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.

Jill Ciment

7.11.19

“I begin my writing day with a sip of coffee and a vape (or two) of marijuana. (Disclaimer: I live in a state where medical marijuana is legal.) I never actually compose stoned, but I do read what I wrote the day before and take notes—silly, hallucinatory notes, but sometimes ideas that I might not have stumbled upon otherwise. The high, which also causes me to be forgetful, makes rereading a paragraph that I have read a hundred times before feel fresh and full of possibilities. The intoxication never lasts more than fifteen to twenty minutes and then I get on with the business of writing.

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Chad Sweeney

7.4.19

“Seeing is an act of imagination. When I am stuck in writing, it means that I have stopped seeing, that I have reduced the myriad forms to irrelevant background shapes like extras in a film, that I have closed off the sense doors to dwell in an anxious hermitage of bills and paperwork.

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Franny Choi

6.27.19

“If I’m stuck, it usually means one of two things: either I need to travel further into myself, or I’ve gone too far and need to be pulled out. If I sit down to write and can feel that everything I’m making is relying on the old tricks, just bobbing at the surface, then I know I haven’t dug a deep enough well. On the other hand, if writing feels painful or laborious, or if it’s been a long time since I wrote anything because the thought makes me sick, it usually means I’ve dug too deep a well!

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Heidi Diehl

6.20.19

“When I get stuck on the question of what’s happening in a piece of fiction, when my words feel stilted or dull, I like to read a bit of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). The book consists of thirty-seven prose poems, each one corresponding to a year of Hejinian’s life, each one exactly thirty-seven sentences long. It’s a kind of autobiography, but it’s not narrative—instead, it’s moments, details, language. Freed from the strict confines of a more traditional sense of story, I think about feeling and movement.

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Lauren Acampora

6.13.19

“When I feel uninspired or uncertain about my work—especially when struggling with self-doubt and falling prey to comparisons with better writers—I find it helpful to think about art. I remind myself that, just as there’s room for a wide variety of visual art to coexist, there’s room for a wide variety of fiction to coexist without ranking. We can love Rembrandt and also Paul Klee; we can admire both Vincent van Gogh and Louise Bourgeois without ever dreaming of comparing them. In the same vein, we can love both Don DeLillo and Lydia Davis, Charles Dickens and Kelly Link.

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Kristen Arnett

6.6.19

“Something that keeps me going when I get stuck in my writing is getting the hell out of the house. I take walks, very late at night, around the lake that sits nearby. It’s quiet—just me and all the nocturnal animals, many mosquitoes, and my sweaty beer—and I’ll stroll and listen to the cicadas shriek. It’s good to look around at all that expansive beauty and wonder about the largeness of the planet: I’m such a small thing, just one of many creatures. After being on the Internet all day, or staring at a blank Word document, being out in the Florida evening helps my mind reacclimate.

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Kendra Allen

5.30.19

“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.

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Jan-Henry Gray

5.23.19

“I borrow often and widely. I recommend borrowing ideas from Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series to see the relationship various kinds of artists have with process and material. As someone who has spent more of my life cooking food than writing poems, I have an intimate relationship to material; how things feel in my hand and in my mouth. Faced with an empty page, sometimes I need to leave words, get up, go outside, and get my hands dirty.

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Willie Perdomo

5.16.19

“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.

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Sarah Blake

5.9.19

“When I find myself in the writing weeds, I have finally learned to pay attention to the warning signs: Stop. Go back. Do not push farther in. I resist the urge to soldier on, to muddle through, to fix a line here or there, to delete whole paragraphs that make no sense at that moment, to get to the end of the page. Sometimes I am concentrating so hard I can almost hear the synapses up there groaning, the machinery grinding to a slow, protesting halt. And I give in. I nap. Conk out. Let sleep’s hammer fall. Writers write, we’re told endlessly. Yes, but writers must also stop.

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