Keep a book beside you that reminds you of what it means to write, why it is important. When I grow tired and the work feels futile, I return to books that make me feel so deeply that, suddenly, I am crying on the subway, in the grocery store, or on a beloved’s couch, and art becomes something I can make sense of again.
Go to a reading. Listen as artists read aloud their books you have already read; witness writers who are new to you reading work you have never encountered. For weeks at a time, I sometimes do not touch my own writing, choosing instead to be so present that my project feels a thousand miles away. Then, unexpectedly, I’ll stumble upon a work so beautiful, with perfect sonics, that I will cancel dinner plans to sit at my laptop until the words have poured out of me.
Lie in the sun. Your friends will join you later—first, slather sunscreen over your body and stretch a blanket out in the park. Give yourself that extra hour. Write so quickly and obsessively that your penmanship changes across the pages: from even and clean to cursive, necessarily sprawling to meet your pace. Voice-to-text your thoughts into a smartphone note. Handwriting is always noncommittal; you can clean all of that up later. More than I fear the messy draft, I fear tomorrow I will have forgotten that nascent thing I am turning over in my mind right now.
Wash your hair and wonder why you are writing a book. Wash your dishes and wonder the same. Curled beneath blankets at night, picture the scene you will write tomorrow. Let sleep expand on the idea and let your subconscious feed in an image or two. Trust instinct.
Being stuck means you have been solitary for too long. The answer is not always staring at the art and waiting for a muse. Writing is about being alive. Go to your community. Stand with them. Build with them. Break bread and share and listen and march. That is the point of being alive. What is the point of all this imagining and writing, if not to work toward something bigger? Feel so deeply and abundantly that you can be brought back to the work.
—Asha Thanki, author of A Thousand Times Before (Viking, 2024)
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