Question: How do I institute a writing practice that I feel good about?

I can’t speak for other writers, but you can’t let not knowing what you are doing stop you.

I’m always amazed when people are able to write. They say, “I wrote 5,000 words today,” or however many words they wrote. How do you write 10 pages?

I’m always reinventing what I do, the way I make things, or the way I look at things, or the way I write every single time I start a book.

I needed to approach it all these different ways and have all of these failed experiments in order to get to the place where I could feel like, “Oh, this is actually the way I want to be doing this.” Sometimes it takes a while to get there.

Writing for me is no different than playing basketball, it’s my body moving among and pushing up against and being moved by other bodies of language and the energy of language.

Mostly you need to realize that you make your own place as a writer. You make your own New York, your own Beat Hotel. Look, your friends are amazing! Just look at them, you don’t have to become famous and hang out with cool friends. Your mom is much cooler and more complex than you can even imagine.

I go on long walks, like probably every writer. I connect with the people that I really love and that love me back, because sometimes that reminds you of who you are. It cuts out a lot of the extra stuff that we require to be in the world. One of the most integral parts of that is returning to whatever art has made me want to pursue writing. If it’s a movie that reminds me of what’s important to me, or a poem that restarts my day, those kinds of things really remind me of who I am, and how what I want to do requires quiet time with the art that has galvanized me.

What’s weird about writing is that, in some ways, you’ve been sowing what you reap—you just don’t know exactly when and how you sowed it.

I get very worked up when I write. I’m a very slow writer. Half of what I write, I delete right away. Another half of what’s left, I delete the next day. It’s a lot of moving backwards and forwards and feeling stuck, but eventually it all accumulates.

Writing for me is like very elegant shitting. It’s involuntary. It just comes out of me. It’s how I get through the day. I don’t always put words on paper. Or I don’t always do the kind of writing I want to do. Or I don’t always put words down the way I want to, in the shape I want to, I don’t finish as much polished writing as I would like to right now with my schedule, so a lot of what I’m writing now is lesson plans. I don’t always read as much as I would like to or have time to. But I always keep multiple notebooks. I’m always planning for the next time that I can do the kind of writing I want to do. Always looking for that time. It’s just very mixed up with everything else in my life.

One of the most important things I kept telling myself once I started writing the book again was that I couldn’t be afraid of failing. I can’t. If I’m going to fail I want that failure to be spectacular. I want it to be big. I don’t to inch my way into it. I just want to push as far as I can and see what happens. If I fail I want to fail ambitiously, and not in some tepid way where I second-guessed myself to death.

There’s no one answer I can really give you about my research or writing practice because there’s no practice. That would be true to everything I’ve written during of my relatively long life… If you were to take a kind of God’s eye view of my life, it would be filled with thousands and thousands of little scraps of paper. They would just look like clutter to anybody else and sometimes look like clutter to me, filled with notes I’ve taken which probably have piqued my interest or seemed viable for a poem or an essay. They’re scattered all over the house; in the pockets of all of my clothes; they’re slipped into books; they’re on napkins; they’re on receipts. They’re on burger wrappers.

It was so hard for me to fit a structure or a plot around the kind of sentences I wanted to write and the feelings I wanted to evoke. This sense of discovery and elation and melancholy. That’s the stuff that no one, for the most part, ever talks about.