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In this online exclusive we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts, films—anything and everything—that has inspired them in their writing. We see this as a place for writers to turn to for ideas that will help feed their creative process.
“Stuck feelings come to me in two ways: first, a story-level stickiness, when I’m working on a project but don’t know where it’s headed next, and second, a more existential stickiness, when I don’t have a project and don’t know where I myself am headed. The first one is easier to handle.
“I find that the hardest work of my writing is done in my subconscious brain, somewhere in the back of my skull far out of the reach of my control.
“Taking a spin through the Smiths album Hatful of Hollow is one of the things I allow myself when faced with troubles on the page. It’s not so much to inspire as to reset.
“When it’s warm enough in Maine—May through October, mostly—I write in a small attic that sits above a 20-by-20-foot garage/shop building in my backyard. I do a lot of carpentry on the side, and all my tools are in my shop.
“I begin my writing day with a sip of coffee and a vape (or two) of marijuana.
“Seeing is an act of imagination. When I am stuck in writing, it means that I have stopped seeing, that I have reduced the myriad forms to irrelevant background shapes like extras in a film, that I have closed off the sense doors to dwell in an anxious hermitage of bills and paperwork.
“If I’m stuck, it usually means one of two things: either I need to travel further into myself, or I’ve gone too far and need to be pulled out.
“When I get stuck on the question of what’s happening in a piece of fiction, when my words feel stilted or dull, I like to read a bit of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (Burning Deck, 1980).
“When I feel uninspired or uncertain about my work—especially when struggling with self-doubt and falling prey to comparisons with better writers—I find it helpful to think about art.
Something that keeps me going when I get stuck in my writing is getting the hell out of the house. I take walks, very late at night, around the lake that sits nearby.
