.09
“I take notes all the time—when I watch a
movie, when I listen to a talk, when I ride on the subway or sit in a waiting
room. I write down things I see, things I hear, things I think. None of it has
to cohere at the time but I keep it all in a small notebook and occasionally I
look there and some of what I’ve written will cluster and suggest a direction.
The park bench, Washington oysters, Vladimir Vodka, and Cher dressed as
Cleopatra, will sometimes line up and lead me to a subject.”
—Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E (Graywolf Press, 2009)
posted 11.18.09
"Seek out influence. When I'm stuck on how
to do something, I'll reread a book that accomplishes what I am attempting—The
Quick and The Dead by Joy Williams is one I return to often—and try
to figure out how the author pulled it off. Sometimes just looking at a few
passages, or reading them aloud, can alter my way of seeing. Also, I like to go
to places that inspire me—a bench in my favorite park, a quiet spot in a
museum, a seat in the dark back row of a movie theater. Getting away from my
desk and sinking into the movement of the outside world can be a welcome kind
of influence as well."
—Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All
the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009)
posted 11.11.09
"I am, for the first time in my writing
life, consciously taking a break from writing. By which I mean that I'm not
involved in a big creative project just now. I just had a book published, and I
have another manuscript that I'm about to shop around, so I'm not ready to dive
into something new, if only because I have no ideas at the moment. 'Sometimes,'
as one of my writer-friends likes to say, 'you need to let the toilet tank fill
up.' So that's what I'm doing. Sort of. In fact, what's happened in the last
year is that I've been so busy that I really haven't had time to read, but I
have had time to listen to books on CD and to listen to podcasts. I'm spending
what would be my writing time trying to understand documentary radio, trying to
figure out how the narratives on shows like National Public Radio's This
American Life, The Moth Radio Hour, and Radio Diaries
function and what they might have to teach me about how I want to construct
stories in the future."
—Debra Spark, author of Good for the Jews (University of Michigan
Press, 2009)
posted 11.04.09
"My childhood location, south of New Orleans, on the banks of the Mississippi River leaned me toward inclinations I think help with poetry's desires:
"What's coming around the bend, what might float by next on its waters, what weather will do to it, who will pass by, who will wave or hail and how, what's it like in the day time and in the night, how many waves will any particular ship's wake make, what tides do, how seasons are.
"Our farm's fields' rhythmical ways, a sensibly repetitive insistence, up on a mule is very high up for a child, seeds, culling, transplanting, cultivating, grafting, hoeing, picking and packing, selling on the road or at the French Market in the city, strangers one always met there, their accents, their stories.
"And schools (as in fish) and flocks (as
in birds) and crowds (as in people as in Mardi Gras)—these keep their
individual parts apart and then make such amazing configurations and shapes
altogether seeming as one."
—Dara Wier, author of Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009)
posted 10.28.09
"Over the years a number of things (film, theater, writing, music, etcetera) have become catalysts and have boosted me in my writing. I just looked up the word boost and three definitions are (1) a push from below, like a boost over a wall, (2) an amplification, and (3) informally, to steal. So, almost randomly, here are two boosters I've had.
"I remember getting ready for a reading I was doing in Chicago, and I had a lot of notes for the reading, but nothing was cohering, and as the night of the reading approached, for some reason, I happened to see an early Godard movie. I don't even remember which one it was, but I remember the freedom I saw in the movie, the joy and passion, and especially the fun of putting ideas and images and words together.
"The other catalyst is a play by Peter
Brook, The Mahabharata. I only saw it once, but I remember one
character in the play: Krishna. I sort of fell in love with Krishna, and for
years I would quote his lines: ‘Resist what resists in you. Become
yourself.'"
—John Haskell, author of Out of My Skin (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009)
posted 10.21.09
"I'm not sure many people think of
insomnia as a good thing, but it is. As a 'sufferer,' I'm up until five or six
in the morning almost daily. One thing I've found is that I write with the most
imagination in the middle of the night, as though my subconscious and conscious
are more in tune with each other—something about being liberated from cell
phones and e-mails and other plights of the real world. So I recommend brewing
some coffee at ten or eleven at night, settling in, and letting your brain get
as reckless on the page as it wants, without any distractions pulling you back
to earth."
—Joshua Mohr, author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me (Two
Dollar Radio, 2009)
posted 10.14.09
"I wrote The Boy Next Door in
Geneva, Switzerland and one of the biggest challenges for me was to capture the
essence of life in Zimbabwe, particularly the second largest city, Bulawayo, in
the eighties, which was a delicate period: optimism and hope (Zimbabwe was
newly independent after a brutal war) and fear (the peace, at times, seemed
fragile). Music was what constantly brought Bulawayo during that period vividly
alive for me. Mostly Johnny Clegg and Savuka with their song,
"Scatterlings." That song had a visceral effect on me, the energy and
vibrancy of its African beat surging through my body, sweeping away the years
and landing me right there in that time. More so when I came upon the video on
YouTube. It made me both sentimental and clear-eyed. And then there is the
wrenching cry of the song 'Asimbonanga,' 'We have not seen him,' that captured
for me the sorrows of that period when South Africa was still under apartheid
and the southern part of Zimbabwe was suffering from a wave of killings. The
music grasped me at a profoundly emotional level; when the emotion subsided its
echo was still there as I sat down and wrote Lindiwe and Ian's story."
—Irene Sabatini, author of The Boy Next Door (Little, Brown,
2009)
posted 10.08.09
"When I need poetic inspiration, I return to music. My go-to album these days is the Upsetters' Super Ape. The songs 'Underground' and 'Dub Along' work like chiropractors for the imaginary. Behind the hoist of bass and reverb, voices twist up, then meld into rhythm. The same way good poetic imagery does (or should).
"There is an inscription on the album
cover, situated in the upper-right corner like postage: 'DUB IT UP Blacker Than
DREAD.' This seems like an instruction for free writing, too. Dub it up: Make
the verse echo, make it more extragalactic. Harmonize ideas and words."
—Adrian Matejka, author of Mixology (Penguin,
2009)
posted 9.30.09
"Sitting at the desk. Naps. The painting
over my desk shows a woman lying on a bed with her eyes closed: The
Sheepshearer's Dream. I jump rope to keep awake. Walk the dogs. Nuts, one
at a time until my stomach hurts. No music—I get sucked into the emotion.
Forget about lyrics. I reread what I really admire and can't quite understand,
say, Brenda Shaughnessy or Dawn Raffel or Caryl Churchill. I need rough edges
or half a memory, the perfect story only if it's mostly forgotten. The way you
forget how bad birthing is—and still have sex again."
—Terese Svoboda, author of Weapons Grade (University of Arkansas
Press, 2009)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 7.15.09
"I need to feel invested in life to write. So I dance to music that compels life into my body: any from the old hippie Broadway musicals—Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair—any Latin ballroom or belly dance, any Jay-Z, Madonna, Run-DMC, George Michael, Black Eyed Peas and I'm at ‘Boom Boom Pow' with life.
"Being
at uninhibited physical ease with the universe creates space in me for the rich
interiorities people cart around as they move, in their own ways, in the
variously hospitable worlds of our making. If the story is stuck, I let it be
and begin something else; the given day is too precious to squander on battling
the occasionally intransigent fictions of my mind. Eventually, it becomes
possible to return. The trail separation gives us both new perspectives; if the
differences are irreconcilable, there's always divorce. Not everything I write
must be seen and read, nor every story told."
—Ru Freeman, A Disobedient Girl (Atria Books, 2009)
posted 7.08.09
"The
first and most visible source of inspiration for my poems is other poems. A
less voluble influence is abstract art. I like seeing if I can hear the visual
voice in the colored grids of Gerhard Richter and Ellsworth Kelly; in the
subtle pink math of Agnes Martin; in the reflective sapphire of an Anish Kapoor
floor sculpture; in the regimented presentation of red, yellow, and blue in a
horizontal Donald Judd progression. I admire the treatment of Scotch tape by
Tara Donovan and Tom Friedman. I look to David Hammons for whimsy and bite; to
Ellen Gallagher, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky for mark making; to Ed
Ruscha and Jenny Holzer for making poems when they make art."
—Sally Van Doren, author of Sex at Noon Taxes (Louisiana
State University Press, 2008)
posted 6.24.09
"To
break from the heavy lifting of writing moderately vulgar dark comedies, first
I will turn to Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer for some light reading. Then I
will wander outside to see if there are any important public gatherings. If
there are no gatherings, I return to the house and head downstairs to the
basement where I will spend a few minutes adding to my bottle cap collage of
the Nuremberg Trial. For lunch, I boil one egg and eat it on dry bread. This is
a crucial moment in the writing day, for it is now that I remember the jar of
orange marmalade in the refrigerator. If I forgo the marmalade, I will
immediately return to my desk, put away the Rimbaud and continue writing the
moderately vulgar dark comedy. If I give into the marmalade, I will not only
not return to the comedy, I will not write another sentence all day; rather I
will drift between a greedy ecstasy and a brooding malaise, dreaming of utopian
countries in the shape of rectangles—unless, of course, the mail comes—"
—Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent (McSweeney's
Books, 2009)
posted 6.17.09
"If you're writing a book that no one is waiting for, buy the debut album of an indie band—not the latest darlings, but an underappreciated act—a band like Pittsburgh's Meeting of Important People.
"Listen
to the album for its details—a cutting lyric, a defiant high harmony. Let the
songs' characters mingle with your own. Keep in mind that few people were
waiting for this album while it was being made. But the band made it anyway
and, somehow, you found it. Then sit down to write—and believe that, when it's
finished, your work, too, will be found."
—Dave Reidy, author of Captive Audience (Ig Publishing,
2009)
posted 6.10.09
"The best advice I ever got about writing was from Stephen King's memoir,On Writing, in which he talks about the writer's need to be ‘willing' to shut the door on the world for a few hours a day. He suggests writing one thousand to two thousand words a day, without editing or planning ahead.
"Similarly,
some of my students who've had trouble finishing a book or a story because they
keep second-guessing every word they write, swear by the Web application Write or Die, which ‘encourages writing by
punishing the tendency to avoid writing.' I'm told it's stressful, but I've
seen great results in terms of productivity."
—Gina B. Nahai, author of Caspian Rain (MacAdam/Cage,
2007)
posted 6.03.09
"Lately
I've been listening to Homer's Odyssey on CD. Listening to
classics on CDs is a part of my yoga practice. Because I am taking in this
material while concentrating on breathing and physical effort—and also because
I'm listening rather than reading—my mind seems to move into a right-brain,
nonanalytic state. This piques my creativity, while it also hones my focus and
mental reflexes for the long term, much as meditation does. Some yoga friends
would argue that concentrating on an audio reading while practicing postures is
the yogic equivalent of multitasking, that it undermines rather than cultivates
focus. But for me it's a unique way to immerse myself in the world of story
while turning off the self-criticizing, over-thinking part of my brain."
—Elizabeth Kadetsky, author of First There Is a Mountain (Little,
Brown, 2004)
posted 5.27.09
"(1) Most important, I recommend patience—which I have to remind myself of all the time. So often, I get excited about a poem in progress and start to spin my wheels, which I do for a week or two until it's time to set the poem aside. Then, sometimes months later, I find a new angle or approach and the poem begins to move again.
"Incidentally, the same is true for reading. How often did I read a brilliant writer and think I disliked his/her work when I just wasn't ready for it?
"(2)
I like to look at historical photographs of places I know intimately—cities and
towns I've
lived in, etcetera. I think it's good for writing to imagine the present moment
as just the pinhole in a camera—all that past beyond it, like
the boundless world flooding in and through the tiny lens of one's moment.
"Not
a bad way to think about one's own writing in the context of literature,
either."
—Wayne Miller, author of The Book of Props (Milkweed
Editions, 2009)
posted 5.20.09
"Storytellers
inspire me. I listen intently then let my imagination take over. Characters
need to be fully rendered in my head before they make it into any story. I try
to read new writers, but there are a few books I return to again and again.
When I want to analyze ways to portray dysfunctional family bonds and
relationships, I revisit Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage. Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions is
full of delightful inspiration. And I've read Junot Díaz's Drown and
Sandra Cisneros's Carameloseveral times and always come away sated
and in awe of their characters."
—Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, author of Marielitos, Balseros and
Other Exiles (Ig Publishing, 2009)
posted 5.13.09
"I'm
teaching a class this term on Dirty Realism, the fiction movement that may or
may not have existed twenty or thirty years ago, and my own syllabus has
brought me to Jayne Anne Phillips's Black Tickets, an amazing
collection of short fiction that pushes hard against the boundaries of what
I've typically understood stories to be. Phillips's writing is visceral and
shockingly alive; no doubt many readers out there know how incredible a writer
she is, but for me, her work is new, and does what all good fiction does: It
makes me want to learn more."
—Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle (Little,
Brown, 2009)
posted 5.06.09
"A good soak in a bathtub invigorates the senses, relaxes the muscles and allows the mind to wander. Like Rostand, I often escape the world by hiding out in the bath, and I find that the leaps and associations I make while immersed in warm water are often more surprising than any I've made on dry land. I haven't yet leaped from the tub like Archimedes, crying ‘Eureka,' but I have on more than one occasion gone straight from the bath to the desk, brimming with new ideas and a (pardon the pun) more fluid sense of language.
"For other forms of inspiration, I like history books, screenplays (with their precise interplay of language and image), old radio shows and nineteenth-century novels. Also the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Jimmy Webb.
"I
try not to imitate poets, though I do love to read them. I won't list everyone
whose work I like, for fear that I'll omit someone unintentionally. But if
there were two books I would have wished to have written at this particular
moment, I'd say they were Barbara Hamby's All-Night Lingo Tangoand
Marvin Bell's Mars Being Red."
—D. A. Powell, author of Chronic (Graywolf
Press, 2009)
posted 4.29.09
"Listen
to the soundtracks of Giorgio Moroder. Visit the Rubin Museum of Art. Open to
any page of The Mariner's Dictionary. Sit in churches that watch
over cities. Stand in trains that run under rivers. Swim on the Greek island
Ikaria, whose hot springs are among the world's most radioactive waters. Read
Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary and feel encouraged by the
fact that a genius worried about bad reviews. Read Pliny the Elder'sNatural
History and learn that after lightning strikes, 'the immediate area of
the wound is colder than the rest of the body.'"
—Leni Zumas, author of Farewell Navigator (Open City
Books, 2008)
posted 4.22.09
"I
am permanently inspired by Gavin McInnes's book Dos and Don'ts: 10
Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques.
Under a photo of a guy wearing a Japanese flag do-rag: ‘While chickenshit
hipsters desperately cling to their jeans and blazers...there are real
scientists out there taking risks and trying out dangerous experiments, like
"What if I put a bunch of Japanese stuff on my head?" Scoff all you
want, but this is exactly how they found a cure for Lou Gehrig's disease.'
McInnes reminds me to include everything in everything, and not to be afraid of
freedom. When I read him, the door reopens."
—Sarah Manguso, author of The Two Kinds of Decay (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2008)
posted 4.15.09
"Mickey
Hess's self-published creative nonfiction masterpiece, Big Wheel at the
Cracker Factory, was recently reprinted by provocative indie press Garrett
County in November 2008, and to my mind, it is the funniest, most honest
depiction of the struggle almost all college graduates face when trying to
decide what the hell they're going to do with the rest of their lives. Hess,
during the time the memoir is set, is a young adjunct professor teaching at
four different colleges throughout Kentucky and Indiana, working without a
contract or health insurance, who takes weird job after weird job to supplement
his income: ice cream man, character at a haunted house, ball-pit monitor at a
children's arcade, incompetent house sitter. The question the book keeps asking
is, "Can you pay the rent while still maintaining some sense of
dignity?"
—Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps (Norton, 2009)
posted 4.08.09
"One of the most important books ever to me is the glorious New DirectionsCollected Poems, 1912-1944 by H. D., as I was saying recently, 'that cover, that weight.' It was an undergrad college text I couldn't afford at the beginning of semester, but once I saw it I used the Christmas money from my maternal grandparents to go and get it. Much smaller and more recently: Green Integer's edition of Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer was nearly a pillow. Propped on my office desk at Wesleyan: the slimProphecies (Hesperus Press) by Leonardo da Vinci and right behind it Tracey Emin'sStrangeland (Sceptre)."
—Douglas A. Martin, author of Your Body Figured (Nightboat Books, September 2008)
posted 4.01.09
"What I find most inspirational are large masses of birds—any kind. Geese, blackbirds, crows, etc. I also find some birds inspirational in singles, particularly these three ducks—wood, harlequin, hooded merganser (especially!!) The surf scoter is okay too.
"Also I like wildly colored reptiles and amphibians, particularly poison ones, like poison-dart frogs. Can be: in the wild (best), in books, in zoos, even with the sadness associated with captivity. And those tanks of drapey lingerie-like jellyfish: yow!
"Really, anything will do for inspiration, and one has to limit one’s watching of something likeDouble Indemnity after the twelfth double-indemnity poem. Or, who knows, maybe the world needs thirteen? I also like the science section of the newspaper, for the pictures. An eleventh-century skull of a female vampire exhumed recently—we know she’s a vampire because someone wedged a brick in her mouth. We do not need more than that to get going.
"But
don’t take that one (the brick vampire), because she’s mine."
—Lucia Perillo, author of Inseminating the Elephant (Copper
Canyon Press, 2009)
posted 3.25.09
"If
I ever get stuck writing a poem, I will play some Talking Heads. That band is
the poet I want to be! The album Stop Making Sense is
especially meaningful to me. Although pop music might not always be clever or
complicated, it is deeply honest and open. Like the band Vampire Weekend sings:
‘First the window, then it's to the wall / Lil' Jon, he always tells the
truth.' Lately, and not only because our names look weirdly similar, I have
been reading Matthew Lippman's The New Year of Yellow again
and being deeply moved and jealous. My poems will never be like Lippman's, but
they are not supposed to be. It is the fire in another person's work that can
keep us warm and the blaze in a song that ridiculously asks the question ‘What
you gonna do with all that junk? / All that junk inside your trunk?' that
lights a path of honesty and fun."
—Matthew Dickman, author of All-American Poem (Copper
Canyon Press, 2009)
posted 3.18.09
"I
hate to sound so directly instructional, but a book I've found immensely useful
is Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide From the Nieman
Foundation at Harvard University. Collecting insights on narrative
journalism from writers like Nora Ephron, David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Susan
Orlean, Tracy Kidder, Phillip Lopate, and Malcolm Gladwell, the book is an
inspiring and informational read for anyone looking to deepen their nonfiction
writing craft."
—Rolf
Potts,
author of Marco Polo Didn't Go There: Stories and Revelations From One
Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer (Travelers' Tales, 2008)
posted 3.11.09
"I
assemble things to maintain a place in my creative thinking, a little like
stumbling around in the undergrowth of a slightly wild place. I put down
markers and listen for sounds and silences. Right now Obama's Dreams
From My Father is in a triadic configuration with Graham's The
Dream of a Unified Field, and Hass's Time and Materials. I mark
my reading with music, from Gregorian chants to hip-hop. A recent article
in Wired about dinochickens, reviving dinosaurs by
manipulating the DNA of chickens, has my attention. They will be little
dinosaurs, creeping on dinosaur mini feet, whispering ‘mee, mee' with swishing
tails and tiny webbed feet...and little giant teeth."
—Afaa
Michael Weaver,
author of The Plum Flower Dance (University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2007)
posted 3.04.09
"When
my writing stagnates, I do occasionally turn to fiction for motivation or
inspiration: I might read a favorite passage, say, the epilogue to A. S.
Byatt's Possession, or a random page of Bleak House.
But I'm actually much more likely to read poetry—Yeats, Eliot, Auden, e.e.
cummings, and Seamus Heaney are favorites—or listen to music to unstick myself.
I love the baroque period—J. S. Bach, Telemann, Scarlatti—and folk/acoustic
music from the 1960s and 1970s: Simon and Garfunkel (which won't come as a
surprise to anyone who's read my novel!); Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob
Dylan; the Mamas and the Papas. There's a kind of nostalgia this music awakens
in me, a sharp longing for a past I never even experienced, that is a crucial
element of my writing 'zone.'"
—Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening Is the Whole Day (Houghton
Mifflin, 2008)
posted 2.25.09
"I
find it easier to follow form to content than content to form (forgive the
false dilemma), which means I depend on discovering an essential rather
than an accidental relationship between the two: a form that can only
sustain that content, and a content that could only be
articulated in thatform. So I find inspiration in works that
manifest just such an essential relationship. My paradigm for this for years
has been Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy. My most recent sighting of
it has been in Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary."
—H.
L. Hix,
author of Legible Heavens (Etruscan Press, 2008)
.
posted 2.18.09
"Something
that has energized me lately is this great new site calledHTMLgiant.com. They call it 'the internet
literature magazine blog of the future,' and I've decided that joking or not, I
think they're right. They cover a broad range of what's happening in the indie
lit world with an enthusiasm that you would be hard put to find elsewhere. The
contributors regularly take to the mat in the comments section, with
down-and-dirty brawls of the highest literary order. This is a blog that makes
me want to read/write/tear down a few walls."
—Zach Plague,
author of Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring (Featherproof
Books, August 2008)
posted 2.09.09
"Baffled
by my obsession with writing about objects both in poetry and fiction, I
discovered The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objectsby
Peter Schwenger. Why, I’ve wondered, are objects so tantalizing, collectable,
and mysterious, and why do such objects define and unnerve me. This book
analyzes poetry, fiction, paintings; it begins with Emily Dickinson; it
addresses the way that one’s inability to possess an object gives rise to
melancholy. The book has introduced me to a stronger sense of how things
invested with memories stand for all that is lost, a stronger sense of my
inevitable return to this subject."
—Martha
Ronk,
author of Glass Grapes and Other Stories (BOA Editions, 2008)
posted 1.30.09
"When
I despair about my work, I dig out a book that I discovered years ago in
college: Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Her essays
explain how creativity in any form—writing, planting a garden, starting a
business—is crucial for leading a good life. The book is anti-critic and
anti-publishing world and this is what I like about it. Not because I don’t
want to impress the critics (I do), but because Ueland writes so eloquently
about what happens at the core—that scary moment when the author is alone at
her desk with only a blank page before her."
—Rishi Reddi, author of Karma and Other Stories (Ecco,
2007)
posted 1.26.09
"Go
to a museum. Not to find ideas or to seek inspiration from what hangs on the
walls, rather to be in a place that’s purpose is for responding to art and
artistic thought. The arts, in general, have become more and more marginalized;
their value measured by commodity (especially writing, given its obsession with
'publishable'). In the gallery, your relationship to the work is its vision,
energy, technique, and, of course, its aesthetic—not its commercial promise. Go
to a museum. Breathe in a place that’s only reason for being is art. Then go
home. Then make art."
—Adam Braver, author of November 22, 1963 (Tin House
Books, 2008)
posted 1.12.09
"When
I’m stuck in a poem it usually means my engagement with the subject is lacking
intensity, and instead of fully entering the material, I feel like I’m at the
doorway tentatively knocking in that lazy way we do when we don’t actually want
to be admitted. One piece of writing that can reliably revive me from this
state is the title essay in Guy Davenport’s Geography of the
Imagination. In the grand finale of this short essay, Davenport looks at
Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic. But here looking is the
most active, most adrenalized, most divine activity possible. With an inspired
X-ray gaze that feels downright otherworldly, an uncanny reading emerges.
Looking passes into seeing, and the figure of the writer is restored to that of
seer. Davenport’s fans are passionate, and yet I think too few. I wish more
poets would read him!"
—Robyn Schiff, author of Revolver (University of Iowa
Press, 2008)
posted 12.22.08
"When
I get stuck, I walk to the cemetery and sit by the grave of Polexenia Velicu,
on the seat where I wrote my first chapters of The Great Inland Sea.
Or I lie in the grass beneath the cypress tree with Grandma Caroline Hidden, as
if I’m a sole surviving relative. I dream around my story, meditate on
characters, wait. If I get nothing, I move to the headstones of others I've
adopted, Mabel Silent or Bessie Slaughter.… Annie Dillard said writing a book
is like sitting up with a dying friend: You 'hold its hand and hope it gets
better.' For me, I visit the already dead with pencil in hand. I feel the earth
and get humble, hope that words might come."
—David Francis, author of Stray Dog Winter (MacAdam/Cage,
2008)
posted 12.22.08
"When
reading Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, I get the sense
that a very short movie lives inside each sentence. Whether focused on a wall
or a person, his sentences contain a whirlwind of movement that culminates in a
mini visual narrative, confirming that in Schulz’s world, there is no such
thing as an inanimate object. Everything has life, because he breathes life
into every thing by using surprising verbs and cinematic metaphors. Nearly
empty of plot, the book is fueled by the power of his language alone, which
reminds me that if I focus on writing the best sentence, the rest will
follow."
—Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere (forthcoming
from Riverhead Books in January 2009)
posted 12.17.08
"Theodore
Weesner's 1987 novel The True Detective is a book I go back to
again and again. The story of a child abduction, seen through the eyes of those
closest to the case, it's got the velocity and compulsion of a thriller and the
depth and compassion of a great literary novel. Weesner's brilliant at moving
from one character's point of view to another's while keeping the action
moving. It's been out of print for years now, and every time I see a copy of it
in a used bookstore, I buy it to give to someone else."
—Stewart O’Nan, author of Songs for the Missing (Viking,
2008)
posted 12.17.08
"When
I’m at my most creative, I call it being 'sticky,' and almost anything at all
can help enrich the work. I’ve found a really simple, effective source of
inspiration is to just go outside. I’ll settle into a big, old Adirondack chair
in the backyard and try to enter my senses as fully as I can as I work. Writers
spend their lives holed up at desks, so the 'surprise' of nature can be
intensely vivid. Sometimes the details of sky, trees, stone will work their way
into my narratives, sometimes they don’t, but the process always helps to move
my writing forward."
—Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Origin (Norton, 2007)
posted 12.17.08
"Whenever
I feel that I've lost sight of a story I'm working on, I return to one book in
particular: Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago. I can open this
book to almost any page, read a few paragraphs, and be reminded of why I wanted
to start writing short stories in the first place. There's such simple elegance
in the storytelling, such honesty and clarity on every page. I'm sure that all
writers have a book like this, a book they return to with such frequency that
half the pages have fallen out. The Coast of Chicago is
mine."
—Andrew Porter, author of Theory of Light and Matter (University
of Georgia Press, 2008)
posted 12.17.08
"One
of my enthusiasms of the moment is David Shield's great and overlooked
book Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography, just
reissued by Soft Skull Press. Shield's insights about the complex
back-and-forth of fiction and fact in literature and our larger culture are
remarkable. This new edition is introduced by documentary filmmaker Ross
McElwee, so I went back and watched his hilarious and amazing filmBright
Leaves. Also, I was surprised recently while rereading Langston
Hughes's Best of Simpleto see how much my new book, Fight
Scenes, borrows a rough structure/form from that book, which has always
been one of my favorites for its unpretentious, breezy style and moments of
poignancy mixed with comedy and dark truths."
—Greg Bottoms, author of Fight Scenes (Counterpoint,
2008)
posted 12.16.08
"Richard
Siken's Crush illuminates the intersection of passion and
violence with perfect clarity. Poems like 'Little Beast,' 'A Primer for the
Small Weird Loves,' and 'You Are Jeff' capture the chatty, campy voices of real
people in real time without ever losing the sweep and musicality of great
literature. I've worn my copy into a loose portfolio of coffee-stained pages, obsessed
with the simplicity and bravado of lines like, 'Tell me about the dream where
we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes
again.'"
—Carol Guess, author of Tinderbox Lawn (Rose Metal
Press, 2008)
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 9.23.09
"My sense these days is that I'm
constantly inspired by all kinds of things, and it's about extremely compelling
works giving me the necessary jolts of energy, courage, and fear to continue.
In that vein, Lucinda Childs's collaborative piece with Sol LeWitt and Philip
Glass, Dance, which I saw this summer, made making feel possible, even
ecstatically so, especially regarding matters of scale and light. This is no
small thing for me, as I tend to write out of places of dense agitation, and am
on the lookout for ways away from that. The second and third songs on Grizzly
Bear's Veckatimest, Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, and the poems
'Joe's Jacket' by Frank O'Hara and 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' by
Coleridge are high on the list at the moment as well."
—Anselm Berrigan, author of Free Cell (City Lights Publishers,
2009)
posted 9.16.09
"There's a studio recording of Nina Simone singing 'My Father' that always knocks me out. Ms. Simone actually sings only a few lines from the song:
My father always promised me
That we would live in France.
We'd go boating on the Seine
And I would learn to dance
"And then she stops, suddenly, and says:
'I don't want to sing this song. It's not me.' She begins to laugh, wildly,
infectiously. When she recovers, she apologizes to the musicians and tells
them, with utter authority, 'Okay, we have to skip this one.' It's such a
lovely moment of an artist being true to herself, refusing to say something
that feels wrong in her mouth, in her body. She trusts her voice, and its
inclinations. Every time I hear the recording, it makes me happy."
—Victor Lodato, author of Mathilda Savitch (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009)
posted 9.09.09
"The Lure of the Detour: five things that feed me plus the sixth that haunts them.
"(1) Silence: the body and the breath that haunts that house.
"(2) Sound: Alice Coltrane, Yoko Ono, David Lang, John Cage, Krishna Das.
"(3) Words, usually shattered. Books of poetry that will never leave me: Sappho's Gymnasium by Olga Broumas and T Begley, The Veiled Suite by Agha Shahid Ali, Arcady by Donald Revell, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 by Lucille Clifton, Selected Poems by Fanny Howe. Of course always Mahmoud Darwish. Always Jean Valentine.
"(4) Writers whose work provides a vibe for me—each time I read them I have to go write something: Bhanu Kapil, Nathalie Stephens, Richard Greenfield, Saskia Hamilton, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Sarah Gambito.
"(5) Pictures: Agnes Martin, Makoto Fujimura, Zhao Wou-ki, Hans Hofmann, Layla Al-Attar.
"The life and the art and the death of Layla Al-Attar. Feeds me and haunts me. Every day."
—Kazim Ali, author of Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009)
posted 9.02.09
"I believe, as many writers do, that there are touchstone moments in literature—poetry, fiction, and plays—that spark the imagination. So here are a couple of personal inspirations:
"(1) The scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in which Mrs. Ramsay despairs while sitting in Cam's room as she sleeps. She is the center of the novel's 'galaxy,' she is the heart. But unknown to her husband and children, who rely on her, she sits in the steadily recurring beam of the St. Ives lighthouse and wonders why people fall in love and why they have children, when all are doomed to die. It is the most devastating lyrical moment.
"(2) 'He Is More Than a Hero' is one of the many poem fragments by Sappho which always stir me. It provides a description of the physicality of being in love—how the heart races, the tongue is tied—as thrilling and accurate as if Sappho were speaking to us in this moment and not the sixth century BCE."
—Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Channeling Mark Twain (Random House, 2007)
posted 8.26.09
"Running takes me out of the city and into
nature, which does something to me that most man-made stuff can't. I pass the
Brazilian transsexuals, wave, pass the mean forest cops on their big horses,
salute, pass that one old guy with the terry-cloth headband, wave. I stop next
to that pond with those two nasty swans and I hang upside down and stretch
until my head feels as alive and as heavy as an electric watermelon. I go home
(everything in the city now looks like a concrete cartoon), shower, put on ugly
clothes made of soft material, stretch my hands to the higher, hidden deities
of the unknown universe, bow to them, wait for them to bow back, then I open my
computer. Sometimes I feel like a big zero a-hole loser with nothing to say and
that is when I put on some Irish music—anything with fiddles and flutes—or some
Chinese stuff and this music says yes you are an a-hole but so what and
sometimes I buckle down in silence and get as close to my characters as I can
and these are beautiful moments that make me really tired. When things are bad,
I get up and walk around talking to myself; when things are worse, I stop
everything and put my head on my knees, close my eyes, watch the darkness
inside my head swirling around, and wait until the feeling passes. Writing
isn't easy for me."
—Nicola Keegan, author of Swimming (Knopf, 2009)
posted 8.19.09
"One of the seventeen times the Supremes
appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, they sang 'You Can't Hurry Love'
wearing earrings that weighed close to what Diana Ross weighed at the time. At
some point in the song, one of Ross's earrings dangles and falls. What does she
do? She keeps singing lead, and includes in the choreography a catch you have
to watch the footage several times to see. Suddenly, Diana Ross has one earring
on and one in her hand. Poetry is performance. I recommend watching this to
learn writing with focus...and grace."
—Jericho Brown, author of Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose,
2009)
posted 8.12.09
"Lately I've been writing poems on my iPhone. But I also like to write poems on Post-it notes and in my trusty sketchbook, too. Writing on various media, not letting myself get comfortable, is very helpful. I also like to send myself off into what I call coffee shop exile. Being in public spaces makes me a little edgy, which is good for my writing.
"Also, if I want to write but can't find a way in, often the best thing I can do is read any old John Ashbery book of poetry. I write almost nothing like him, but reading his work gets me leaping in interesting directions.
"Finally, recently, I've been listening to Jack Teagarden's jazz trombone music while I write. When I play his greatest hits through my headphones while I sip my latte, I can write like a madman."
—Frank Giampietro, author of Begin Anywhere (Alice James Books, 2008)
posted 8.05.09
"I’m the least athletic person in the
world—the proverbial kid picked last for teams—so what I’m about to suggest is
a bit strange: Go running. Whenever I get stuck in story, unable to get my
character out of the car and into his apartment, I step away from my desk,
throw on shorts, and hit the pavement. I hate sports. Truly. But there’s
something about the rhythm of running—and the complete solitude it allows—that
calms me down and allows me to work through whatever problems I’m encountering
on the page."
—Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age (Scribner,
2009)
posted 7.29.09
"I am very interested in cities and
places, and in having conversations with them. Research and lists are big for
me. Often, lists I make become poems unto themselves. Notes from my research
make some of the strongest lines in my poems, I've found, or, like the lists,
turn into poems of their own. I began my book The Straits in response to
the sparse but lyrical narration in a Russian film, Palms, so I find
listening for refrains and cadences—anywhere and everywhere—then responding to
them highly evocative. It's not something I do deliberately, as some do by
listening to music, but I always find myself tuning into certain rhythms when
I'm out and about or in something I'm reading and later realize that it has
entered my work."
—Kristin Palm, author of The Straits (Palm Press, 2009)
posted 7.22.09
"I loved that moment at the 2008 Oscars
when Glen Hansard closed his acceptance speech with this exhortation to the
world: ‘Make art. Make art.' As a writer, I try to ‘make art,' but all too
often the twenty-first century's ubiquitous, on-demand distractions interfere
and keep me from getting to that place where I can apply a fierce commitment
and single-minded focus to the act of creation. When I need a reminder of how
essential such commitment and focus are to the creation of a miraculous work of
art, I reread Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires, or I listen to Neutral
Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, or to anything recorded by
Joy Division in 1979 or 1980. Then I pick up the pen again and try to make
art."
—Dan Albergotti, author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008)
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 2.17.10
"Like most writers—specifically parents who are writers—I don't have a lot of time to find inspiration. Galway Kinnell once told me to keep a notepad handy so I can take notes wherever I am: in the grocery store, listening to NPR, in the doctor's office (I once wrote a poem waiting for my annual mammogram). On my commutes to and from work, I dictate my thoughts into my iPhone to store ideas until I can get to my computer. These are some favorite phrases currently rolling around in my head: universal joint, hounds will hunt forever without any reward, silent as stars, boxed lunch, white athletic socks around hairy calves.
"Part of the fun of poetry is making sense
out of ordinary randomness, thereby making everyday experiences
extraordinary."
—January Gill O'Neil, author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press,
December 2009)
posted 2.10.10
"It helps me to remember that inspiration
needs courting; it won't come if I wait passively. Also, let's say I get
inspired but have a rusty hand...then the inspiration plugs into a faulty
outlet. So, when I've time to write but no mojo, I count. I write iambic
pentameter or sapphic stanzas, or I make up some rhythm pattern and repeat it
for a while (like writing lines with spondees, which is way hard!). If these
attempts fail, then I go to a park or a café for an hour or two and write down
what I see—not trying to say anything, but just attending to shapes, juxtapositions,
data. These things all help, plus, lately, reading John Ashbery—this shakes me
alive."
—Joanie Mackowski, author of View From a Temporary Window
(University of Pittsburgh Press, January 2010)
posted 2.03.10
"There is phenomenal beauty in the
language developed for a particular field—whether it's architecture, dentistry,
tree pruning, or accounting. Stories lurk in the specific tools and tasks. For
me, the natural sciences and seafaring are muses. Science News and the American
Practical Navigator come to mind as sources I've turned to. But immersion
in the language and concerns of any profession can unveil rich sounds and
provide a new lens through which the world can be seen. Take the scupper,
the hole that allows water to drain from a boat's deck—how can you not be
inspired by the word scupper? Using that 'other' language and making
sense of the view it describes—bridging the plumber's or the neurologist's
vision and your own—is a challenge and a delight."
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Approaching Ice (Persea Books,
2010)
posted 1.27.10
"I'm thoroughly inspired, moved, agitated,
elevated by music (mostly hip-hop). My first collection, Lobster With Ol'
Dirty Bastard, situates rap heroes, culture, and iconography inside the
four walls of fourteen-line quasi sonnets. Writing based on music has almost
become a compulsion of mine. When I listen to old Smiths' albums with names
like Hatful of Hollow or Meat Is Murder, I think
"literature!" When Morrissey sings, "I decree today that life is
simply taking and not giving / England is mine / And it owes me a living / Ask
me why and I'll spit in your eye," I immediately think remix. Remix
is a term most commonly used in hip-hop music or, more recognizably, from grad
school imitation poem writing prompts ad nauseum. Imitate it, re(in)state it,
reconfigure it, say it in Braille! My forthcoming collection, Vacations on
the Black Star Line, remixes the whole Mos Def & Talib Kweli are
Black Star album through the lens of race, privilege, whiteness, and
exoticization. I could take a song like Lupe Fiasco's "Dumb It Down"
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Et1siZhTk) and
spend hours trying to dissect each line, each metaphor, each double and triple
entendre. The stuff of good hip-hop puts language in a rocket ship!
—Michael Cirelli, author of Lobster With Ol' Dirty Bastard
(Hanging Loose Press, 2008)
posted 1.20.10
"Notes—on Post-its, index cards, scraps of
paper—have saved me as a writer. Because they fade so fast, I've made a habit
of writing down fragments of memory that arise or images or phrases, sometimes
just isolated words. Then I put them in folders, see what belongs together with
what, find out where those fragments lead, and build very slowly to an essay or
poem. I've learned to use writing as an act of discovery, and such small notes
are for me the fundamental source."
—Floyd Skloot, author of The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a
Writer's Life
(University of Nebraska Press, 2008)
posted 1.13.10
"Make a tiny book! At least once a year I write something quickly, in one day—a list poem or found-text piece—arrange it in sections, print, cut, stack the pages, staple, and make a handful of copies. I give one away immediately. It's not about showcasing my writing; it is about the playfulness of ungroomed surfaces and the intimacy of a gift.
"The poem 'Thinking a kite' from my book Torchwood
began this way. But the point is to act without thinking of a result beyond
your tiny book. This act of bookmaking is a writer's tradition: from literatura
de cordel in Brazil to the Dusie Press Kollektiv. Check them out!"
—Jill Magi, author of Threads (Futurepoem, 2007)
posted 12.16.09
"I am inspired to write because for many,
many years, while living in solitary confinement, writing was my only means of
communication. In the world outside of prison, when we are feeling isolated or
alone, we might reach for the phone to talk to someone, or reach for the
refrigerator door and eat something. Living at San Quentin State Prison on
death row, I reach for my pen. The pen is a form of therapy, meditation, and
reflection."
—Jarvis Jay Masters, author of That Bird Has My Wings: The
Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row (HarperOne, 2009)
posted 12.16.09
"I'm an American. My husband is from
Ireland. We adopted our daughter from Vietnam. We live in Shanghai, China. During
the past four years, I've traveled to India, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam,
France, Ireland, Italy, China, and, of course, the United States. Every time I
land in a new country, a new city, I get this crazy buzz...this itch...this
urge to see, see, see...watch, watch, watch...listen, listen, listen...and then
write, write, write. When I'm a stranger, an explorer, images and sounds and
people stick with me—the starved hound in Mumbai chomping dusty leaves from a
half-dead potted plant, the wedding procession through the rainy streets of
Milan, the slight suction of the elephant's trunk against my mouth when it
kisses me. I tote these around in my head until at some point I hunker down at
my desk where they become characters or moments in a story."
—Kristin Bair O'Keeffe, author of Thirsty (Swallow Press, 2009)
posted 12.16.09
"Have lucky things. It doesn't matter what
they are. I bought a green cardigan sweater for a quarter at a thrift store in
Bennington, Vermont, and wore it nearly every day through the writing of my
first three novels, until it was in tatters. Even then I kept it in my closet
and wore the tatters for selected moments as I wrote the next book or two. When
I wrote The Fortress of Solitude I had a fortune cookie fortune taped
onto the hood of my computer—a mysterious, atypical fortune, I can't remember
the exact words, something like ‘You don't know the whole story.' It encouraged
me to go deeper in that book than I'd gone before, into my personal mysteries.
Not to settle. While I was working on Chronic City I ate the same kind
of breakfast cereal (Barbara's Shredded Spoonfuls) with the same bowl and the
same spoon (it had a kind of fluted handle I liked) every morning, just like
Wade Boggs eating chicken before every baseball game. The point isn't to
believe in hokum, but to turn yourself over to the force of ritual, to deliver
the project out of your own neurotic proprietorship. The philosopher Niels Bohr
kept a horseshoe over his doorway, and when he was challenged by a visitor as
to whether he believed in such things, he replied, 'Of course not, but I am
told it works even if you don't believe in it.' Or the joke about the man who
was searching for his lost keys on a darkened street: A policeman stopped to
help him, and the man had the cop look with him under a street lamp. When the
cop asked if this was where the man had lost the keys, the man said, 'No, but
there's more light here.' Always search where the light is."
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009)
posted 12.09.09
"I try—and I fail all the time as I am
very idea oriented—to leave my desk and take a walk or a drive and just look at
the world more closely, to take note of the names of things so I'll be able to
mix them up later with the names of other things in an attempt to think and
write some new thought: the Ash-throated Flycatcher, the silver hair barrette,
and the cicada all mixed together with the sock, the respirator, and the
container in the room with the awful word BIOHAZARD written on it in such
bloody letters."
—Adrian Blevins, Live From the Homesick Jamboree (Wesleyan
University Press, 2009)
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 2.17.10
"Like most writers—specifically parents who are writers—I don't have a lot of time to find inspiration. Galway Kinnell once told me to keep a notepad handy so I can take notes wherever I am: in the grocery store, listening to NPR, in the doctor's office (I once wrote a poem waiting for my annual mammogram). On my commutes to and from work, I dictate my thoughts into my iPhone to store ideas until I can get to my computer. These are some favorite phrases currently rolling around in my head: universal joint, hounds will hunt forever without any reward, silent as stars, boxed lunch, white athletic socks around hairy calves.
"Part of the fun of poetry is making sense
out of ordinary randomness, thereby making everyday experiences
extraordinary."
—January Gill O'Neil, author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press,
December 2009)
posted 2.10.10
"It helps me to remember that inspiration
needs courting; it won't come if I wait passively. Also, let's say I get
inspired but have a rusty hand...then the inspiration plugs into a faulty
outlet. So, when I've time to write but no mojo, I count. I write iambic
pentameter or sapphic stanzas, or I make up some rhythm pattern and repeat it
for a while (like writing lines with spondees, which is way hard!). If these
attempts fail, then I go to a park or a café for an hour or two and write down
what I see—not trying to say anything, but just attending to shapes,
juxtapositions, data. These things all help, plus, lately, reading John
Ashbery—this shakes me alive."
—Joanie Mackowski, author of View From a Temporary Window
(University of Pittsburgh Press, January 2010)
posted 2.03.10
"There is phenomenal beauty in the
language developed for a particular field—whether it's architecture, dentistry,
tree pruning, or accounting. Stories lurk in the specific tools and tasks. For
me, the natural sciences and seafaring are muses. Science News and the American
Practical Navigator come to mind as sources I've turned to. But immersion
in the language and concerns of any profession can unveil rich sounds and
provide a new lens through which the world can be seen. Take the scupper,
the hole that allows water to drain from a boat's deck—how can you not be
inspired by the word scupper? Using that 'other' language and making
sense of the view it describes—bridging the plumber's or the neurologist's
vision and your own—is a challenge and a delight."
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Approaching Ice (Persea Books,
2010)
posted 1.27.10
"I'm thoroughly inspired, moved, agitated,
elevated by music (mostly hip-hop). My first collection, Lobster With Ol'
Dirty Bastard, situates rap heroes, culture, and iconography inside the
four walls of fourteen-line quasi sonnets. Writing based on music has almost
become a compulsion of mine. When I listen to old Smiths' albums with names
like Hatful of Hollow or Meat Is Murder, I think
"literature!" When Morrissey sings, "I decree today that life is
simply taking and not giving / England is mine / And it owes me a living / Ask
me why and I'll spit in your eye," I immediately think remix. Remix
is a term most commonly used in hip-hop music or, more recognizably, from grad
school imitation poem writing prompts ad nauseum. Imitate it, re(in)state it,
reconfigure it, say it in Braille! My forthcoming collection, Vacations on
the Black Star Line, remixes the whole Mos Def & Talib Kweli are
Black Star album through the lens of race, privilege, whiteness, and
exoticization. I could take a song like Lupe Fiasco's "Dumb It Down"
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Et1siZhTk) and
spend hours trying to dissect each line, each metaphor, each double and triple
entendre. The stuff of good hip-hop puts language in a rocket ship!
—Michael Cirelli, author of Lobster With Ol' Dirty Bastard
(Hanging Loose Press, 2008)
posted 1.20.10
"Notes—on Post-its, index cards, scraps of
paper—have saved me as a writer. Because they fade so fast, I've made a habit
of writing down fragments of memory that arise or images or phrases, sometimes
just isolated words. Then I put them in folders, see what belongs together with
what, find out where those fragments lead, and build very slowly to an essay or
poem. I've learned to use writing as an act of discovery, and such small notes
are for me the fundamental source."
—Floyd Skloot, author of The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a
Writer's Life
(University of Nebraska Press, 2008)
posted 1.13.10
"Make a tiny book! At least once a year I write something quickly, in one day—a list poem or found-text piece—arrange it in sections, print, cut, stack the pages, staple, and make a handful of copies. I give one away immediately. It's not about showcasing my writing; it is about the playfulness of ungroomed surfaces and the intimacy of a gift.
"The poem 'Thinking a kite' from my book Torchwood
began this way. But the point is to act without thinking of a result beyond
your tiny book. This act of bookmaking is a writer's tradition: from literatura
de cordel in Brazil to the Dusie Press Kollektiv. Check them out!"
—Jill Magi, author of Threads (Futurepoem, 2007)
posted 12.16.09
"I am inspired to write because for many,
many years, while living in solitary confinement, writing was my only means of
communication. In the world outside of prison, when we are feeling isolated or
alone, we might reach for the phone to talk to someone, or reach for the
refrigerator door and eat something. Living at San Quentin State Prison on
death row, I reach for my pen. The pen is a form of therapy, meditation, and
reflection."
—Jarvis Jay Masters, author of That Bird Has My Wings: The
Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row (HarperOne, 2009)
posted 12.16.09
"I'm an American. My husband is from
Ireland. We adopted our daughter from Vietnam. We live in Shanghai, China.
During the past four years, I've traveled to India, Thailand, Indonesia,
Vietnam, France, Ireland, Italy, China, and, of course, the United States.
Every time I land in a new country, a new city, I get this crazy buzz...this
itch...this urge to see, see, see...watch, watch, watch...listen, listen,
listen...and then write, write, write. When I'm a stranger, an explorer, images
and sounds and people stick with me—the starved hound in Mumbai chomping dusty
leaves from a half-dead potted plant, the wedding procession through the rainy
streets of Milan, the slight suction of the elephant's trunk against my mouth
when it kisses me. I tote these around in my head until at some point I hunker
down at my desk where they become characters or moments in a story."
—Kristin Bair O'Keeffe, author of Thirsty (Swallow Press, 2009)
posted 12.16.09
"Have lucky things. It doesn't matter what
they are. I bought a green cardigan sweater for a quarter at a thrift store in
Bennington, Vermont, and wore it nearly every day through the writing of my
first three novels, until it was in tatters. Even then I kept it in my closet
and wore the tatters for selected moments as I wrote the next book or two. When
I wrote The Fortress of Solitude I had a fortune cookie fortune taped
onto the hood of my computer—a mysterious, atypical fortune, I can't remember
the exact words, something like ‘You don't know the whole story.' It encouraged
me to go deeper in that book than I'd gone before, into my personal mysteries.
Not to settle. While I was working on Chronic City I ate the same kind
of breakfast cereal (Barbara's Shredded Spoonfuls) with the same bowl and the
same spoon (it had a kind of fluted handle I liked) every morning, just like
Wade Boggs eating chicken before every baseball game. The point isn't to
believe in hokum, but to turn yourself over to the force of ritual, to deliver
the project out of your own neurotic proprietorship. The philosopher Niels Bohr
kept a horseshoe over his doorway, and when he was challenged by a visitor as
to whether he believed in such things, he replied, 'Of course not, but I am told
it works even if you don't believe in it.' Or the joke about the man who was
searching for his lost keys on a darkened street: A policeman stopped to help
him, and the man had the cop look with him under a street lamp. When the cop
asked if this was where the man had lost the keys, the man said, 'No, but
there's more light here.' Always search where the light is."
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009)
posted 12.09.09
"I try—and I fail all the time as I am
very idea oriented—to leave my desk and take a walk or a drive and just look at
the world more closely, to take note of the names of things so I'll be able to
mix them up later with the names of other things in an attempt to think and
write some new thought: the Ash-throated Flycatcher, the silver hair barrette,
and the cicada all mixed together with the sock, the respirator, and the
container in the room with the awful word BIOHAZARD written on it in such
bloody letters."
—Adrian Blevins, Live From the Homesick Jamboree (Wesleyan
University Press, 2009)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 9.23.09
"My
sense these days is that I'm constantly inspired by all kinds of things, and
it's about extremely compelling works giving me the necessary jolts of energy,
courage, and fear to continue. In that vein, Lucinda Childs's collaborative
piece with Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass, Dance, which I saw this
summer, made making feel possible, even ecstatically so, especially regarding
matters of scale and light. This is no small thing for me, as I tend to write
out of places of dense agitation, and am on the lookout for ways away from
that. The second and third songs on Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest,
Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, and the poems 'Joe's Jacket' by Frank O'Hara
and 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' by Coleridge are high on the list at the
moment as well."
—Anselm Berrigan, author of Free Cell (City Lights
Publishers, 2009)
posted 9.16.09
"There's a studio recording of Nina Simone singing 'My Father' that always knocks me out. Ms. Simone actually sings only a few lines from the song:
My
father always promised me
That we would live in France.
We'd go boating on the Seine
And I would learn to dance
"And
then she stops, suddenly, and says: 'I don't want to sing this song. It's not
me.' She begins to laugh, wildly, infectiously. When she recovers, she
apologizes to the musicians and tells them, with utter authority, 'Okay, we have
to skip this one.' It's such a lovely moment of an artist being true to
herself, refusing to say something that feels wrong in her mouth, in her body.
She trusts her voice, and its inclinations. Every time I hear the recording, it
makes me happy."
—Victor Lodato, author of Mathilda Savitch (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2009)
posted 9.09.09
"The Lure of the Detour: five things that feed me plus the sixth that haunts them.
"(1) Silence: the body and the breath that haunts that house.
"(2) Sound: Alice Coltrane, Yoko Ono, David Lang, John Cage, Krishna Das.
"(3) Words, usually shattered. Books of poetry that will never leave me: Sappho's Gymnasium by Olga Broumas and T Begley, The Veiled Suite by Agha Shahid Ali, Arcady by Donald Revell, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 by Lucille Clifton, Selected Poems by Fanny Howe. Of course always Mahmoud Darwish. Always Jean Valentine.
"(4) Writers whose work provides a vibe for me—each time I read them I have to go write something: Bhanu Kapil, Nathalie Stephens, Richard Greenfield, Saskia Hamilton, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Sarah Gambito.
"(5) Pictures: Agnes Martin, Makoto Fujimura, Zhao Wou-ki, Hans Hofmann, Layla Al-Attar.
"The life and the art and the death of Layla Al-Attar. Feeds me and haunts me. Every day."
—Kazim Ali, author of Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009)
posted 9.02.09
"I believe, as many writers do, that there are touchstone moments in literature—poetry, fiction, and plays—that spark the imagination. So here are a couple of personal inspirations:
"(1) The scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in which Mrs. Ramsay despairs while sitting in Cam's room as she sleeps. She is the center of the novel's 'galaxy,' she is the heart. But unknown to her husband and children, who rely on her, she sits in the steadily recurring beam of the St. Ives lighthouse and wonders why people fall in love and why they have children, when all are doomed to die. It is the most devastating lyrical moment.
"(2) 'He Is More Than a Hero' is one of the many poem fragments by Sappho which always stir me. It provides a description of the physicality of being in love—how the heart races, the tongue is tied—as thrilling and accurate as if Sappho were speaking to us in this moment and not the sixth century BCE."
—Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Channeling Mark Twain (Random House, 2007)
posted 8.26.09
"Running
takes me out of the city and into nature, which does something to me that most
man-made stuff can't. I pass the Brazilian transsexuals, wave, pass the mean
forest cops on their big horses, salute, pass that one old guy with the
terry-cloth headband, wave. I stop next to that pond with those two nasty swans
and I hang upside down and stretch until my head feels as alive and as heavy as
an electric watermelon. I go home (everything in the city now looks like a
concrete cartoon), shower, put on ugly clothes made of soft material, stretch
my hands to the higher, hidden deities of the unknown universe, bow to them,
wait for them to bow back, then I open my computer. Sometimes I feel like a big
zero a-hole loser with nothing to say and that is when I put on some Irish
music—anything with fiddles and flutes—or some Chinese stuff and this music
saysyes you are an a-hole but so what and sometimes I buckle down
in silence and get as close to my characters as I can and these are beautiful
moments that make me really tired. When things are bad, I get up and walk
around talking to myself; when things are worse, I stop everything and put my
head on my knees, close my eyes, watch the darkness inside my head swirling
around, and wait until the feeling passes. Writing isn't easy for me."
—Nicola Keegan, author of Swimming (Knopf, 2009)
posted 8.19.09
"One
of the seventeen times the Supremes appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show,
they sang 'You Can't Hurry Love' wearing earrings that weighed close to what
Diana Ross weighed at the time. At some point in the song, one of Ross's
earrings dangles and falls. What does she do? She keeps singing lead, and includes
in the choreography a catch you have to watch the footage several times to see.
Suddenly, Diana Ross has one earring on and one in her hand. Poetry is
performance. I recommend watching this to learn writing with focus...and
grace."
—Jericho Brown, author of Please (New Issues Poetry
& Prose, 2009)
posted 8.12.09
"Lately I've been writing poems on my iPhone. But I also like to write poems on Post-it notes and in my trusty sketchbook, too. Writing on various media, not letting myself get comfortable, is very helpful. I also like to send myself off into what I call coffee shop exile. Being in public spaces makes me a little edgy, which is good for my writing.
"Also, if I want to write but can't find a way in, often the best thing I can do is read any old John Ashbery book of poetry. I write almost nothing like him, but reading his work gets me leaping in interesting directions.
"Finally, recently, I've been listening to Jack Teagarden's jazz trombone music while I write. When I play his greatest hits through my headphones while I sip my latte, I can write like a madman."
—Frank Giampietro, author of Begin Anywhere (Alice James Books, 2008)
posted 8.05.09
"I’m
the least athletic person in the world—the proverbial kid picked last for
teams—so what I’m about to suggest is a bit strange: Go running. Whenever I get
stuck in story, unable to get my character out of the car and into his
apartment, I step away from my desk, throw on shorts, and hit the pavement. I
hate sports. Truly. But there’s something about the rhythm of running—and the
complete solitude it allows—that calms me down and allows me to work through
whatever problems I’m encountering on the page."
—Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age (Scribner,
2009)
posted 7.29.09
"I
am very interested in cities and places, and in having conversations with them.
Research and lists are big for me. Often, lists I make become poems unto
themselves. Notes from my research make some of the strongest lines in my
poems, I've found, or, like the lists, turn into poems of their own. I began my
book The Straits in response to the sparse but lyrical
narration in a Russian film, Palms, so I find listening for
refrains and cadences—anywhere and everywhere—then responding to them highly
evocative. It's not something I do deliberately, as some do by listening to
music, but I always find myself tuning into certain rhythms when I'm out and
about or in something I'm reading and later realize that it has entered my
work."
—Kristin Palm, author of The Straits (Palm Press, 2009)
posted 7.22.09
"I
loved that moment at the 2008 Oscars when Glen Hansard closed his acceptance
speech with this exhortation to the world: ‘Make art. Make art.' As a writer, I
try to ‘make art,' but all too often the twenty-first century's ubiquitous,
on-demand distractions interfere and keep me from getting to that place where I
can apply a fierce commitment and single-minded focus to the act of creation.
When I need a reminder of how essential such commitment and focus are to the
creation of a miraculous work of art, I reread Jack Gilbert's The Great
Fires, or I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane
Over the Sea, or to anything recorded by Joy Division in 1979 or 1980. Then
I pick up the pen again and try to make art."
—Dan Albergotti, author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions,
2008)
Writers Recommend
In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
posted 4.27.10
"I recommend finding time to write every
single day, even when you don't feel inspired. I'm a night person, but since I
have a child in school I have learned to wake up early to make writing part of
my morning routine, between brushing my teeth and exercise (which I also
recommend; my current obsession is Kundalini yoga). Sometimes I write for five
minutes, sometimes an hour. If I can't think of anything to say, I begin
describing objects in the room as if drawing them. Prioritizing writing first
thing helps focus a hectic day—and then the books get written."
—Khadijah Queen, author of Conduit (Akashic Books/Black Goat,
2008)
posted 4.22.10
"I find inspiration in so many
things—paintings by Gerhard Richter or Mary Heilmann, conceptual art, novels, a
nice run at the blackjack table, a long mountain bike ride, talks with my wife,
talks with other writers. Also, music, it isn't inspiration for me exactly, but
listening to certain albums puts me in a mood, a frame of mind, sort of like
method acting for actors. For instance, I listened to Bon Iver's For Emma,
Forever Ago over and over again as I was finishing my new novel."
—Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody (Alma Books, 2008)
posted 4.14.10
"When I'm writing every day, I read and
meditate a lot. I look to architecture—in landscape and art—as a way to
generate stillness, inspire form, and make me feel less alone. I particularly
enjoy artists who reinterpret indigenous crafts and translate them through
other polished art forms. The work of Bay Area artist Ruth
Asawa inspires me to perceive texture and time out
of empty space. San Antonio painter Omar Rodríguez works
with the brilliant colors of the Mexican marketplace; the way he quilts color
reminds me that I can grasp warmth from inanimate detail."
—Kristin Naca, author of Bird Eating Bird (Harper Perennial,
2009)
posted 4.02.10
"Sometimes all that saves me is being
willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful,
important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own
inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze.
Times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't
do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.'
Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right
way."
—Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love (Knopf, 1989)
posted 3.31.10
"Ross McElwee's self-reflexive documentary
Sherman's March changed my writing life. (Shortly after I watched it,
someone said to me that it was 'the first film I've ever seen in which I
recognized the South in which I lived'; I misheard her as saying 'the self in
which I lived.') What is it about this work I like so much? The confusion
between field report and self-portrait; the confusion between fiction and
nonfiction; the author-narrator's use of himself as persona, as representative
of feeling states; the antilinearity; the simultaneous bypassing and stalking
of artifice-making machinery; the absolute seriousness, phrased as comedy; the
violent torque of his beautifully idiosyncratic voice."
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010)
posted 3.24.10
"I ingest art daily—from the films of Lars
von Trier, Takashi Miike, and Lucrecia Martel to fashion blogs to art openings
in Los Angeles. Of course, I need my fix of poetry, fiction, and religious and
theory texts. I read tabloids. For The Ravenous Audience, I read a lot
of trashy biographies of starlets such as Clara Bow and Marilyn Monroe. All of
this digests into my writing, and then when I present my work to an audience, I
think of how the work can ‘excrete' beyond the book. Here, the work of
shock-fashion artists such as Karen Finley, Leigh Bowery, Lady Gaga, Klaus
Nomi, Orlan, and the Cockettes inspires me."
—Kate Durbin, author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic
Books/Black Goat, 2009)
posted 3.17.10
"‘Go see some live local music'" is
the hourly recommendation from New Orleans radio station WWOZ, and it's
good advice, not only true to New Orleans—where I recommend all writers live
(although I moved away)—but also wherever you live. Cover the typewriter and
leave the house; see what's happening. Go to Joshua Tree to see Noah Purifoy's
sculptures decaying in the desert, then to L.A.'s Museum of Jurassic
Technology. As for books, I think one is likely to find courage in Roberto
Bolaño's The Savage Detectives; the novels of Peter Handke; and the
poets Roque Dalton, Evgeny Rein, and Adélia Prado."
—Ed Skoog, author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
posted 3.10.10
"After years of thinking setting didn't
inspire me at all, I have come to realize that it does—but only after I'm gone.
I've learned not to try to write about a place until I've left it, whether I
was traveling or living there. For instance, I have written two books set in
Madison, Wisconsin, but I didn't feel an urge to set anything there until I had
moved to Westchester, New York, to get an MFA. Once I was gone, Madison leapt
into focus, and instead of looking out my window and going nuts trying to
capture every little thing before me, distance let me edit and reimagine. But
now that I am living in Madison again, I no longer feel a need to put it on the
page. I've been picturing Yonkers instead—a place I lived for school and cheap
rent, a place I fully intended to leave every day of every year for the entire
seven years I lived there. I never really thought it would do much to inspire
me, but I began thinking about it again the other day, wondering if the same
pattern would hold true, and sure enough, it has."
—Michelle Wildgen, author of But Not for Long (Thomas Dunne Books,
2009)
posted 3.03.10
"For some poetic guidance I always find
myself going back to books like the Orphan Factory and Selected Early
Poems by Charles Simic; also, Reasons for Moving and The Weather
of Words by Mark Strand. I am deeply moved imagistically by poems such as
"Dismantling the Silence," "Watch Repair," and
"errata" by Simic; and "Eating Poetry," "Keeping Things
Whole," and "The Accident" by Strand. While I write I love
listening to the empathetic sounds of bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, the
Organ, Interpol, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, and Die! Die! Die!"
—Orlando White, author of Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009)
posted 2.24.10
"When I first moved to Philadelphia, a
friend of mine was very excited to show me Marcel Duchamp's assemblage Étant
donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage... in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. I won't describe it here—if you haven't seen it, reading about
it would lessen your first encounter. I have to go back a long time, though, to
remember another work that so completely upended my sense of what one piece
could do. What exactly is so terrifying about it? Is it also funny somehow, how
we peep, how we admire the little twinkling waterfall in the background? Ever
since, I've been wondering, how might a written work implicate a reader as
Duchamp does the viewer? I don't know if one can go around museums and
galleries looking to have one's notions shattered, but in the meantime, perhaps
I can think of the page as a space for an elaborate, unsettling installation."
—Catie Rosemurgy, author of The Stranger Manual (Graywolf Press,
2010)
تحقیق کار :مجاہد علی لاہور پاکستان
All Credti goes to Nancy .I have not seen her,but i am sure that she will be the beatiful woman of world/universe not in aesthetic sense but in manners.My sincere prayers for her and wish her every success in life.
She had shared very useful and precious link and i really learnt and still learning from the material shared by auhors and these are supporting me in becoming a Writer.I really thankful to her for all my life.I really do prayers for her in my life whenever i remember her.Kindly if any one learns from this material ,kindly do prayers for her as she deserves a lot of in this context.She is blessing for every one and really a gift of ALLAH(God) in this life.Such people are really blessings and gift of ALLAH for every one who share knowledge for every one wihtout any interest.Only Allah will give her a reward,We as a human being can do only prayers.
Source with very bundle of thanks:www.
اقراء
فقل ربی ذدنی علما
بندہ ناچیز اور احقر کو اپنی خصوصی دعاوں میں ضرور لازما یاد رکھئے گا
شکریہhttps://www.scribd.com/document/620521671/Writers-Recomend-Recommended
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