52 Ideas for an Inspired New Year

If you’ve ever experienced that wonderful feeling of creative flow while working on a project so original and so promising that you lose track of time (and of course you have; you’re a writer), then you know the opposite feeling of being stuck, your creativity blocked. To help you get unstuck, for ten years we’ve been asking authors to recommend books, art, music, films, and activities—anything that inspires them in their writing—and shared those suggestions in our weekly online feature Writers Recommend. Here are fifty-two of the most inspiring ideas to keep creativity flowing in the new year.

I listen to the Rolling Stones of the early 1970s play a live version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
—ADAM GOPNIK

I return to Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott like the literary scripture it is.
—HALAALYAN

Find a tree. A tree with many, many branches, underneath or within which you allow yourself to daydream and nightsing.
—CHEN CHEN

Running sheds any internal blockage and allows me to write more emotionally inclusive poems by letting me see more of the world we all live in.
—JOHN MCCARTHY

Read Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary and feel encouraged by the fact that a genius worried about bad reviews.
—LENI ZUMAS

I head to the aquarium. I often go alone. I—SJ SINDU