Antonya Nelson

	Antonya Nelson teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, and is the award-winning author of three novels—Some Fun, Female Trouble, The Expendables—and four short story collections, most recently In the Land of Men. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, and Best American Short Stories. She divides her time among Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.
photo credit: Steve Puppe

An Artist in the Studio, Working—From an Interview by Andrew Scott

If you could step back and offer your younger self, the one who's just started to think of herself as a writer, one piece of writing advice, what would it be?

I think I would encourage myself to be patient with my own proclivities. I spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn't being a writer in the correct way. I don't write every day—I write when I'm burning with an idea. I don't really want to write novels—I prefer stories. These are temperamental issues. When I was young I didn't trust my temperament, or I didn't understand it, and therefore wasted time fretting about what I didn't do well rather than simply trusting what I did do well. It's only recently that I've adjusted my thinking to imagine myself as an artist. I don't know why that made such a huge difference, but it did. An artist in a studio, working. Not the author of the book in the store, but the person in her house, pursuing a thought or character or image and trying to wring something meaningful from it. I don't know if that actually sounds like advice, per se, but the longer I write the more aware I am of the privacy of the endeavor. And I would have been well served by understanding that earlier.