Writers Recommend

“When I’m overwhelmed that I’m lacking something—a metaphor, a meaning, a story even—I turn to words that make me think about words. And nothing accomplishes that more than music for me. I turn to music to get those thoughts flowing. I create playlists by artists who write how I want to write. I find music by artists I’m not familiar with. I listen to old music by artists I’m in love with. I dance to their words. I sing their words. I rap their words.

“First, I turn to my lit bars: Cane (Boni & Liveright, 1923) by Jean Toomer, Cooley High, and Ray Baretto. These are my aspirational spark plugs. When I was revising The Crazy Bunch, there were two nights during my Lucas Artists fellowship in California—rare nights—where I drank a little gin, listened to nineties hip-hop, and I danced as I wrote and rewrote. I broke night with my poems.

“I’m writing a novel, and have been for over a decade. I’ve had periods of great productivity, days when one thousand-word quotas turn into four thousand words, vivid dreams of a nineteenth-century Southwestern desert crisp with blue mountain air, mornings when I awake smelling the campfires of the past. I love the world of my novel-in-progress—the extravagance, the lush dance halls, a sharpshooting, tea leaf reading, snake charming, feminine, and indigenous Wild West. But working on a singular project for years isn’t easy.

“I’ve come to some kind of understanding about what it means for me to be in the act of making. Obviously people struggle with the negotiation of time when it comes to the needs of our professional selves, our personal selves, our creative selves. And because so much of our lens views a finished product as the metric by which we determine that work has been done, if I don’t actually have words on the paper or a finished poem then I’m supposed to believe I was ‘stuck.’ If I’m reading a book, I’m not stuck.