Creative People Way Out of My League Who Nonetheless Inspire Me

My corner desk in a small space with a door that shuts tightly. If I were a better photographer you could read the inspirational quote by Jane Smiley on the slip of paper under the lamp that reads “The sooner you put words on paper, the happier you will be.” The diploma is to remind me that I’m not as dumb as I sometimes tell myself I am. The photo is of me at twenty-two, holding my newborn niece Claire.

Amy Pohler as pollyanna powerhouse Leslie Knope in “Parks and Recreation”, the way Ali Wong nails racist Asians in her Netflix special Baby Cobra, Tina Fey stuffing her face with sheet cake in solidarity. Novelists Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Natsuo Kirino…

Where is the place, and when during a given day do you feel most inspired and do your best thinking / creating? In the winter on a rare sunny school day, I write in the only south-facing bedroom, my seven-year-old’s, scrunched in his papasan chair. When I want to shut myself away, I go to the desk above behind two closed doors, where I can write standing with the drop leaf closed, or sitting on the red exercise ball (which currently needs more inflating). It feels as if I’m hiding with my lover off in the corner when I write there, like Elizabeth Gilbert describes in Big Magic. The naughty teenager and twenty-something inside me exclaimed in recognition at Gilbert’s analogy of writing time as secret tryst. How long has my seven-year-old been watching a screen downstairs since I’ve been writing here? It’s almost always too long, alas. I sneak away to my corner and put headphones on with instrumental music for ten minutes here, fifteen there, and sometimes ten minutes turns into forty.

Toni Morrison writes very early in the morning, before first light with a cup of coffee, as she did when she was raising small children. I sometimes get up really early, always have a cup of coffee. Marilynne Robinson’s muse immediately settles on her shoulder when she enters her writing room in Iowa City (of course — she is divinity itself). I try routines and rewards and self-cajoling with charts and scheduling and lists. I think my method is starting to coalesce into a Throw Things Against the Wall Until Something Sticks method. I draft with pen and paper, edit on the computer, print out that draft, then cut and paste with metal craft scissors and removable cellophane tape. That last part brings back fond memories of childhood crafts.

I play instrumental music in my headphones — Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, Max Richter’s “Woolf Works,” an album music (and later a production by the Royal Ballet) based on three novels by the incomparable Virginia Woolf. I tend to get fixated on the same album for weeks or months at a time, so I welcome fresh suggestions.

Who are your creative heroes?