My Brain Is a Compost Bin

(Inspiration is not theft)

I listen to a lot of writing podcasts, read a lot of Substacks, interviews, and craft books, and there’s one thing that hits me like a jump scare every time I hear it — 

Some writers don’t read while they are drafting!

Their motivations are honorable, surely. They don’t want to taint their stories with stories that came before. They don’t want other voices seeping into their own. Do they fear actual (accidental) plagiarism, or do they believe their prose needs to be protected? Or is it something else entirely? A way to protect themselves from the imposter syndrome that can come from reading a published (read: meticulously-edited) book when they are drafting (read: flailing around with) their own manuscript?

Whatever it is, I don’t relate.

It’s me.

No matter where I am in the writing process—from the first flash of a premise to the final edits (which surely I will get from my editor soon?)—I never stop reading. I love stories too much to take a break. I need them. I read to escape, to learn, to fall asleep or to stay awake. I listen to audiobooks as I chauffeur my kids from ballet to krav maga to flag football to therapy because if I didn’t, I would go insane in all this traffic. I read because I want to know what other people are reading, and I want to talk about it. I read for inspiration.

I read because I am greedy.

This would make nice compost. Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

I believe it was Neil Gaiman who came up with the concept of the creative compost heap, but I didn’t hear it from him first. All I know is that when I did hear it, his metaphor resonated with me. It still does.

I keep notebooks the way a gardener collects scraps. As she saves eggshells and crunchy leaves and banana peels—all those precious, organic, vitamin-rich bits—to transform them into fertilizer, so do I churn together pieces of everything I find—from personal relationships to overheard dialogue, and yes, other people’s books—in order to create soil rich enough to grow a whole new novel.

Here is a sampling of things I dropped into my compost heap while I was writing TELL THEM YOU LIED: 

My midwestern undergrad campus

Dayna Kukafka’s breathtaking prose in NOTES ON AN EXECUTION

Ashley Audrain’s POV in THE PUSH

The nickname a high school friend’s parents game him that he still uses 40+ years later

Jessica Knoll’s dual timeline in LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE

My daughter’s white-blue eyes

The perfect pacing of THE TURNOUT by Megan Abbott and WE WERE NEVER HERE by Andrea Bartz

The podcast ONCE UPON A TIME AT BENNINGTON COLLEGE (and by extension THE SECRET HISTORY and everything Donna Tartt has ever written)

My sister’s dimples

The ingenious twist in Ruth Ware’s IT GIRL

The layout of my second New York City apartment (where I lived on 9/11)

That is some rich soil, Seth Cottle (via Unsplash)

I used all of these influences in my novel, but none of them verbatim.

What do I mean?

Well, the very real music college at my alma mater became an art school (I know nothing about music), to which I added the dark academia, everythings-a-competition vibes of THE SECRET HISTORY and ONCE UPON A TIME AT BENNINGTON COLLEGE; together it became a whole new university. A totally fictional place.

My main character’s Brooklyn apartment needed windows in the kitchen, so I shifted the layout and added them, then I moved that apartment to a neighborhood I lived in a decade later, so I could get my MC to the right subway station.

I read IT GIRL twice to see how Ruth Ware pulled off her twist, and I borrowed a reverse outline of THE TURNOUT from my writing partner and did my own on WE WERE NEVER HERE. Then I mapped out the beats in my own book to see how it compared. I tweaked and tweaked until I had an actual structure for the A timeline of TTYL.

My B timeline flashed backward instead of forward, the way I had envisioned when I first read LUCKIEST GIRL ALIVE, and then, many drafts later, I manipulated the B chapters so that they had their own 16 beat structure in order to bridge A and B in the satisfying way that Jessica Knoll had done.

I used second person like Ashley Audrain, but only in half the book, and the reason for the “you” voice in TTYL is different than in THE PUSH (no spoilers).

To write as beautifully as Dayna Kukafka is my goal (but sadly, I will probably never manage it).

I did, however, keep my daughter’s eyes, my sister’s dimples, and my high school friend’s name exactly the same. (Sorry, Boomer. It’s too good not to use.)

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When I first got serious about writing and publishing a book ten years ago, I was still working in the NYC art world, and I felt like I only had one story to tell. That one story had to be unique and special—the only one of its kind. I remember slamming shut Tom Wolfe’s BACK TO BLOOD in cold dread as soon as he mentioned Art Basel Miami Beach. Likewise Steve Martin’s AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY (auction houses), and B.A. Shapiro’s THE ART FORGER (guess!). I was afraid of these books being too close to my book.

But in the years since, I have read enough novels about artists and the art world to know that no two stories are the same. Because no two writers are the same. Because no two compost heaps produce the same soil.

It reminds me of that old nugget: there’s nothing new under the sun. It seems to me the least true thing under the sun. Every story is new—don’t worry about that.

Worry about making it work.