Writers Recommend

"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)

"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)