“Here are two things that have helped me when I feel depleted or confused, which is often. One: I find that ideas like to come when they’re most inconvenient. So I daydream my way through situations where writing is impossible.
In the shower. While dog-walking. On the subway. I don’t rush out of that situation to write anything down—I just let my mind go, fabricating and wandering, until the end of the day, when I make a record of where my thoughts have gone. It gives me material to start with the next morning. Two: When I’m in direst need of inspiration, I do what I call ‘sentence stealing.’ I find a sentence from a writer I admire and write it down. ‘In the beginning I left messages in the street.’ Or, ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Then I write my own version of the sentence, focusing only on its rhythms: by which I mean, replacing a noun with a noun, a verb with a verb. What’s left is a ghostly echo of the original sentence with no relationship to its actual content. And I follow that new sentence wherever it takes me, down the road to an unfolding story.”
—Alix Ohlin, author of Inside (Knopf, 2012)