Writers Recommend

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)