Writers Recommend

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)