“Where do you get your inspiration?”

Or: how I knew the right book to write, right when I wrote it

Back in the early days of my career, in the mid-aughts, when readings were one of the few demonstrable things a writer could do to support her book (hence, I did a lot more readings than I do these days), there was always a moment in the given evening’s Q&A when someone would ask some version of: “Where do you get your inspiration?” and my heart would sink.

Most novelists I know get this question at almost every Q&A, and those I’ve talked to about it admit to sharing my feelings. Not because we’re not immensely grateful to be answering questions about our books to any kind of audience— we truly, always, are. No, it’s more like: answering that particular question is virtually impossible and/or kind of exhausting, because it requires having to point out the disconnect between what non-writers think writers’ working lives look like, and what writers working lives actually look like, and that takes up all the air in the room and doesn’t allow much time to actually answer the core of the question itself.

I’d wager this disconnect stems from the simultaneous elevation and denegration of art-making inside the construct of capitalism. Popular culture casts artists as tortured, but also incredibly lucky— free from the formal burdens of a working person’s life, rich in creativity, and also, quite often, in finances (did anyone see A Family Affair? Nicole Kidman’s a novelist? With that house? Really?!? But seriously, please do watch for the plastic surgery alone!). When I first tell people I’m a novelist, there almost always appears between us a kind of dreamy scrim, if even for a moment, as if I’m some unicorn who has suddenly appeared in their midst— unless the other person is a novelist (only someone else who has written a book actually understands that there is virtually nothing magical about it). To ask a writer what their inspiration is (or at least in my early career I believed this), is to assume we’re flitting around with a metaphorical net, casting into the air for fully formed butterflies of bewinged thought that will surely bloom into the novel our readers are now holding in their hands (hello, mixed metaphor, but you get it, right?), when, in reality, most of writing a novel is a lot of thinking and then many, many hours of turning those thoughts into words on paper, and then many, many, many more hours of moving those words around until they’re better.

For these reasons, when I started out in this job, the dreaded question made me mad. I wanted to be asked, instead, “What are the kernels of this book that have been there from the beginning?” or “What is the essential DNA of this book?” But it’s not fair to have expected that; I know enough now to know that those are questions that only novelists know to ask each other. Now, years later, I appreciate the question for what it is meant to be; the best attempt of someone who doesn’t know a whole lot about how writers actually work to get closer to understanding how they do, and that’s only a good thing.

Also, I’m a hypocrite.

Because every book I’ve ever written, yes, has taken a ton of hard work— as in thousands upon thousands of hours… and yet, I’d be lying if I told you I know where I get my ideas. I literally don’t know where my ideas come from. I’ve now written eight novels (and published five of them), and every time, at the start, an idea really does just kind of show up— or a set of ideas find each other in my mind— and then I just kind of get this ripply feeling which indicates that it/they are enough to build a book. The word “inspiration” apparently sets my teeth on edge, but isn’t what I’m describing— the thing that begins the novel— actually, truly, inspiration?

Let’s go back to the beginning, then. Back to the first little bits of thinking I wrote down about this, my most recent book— what I’m going to call NB (for “New Book”)— to figure out its source. (One of the reasons I’m able to do this is because for the first time ever, I kept a writing log for NB. Every time I worked on NB, or had a big thought about it, I wrote it in the log, mainly because I realized that I have a kind of aphasia around my own writing process— it’s really tricky for me to remember anything about the brass tacks of it after I’m done with it, which is annoying in a lot of practical ways, all of which I’ll go into in a future post about my writing log).

How did I come to start this book?

The first entry in my work log for NB is from the summer of 2021. Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel The Plot had just been published, and my writing group— which had formed online the year before, a welcome respite from the isolated, early days of the pandemic, when we were all on deadline— had heard me allude to a “plagiarism novel” I had finished but put in a drawer in 2010, when I couldn’t sell it as my third book. The Plagiarist, as this defunct novel was called, had been deemed too “inside baseball” by the numerous editors who rejected it, because it was ostensibly set in the writing/publishing world. In 2021, my writing group argued that with The Plot getting so much widespread attention, a work set in the literary world might have more of a chance in the current market.