“When I’m at my most creative, I call it being ‘sticky,’ and almost anything at all can help enrich the work. I’ve found a really simple, effective source of inspiration is to just go outside. I’ll settle into a big, old Adirondack chair in the backyard and try to enter my senses as fully as I can as I work. Writers spend their lives holed up at desks, so the ‘surprise’ of nature can be intensely vivid. Sometimes the details of sky, trees, stone will work their way into my narratives, sometimes they don’t, but the process always helps to move my writing forward.”
—Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Origin (Norton, 2007)