The Book of Alchemy

The Book of Alchemy came from a habit she dismissed as too easy. Jaouad had journaled since childhood and kept hundreds of journals, but avoided turning that practice into a book because it felt unserious and too easy. The creativity book grew out of it anyway.

Both her books grew from questions already sitting in her journals and her talks with friends, though it hadn't occurred to her that these were subjects. Her advice is to ask what question or obsession you keep circling, because it is often too close to see: "the question you're already asking yourself might be the question that guides the writing."

How I Write▶ 30:10

A private, unjudged journal is what unlocked her creative work. At 22 she opened a Word document thinking she had to write something "New York Times"-worthy, which killed any impulse. In the hospital with leukemia, with no one expecting anything, she wrote in her journal like a child, for the joy of it, using it as a reporter's notebook for things she could not say aloud.

She drafts by hand to keep the inner editor away, and uses prompts to break recursive loops; the prompts she resists often yield the most. Poet Marie Howe's trick of starting with "I don't want to write about" and writing into it is one example she cites.

How I Write