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 her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.

Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.