Write Toward Your Unspecified Anxieties

I don’t recall which author said it, but I’ve always remembered a very specific piece of writing advice:

Write about the things you can’t forget, the things that keep you up at night.

I take that to mean: write about scenes you can’t stop replaying in your head, write about the moments that still horrify and provoke you, write about the events where you’d like to dig a hole in the ground and disappear from the world in which they ever existed.

In the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, Roxana Robinson discusses that impulse—to write toward your anxieties. She says:

All the fiction I write arises from the same sort of impulse: it’s a feeling of discomfort, a kind of unspecified anxiety, a need to uncover something that troubles and disturbs me. I write toward that feeling. I try to explain it to myself in order to disarm it, to rob it of its potency. I don’t know how this explanation will happen. I don’t know how the disarmament will take place, or what else will happen in the process.

Read Robinson’s full piece.

Also this month at Glimmer Train:

• Interview with Myla Goldberg by Sarah Anne Johnson
• Interview with Javier Marias by Eli S. Evan

Jane Friedman

Jane Friedman has spent nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.