The more I think about my stories, the more I try to understand them, the less sense they make.

Pleasing me, it turns out, is no one’s job but mine.

There’s something within you that can’t quit.

The sitting and the staring and the typing all feel the same.

I think everyone wants to be entertained, and everyone also wants to know why life is worth living.

There was something holy to me about the raised proscenium and the rows of chairs and the lights above.

Writing is a way of stepping back from our thoughts and beliefs and experiences so that we can see them accurately.

Don’t write from fear; it’s a shallow source of motivation.

My main job when teaching is to remind my students that they are perfectly equipped to tell any story the want to tell.

Joyce Maynard is the author of twelve previous novels and five books of nonfiction, as well as the syndicated column Domestic Affairs. Her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, has been translated into sixteen languages. Her novels To Die For and Labor Day were both adapted for film. Her most recent novel is How The Light Gets In.

Kristen Perrin is originally from Seattle, Washington, where she spent several years working as a bookseller before moving to the UK to do a master's and PhD. She lives with her family in Surrey, where she can be found poking around vintage bookstores, stomping in the mud with her two kids, and collecting too many plants. Her middle-grade series, Attie and the World Breakers, was published in German, Dutch, and Polish. How to Solve Your Own Murder is her adult debut and was a Jimmy Fallon’s Book Club Finalist for 2024!

Boo Trundle is a writer, artist, and performer whose work has appeared across various platforms and publications, including The Brooklyn Rail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and NPR’s The Moth. She has released three albums of original music with Big Deal Records. She lives in New Jersey. The Daughter Ship is her first novel.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of The Waters, a novel, which was the Today Show’s January selection for their “Read with Jenna” Book Club. The Waters was also featured in Oprah Daily’s list of “Best Books of 2024.”

I am the introvert; she, the extrovert. She is your friend as soon as you meet her. We were born across the globe from one another, me in a city among gray buildings, she surrounded by nature. I grew up through the storm of a communist-born dictatorship, that of Ceaușescu in Romania, and she experienced the childhood freedom in the States. Yet we had so much in common, my mother-in-law and me. We both loved to explore. We just started from different places; me from the inside of myself, she from the outside of herself, and we rescued each other from the limbo of wanting to write a message to the world and the fear that it may not be good enough for anyone to care about it. 

Rhona (my mother-in-law) is a caregiver,She feels stuck at home sometimes, as her mother can’t leave her bed anymore, so she finds refuge in her happy childhood stories. When she shared them with her friend, a primary school teacher, Rhona noticed that she may not be the only one who would relish her past adventures.  Once she started writing, the stories practically wrote themselves. The hurdle came afterwards, when no one seemed interested in reading them. She did not know what to do for a long while until she saw something I posted on my blog, and felt inspired, recognizing  a fellow writer. And yet, it still took several years until she dared show me these stories. She was not worried about rejection as much as she was about asking too much. She loves her son, her first-born, and until it came to challenging her core values manifested through a voting choice, she had always tiptoed around us, always worried she may upset the balance - but she couldn’t change her identity just for my sake.

Several times a day, I find myself at a loss for words. Meaning gets caught unformed behind my teeth, or I puzzle through an avalanche of sounds whose hidden significance refuses to emerge. 

I’m in this fix because in midlife I moved to a place where I’d never learned the language, trailing after my German-speaking Swiss husband and hoping for the best. As an American in Switzerland, I’m a one-language person in a land where everyone else seems comfortable with least three or four. For as long as I could remember, English had been my superpower. Now I’ve lost that strength and had to start over, inarticulate as a newborn. 

In an earlier stage of life, working in editing and communications, I was proud of my knack for correct spelling, my wide vocabulary, my ability to fine-tune manuscripts to better express what their authors wanted to say. I’d been on a quest for perfection in words; these days, when I open my mouth to speak, I can be happy if I come up with any words at all. 

One of my most helpful writing practices is not writing at all—rather, setting the pen (or keyboard) aside and doing handwork. Some writers knit, some carve wood, some paint, some throw pots. I coil pine-needle baskets.

First, I must leave my writer's desk and go outdoors. I head for a park or forest in search of long-needle pines, then gather a sack of dry brown needles from beneath the trees. Ponderosas are best, and since there are few near my home, I am always on the lookout to find them—yes, like keeping an ear out for a ‘just-right’ word, a good line, a story concept. Sometimes you find them where you least expect them. A neighbor’s yard. An empty lot. 

I take the needles home, remove the debris, wash them and set them out to dry. I study the needles' conditions, their lengths and colors, and begin to imagine a basket design. I liken this to sorting ideas before writing—so many notes, fragments of ideas, bits and pieces, thoughts to sort out.

Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” 

This always made perfect sense to me. And when I  taught high school English, the students would erupt in debate when I would introduce this book.  

If it’s not true, it’s not true!

If you say it’s true, and it’s not, then that’s lying. 

It’s black and white. 

But here’s the thing: It’s anything but black and white. Our society embraces binary thinking: Pick a side, it’s either this or that, etc. And the enigma is our society simultaneously loves coaching one another on “speaking your truth.” 

When I see my teenage sons lounging in front of the TV, I sometimes marvel at how much the experience of watching television has changed in one generation. At the risk of sounding like the world’s youngest curmudgeon, they have it much easier than I did.

When I returned home, I discovered that my own doctor was on a month-long vacation. I could only see a doctor who was unknown to me. She examined me, took my history of this situation, and concluded that I had something called Polymyalgia Rheumatica. She put me on Prednisone. Later, I saw a specialist who said I had Arthritis, but the treatment was the same. 

Once, after participating in a panel discussion on sexuality and faith at a local university, I was approached by a student with the usual request to sign her copy of my book. But when she handed it over, I was shocked. The soft-cover bristled with post-it notes. Pages were dog-eared, the text striped with fluorescent highlighter, the margins crammed with handwriting, and the cover ripped. She might have run over it with her car.

 I certainly didn’t receive training in my two MFA programs on how to wait or hope for a warm human response. “How to not check your Submittable account twenty times a day” wasn’t in the curriculum. It’s something we endure privately during the boom-and-bust periods of our careers. What I've come to realize is that I don’t have writer’s block; I have reader’s block. To clarify, I don’t mean a failure to reach an audience. Readers’  blocks don't correlate with the number of published titles or level of acclaim. Just as writer’s blocks are caused by mindless mishandling of the present moment at the desk, reader’s blocks are glitches in our mindset after work is ready for publication. 

More than a year ago, I found myself, a professional writer, stuck. 

I’d been stuck before. Definitely after my first book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, foreword by Gloria Steinem. Random House sent me all over the country to talk about the book, especially about the harrowing experiences with pre-Roe illegal abortions that people I interviewed like Whoopi Goldberg and Rita Moreno had. It was a heady time, but when it was over, I crashed. 

I didn’t get stuck after my second book, which came out 10 years later, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. I still had more to say about the Church. I had occasionally gotten stuck at other times on other particularly demanding projects, but it had been a long time since I felt stuck like this.

With alacrity, I read Hank Phillippi Ryan’s essay Paying It Forward, one of the stories in  In Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers: 101 Motivational Stories for Writers – Budding or Bestselling – from Books to Blogs. This well-known mystery author made points that resonated with me. 

First, she emphasized how it was mere grit and persistence that landed her a job as a TV reporter at age 25, with no experience or real qualifications for the job. She found a mentor. Walt, a veteran photographer, showed her what to do. Within three weeks of following his instructions, she felt confident about her reportage.  Grateful, she vowed to pay it forward, which meant that if she could ever help newbies or wannabe writers, she would. Ergo, Hank helped a young girl Sally, an intern. Sally confided she wanted to be a producer someday. In her spare time, Sally composed a book. She got that book published. Well, Hank wanted to be a novelist, too. Sally ended up mentoring her. Roles reversed.

I’m lying in bed, curled in a ball, whispering to my ankle under the covers. More specifically, I’m whispering to my new Apple Watch. It’s 2AM, the time when the best ideas come. I must capture them before they dissipate into the ether. 

We writers are used to a flurry of inspiration arriving in the middle of the night. We receive the Muses’ whispers in that twilight state so well that creatives like Thomas Edison covet it. To take advantage, he would nap with balls in his hands — when the balls fell, he’d hear them, wake, and immediately jot notes while the ideas were fresh in his head. 

Historically, we writers struggle to take notes in the night. Turning on a light might wake anyone with whom we share the room. Leaving the room abandons any hope of retaining the inspiration. My strategy involved grabbing the inevitable paper and pen on my nightstand and scribbling keywords while blinded by the dark. Within moments, the thought would be jumbled by consciousness. 

How, then, did this paper-and-pen writer end up whispering to an Apple Watch on her ankle?

As a writer living in a small town, you sometimes feel you don't have much of a contribution to make to community life. No, not as a person—every resident has that opportunity—as a writer. If you were a painter, you could paint the firehouse. If you were a plumber, you could fix the old furnace in the school. But what’s a writer to do?

For many years, I was a writer in a small town; actually, in a poor and tiny northern Vermont village. A calamity there made me think about the role of the write.

Small-town calamities are the worst kind. Whether it’s fire or flood or frantic parents desperately searching for a bone-marrow donor for their daughter, you either know the people involved or your next-door neighbor does. If you were born there, you're probably related to them. In a small town, all tragedy is personal.