How I Finish Creative Projects, with Roxane Gay

(can pops) Headspace Studio. Hello everyone. I'm Roxanne Gay, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace, and welcome to Wednesday. This week we're talking about creative expression, and today I want to talk to you about how I take a creative project from start to finish, because even though you may not be a writer, my process or at least parts of it can be applied to all kinds of artistic forms. So today, I'll break down how I prep, outline, and write a book, and I'll give you a few ideas on how to think about your own creative project. All of my books, all of my long form projects, and even my essays, start with questions, and I tend to write those questions down or really type them down, my handwriting's atrocious, and start to do research to answer those questions. And as I do research, new questions are going to arise. And so I assemble hopefully an interesting body of knowledge to sit with, to read from, and to figure out, okay, now, what is it that I have to say? And so after questions and research, I start to create a broad outline of what it is that I wanna say, what I actually believe. And sometimes I'm actually writing my way toward answers instead of having the answers from the outset. But I do like to have a rough sense of where I'm going to begin and where I'm going to end. When I was writing my memoir "Hunger," I certainly dragged my heels for a very, very long time and procrastinated. And then I wrote it very quickly after thinking very slowly. But with "Hunger," I wanted to do two things. I wanted to write a memoir of my body, and the subtitle of the book is actually a memoir of my body. And so that gave me an organizing principle. When I'm actually writing a book, the challenge for me is to get into it, but once I get into it, I'm into it. I write for hours and hours a day. When I wrote my first novel, "An Untamed State," I was writing for 10 hours or more a day because it was in the summer after my first year of teaching. And I knew that that was the only time I was gonna have to get a draft of the novel done. And I did. I'm not really great as a writer about managing distractions. I don't put people on notice. I've never done a, a residency or taken real time away. I would like to try that someday, because I think it would be very fruitful for me, but I just make the time. And so I would write, I'm a night writer. Only old people will get that joke, but I love to write at night. And so after work, after dealing with life partner at the time, et cetera, I would just sit down and...