How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors

Categories: Staff Picks , Nonfiction

After turning the last page of a particularly breathtaking book, have you ever said to yourself, “Hmmm, I wonder where the inspiration for that came from?”  You aren’t alone.  Driven by the need to “tear down the invisible wall between us readers and them writers and see what’s really going on behind the page,” Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann took an unusual approach to exploring the creative writing process.  Instead of relying on the standard Q&A exchange, they asked the writers to “…think for a minute about which object, picture, or document in your study reveals most about the relationship between living and writing, and then send it to us.”  The resulting essays and photographs, collected together in How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors are surprisingly fascinating!

Some excerpts:

Jay McInery: “This is an Acheulian hand axe, approximately half a million years old, crafted by Homo Erectus, which was given to me by my friend Hamilton Russell…I like to heft it and hold it between paragraphs. It fits the palm beautifully. It reminds me of a friend and a beautiful landscape; sometimes I try to imagine its maker and his world.

Siri Hustvedt: “Attached to the ring was a small chain with a label, on which my father had written in his unmistakable hand: “Unknown keys.” I now work with these unknown keys near me. They have become not only a reminder of my father—the man who is no longer there—but a sign of the act of writing itself. These keys to phantom doors, suitcases, safes, and diaries are linked in my mind to making stories. Now orphaned, they serve only as literal doubles of the imaginary keys that unlock nameless interiors: the peculiar dream spaces of fiction.”

Ian Rankin: “The object in my office I treasure most is probably a framed photograph. It shows the battered signage above Edinburgh’s Oxford Bar…There are few frills to the Ox: no piped music, little in the way of hot food (pies, pasties). It’s a place for drink and for conversation. I decided Inspector Rebus would like it, so he started drinking there too…That photograph helps me get inside the head of Rebus, and of other characters in any Edinburgh-based book I happen to be writing. It keeps me grounded, also acts as a taskmaster: if I can get a good day’s work done, I can reward myself with a pint later on…”

Lionel Shriver: “This is Clippity. He reminds me to eschew fancy-schmancy character names groaning from overloads of symbolism, and to sometimes prefer the obvious…On uninspired afternoons (and they are legion), I can wind up my tenacious toy, and he will clop-clop-clop across the wood.  If a cheap, threadbare donkey from Howard Johnson’s can walk the walk after over forty years, surely my rusty imagination can crank out another miserable paragraph at an age barely more advanced.”

Will Self: “ I write ideas, tropes, images, observations, snippets of dialogue, themes, factoids, descriptions on these Post-it notes and put them in relevant zones on the wall.  Then I organize them into scrapbooks, then I turn them into books.”

Neil LaBute: “One thing that I can always count on to inspire me, however, is the fifty-odd minutes of music woe that Frank Sinatra spins on his album, In the Wee Small Hours. It’s not just the music—which absolutely takes my breath away—but even the cover art can do the trick: Frank, with a trademark fedora looking down and forlorn as a Hopper-esque landscape spreads itself out behind him.”

Sure, Christmas is still months away, but if you know any writers, this is definitely something to keep in mind as a potential gift.