Amanda Inman, 27, wears a pair of tortoise-shell glasses that she jokingly compares to Lester Holt’s, and she flips through a slim black Moleskin notebook until she finds a blank page. Typically, she works her way through three or four of these journals a year.  

Her writing practice yields snippets and images that become the raw material for her stories. Her work has appeared in Entropy, a poetry anthology titled Chasing Light, and elsewhere. 

As a marketing assistant for Penguin Random House, she is constantly immersed in a world of language. Still, she craves more. Her Saturday mornings, and the slivers of time she carves before and after work, are devoted to writing. 

She is now working on a project that’s loosely based on her year teaching in a rural South Florida community, with archival material braided in. 

Amanda shared insight into her creative process, how she handles rejection, and the path that led to where she is today. 

how she carves time 

I have a semi-regular writing group that I belong to. I tend to try to find like-minded people who don’t necessarily share the same taste. Everyone’s working on something very different: one person’s working on a screenplay, one person does personal essays, another person is only working on literary fiction. I found that that’s incredibly helpful to keep myself accountable.

Now that I have a dog, I wake up pretty early because she has to be out at 7. It’s impossible to go back to sleep after you've just been out in 20 degree weather in the snow. And so I come back and I read and I underline images that I like and sometimes it leads to writing. That searching and that reading with intent  feeds the same place that writing does, so it still feels productive.

A lot of my creative process is trying my hardest to devote time to taking classes and working on my own writing whether it's through the workshops or through classes.

she had to shake things up

I started to write creatively in college but I didn’t take it seriously, nor did I think that it was a career. When I moved away [to Paris, France], that distance really made me evaluate what I wanted for myself. There’s a huge anglophone creative writing community in Paris and so that was one of the things I could latch myself onto that didn’t require a ton of effort because that communication happened in English. 

and then, New York

Foolishly enough, I thought that New York and Paris would be somewhat similar but they’re very different from each other. So, while I was a shiny American writer in Paris, I was just one of millions of people trying to do the same thing in New York City, which is humbling.

her grit

It was a long time before I got a job in publishing. I applied for internships, I applied for entry level positions. I applied for everything for two years before finally entering into a publishing program at Pace, and then after one semester I left  because I got my position at Penguin Random House. 

ONE OF THE THINGS THAT I FIND BRINGS ME THE MOST PEACE IS JUST KNOWING THAT EVERY SINGLE STEP THAT I TAKE IS NOT A FINISH LINE, AND IT MIGHT FEEL LIKE IT’S A PLATEAU BUT IT’S NOT. NOTHING IS FOREVER.

Dealing with rejection, that’s really hard. It’s hard to hear that people don’t think your stuff is a good fit for what they’re working on but I think a lot of it... it honestly is random. The person that reads your creative writing work and passes it along to the next editor (or doesn’t)--they could be having a shitty day, and they might not be in the mood for whatever you submitted that day, and that doesn’t reflect negatively on your writing. It just wasn’t the right place at the right time. 

And [I’m also] celebrating even the smallest success like when I get a personalized rejection, I’m like I’m gonna frame it! It made it through the first round, that’s exciting.  

allow, allow, allow

It’s so hard to take the editor hat off when you’re writing, so sometimes your writing wants to take you in a certain direction, the story wants to take you in a certain direction, but then the editor hat is like, “Oh that’s not going to work out, that's a waste of time, I’m not going to explore it.” 

But even if you write like 20 pages and only one paragraph is good, you still have that content that can be repurposed for a different project, so that’s something that I’m working on--when you are writing to take the editor hat off, and to just follow it where it goes regardless. 

the smallest moments of self care 

One of the things that I’ve been really delighting in is taking [my dog] Billie for late night walks in the snow, and there’s a part of Riverside Park where there isn’t a path but some people cross country ski on it, so it’s like slicked down and easy to walk on. I’ll let Billie off leash, and it's just really nice to be alone in the semi-wooded area. That’s a little bit of self care, is going for a  nice walk with a thousand layers so you’re actually sweating.

I THINK SO MUCH OF IT IS JUST DOING THE WORK AND SEEING WHERE IT GOES, BECAUSE YOU CAN’T BE A WRITER IF YOU’RE NOT WRITING.