Reif Larsen Recommends...

“I find that I generate new material via a two-step process. In the morning, I will sit my butt in the chair as close to 9:00 AM as possible. I’ve even contemplated purchasing one of those old punch clocks. Showing up every day is key. I’ll usually bang away all morning. When I’m working on a first draft, what I call ‘fresh tracks,’ the writing is inevitably bad. I used to be horrified by this and would immediately go back and try to improve it. I’ve learned over time to just let it lie, to be comfortable with the messiness. When I get hungry enough that I can’t see out of my left eye, I’ll go make myself a sandwich. Then comes the most important part of the day: I’ll take a run in the afternoon, around 4:00 PM. I won’t bring my headphones. And it is during the course of that run—as I move across the landscape, as I breathe, as the blood moves through my veins, as my muscles contract, as the pores open—that I begin to digest what I threw down on the canvas in the morning. I don’t try too hard. I just let my brain marinate on it. The Japanese call this kind of movement and reflection a ‘brain bath.’ These little connections begin to form and often about twenty minutes in, I’ll stumble upon some revelation and realize what I was actually trying to say. And I’ll run straight back to my office and make some notes. The next morning, I rake the soil and start again.”
—Reif Larsen, author of I Am Radar (Penguin Press, 2015)