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.

Jean Valentine

9.1.10

“Sometimes typos can be helpful. Looking at a poem in a language you can’t read, and working from the sounds. Taping poems on the wall and leaving them there for days—maybe something will come, just from looking at them, over time. Words from a dream. Within the last few months I heard: ‘Will it solve itself?’ And the answer: ‘When you are gone.’ I took this to mean: When the ‘I’ who is trying to solve it (whatever ‘it’ is) backs off.”
—Jean Valentine, author of Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

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Glenn Taylor

8.25.10

“As Jerome Washington wrote, 'The blues is our antidote.’ So I listen. Blues doctors like Neal Pattman inspire something in a writer’s blood. Anyone who can play harmonica like he can, with one arm no less, will get me going. And inevitably my sons will hear 'Momma Whoopin’ Blues’ and start asking questions. I show them the CD cover and they ask more questions and I explain how he lost his arm in a wagon wheel accident as a boy and they ask even more questions.

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Travis Nichols

8.18.10

“To get my mind ready for writing, I try to sit quietly and stare at nothing for ten minutes. It clears away the Salt-n-Pepa lyrics and staircase wit that have been clogging up the channels. After the silence, if I’m at a critical juncture, I then listen to records from Sublime Frequencies—a label specializing in a kind of post-field recording ethnomusicology—and try to transcribe what I hear. This doesn’t often result in work for the ages, but it’s a good reminder that the best writing comes from outside.”

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Sonia Sanchez

8.11.10

“José Martí wrote, ‘In the world there must be certain degrees of honor just as there must be certain degrees of light. When there are many men without honor, there are always others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.’ What inspires me are the men and women who bear in themselves the ‘honor’ of survival—men like the brothers I taught at Graterford Prison, reconnoitering their lives after having fought in Vietnam; young mothers dragging their children around corners of fatigue at the end of the day, looking neither left nor right.

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Brad Watson

6.23.10

“I’ve figured out things that were stonewalling me during cross-country drives, and usually when I’m trying to pull an all-nighter to avoid traffic and get there in less time—maybe it’s all the caffeine and the mesmerizing white lines in the middle of the road. I keep a recorder or a yellow pad on the passenger seat and I talk into the recorder or write on the pad with one hand in big letters because I’m not looking at the pad and want to be sure I can read what I wrote later on.

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Porochista Khakpour

6.14.10

“Nothing inspires me like the imagination in a vacuum. I always pick the most closet-like, even coffin-like, space in the house for my writing room. No windows, no photos, no ‘stuff.’ I never play any music, I don’t have an inspiration board, I disable the internet, and the cell is always off. The outside world is far too tempting. If I go out for a run, suddenly the body is of paramount concern; if I listen to my favorite music, I won’t be able to shake the imprints out of my head; if I watch a great movie, I’m seduced by images. I have to stay put with my project when I'm with-project.

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Robert Vivian

6.2.10

“More and more my foremost, abiding desire is to write books of a surpassing strangeness, and to do this I’ve had to hold closely to Joyce's famous adage of silence, cunning, and exile every day. This means I have to show up at the desk each day before dawn, and so I do like a poor man showing up for a rather mysterious handout, lighting a candle in his tattered cardigan as he sits over an illuminated screen, aware the entire time that this love of language is the deepest and most consistently astonishing thing he knows.”

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Benjamin Alire Sáenz

5.18.10

“These are the things that make me want to be a better writer: the desert sky, the dust storms, the smell of rain, the river that is no longer a river but a border—my entire landscape; the violence that is killing the city of Juárez; opening William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and finding a passage, then reading it aloud; rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; reading anything by C. D. Wright, C. K.

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Molly Brodak

5.11.10

“For inspiration, I love to go to old, junky antique shops—which there are a lot of here in the South, thankfully—and hunt for a box of old postcards and photos. The messages that people wrote to each other in that fancy handwriting no one has anymore are often so weird or sad or funny. Handmade things are also inspiring to me, so I love to find an old carving or a crappy painting and think about the person who may have made it.

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Brian Culhane

5.4.10

“I write to solo piano music (recently I’ve been listening to Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces). Then I pick up something close to hand and see what strikes me. For instance, ‘At Wallace Stevens’ Grave’ was sparked by a detail in Paul Veyne's History of Private Life describing ancient Romans chatting about what they'd like on their own funerary bas-reliefs, and by other reading about early motion pictures and about Wallace Stevens’s last years. All three strands melded into a poem.

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