How I Write – Caitlin Corrigan

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When/how/where do you write?

It varies. Lately I’ve been in kind of a creative slump, so I’ve been handwriting in a few different notebooks basically whenever I feel like it. This helps take the pressure off. When I’m really going on a project, I write a few times a week in the morning before my day job and/or in larger bursts on the weekends and/or evenings. I write at a cool old library carrel that I bought off some guy’s porch in New Orleans and painted green. I like my cluttered, colorful space, but it’s also where I do my boring ghostwriting/copywriting and pay bills, so sometimes I need to go somewhere else to reset myself and get into a freer, creative mode vs. functional deadline mode. I also put a mandala on my laptop desktop a few months ago. Looking at the different patterns is supposed to help reset your thinking. Results on that vary too, but it’s a nice reminder to stay present and refocus if I’m jumping from project to project.

Do you eat while you write? If so, what?

Popcorn and chocolate are two faves. And I drank a whole case of La Croix water on a weekend writing marathon last fall. Something about the bubbles makes me feel extra productive.

Do you play music while you write? If so, what? 

I have a “Cinematic Orchestra” Pandora station that I really like. I can’t do anything with lyrics, so atmospheric and instrumental stuff is where it’s at. (Although sometimes it feels like cheating because it makes your writing feel more evocative than it really is). Silence or “brown noise” is also good!

What are you reading right now?

Just finished Alice Munro’s collection, Friend of My Youth. About to start Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women. I stopped reading short fiction for about six months and now I’m ready to dive back in and make up for lost time.

Caitlin Corrigan lives and writes in southern Maine. She earned her MFA from Rutgers-Newark in 2014, and her fiction has appeared in NANO, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Reach her and read more at www.caitlincorrigan.com.