How did you become a writer?

I find this question flattering, because for most of my adult life I’ve been more scholar than writer. But over the past few years, I have indeed been working to take the lessons I learned from years of study and try to find meaningful ways to communicate them to broader audiences. Doing this is a way of reconnecting with an impulse that I’ve always felt about how writing—both fiction and nonfiction—can help us to build a world that is full of decency and meaningfulness for everyone. I thought being a writer as a profession would be too hard, and that university life would provide security. It turns out that I was quite wrong—security is vanishing everywhere. I don’t think I could be a writer outside of the idea that writing is about creating some universal conditions for stability.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Ever since I came across it in my undergraduate studies, I’ve been inspired by Edward Said’s definition of the intellectual as an amateur, that is, someone who is “moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession.” I find myself almost incapable of doing very narrow or technical work (as much as I respect those who do). I feel recognition in Said’s definition of a vocation to pursue different kinds of study, writing, and action. I get regular inspiration from writers who embody these ideals and cross between genres and between scholarly and public writing. W.E.B. Du Bois is a remarkable example. As are the existentialists—Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Camus.

When and where do you write?                                                                                               

I write when I feel that it is time. I used to write mostly at night. Now I tend to write in the late morning and afternoon. I often write when I am supposed to be doing something else. There’s something about the pressure, and the slight disobedience, that makes we want to write. 

I am a little fastidious about my setup because of back problems. I need a good ergonomic arrangement. Over the years, I’ve learned how to recreate this in less-than-ideal conditions. That’s important because I like how my environment shifts my writing. I write differently in the woods than in the city. And when I can’t get my setup right, I write longhand, which also changes how my thoughts translate onto the page. These different modes of writing bring out different aspects of my thinking. I hope to create writings that provide that rich texture of the plurality we experience as humans. 

What are you working on now? 

I am usually working on a variety of projects. I’m finishing one book on the idea of a “good-enough life” and starting a new one on what it would mean to be wise today. I’ve got a screenplay and a novella that I tinker with endlessly. And I have two collaborative projects with friends—a graphic novel and a series of short stories—that I am particularly excited about. I don’t, however, work all the time. I like to work in bursts and keep separate time for leisure and especially to be with friends and family and meet new people.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Not really. And—perhaps it’s a lie I tell myself—I assume that if I am not writing one day it’s just because my body or mind is telling me that the idea or story is not ready, and that it will come out worse in the end if I try to write too soon. So if I can’t write, I assume that’s for the best, and I pace around or give it a few days and try again.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

I’m not good with bests. But I was listening to George Saunders give an interview the other day. And he talked about his writing process as sitting with a text and letting a kind of positive or negative meter register each sentence. The trick was learning how not to ignore the meter, and also not to register false positives because the mind just wants the writing to be good. This made a lot of intuitive sense to me and referred me back to a lot of moments in my own writing, both good and bad. Sometimes deadlines or other pressures force us to turn the meter off. But I think he’s right: if you have the patience and endurance, you can eventually feel mostly positive about every word in whatever you’ve written.

What’s your advice to new writers?

There’s a lot of advice out there on how to write. I think the most important thing is to find how you write—what your rhythm is, what makes sense for you. A trick that works for one person may not be universally applicable. Sometimes it makes sense; sometimes it doesn’t. Try things out but don’t assume that just because a writer you like said it worked for them that it will work for you.

I think there’s a difference when it comes to the profession of being a writer. Because here we need a little more universality. One thing that really matters today is that writers are part of the creation of new institutions that provide stability and purpose to more people pursuing writing careers. Writing, like so much else today, is a kind of pyramid scheme, with a few very successful able to make a career and the vast majority scraping by, regardless of talent. The poet Donald Justice said it very well some years ago, “There is a randomness in the operation of the laws of fame that approaches the chaotic.” This chaos is bad for everyone. I think part of being a writer today means addressing the structural problems.

Avram Alpert teaches writing at Princeton University. He is the author of Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki (2019), A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well Without Perfection (2021), and the forthcoming Beyond Greatness: A Good-Enough Life for All (2022). He is also coeditor of Shifter magazine and codirector of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, a free school for artists and writers in New York. He has written cultural criticism for outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Aeon, the Brooklyn Rail, and Truthout.