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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.
“‘What kind of beast would turn its life into words?’ Adrienne Rich asks in Twenty-One Love Poems, referring to the being/observing duality of a writer’s life—the persistent possibility of remove that turns the lived moment into ‘material.’ I also think of this quotation as a direct challe
“I often turn to poetry when I get stuck writing.
“I never read when I get stuck, it doesn’t leave enough room to let the devil slip in. Instead, I look to other forms for the methods to resolve art’s various conundrums. Often music helps but, increasingly, I’m interested in photography and the work of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, particularly.
“I think poetry is—or should be—a staple of any fiction writer’s reading diet. It doesn’t matter whether you ever intend to write any poems yourself.
“Show up: at your desk, on the page. Show up often, show up with an open heart, show up all hardcore and ready to work. But when you don’t show up, when it’s been days and weeks and months and you haven’t shown up, take a bath. By which I mean: be kind, be gentle.
“Choose several literary rivals. These should be people you know. They should be people you like, respect, and admire. They should be people who write at least a little bit like you do. They should be more talented and successful than you are.
"I’ve led a good life, but I’ve definitely not led a regretless life. There are plenty of things I stopped myself from doing, people I stopped myself from meeting, things I didn’t let myself say. But I made a promise when I started writing my own fiction: I won’t ever stop myself from writing
“When I feel stuck, despondent, bored of my writing, I watch Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach movie trailers. Growing up, I despised movies. You could not get me to sit down and watch a movie, commitment-phobe was I. But in the past few years, I’ve become slowly obsessed with film.
“When I was younger, it was dangerous to read fiction while writing it myself: Too easily, I found myself slipping into other people’s voices. I read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and wrote eighty pages of a terrible knock-off.
“There’s a bit of hubris inherent in writing fiction—no one that I know of has ever been plucked out of a math lecture and told, ‘No, no. You really should devote more time to your writing.
