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.

That guy taking care of stuff, the domestic Bill, the busy Bill – I don’t think of him as the real me anymore.

All the blank page wants to know is what you’re most interested in right now.

There is something more powerful than a good review or a clever Instagram post or even the recommendation of a friend at play when stories and lovers are found.

To see a memory or a moment without judgment, to just behold it, is to glimpse the totality and integrity of the world

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.”

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.

What do you do when faced with a nasty bout of writer’s block? What do you do when all those fabulous phrases, adorable adverbs, and perky paragraphs just dry up like that once-red geranium sitting on my kitchen windowsill? But unlike the care of the geranium that I admit to neglecting, I’ve nurtured my muse: I read good literature, studied writers’ websites, journaled, poured over guideline pages.

Still, my muse Bob is gone. Perhaps he left me for a younger writer. That often happens to women in my age group. That’s right - maybe Bob wanted a TROPHY writer. Someone who’s flashier, someone who’s fancier, someone who TikToks! Maybe someone who’s writing true crime novels or podcasts. Those seem to be all the rage nowadays. I gave my muse the best years of my life only to be left at the curb like a bag of nonrecyclable packing peanuts! He didn’t even think about the ‘progeny’ he left behind - all those articles and stories we sweated over late at night. I thought we shared something meaningful. The times we laughed together over pieces we finally completed after weeks of sweating over them, cried together over heartless form rejection emails. I know I won’t get any consideration, any compensation from Bob. Maybe he’ll send a few crumbs here and there, like a particularly snappy phrase or a germ of an idea at dawn, while I hover between wakefulness and sleep, it becoming only a vague, nagging itch the next morning on fully waking.  

Twenty-two years ago, I spent the first few weeks of my daughter’s life carefully following the advice given to nursing mothers in the hospital: no pacifiers, no bottles, feed on demand. Add to that the advice of parenting books: no co-sleeping, nothing plush in the crib, put the baby on their backs to sleep. It all added up to no fun, no sleep, and lots of crying (for all parties involved). 

A year later, I was pregnant again. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by the work I knew was ahead of me. But, with a year of parenting behind me, I also felt I knew what to expect. 

“This time,” I thought, “I’ll know what I’m doing.” Surely, it’d be easier the second time around, right? No. 

But…