I love writing to my little sister. It's a very nice, easy kind of way I always find inspiration.
Sometimes words come easily and sometimes they don't. Most songs take me twenty minutes to write.
I tend to write about love because I'm always thinking about it. I think a lot though and struggle with overanalyzing. Way over. That's the thing, I feel like I do that a lot and then finally when I stop thinking, that's when it happens.
It's exciting to do something you're writing. And it's also a lot easier to memorize because you wrote it.
I think the hardest part of writing anything is getting exposition out easily, without hitting people over the head with it.
writing had to take the form of journalism. Not for me the Shangri-la of fiction. The rewards, if any, would have been too little and too late, the bailiffs were at the door. ... Two large bailiffs, they were, who visited frequently and smiled like grand pianos, the only really reliable men in my life. They told me what they were going to do and if they did it, woe was me.
One of my friends who writes novels says that once the book is published, it's a separate thing from you; it becomes its own. I feel that way when I read - and that applies to the experience of reading my work in public, too. The essays are a barrier between me and the audience, and it feels like a disappearing act. Poof! I'm gone, and the woman I've created on the page emerges.
How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?
There's a moment in Sarah Manguso's The Guardians when she writes, "I try not to make anything up, and I fail every time." I get giddy when I come across lines like that - when the writer is not only making a meta-move, but one that troubles truth and fiction, the nature of genre itself.
Simply put, meta-writing is writing that is self-conscious, self-reflective, and aware of itself as an artifice. The writer is aware she's writing, and she's aware there's a reader, which goes all the way back to Montaigne's often-used address "dear reader," or his brief introduction to Essais: "To the Reader." It can be done in a myriad of ways.
I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.
It's assumed that if you're a woman, you want to be the prettiest version of yourself. It always put me in a bad mood. It was like, "OK, I'm successful. I'm supposed to be happy. Well, why aren't I happy?" Part of the problem was that my looked-at-ness had become a priority over my art making. Over and over again it was like, "I don't have time for this. I want to work." I love writing. I don't love somebody putting false eyelashes on me.
We do want the freedom to move scenes from episode to episode to episode. And we do want the freedom to move writing from episode to episode to episode, because as it starts to come in and as you start to look at it as a five-hour movie just like you would in a two-hour movie, move a scene from the first 30 minutes to maybe 50 minutes in. In a streaming series, you would now be in a different episode. It's so complicated, and we're so still using the rules that were built for episodic television that we're really trying to figure it out.
I don't write on demand - I wait for inspiration to come.
I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend's house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song.
Eric Peters' music is at the top of what gets played around my house, in my car and while I am running. I am a big fan. He writes incredibly honest and poetic lyrics coupled with memorable pop melodies and I can think of no better combination.
I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.
I wish I could write solely from imagination, but then I would not have a story to write. I need to produce the story in the real world, live it out, push it forward, watch it unfold, again and again, until it ends or I end it.
The writings are often written in a kind of exhaustion or delirium, I try very hard not to censor myself, to be as honest and vulnerable as possible, as one would in a diary. As a child I used to write my diaries backwards in cursive. No one else could understand them. I think it trained me to be bold and admit feelings that I might feel otherwise scared to write down.
In my process, I am constantly moving between writing, performing, and producing art objects. These various practices inform one another. What I love about both art and writing are that they can be receptacles for everything.
I love books, letters and texts visually as objects, and textually, for their content. The same book I write serves a different purpose when included in an exhibition of mine than when read on its own, outside of it.
I would categorize my books as literature, and I hope that is how they would be consumed. The books do not rely on the artwork to be understood, but I need my art practice to write them.
I think the term "artist's novel" for me has referred to writing which supports an art practice or a more specifically a particular artwork or project. The nonfiction novellas and nonfiction novel I have written play a role in my artwork as objects - which I will return to, but I write the books to exist autonomously.
I've found it easier to write, to coalesce my thoughts, since having children. It brings you back to what you experienced yourself as a child, and you empathize with what your parents went through.
