Yeah. I mean, like the scary truth of being a writer is, at least for me, I have no idea where my stories come from. They’ll come at strange times, and I’ll just be walking my dog or washing the dishes, and I’ll have this idea that I can’t stop thinking about, and you have – know when it feels alive to you.
I think it’s incredibly hard to sit down and come up with an idea for a story. And I used to teach writing. It’s really tough, because that’s what we ask students to do, just sit down and come up with a piece of writing. And I think I have – what the writers have that really helps is, writers are just good at paying attention.
Both at moments where they’re not supposed to be writing and those moments where you’re put on the spot. So I’m just constantly paying attention to things that are interesting in the world around me, things that I like about the world and things I don’t like in the world. Things I think are beautiful, things I think are hideous.
The things that feel so unfair. You know, oftentimes the problems in the world, things that feel unfair, or books that I don’t like, will inspire me to write something in response. And then in the moment, you have to just pay attention to what’s alive to you, what kind of idea is there. What do you care about most?
I think that that’s all writing is. Writing is a skill that you connect to something else you’re interested in, so you can get good at writing sentences, but that doesn’t mean anything until you connect it to something you care about. And you can write about absolutely anything that you care about. But writing is really the connection of those two things.
It’s the connection of a craft to a passion, I think.
