Writers Recommend

"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)

"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)

"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)

"(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)