“I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I’ve set aside for the task. I don’t work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me. Instead, I wake early and drink tea and write or revise through the morning (sometimes before my kids wake up, and sometimes after they head off to school. I drink a lot of English breakfast tea.)”
Source: “Persist. Read, write, and improve.” Jasmyn Ward shares the best writing advice she’s ever received” PBS NewsHour
“I think that as I write, especially through the first draft, like the rough draft, that I’m discovering who the characters are, that they’re just taking on some kind of life on the page and off the page as I’m writing my way into the story.
Because the process of writing about them complicates them, and they do things that surprise me as a writer. So yes, I think that when I commit to writing a story, part of what I’m really focused on, part of what I’m committed to doing when I am interested in telling a story, is to bring all the characters to life in one respect or another and make them complicated and as human as I can on the page. And so they take on shape, but they continue to take on shape even after I’m done with the rough draft, so when I’m going back into a draft and then revising and revising, I’m still adding more dimensions. I’m still complicating them again and again and again, so it’s a continuous thing, right? It’s a continuous task to complicate my characters and to make them more human, more believable, more, more surprising, I think. Human beings are surprising in that you never fully know, you know? You never fully know a human being. So that’s why I think, for Sing, Unburied, Sing, that’s why I think that a 13-year-old boy, Jojo, that he can be learning how to be a man and that part of learning how to be a man is to suppress his emotions and stand up straight and to walk a certain way and to act a certain way in violent situations. But at the same time he can also care for his little sister and nurture his little sister and be very maternal in a lot of ways. And I think that that happened over multiple drafts of the work.”
Source: “How Jesmyn Ward Brings Writing to Life” Electric Literature
More
How Jesmyn Ward is Reimagining Southern Literature by Imani Perry via NYT
Five Minutes With…Jesmyn Ward by Hailey Maitland via British Vogue
Jesmyn Ward Reads From Her Novel, Salvage the Bones via National Book Foundation
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