Writers Recommend

“As with most fiction writers, I can be inspired by virtually anything: a song, a kiss, a cup of coffee, an overheard conversation. And in writing three short story collections, those and many other inspirations sparked a rather diverse number of plots and characters. When I decided to move from writing short stories to a full-length novel, I wanted to find an overarching (or thematic) inspiration that would help me move forward in completing the manuscript and, at the same time, allow me to revel in the creative joy I experience when writing a short story. So, I first decided that I needed to examine who I was and what types of stories I tended to write. My fiction often revolves around my multiple identities as a Chicano (the grandson of Mexican immigrants), a former Roman Catholic, a Jew-by-choice (I converted in 1988; my wife is the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants), a husband, father, and Los Angeles native. After a few weeks of pondering, it came to me: My novel would be based on the Ten Commandments, with each chapter inspired by a commandment. Once I decided upon this structure, I felt liberated to create characters and plots that seemed to grow naturally out of the commandments. Over the course of two years (in which I also wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and book reviews), my novel grew until I had ten chapters I really liked. After reading and editing it several times, I decided to add a short prologue and epilogue. My novel eventually found a home and  received a very nice review in Publishers Weekly. So, on March 24, 2011 (the official release date), I became a novelist. If Moses only knew.…”
—Daniel A. Olivas, author of The Book of Want (University of Arizona Press, 2011)

“I’ve spent six or seven years reading The Man Without Qualities—sometimes I read it all the way through and sometimes random excerpts of it. I’ve returned to it many times. This book has proven to be an exercise in ambience applied to reading. It exists, sporadically at times, in the various rooms that I read it in, at different moments in my life. Each chapter resolves, if that is the word for it, around an anecdote. This anecdote might be about the weather, the occurrence of a love affair, a communications medium, or a note on factory production, which is followed by a meditation or an essay. The essay is not an interruption of the fictive armature because it is part of a work that treats fiction as life.”
—Tan Lin, author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking 
(Wesleyan University Press, 2010)

“As a teenager, I spent hours dreaming up plots for books. This was something I felt was cooler than going to the mall, but not so cool that I was willing to waste daylight at a desk with a pencil and notepad. To make it cooler still, I would burn dozens of CDs (iPods not being in existence yet), soundtracks that would serve as musical stand-ins for what I felt I would be writing: mishmashes of rock and roll, classical music, and show tunes that, as assemblages, had no significance for anyone but me. When played, they would immediately transport me into the world I was devising, and I would walk, sometimes for miles, around and around the neighborhood, while my Discman churned in an effort I believed to be inextricably bound to my writing. I assumed, because I never actually wrote any of what I dreamed up, that this exercise was a failure. Then, many years later, I found myself in grad school and subject to a similar compulsion—except now I had a car, and ostensibly a brain, because the plots were actually making their way onto the page. I still can’t listen to music while I’m writing—music is never just white noise to me. But I would say that any writing time now begins with driving around under the influence of carefully arranged playlists that call to mind characters, plot points, or even the whole narrative arc of whatever it is I’m working on. I’m generally in favor of anything that makes the world you’re trying to create more real and accessible to you, so my advice is: Make a soundtrack for your book!”
—Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife (Random House, 2011)

“Every week, my mailbox explodes with magazines—National Geographic, the New Yorker, O, and People. My mental image of the characters in The Weird Sisters came from an advertisement for a bank. One of the story lines was sparked by a personal essay on being pregnant and dating. When I start a new project, I read magazines, folding down corners and tearing out pages. Flipping back through the clippings reminds me of where my ideas came from, and encourages me to remain open to inspiration no matter the source.”
—Eleanor Brown, author of The Weird Sisters (Amy Einhorn Books, 2011)