The most useful piece of advice a professor gave me while I was working on my MFA in fiction writing. Very simple yet incredibly liberating. I know that while I can’t always write a good poem, I can absolutely write a bad one. And when I tell myself to write a bad poem, I can begin writing. As I tell my own students, if the worst thing you do all day is write a bad poem, you are having a very, very good day.

If I only wrote when I was inspired I never would have written my books of poetry, my novel, my dissertation, my critical essays. I think I’ve been “inspired” perhaps twice in my life. In fact I don’t believe in inspiration as a category or a driving force.

I love writing in ugly places. I’ve done some of my best work in IHOP and Mister Donut and on the E train. Once I let go of wanting a beautiful space to write—once I gave up the idea of a nice pen, fancy notebook, and a view—I felt free to write anywhere.

This wasn’t always the case. At first, my ideal writing space was an artists’ colony, like Yaddo in upstate New York, a turn of the century mansion with antique furniture in all the writing studios and an entirely silent day. Even if you saw a fellow writer in the hall of the mansion, you were not supposed to talk. Of course, this is a wonderful setting for writing, and I have done a huge amount of work at the colony.

But it is also unreal. The demands of my regular life—teaching, family, commuting, being part of a community—made this way of working untenable on a daily basis.

If you play the piano, you practice every day. If you participate in a sport, you work on it every day. To me, writing is no different.

I remember my poetry writing teacher in college telling us, “Somerset Maugham said a professional is someone who works when he doesn’t want to.” I don’t know if Maugham actually said this, but the idea has sustained me ever since. When I sit down to write, I often don’t want to be doing it, but after fifteen or twenty minutes of forcing myself to write, I want to do nothing else, ever.

There is no writing without reading. For example, I read as much poetry as I can, all the time, because I want to know: What is a poem? How does poetry employ language to convey meaning? How do sound and rhythm affect the meaning of a poem? Why do poets write poetry? Why do we read it? What is the connection between poetry and larger social issues? What is the purpose of poetry at the beginning of the twenty-first century?

And I read poetry because reading is what made me want to write poems when I was a child and what continues to make me want to write them now.

Much of my writing—maybe all—takes place in revision. I try to not think too much in a first draft, with the knowledge that I will go back and do that work in revision many, many times. I let my first drafts be awful because I know no one will ever see them. Because I know I will revise the draft over and over.

The poet Donald Hall has talked about a poem he has been revising for 30 years. He keeps it in a desk drawer; every once in a while, he takes it out and works on it. It’s still not done.

Simply put, write what you feel like you can’t write. What do you feel incapable of writing? What seems impossible? What appears to be too ambitious? This is what you should write.

Similarly, I try to experiment with writing what I don’t want to write.

This is different from # 7.

Towards the end of each semester, I assign my students in my poetry writing classes the following task: write the poem you have been avoiding all semester. And I don’t explain any more than that. They might be avoiding certain subject matter or fixed forms or titles or ways of breaking lines; it’s very, very subjective and individual. I let the students decide how they want to interpret the assignment. Each semester, this assignment inevitably generates the best writing of the semester.

Robert Frost said this, and while it may not be universally true, it is well worth considering when thinking about writing. I love the moments when I write something that scares me, shocks me, makes me question myself.

This seems self-evident but is easy to forget—with familiar adages about writing fiction being analogous to opening a vein. I’ve never believed this to be true. Or, at least, it is not the whole truth.

To me, writing is very much like childhood play—much like rearranging my dollhouse for hours when I was a little girl. I think of Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, speaking of “language lined with flesh.” I think of Gertrude Stein, reveling in linguistic play—“ a rose is a rose is a rose”—and finally these are the reasons I want to write. To play with language, to try out voices, to experiment with images and forms and lines and sentences. Writing is an absolute pleasure and delight.