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“The key to an amazing story is the heart of the story,” says novelist Daniel José Older in this segment of Penguin Random House’s Meet the Author series. “If you’re a writer, it’s your compass. It’s what’s going to guide you forward to finish the story.”
“It doesn’t interest me to know how a book will end, I have to discover that for myself.” In this video from the National Centre for Writing, Eimear McBride, who won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, speaks about how character and story and the process of discovery are the keys to her writing process.
“That’s the thing about writing. It’s about sitting with the problem.” In this Behind the Curtain video, screenwriter and director Greta Gerwig talks about adapting Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women into a film and the challenges of the writing process.
In this 2020 BookTube episode, David Sedaris speaks about his candid and confessional style of writing, his family life, and lessons learned with Joel Kim Booster, Cindy Pham, Jake Roper, and Francine Simone.
“Don’t waste your life reading stuff that isn’t giving you pleasure.” In this 2020 CBS Mornings interview with cohost Jeff Glor, novelist Martin Amis talks candidly about his deep friendships with writers, grief and death, and his autobiographical novel Inside Story (Knopf, 2020). Amis died at the age of seventy-three on May 19, 2023.
In this 2020 Kirkus Reviews interview, Emma Cline talks about her story collection Daddy (Random House, 2020) and discusses the experience of writing about contemporary subjects, inhabiting the voice of a male narrator, and the power of the imagination. For more from Cline, read her installment of our Ten Questions series about her second novel, The Guest (Random House, 2023).
“I left like a season’s first lover across a window, // slowly like a southern sun / diagonal on a work-back.” Tyree Daye reads “The Mechanical Cotton Picker,” which appears in his poetry collection Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), in this Academy of American Poets video.
In this 2020 Academy for Teachers craft talk, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins discusses his theories on how poems find their way to an ending and discusses the works of David Berman, Wisława Szymborska, Tom Wayman, and others.
“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved.” In this reading at the Kelly Writers House in 2020, Carmen Maria Machado reads from her debut memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019).
“I no longer want to do this thing of speaking for the voiceless, it’s about passing the microphone and allowing those people to finally speak for themselves.” In this video produced by the Guardian Labs, author and spoken word artist Pages Matam talks about the power of poetry and creating spaces where shared experiences can act as both inspiration and a catalyst for change.
