Writers Recommend

“I take notes all the time—when I watch a movie, when I listen to a talk, when I ride on the subway or sit in a waiting room. I write down things I see, things I hear, things I think. None of it has to cohere at the time but I keep it all in a small notebook and occasionally I look there and some of what I’ve written will cluster and suggest a direction. The park bench, Washington oysters, Vladimir Vodka, and Cher dressed as Cleopatra, will sometimes line up and lead me to a subject.”
—Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E (Graywolf Press, 2009)

"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)