“If you were to glance over the chaos across my desk—inkless pens, paperbacks, an infant toothbrush—you might miss the object I count most valuable: a plastic rainbow-colored slinky. For years, whenever I found myself blocked, I’d pick up the slinky and toss it from hand to hand while walking in circles around my room. Maybe it’s the repetition of the sound, the shuffling of springs, but my mind burrows inside the world I’m building, unobliged to form an elegant sentence. I like elegant sentences, but my initial attempts are almost always doomed. So instead, I begin by thinking about characters, moving with them through a maze of what-ifs. Situations unfold, a left turn takes me by surprise. I don’t enjoy the same focus when I go for a walk outside; my imagination seems to work better within tighter physical boundaries. I realize that my attachment to the slinky is two parts Pavlovian and one part superstition, but there’s a whole lot of mystery where writing is concerned. Maybe engaging in a certain kind of physical activity—meditative, yet constrained—helps to quiet the traffic moving round my brain, to open a way forward. Or maybe it’s the magic of the slinky.”
—Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf, 2015)
Photo credit: Melissa Stewart