Writers Recommend

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.

John Fulton

8.2.23

In the early 1990s, I moved to Berlin, Germany, fresh out of a failed marriage, heartbroken and friendless.

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Amiee Gibbs

7.19.23

“I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.” Perhaps no other lyric has enthralled and sparked my imagination more than Robert Johnson’s mournful plea in his song “Cross Road Blues.” When my debut novel, The Carnivale of Curiosities, was in its nascent stage, the first thing that I

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Monica Prince

7.5.23

It’s silly, but it’s honest: When I’m stuck, I play The Sims 4. Over the last few years, my academic job has stressed me to the point of stagnation in my poetry. I’ll sit down to write, with ideas and inspiration in my fingertips, and after an hour, nothing.

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Angela Peñaredondo

6.21.23

I am one who experiences frequent hypertensions and palpitations from a racing heart and mind, so I often find myself both activated and lost. Although these parts of me are quite realized and muscular, their speed and capacity to hold so much can feel staggering.

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Rafael Frumkin

5.31.23

Too often, I am losing myself in my work. Sometimes that feels like all I am: someone who wakes up and writes and pushes himself to read difficult books, then goes to sleep and does it all over again the next day.

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Jane Wong

5.17.23

My debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, begins and ends with fruit. A line from the opening reads: “In the murky broth of yet another heartache, my mother cuts me slices of dragon fruit.” So much of my writing process is about nourishment—literally and metaphorically.

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Daniel Wallace

5.3.23

Maybe we write too much. Maybe that’s what these physical, emotional, and psychological roadblocks to story making are trying to tell us. Must we always be writing (especially those of us who love it and need it the most)?

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Mahtem Shiferraw

4.19.23

Writing poetry for me is an act of collecting. It requires me to be in a state of total surrender, to be able to listen where I haven’t before, to take notice of the silences around me.

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Karisma Price

4.5.23

Poetry can be serious work. When writing my debut collection, I’m Always So Serious, soul and blues music became their own characters in the collection

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Christine Hume

3.22.23

Writing Everything I Never Wanted to Know almost entirely in the hellish eternity of the T%&*! Years—where the daily feed of sexual violence, finally widely recognized, became layered eventually into other (medical and social) epidemics—sometimes seized me with an untouchable despair

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