Writers Recommend

“Every writer’s universe is a museum—there’s a permanent collection of concerns and obsessions and themes, then there are temporary rotating exhibitions, and then there are inventories of objects and curiosities that the writer has yet to employ. I led a writing exercise once where students listed the themes that pervade their work (their ‘permanent collection’), some present fixations or obsessions (their ‘rotating exhibitions’), and future topics they were interested in (their ‘inventory’).

“Staring intently doesn’t help us to see faint stars at night. We can see them better if we use our peripheral vision. This counterintuitive technique called averted vision works because rods—those light detectors in our eyes that allow us to see in weak light—are concentrated at the sides of our retinas. If we avoid a direct gaze and instead look slightly away from a star in the night sky, we involve our rods and thus see the star more clearly. I bring up this technique because it’s analogous to a practice that often helps me come up with creative ideas.

“In her book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain (Mariner Books, 2005), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty describes how the brain functions when we write: the temporal lobes deal in raw creativity—it’s the part of the brain we use when we generate new material; the frontal lobe is in charge of the editorial process. We need both parts of the brain working in concert to write well.

“I used to think half the battle was simply sitting down to write, but over the years I’ve learned sometimes that isn’t enough. Sometimes inertia seeps in like the plague, my pen heavy with ink, the page blanker than it’s ever been. I know my conscious mind is responsible, and that I have to loosen up my associative memory, move it toward a dream state. For me, this process usually involves some combination of reading poetry and going on easy runs around Brooklyn.