To her 18,000 followers on Twitter, she tweets about episodes of The Barefoot Contessa, poker games with men, or her latest bout with insomnia. Flavorwire recently named Gay one of the Internet’s most influential writers. I remember that the joy of these moments is the only thing that truly makes me a writer.Roxane Gay’s writings capture the zeitgeist.Īn Untamed State, her chilling debut novel of a woman kidnapped and held 13 days for ransom, garnered praise from coast to coast after its release last May.
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What I crave more than anything is the luxury of those times when I start to write, and though I don’t yet know the shape of what will come, I write my way forward. I tell myself I have written for the day and have, therefore, done as I was counseled to do so long ago. Then I remember I am a writer who should be writing, so I open up a Microsoft Word file for any given project, and read what I’ve previously written to orient myself. At the end of a long day, when I finally get a chance to open my laptop, I scroll mindlessly on Twitter or read the news or try to answer a few emails. Yes, I still write every day but on so many days, the fact of that writing is tenuous. Those reminders are not especially welcome, though I am sure these failures are edifying in some way. And in taking risks, I am reminded, with some frequency, what failure feels like. I find myself taking risks by working in new genres – comic books, screenplays, television shows, a podcast, a magazine. When I am very lucky, I write in my own house – mostly sitting on my couch, the television on in the background, the back door open to the night.
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I write in green rooms during the downtime before I go on stage. I write in hotel rooms with the blackout curtains pulled tightly together to keep out all light. I write in hotel lobbies, watching people in Boston and Austin and Chicago and Denver and Sydney and Spokane. I write in airport lounges as men in wrinkled suits talk loudly into ear-bud microphones about very important business. I write on airplanes, quite a lot, because the internet on planes is terrible and therefore largely unusable for the distractions that keep me from focusing on writing when I am at home. I speak at colleges and universities across the United States. I do not know what to make of the opportunities that come my way, though I take none of it for granted. I do not know what to make of my career, or the way people respond to my writing. Writing is an act of creation and the business of writing is doing everything in your power to ensure that you will have the opportunity to create again. I learned there is the business of writing and writing itself and they are two very different things. Along the way I learned that the more you succeed as a writer, the less time you have to actually think or read or write. I did not dare dream beyond that, so every moment since then has been thrilling in one way or another. The dream had been to write a good book and sell it. I assembled an essay collection and that sold too.
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Two very long years and two revisions later, I sold that novel and it came out in 2014. I was writing for myself and was not at all concerned with what would happen to the work, not just yet. It was some of the most fun I have ever had as a writer because everything was at stake but also nothing was at stake. It was an exhilarating experience to have so much unencumbered time to immerse myself wholly in a world of my own making. I wrote for up to 10 hours a day for four months to develop the first draft of An Untamed State. The summer after my first year as a professor, I decided to write a novel.