Is there a right way to write?

Arts & Culture
‘Harvard Thinking’: Is there a right way to write?

Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Samantha Laine Perfas

Harvard Staff Writer

October 22, 2025 long read

In podcast, pros share tips on technique, process — and tapping ‘deepest part of yourself, even if you’re writing something that is set on a spaceship’

Writers draw upon a variety of technical skills to tell a story, such as sentence structure, character development, literary devices, and narrative techniques. But it’s an inherently personal process.

“I think you are writing from the deepest part of yourself, even if you’re writing something that is set on a spaceship,” Lauren Groff, an award-winning novelist and 2018-2019 Radcliffe fellow said. “That is a lot of very hard work for me, and it takes me a really long time to work myself into it.”

James Wood, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard and a literary critic for The New Yorker, said that when he’s reviewing work, he looks for a sense of vitality. “The thing that we’re trying to feel and find is just something very alive that draws you in,” he said.

“I find writing begins with a particular character and then just figuring out what that character wants and what is getting in the way of what that character wants,” said Nick White, Associate Senior Lecturer on Fiction.

Sam Marks, Senior Lecturer on Playwriting, said that a writing teacher once told him that you can’t make anyone a better writer, you can only help them get closer to their obsessions. “It’s like we know these places are in our souls or our bones,” he said. “And I think those are assets as a writer, not bad things.”

In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Groff, Wood, White, and Marks about their writing process — and tips for other writers to hone their own craft.

Listen on: Spotify Appl e YouTube

The transcript

Lauren Groff: If you want to write something that’s going to affect people emotionally, you have to do it emotionally.

Nick White: And it has to cost you more than the time you’re spending writing. It pushes me to my emotional and intellectual capabilities. I feel like when something is working it is because all cylinders are firing, and I am working at the very bleeding edge of what I am capable of.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Storytelling is a huge part of the human experience. But how do you tell a good story? There’s the cliche of a writer sitting at a desk, wrestling with a page, trying to find their ever-evasive muse. There are elements of craft to consider for sure, but for many authors, creativity comes from a place deep within themselves, and it looks different from writer to writer.

So what’s the secret behind an unforgettable story?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today I’m joined by:

James Wood: James Wood. I’m a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard in the English department.

Laine Perfas: He’s also a literary critic for The New Yorker and the author of multiple books, including “How Fiction Works.” Then:

Marks: Sam Marks. I am a senior lecturer in the English department in playwriting, and I also teach a TV writing class.

Laine Perfas: For the past three years, he was also the director of Creative Writing. Then:

Groff: Lauren Groff. I am a novelist and short story writer, and I own a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida.

Laine Perfas: She was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe fellow, and three of her novels have been finalists for the National Book Award. And our final guest:

White: Nick White. I’m a short story writer and a novelist.

Laine Perfas: He is also an associate senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today we’ll talk about storytelling with four writers and how they take an idea and bring it to life.

What is it that gets a story started for you? Is it an image, a character? Where do you begin?

Groff: It depends on the situation and the story that’s being told. Sometimes it’ll be something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. It doesn’t become a story until I experience something, or I read something else that collides with the initial idea that sort of blooms into a story with urgency and density and gravity and weight; and after that happens, it takes a much longer time to build in the subconscious.

Marks: I’m often thinking about a thing, an idea or a character or a moment or an experience, for a long time. But I think that the story itself doesn’t actually happen until I start writing it. That’s when it actually unfolds. I found that generally writing is not successful for me if I’m like, “Oh, and then this crazy twist happens.” That’s usually a disaster; and so it’s a combination of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and also the immediate thread of whatever is going on. It’s in some ways — I’m not a musician — but like a musician improvising, like you’re searching for the right note or lick. And then you find the harmony, and you kind of take it where it goes. I apologize to all the musicians out there who are like, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“It’s in some ways like a musician improvising, like you’re searching for the right note or lick.”
Sam Marks

White: I think I do a mix of both. There are still stories that I want to write that I’ve been thinking about for years that I just haven’t figured out yet how to bring to the page. And then there are stories that come more easily to me. And then once I have what Anne Lamott calls that “shitty first draft,” I have something I can work with and shape once it’s outside of my head, because I think all my stories sound good to me when they’re inside my head. And then when I put them in the cold, harsh light of the page and begin to go back and inspect it, I can see all its weaknesses, but then I have something tangible that I can work with. I think speaking in terms of images or characters, oftentimes for me, I find writing begins with a particular character and then just figuring out what that character wants and what is getting in the way of what that character wants.

Wood: I like this question because if I think of beginnings, literally for me, knowing what a first line might be or knowing what an ending might be is very helpful to me. I have much less experience than the other panelists in actually writing stories. For instance, I’ve never written a short story in my life, don’t think I could. But if I expand slightly the definition of a narrative to be, say, a nonfiction account or even stretching it a little bit here, even a review, it can be very helpful to me sometimes, even if I don’t know what’s going to go in the middle of something, to know where I’m beginning and where I’m ending, and sometimes just knowing where I’m ending, I can do it.

Laine Perfas: Nick, you mentioned characters. There’s this idea out there about how you might think of a character, but then once they exist, they take on a life of their own and they start to do things that you maybe didn’t think they were going to do when you started. Do any of you find that to be true, or in what ways do you wrestle with the character development within your stories?

White: I love when that happens. I’m working on a novel right now. I have things in the draft broadly outlined, but the sort of scenes that I begin to write sometimes, especially when I have two or more characters in a scene, it can sometimes — especially in those first drafts — feel a little bit like a science experiment of seeing how these characters are going to spark off of each other or putting the character in a particular situation.

It can be really exciting to go with it and have a kind of looseness. I’m currently reading that book, “Toni at Random,” which is about Toni Morrison being an editor. And there’s somewhere in the book where they talk about how she thinks about characters when she’s writing as whispering over her ear and telling her, like, “Oh, that’s just right. That’s right. Oh, nope, that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough.” I wish I could experience characters like that. I think that’s a beautiful way of thinking about it.

Marks: A lot of times when I write plays, the characters — I don’t see them, I hear them. It’s an aural form and I often feel like they’ve appeared in my head or my imagination or whatever, the play, for a reason, but I might not know what it is. And so it’s: Let’s see where we all go together. I think it also varies. Sometimes characters are incredibly strong and they’re very clear and you have a really good sense of them. And then sometimes they’re more hazy and you have to spend more time with them and chip away or see how they reveal themselves to you.

Groff: Often we think of character as a fixed idea that we have of specific people, but everyone is an animal. And so I think a character can shift radically depending on the environment, but you can have the same people having a breakup scene, but if you have it on a beach versus on the top of Mount Everest, it’s going to go very differently. So paying attention to not only whatever is the inflexible center of what your conception of this person is, but also paying attention to the true animal nature of being a person in the world is really important at the same time.

Laine Perfas: Lauren, there was an interview that you did and you were describing your creative process as a nuclear fusion. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and what exactly that means for you.

Groff: Yeah, it’s really like my literature is born out of literature, right? And I think it’s possible to write a novel without ever having read a novel, but it’s very vanishingly rare, and it’d probably be a very bad book. Just my opinion, James can tell us whether or not that’s true. But I think if you have steeped yourself in literature, in ideas, in other people’s voices, and you’re sort of listening to the ghost of George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes, right, you’re going through your day listening to these things, of course it’s going to be nuclear, right? Because your ideas are always going to explode when they come in contact with other people. So I think that is one of the great and moving joys and mysteries and beauties of living this life of writing. You are constantly surrounded by explosive ideas of other people.

Marks: Can I just go back to the character thing? Aristotle basically — who wrote the “Poetics,” which is a doctrine on how to write plays in a very specific way, but very influential — puts character subservient to action. Anything that the character does that doesn’t feed the action to him is extraneous. Now, I don’t think that we live in that model anymore, but there’s a spectrum of character-driven versus plot-driven. And I think sometimes it seems dishonest if a character is shoehorned into the plot. But then also sometimes there’s the experience of listening to characters where you’re like, “I don’t care, what’s the story?” So I think it’s a balance.

Wood: But Sam, the thing about the action and character breaking apart, actually if you think of a great deal of the kind of TV writing that I’m sure you would never do, but that it’s just the stuff that’s out there now, an enormous amount of it is just simply plotting for the sake of plotting with ridiculous twists and turns that even within the confines of the thriller genre don’t really make any sense at all. And you’ll sometimes encounter a piece by a student, and it’ll be trundling along, and then suddenly, in effect, they get into a spaceship and go off to Mars, and you say, “Now why did you do that thing on Page 8?” And they’ll just say, “I don’t know. Because I can, I just felt like it.” I think, OK, this is a bit of a problem.

Marks: I fully agree with that. I think that for so many students, and so many writers in general, sometimes I think about writing as a process of confronting how you confront challenge — often it’s like, I want to quit. I want to take a break. I want to have a drink. I want to have a spaceship, right? I want someone to rescue me from the process of having to figure what the heck I have to do, because to figure it out is incredibly painstaking. And that’s the cliche of the writer tearing their hair out. But it’s because it is hard to figure out. What happens next?

White: I’m now thinking of the story that ends with a character going off in a spaceship, and what my response to the student would be: The story begins when they enter the spaceship and go off. Like, why are they? That’s the beginning.

I also liked what you said about a lot of times how we deal with conflict in our everyday lives is related to how we do that in our writerly sense. I can feel that, but I also feel that there are ways in which I allow my characters to be much braver on the page than I am and much bolder. And I think that is a really great way to think about fiction and inhabiting characters. Have your characters do the thing that you’re afraid to do. I think that is a really interesting prompt.

Laine Perfas: That actually makes me think: We’ve talked about character-driven; we’ve talked about plot-driven. I’m also curious how much of it is soul-of-the-writer driven. How much of yourselves do you feel like you are putting into these stories?

White: My first novel was very much autobiographical, but it was also kind of an alternative history for myself. It dealt a lot with conversion therapy and being gay from Mississippi and having a family that would not be accepting and dealing with all of that mess and trauma on the page in a way that I felt unable to do in my real life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’ve been talking to my students a lot about setting and place, and I find it really ironic that I spent so much of my time growing up in Mississippi — I’m from a really small town called Possumneck — and I spent my whole life waiting to leave, couldn’t wait to leave; and as soon as I leave the state, I immediately start trying to write my way back in. I do feel that tension a lot in my work. And I still set things in Mississippi, and I go back and visit a lot, and that place has been very fruitful for whatever the river of my imagination is.

Marks: I once had a writing teacher, Carole Maso, who’s a fiction writer, who said you can’t make anyone a better writer. You can only help them get closer to their obsessions. And I feel like the more I write — not all of my plays are set in Harvard or New York, but even if I try to write something differently, I inevitably write about a version of the same thing, which I don’t think is bad. In some ways I feel like I’ve succeeded on some level. Not to say that you repeat yourself, but that you’re working out some of the same questions. And I think that those are questions of the self, even if they take place in different settings. I also think it’s interesting that you keep writing about Mississippi. It’s like we know these places are in our souls or our bones. And I think those are assets as a writer, not bad things.

Groff: I think you are writing from the deepest part of yourself, even if you’re writing something that is set on a spaceship. Something that is so far from your lived experience, it’s still autobiographical in a very real way, even if the contours of the story don’t accord to the contours of your life, because it’s so deeply personal. Every character is a prismatic hologram of who you are. I love to play with the titration of closeness that I’m giving the reader. That this is a joyous thing to play with, the trick of writing something that is beyond your autobiographical details, but it still really feels deeply personal. That is a lot of very hard work for me, and it takes me a really long time to work myself into it. And I do it through the music of the line, right? I can only do it by playing and failing vastly so often. And then finally finding a piece of music that corresponds to this story that I’m trying to tell. But I think all of it is the soul, if you’re doing it right.

“All of it is the soul, if you’re doing it right.”
Lauren Groff

Wood: Lauren, I have a question for you. You’ve been writing in historical periods remote-ish from the contemporary recently. And whether you’d had the experience of recognizing an autobiographical motif or impulse, even as you seemed to be in a completely different fictional universe.

Groff: Yeah. Marie de France, c’est moi. I mean, every grandiose idea she had is my idea. That’s me right there. And the girl in “The Vaster Wilds,” that’s me as a panicked young person alone, which I’ve been many times in the woods, running, I’ve done that. Sometimes I access that even if the people are distant from me in temporal terms or in even demographic terms, you find it through the body. Find it through the sensory information that you’re getting from the world. I wrote a book about a 1960s utopian commune called Arcadia. I’ve never lived in a commune, but I have in fact actually held a handmade blue bowl filled with warm oatmeal. I know how that feels. And so that is me right there holding that, when it’s actually the character holding that. So you find the bodily information that allows you to access the rest of the world.

Laine Perfas: Lauren, you mentioned failure. What does failure look like?

Groff: This is so funny that we’re doing this for the Harvard community because I think most people have never failed, ever. And I love failure, actually. I go after it. I have OCD, and so it’s really hard for me to do something and let it be imperfect. I’ve developed a process, which is insane, but allows me to embrace failure in the way that a child would embrace failure if they’re trying to build a LEGO castle. If it doesn’t work, they just trash it and start over again, and it’s just joyous. You’re just playing, you’re figuring things out. It’s delightful. So I’m purely analog. I only write with my pen. I don’t write on a computer until the very, very end. I don’t even read my drafts ever. I write a full draft and then I put it to the side. I start over again as many times as is necessary. Because I’m actually embracing failure. I want to know the limits of my ability to tell this story. And then it starts to grow its own ability to tell itself. Eventually if you do it enough times, then it’s not me, right? I’m not the one writing it; it’s the book itself that has come up against all of these obstacles and is teaching me how to put it down on the page. Failure in our society has so much negative baggage. But if you’re thinking about it as pure play the whole way through until the story itself starts to talk to you, until you know what you need to do, then that’s just pure joy, that’s sheer pleasure. And so I really love the fail draft. I love the first shitty thing that I don’t want anyone to ever read, because they couldn’t, because my handwriting’s egregious. So I let it all in. I let the failure in because it’s how you understand the world.

Wood: But that’s an amazing thing were you saying, Lauren. If you are at 100 pages into a manuscript, or even just 20 pages into a manuscript, you don’t sit down and read that 20 pages; you just keep going?

Laine Perfas: Oh, just a quick note for our listeners, Lauren is now holding up a notebook.

Groff: This is what I’m working on now, and I’ll never read it over again. It just doesn’t matter.

Wood: Wow. That’s amazing. I’m fascinated to ask the other two, Nick and Sam, do you work like that?

White: I have yellow legal notepads that I write on when I’m trying to just figure out the bones of the story, and then I’ll go to the computer. And I’ll type up what I imagine is going to be the first chapter, and then I’ll print that out and set it aside and look at it again. And then I’ll make corrections on that. And then I’ll open up another Word document, then I’ll go back to the yellow legal pad. So I do a mix of that, but I also find that when I’m working on a project, I carry it around with me everywhere I go. For me, writing is the stuff I do at my desk, yes, but it’s also the stuff I’m thinking about when I’m walking. My partner likes to say that I live in the clouds. And I think that is something that I struggle with: being present a lot of the time. Because I am thinking about the story and the ways in which I’ve written myself into a corner, or things that I don’t quite yet understand about a character or a situation. And it feels like there are these little knots that I’m slowly untying. I think for me, time is a great teacher. When I’m drafting in the heat of the draft, I can convince myself what I’ve written is brilliant. And then I go back the next day, and I look at it with perhaps more sober eyes, and I’m like, “Oh, this is not actually brilliant.”

Marks: I think that “shitty first draft” thing is accurate. It’s a weird, altered state where I’m writing and when I go back, I’m like, “I wrote that, oh, that’s cool.” Like, literally, I’ve forgotten what I’ve written. I do that a couple of drafts. And then once you find what it is, then more of the craft comes in, then I have to be a different kind of writer for myself: What am I trying to do in this scene? What is it really about? And then molding it. But that first phase of just going is the hardest and most exciting thing.

White: James, you mentioned about beginnings and trying to find the first sentence, and I was thinking a lot about that. I often think that revision for me in the drafting process is a way of pulling it out of myself when I’m the only reader, but start thinking about there’s going to be other readers to this and start thinking about it like a reader. And one of the things that a writing teacher once told me about beginnings that I think is so important is that when you begin a story, you also, through discourse, begin to teach the reader how to read the story. And I feel like the process of revision is like thinking about that reader constantly and who that reader is.

Wood: I love that. I was just so interested to hear from all of you because most of my writing is professionalized reviewing, this is like 4,000 words, 5,000 words at the most, and so it’s completely different. I tend to begin at the beginning and end at the end. And that means I obsessively have to get the beginning right. The first couple of paragraphs have to be the right ones. Once I’ve got that, then everything can flow, and it flows fairly quickly. But that first bit can be extremely slow.

Marks: Can I ask a question about your process, James? Let’s say you’re reading a novel. What’s the process of reading and synthesizing your experience to writing what you thought about it?

Wood: So the first reading I, like most of us, I’m sure, I read with a pen in hand and I’m putting lines under things and dog-earing pages. But I try to just suspend judgment as much as possible and let the experience of the book have its way. And then when I go back to the things that I thought were interesting… “Why did I dog-ear that? Oh, there’s that passage. I really liked that image, that word.” And then when I’m doing that, I’m assembling some kind of argument, but I think that first reading, I try to be fairly open and innocent.

White: That’s how I tell my students to read each other’s work in workshops. Read it at least twice; the first read is what I call the “honeymoon read,” where anything goes. This is just like a fun read; let the piece just have its way with you.

Laine Perfas: So what’s after the honeymoon read?

White: Well, then it’s the “seven-year itch.” That’s when you get the pin out and that thing that you first adored, you’re like, “Dear God, does he have to use a conjunctive adverb every time he makes a contrasting point?”

“The first read is what I call the ‘honeymoon read,’ where anything goes. Then it’s the ‘seven-year itch.’”
Nick White

Laine Perfas: James, I was just thinking about what makes a good story, and is it possible to be objectively good, or does the reader just bring so much of their own selves to a text? I have picked up titles that were raved about by critics or friends. Then I get two chapters in and I’m like, “Ugh, it’s just not me.” So as a professional critic, I’m wondering your take on that question.

Wood: I would say, and I bet I’m joined here by everyone else, that I’m responding to and looking for a kind of vitality, a sort of liveliness and life on the page. And in that sense, once you’ve got that, other questions like, Is this a realist novel? Is this a postmodern experimental novel? Is it broken into numbered paragraphs? All that stuff, that’s not to the point. Is it? The thing that we’re trying to feel and find is just something very alive that draws you in. I have a very strong memory of back in about 2011, standing in the kitchen at the kitchen counter and opening a package from Archipelago Books. And they had sent me just on spec, the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s “My Struggle.” And I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never heard of him. I knew nothing about it, and there was just a little note saying, “Seems like you might be interested in this.” So I opened it and I just started reading it and I was standing there for three or four pages and I thought, “This has something. This has it, it’s drawing me in. It has real vitality.” So above all, I’m just looking for that thing, the non-deadness.

White: When I pick up a book to read it, I am always in the mindset where I am reading with my arms uncrossed, like, I want to be impressed. I want to be taken somewhere. I want to be drawn in. I never underestimate a book or a story’s power to make me forget everything else.

Laine Perfas: Thinking about that vitality or that life, I feel like that might be a sign that a story is working, either for you or just in general. As you are writing your own stories, how do you know whether or not it’s working?

Groff: If it comes close, you can feel it. It’s almost like a vibrational thing, you’re writing into it and it feels good, right? Even if it feels bad to write it, it feels good because you’re coming as close as possible to this thing that you want so badly to do. And that doesn’t mean that everyone who’s going to read it’s going to like it or going to feel the same vibration, but you feel it and you sense it and you know that it’s there. And it takes a very long time as a writer to actually develop a sense of that in your own work.

Marks: I just really appreciate, Lauren, how much you talk about how things feel and the vibrations and the physical nature of it. You’re talking about success at Harvard, and I think that a thing at Harvard — you’re right, most of the students are very successful. And most of the success has come at an intellectual level, and they plan their plays or their things in some ways. But, I think just returning to feeling or vibrations I just find it really useful, and I think I might use it in my class, that’s all. I’ll credit you.

Groff: Good! Sometimes we do have to detach our intellect from the thing that we’re trying to do, because it’s not all about intellect. Eventually in the editing process, that’s when we apply it. If you want to write something that’s going to affect people emotionally, you have to do it emotionally.

White: And it has to cost you more than the time you’re spending writing. It pushes me to my emotional and intellectual capabilities. When something is working, it is because all cylinders are firing and I am working at the very bleeding edge of what I am capable of.

Wood: I’d also say, as a tip — I don’t know if it’s useful for any of our listeners — first of all, I tend to just quietly read under my breath as I’m reading through a paragraph or two. I quietly read it so that I can get a sense, but I also think actually just a more vocal version of that, of actually reading something out loud. It’s interesting, isn’t it, when you read from your work in a bookshop. I don’t know if others have had this. I’ve certainly had it. You agree to read a few pages, and suddenly you find you’ve edited out a sentence. It’s like some weird kind of bullshit detector went off and you thought, “Ah, I can’t pull that one off on the room.” And there’s probably a good reason for that, right? And it should have been left out in the original book. So I think that’s the estranging thing always — you want estrangement, don’t you? Because you’re trying to split yourself into two. This other person, this colder person who is ready to murder the darlings, will ideally read what you’ve written, and that’s very difficult to do.

White: Reading aloud is so important. I work in my office here at Lamont and I’m sure that when I was back at OSU as a professor there, my colleagues who were nearby, probably thought I was insane because I’m reading my stuff aloud and it must appear that I am like in some ways having a breakdown, especially depending on what part of the story or chapter I’m reading. But that is so true.

Laine Perfas: James, you mentioned the phrase “murder your darlings.” Just in case there’s people listening who are not familiar with it, because it sounds pretty morbid, it’s this idea that you may have these beloved passages or sentences or characters even, but you have to kill them for the greater good of the story. Does it get easier to murder your darlings?

Wood: I think it does, I certainly have memories of being much younger and reacting badly to editors, possessively and somewhat neurotically storming around the house for a couple of days and saying, “This fool wants to…” And then I think just having enough of those experiences, you begin to realize that there is wisdom outside oneself.

White: Editors have saved my ass so many times. I remember in a story from my story collection, my editor, Kate Napolitano, she was so brilliant. She had a great bullshit detector. I remember there was one line in one of my stories where I said, “He wept,” and she put a little note there that said, “Who is he? Jesus?” And, I just cut it out. And I was like, oh, I don’t know. I think I like this, but she’s saying, cut it out. And I cut it out and then I go back and revisit the story. It just works so much better. Like everything she’d ever told me to cut out, I have done and followed. And it made it so much better. I totally agree that murdering all of that gets so much easier, becomes a sociopath almost for your bad lines.

Marks: Can I have a little counter to this? A gentle pushback. Obviously. Yes. Kill your darlings. Yes. Of course. Edit. And it does get easier. I think that’s true. That said, sometimes things are difficult, and people don’t like them, but it doesn’t mean you should cut them. I’m not saying you need to be willfully difficult, but that you do things even though they may not be immediately appealing. It goes back to the TV conversation. So much TV is bad because it’s always rewarding, and there’s a place for that. But there’s also a place for things that don’t reward immediately. I’m just saying that in the killing of your darlings discussion, you have to balance, do I need this? Is this bad? Who is this telling? And that’s why it makes it hard, right? Maybe I haven’t done a good enough job of writing the thing I want to write. It’s not that I should cut it, it’s that I should write it better. That’s the challenge.

Groff: That’s what good editing is, flagging those moments where there’s no life or there’s less life than you need. It’s not telling you to cut something. It’s telling you it needs to be better. Everyone needs an editor.

White: One of my greatest writing teachers, Michele Herman, she had this famous mark that she would put on your stories. They were brackets. She would bracket a sentence and she would just write out on the side, “Do better here.” And it really worked.

Laine Perfas: I am having a flashback to my early writing career and how a comment like that would’ve caused me to have a total breakdown, and I would take it so personally. But I do think with experience and perspective, you realize that there’s nothing to take personally; we all benefit from having other people weigh in on stuff.

White: We all make bad art on the way to making good art, and it’s just the way it is.

“We all make bad art on the way to making good art.”
Nick White

Laine Perfas: As we wrap up this episode, do you have any advice for other writers out there?

White: One of the things I’ve found has been very useful in talking to my students, especially, when we’re working on short stories, but more than ever when we’re working on novels, is thinking about your process and thinking about your schedule. I’m teaching a novel workshop next semester, and one of the first things that we’re going to do is talk about our schedule, making time for the practice of writing in our daily lives. And I think that has always been something that has saved me even when I’m feeling stuck, I know that every Monday from 7 in the morning to 10, I’m going to spend three hours that Monday thinking about my work, even if I don’t put a mark on the page, I’m still thinking about it. I’m still wrestling with it. I think Peter Ho Davies, who teaches at University of Michigan, talks about how you don’t have to write every day, but you still need to touch your work every day. And I think that is something that has always helped me. When I feel like I’m failing and I don’t know my way out of a particular story, my instinct, going back to what Sam said about how we deal with conflict is to run away, is to procrastinate, is to watch a really bad television show or do something that’s not writing. But that’s the time when I need to go to the work and sit with it.

Groff: Writing is more a verb than it is a noun. It’s the process. What you’re doing is focused on the process. That’s the art. And if you happen to have something at the end of it that other people can read, that’s great. That allows you to do it again.

I don’t know if anybody ever gave this advice, but it feels like someone did, so I’m just going to go with it. There really are no rules, right? If you look at the great works of literature, Leo Tolstoy does everything that he wants to do because he can, right? So it’s really only the rules inherent to the story at hand that you need to discover, and then everything else you just figure out as you’re going.

So do not be hide-bound. Do not be rule-bound. Do not be afraid. Go courageously into the work and the work will reward you.

“Do not be hide-bound. Do not be rule-bound. Do not be afraid. Go courageously into the work and the work will reward you.”
Lauren Groff

Wood: Lovely.

White: I love that.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me today.

Groff: Thanks, Sam.

White: Thank you.

Marks: Thanks, Sam.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To see a transcript of this episode or to listen to our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. If you’re a fan of this podcast and want to support our work, share it with a friend or colleague. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas, with additional production and editing support from Sarah Lamodi, and editing by Ryan Mulcahy, Paul Makishima, and Max Larkin. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2025.