Writers Recommend

“Most of the time when I’m stuck, it’s because I’m trying to get a sentence or a scene to be perfect when it’s too early in the process for perfection. I tell myself going in nothing’s going to be perfect in the first draft, then I sit refusing to write one more imperfect line. Getting unstuck begins with reminding myself the first draft is where you get the mistakes out on the page. Perfect comes in later. I write long-hand and on-screen, so sometimes a switch can dislodge a block. I stockpile pages to transcribe for when I need a kick start.

“Whenever I reach a standstill, I find that I’ve detached from a text. I also find that the experience of being stalled isn’t something I receive as negative; it can be a defense against falsehood, in my experience, and against producing material that’s serviceable, but lifeless in the end.

“If I don’t write for a few days, I feel hungover, like my muscles are tight. Creative and intellectual exertions parallel, for me, physical exertion. Having run cross-country in college, I spent thousands of hours and miles on roads all over Illinois. I still spend a lot of time running, witnessing the landscape, and finding my solitude mirrored by the Midwest. Writing after a run creates a dialectic between landscape and the personal thoughts I want to express. Sometimes it’s the corkscrew-tin gutters beneath a gravel driveway or the cinderblocks lifting up a mobile home.

“My approach to short stories is to think of each as its own world, with its own parameters, and even its own aesthetics. The tradeoff for the fun and satisfaction this brings is that I often find myself between them—it can be difficult to gain momentum with a new idea if I’m not finding the ‘right’ language or feeling inspired by some leap of the imagination. It helps then, to immerse myself in other forms and be reminded of what’s possible in art more generally. Movies, even more so than written fiction, must necessarily make a world concrete.