Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Be relentless with yourself when it comes to revision, with pushing yourself as hard as you can to take each sentence closer and closer to the truth. But don’t let that urge blind you to the need to go slow, to go back, to write it again. I know how strong that urge is to just be done with something - to send it out, to declare it finished. I have learned the importance of sitting myself down, of putting in the hours. Mary Gordon once said to me (when I was talking about not having enough time to write), “If you are a writer then you write.” I have never forgotten this straightforward and crucial piece of advice. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

And then sometimes, that feeling of being empty or stuck gives way and opens the path to the next breakthrough. I know all too well how maddening it can be, to feel used up or hollowed out to feel like I have run into a wall. I feel like its just part of the process for me - a back and forth between motion and stillness, between ease and frustration. Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Right now I am trying to slowly sneak up on the novel, making notes, doing some reading, letting myself think about what I want to write about before actually diving in. I am just about to start a new novel, and though I’ve written four book, I still feel a sense of immense fear that I don’t know how to do this. I try to sit for long stretches even when I don’t feel like it. I write different places depending on my mood - often in bed, sometimes in coffee shops, always with my headphones in to block out any noise. I write during the day when my kids are in school. In college, I had the privilege to study with Mary Gordon, a brilliant writer and extremely generous teacher who first made me believe in the possibility of my becoming a writer. In high school I had an English teacher - a poet with a renegade spirit who was marvelously out of place in my strict Orthodox Jewish high school - who first opened me to the possibility of writing. I have had the gift of several teachers who have influenced me. Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). I grew up in a religious world where I always had the sense that many things were being left unsaid, and writing became a way to say those things.

And then, as I got older, I found that writing was the way I could understand the world, the way I could ask hard questions and think about different ways to be. I first wanted to become a writer because I loved to read - I was one of the kids always buried in a book.

The book of separation by tova mirvis