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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.
“When I’m working on a book, I’m intensely focused and disciplined. I start at nine in the morning, turn off the internet, and work through until two in the afternoon. What that work looks like, however, also involves lying on my daybed and staring into space or nodding off on my keyboard so I wake with six pages of cccccccccccccccvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvbbbbbbbbbbbbb.
“Recently I read a poem by Leslie Marmon Silko in which she states, ‘the struggle is the ritual.’ I’ve continued to think of this line in regards to my process of writing—what comes before I begin a poem and what helps me gauge that it has worked in some way. When I feel stuck, it often means that I’m in a moment of transition and that I need to give myself space to explore whichever internal landscape may be shifting and what new focus I’m finding.
“As a professional book editor, I spend much of my time focused on how a manuscript can be improved, aka what is wrong with it. Admittedly, a paralysis can come from attending too closely to that with your own work—if you only see how much in it is broken, you might lose hope of ever mending it.
“For me, the key to staying inspired enough to come to the page with energy, confidence, and focus is all about my routine, as well as knowing when to break it. Before I go to sleep, I tell myself I’m going to write the next day, so that when I wake up, there’s no question about it. It’s going to happen. In the morning, I meditate, allowing my mind and body to gently enter the new day. Then there’s the normal hygiene stuff, and breakfast, which is the same every day that I’m writing—a waffle with a side of orange juice. Do I sound like a psychopath? I don’t know, let’s keep going.
“When I am struggling with writing, I move to a different medium. If I am unproductive at the keyboard, I pick up a pen and a yellow legal pad. The color alone makes me feel like writing. Or I draw a picture. I keep a messy drawing of the whole story of a novel where I can see it while I am working on it. After an agent dumped me because my book Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press, 2013) had been rejected by more than forty publishers, I started asking dancers and martial artists to teach me how to physically fall. It helped.
“The worst thing I think I’ve done for myself when being unable to write anything is to wait for the feeling to pass. I’m a quitter. I give up easily when I can’t see a clear way out. That being said there are two things that I know will keep me going if there isn’t anything else, and that is spite and humor.
“In the midst of a global pandemic, raging wildfires, police brutality, and a deeply unsettling, mind-boggling political reality, the urge to write can be nearly subsumed. Before all of this, I turned to—what else?—books for inspiration. Sometimes the same ones over and over. But in my post debut novel world slump, my normal go-tos haven’t sufficed. That is until Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020) by Zadie Smith, which contains a series of essays written during the early months of quarantine (who else but Zadie could put together something so artful in a time of panic?).
“As I’ve been navigating the funk that comes with releasing a first book, it has been very helpful to revisit my earliest work. Though reading my messy old poems and short stories sometimes makes my teeth ache, I’m captured by the freedom in the work: that reckless exploration before I took part in workshops, before I became mired in studies of craft, learned my strengths and how to lean on them too completely. Despite my best efforts I’ve been penetrated by myriad gazes.
“Last week a non-writer friend asked Facebook for advice on how to separate two drinking glasses that were stuck together. The hive mind responded: dunk the bottom glass in hot water and fill the top one with ice; add dish soap at the joint and wiggle; add oil; stick a straw between them; use a knife; flip them and tap against a wooden counter; put them in the oven at low heat and wait; the freezer overnight; the microwave. Writing advice is like this—what works for one person won’t work for everyone. So with that in mind, my advice is to move away from the framework of ‘stuck vs.
“In Mona Hatoum’s film Measures of Distance, the artist reads out letters from her mother, while on screen, photographs of her mother’s nakedness loom too close, overlaid with the Arabic text of the handwritten letters and murmurings of their recorded conversations. Sound, image, and text merge, unable to distinguish themselves from the mother’s body, obscured by the very closeness of the camera.
