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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.
“I tend not to need too much motivation or inspiration, but I do try to make sure I’m having good weird adventures each and every year. Sometimes that means traveling to a new place or imbibing a new psychedelic substance or forcing a new interesting person to be my lifelong friend. I like getting lost every once in a while—just something to remind myself that the world demands constant exploration, outward and inward.”
—Stephen Markley, author of Ohio (Simon & Schuster, 2018)
“As the mother of young children, the hours I spend working on poems are unaccountably precious. My husband and I exert huge amounts of energy to craft a family life that leaves space for my work, and after all that effort, I have no choice but to sit down and write. First I brew a cup of tea, and then I light a candle, a simple ritual of return that brings me back to my work. I’m a very methodical writer, so I believe wholeheartedly in the process of writing: ideas first, revision later, preferably in small, easily digested steps.
“For me, the struggle to move forward in my writing tends to be an issue with the characters in my short stories. I don’t know them well enough. The writing feels forced, labored. I step away from my computer. Maybe the hour I had designated for my writing ends up with me lying on my back on my yoga mat outside. I meditate on my characters. A narrative starts to form. Perhaps a line of dialogue comes to me. Sometimes instead of lying down, I go for a walk. I find that my imagination is most fruitful when I allow myself to be.
“Someone—a teacher of mine, though I am not sure who—told me that once you know what you’re doing in writing, you have to give up and move on. In major moments of writer’s block, I think of that advice and how writing from a sudden moment of loss or blankness is part of the vocation; how not knowing is such an important part, even central to language and what it can accomplish. And though it is important to understand the workings of writing and deploy its techniques and tools, it is equally important to remember that the writer is sometimes a seer, an adherent, or a conjurer.
“When I started to work on my first book, The Balcony, I took down the painting that had been hanging on the wall by my desk and replaced it with a taped photocopy of Judy Dater’s 1974 photograph ‘Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite.’ In that photograph, the ninety-year-old photographer Imogen Cunningham looks around a redwood tree, a camera around her neck, to peer at the young and nude model Twinka Thiebaud. Somehow, the Dater photograph reflected the idea of the book that I wanted to write, even if I couldn’t articulate how.
“When the writing gets away from me, it’s rarely something creative that brings it back. Feeling stuck for me usually means being in a state of creative surfeit, where I want nothing to do with stories at all. In these moments I like reading articles filled with statistics. Give me crude oil outputs, carbon dioxide levels, employment growth rates, life expectancy projections by country, or the number of annual visitors passing through various airports. Documentaries about pharmaceutical companies, deep-sea life, and the exorable spread of Nordic minimalism work too.
“When I feel genuinely stuck in my writing, I find that it’s often because I’m bored. If I’ve done my pre-writing work, then I have an outline, and because I already know the story I’m going to tell, I’ve stripped myself of one of the greatest joys that comes with reading a novel—to discover the unexpected. So, if I’m in a rut, I’ll go back to the outline and toss in some wrenches. What happens if I remove a character, or add one? What happens if the current chapter four becomes the new chapter one? What happens if I give a character a dog?
“I have to listen to music while I write, and usually I play just one song at a time. I repeat it all day, often for weeks on end. Months, even. There’s one song that I replayed up to 30,000 times during the ten years I was writing The Incendiaries. I love that song and its powers; I can’t tell you its name, lest it stop helping me. By obsessively replaying a single song at a time, I can, if I’m lucky, set the pitch. It gives me a place to start. The ritual of it, the repetition, lulls and quiets my anxious, everyday self.
“I’m beginning to realize that the primary engine of my writing may be loneliness. I don’t want to recommend loneliness, however. So what I’ll say is that there are certain works I return to that make me want to write, that never fail to punch me in the gut and wash out my eyes. The scene near the end of ‘Old Boys, Old Girls’ by Edward P. Jones, in which Caesar attends to the body and room of Yvonne, his former lover, provides the ache and clarity I mean. Or the essay ‘Documents’ by Charles D’Ambrosio. Or Raptus (Penguin Books, 2010) by Joanna Klink.
“Writing tends to be a stressful activity. I worry when I’m not writing and when I am, I often wonder whether I’m just sending off lines of ink into some abyss. While working with my editor on my first novel, TITLE 13, I developed Central Serous Retinopathy, or stress-related vision loss in my left eye. Doctors said it was imperative that I relax, but I wasn’t about to give up my passion. Then it hit me: the absurd reality that writing a book robbed me of my sight. The human brain is powerful enough to send a man to the moon, yet, writing nearly blinded me.
