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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.

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Frank X. Gaspar

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)

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Sarah Gridley

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)

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Michelle Hoover

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)

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John Reimringer

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)

Tina May Hall

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)

 

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Benjamin Percy

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)

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Carol Moldaw

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)

 

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Jacob Ritari

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)

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Aimee Bender

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)

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Brando Skyhorse

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)

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