I hope I taste great.

Here’s the thing to know about me: I’m never so sad that I lose my appetite. Sometimes I pretend that I am because the part of my brain that is responsible for being dramatic is probably too large (I suspect this is because it is overfed). Also, claiming that I’m “too distraught to eat” seems like tragic-heroine 101. But in truth, barbeque chicken always sounds great — before a break-up, after a break-up, in the middle of a breakup. And just like I’m never too sad to eat, I’m also never too sad to dream up fantastic alternate universes. Or practice my Academy Award acceptance speech in really shiny storefront windows. And, perhaps most importantly, I am never too sad — never “too” anything — to read. Food, books, a wildly reckless imagination — these are the cornerstones of my life and my writing. People fit in there too, but good crust and good characters? They never disappoint.

Have you ever noticed that different writers taste like different things? Salinger tastes like pickled herring on crackers — the kind that comes in a glass jar and has been in someone’s cupboard since the ’50s. Hemingway tastes like an old fashioned — he would have loved that. David Sedaris tastes like Cherry Pepsi and John Irving is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich on white bread. Roald Dahl is a pimento olive. Sometimes he’s malt balls. Larry McMurtry is black walnut saltwater taffy. Kay Thompson is a strawberry mille feuille, where as Norah Ephron is a soy latte. And though it changes, today when I was reading Winesburg, Ohio I tasted Saltines in Sherwood Anderson.

Sometimes when I don’t know what to write the simplest thing to do is eat, hoping the writer snuggled up in that jar of mayonnaise (that’s Dr. Seuss, by the way) will inspire me to similarly fatty greatness. Sometimes I eat bad food. That works too. A hunk of rye so hard you have to soften it in coffee that’s weak and tastes like cigarette butts or else break your molars? I did that once and came out with something delightfully Mid-Western. You get different words with good and bad food, but you never get bad words. Sitting in a diner one time at 11:00 pm I ordered a slice of key-lime pie (the kind so green you know it shares an ingredient with drain cleaner) and tasted my character’s backstory in the star of whipped cream piped on top.

This works for me because I don’t have to think to taste, I just have to open my mouth. Sometimes it’s for a tiny lick — a flick of the tip of my tongue on the frosty-white side of a grape popsicle. Sometimes it’s muscle-pulling, sweat-inducing chews on square chunks of not-quite tender beef in carrot and potato stew. Sometimes it’s a shard of dark chocolate that I coax into play by rubbing it in the hot space between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Food can be a shamelessly sensual experience if you let it. And it’s in the moments where I let a bite, or a lick, or a crunch take me out of my own body — where I let my senses be queen and force analysis to take a hike — that I come up with some of my favorite combinations of words.

But when people ask me how I get inspired and how they can get inspired — bracing themselves for some eccentric artistic process involving sun salutations or self-flagellation — I don’t tell them I think about whether my main character is finger-food or not, and then stare at them like they should know what I’m getting at. Instead, I tell them what all writers know and pass down to other inspiring writers — I read. A lot. And the person who asked me pretty much gets bored at that point and we start talking about something else. But the truth is, if you think reading is boring, you probably shouldn’t be a writer. The good news is, if you think reading is boring you probably don’t want to be a writer. (I hear there are big exceptions to this, but I liked the bad-ass finality of that line too much to change it for accuracy’s sake).

If I can’t write, I pick up a book and at some point some sentence — some extraordinarily simple and unexpected use of language — will trigger a swell of emotion in my throat that I absolutely must let out before it chokes me. You can’t swallow it. It causes horrible acid reflux. And if you grind your teeth against it someone else can’t Heimlich it out of you — it’s like a marshmallow in that way. And trust me when I say you want to unclench your jaw and let all the Q’s and L’s and P’s tumble out from their pig-pile in your esophagus onto a page held right under your chin to catch them, because what results is sometimes funny, occasionally sad, and always surprising.

So here’s my process. On days I want to write I start the morning off with Isabel Allende and coffee. I’ll leaf through some Billy Collins while the toast is crisping, and alternate swipes of blackberry jam with paragraphs of George Saunders. If it’s raining, I’ll have Virginia Wolfe and oatmeal. If it’s too hot for electricity, I’ll sit outside with my bare feet on the porch railing — biting the teeth off big smiles of cantaloupe and alternating bites of muesli with Anne Lamott. Sometimes it’s noon and it still doesn’t feel like a writing day. So I go off and do something or other until, over a thick slab of honey-cake and mouthfuls of iced peach tea, I suddenly have the inescapable urge to be as great as Somerset Maugham. When I fail, as will always be the case, I sit — stomach and heart happy despite it all — and let e.e. cummings tell me how much he loves me in just enough words.

And at some point — in this mess of eating and reading and day-dreaming of grandeur — I sit at my computer and let myself try and capture nothing but a feeling that I feel is true. Whether I got there on circus peanuts or caviar. On the back of Michael Cunningham or in the lap of Helen Fielding. I know words are coming when the tips of my fingers start to tingle. It’s a sensation similar to what happens in your toes when you looking over the side of a cliff. Or the feeling on the under side of your tongue when you think about vinegar. When I’m writing, it means that my body is ready to cooperate with my mind. It also means that if I don’t write down whatever words are wriggling around under my skin trying to get out, my hands will fall off. And I can just forget about sleeping. Sometimes I write just so I can sleep.

I will pen, pencil, type, lipstick write on my mirror, dictate paragraphs into my phone, say it out-loud while I’m driving and demand that whoever is sitting in the passenger seat remember it word for word until I can find a marker and a stoplight — basically stop at nothing — until in some form the words are out of me.

My point is that it doesn’t matter two-shits whether I use a №2 pencil or the collapsible keyboard on my iPad, as long as it gets rid of that tingling. The moment I accepted my moleskin would be used for grocery lists and lines of songs I want to remember to find the names of later, I freed up my imagination to puke itself up on whatever surface was nearest and available. Yes, I stand by “puke” because sometimes it’s even more embarrassing than that. Sometimes it stinks so badly I write my sister’s name in the corner so that if somehow it gets separated from me I can flat out deny it is mine.

Yet caring about if others like what I write — and by others I mean real, breathing humans that people besides myself can see — is actually a recently developed vanity. Trust me, it’s alive and swinging now. But mostly I write so I can live brighter. Because somehow I find that if I do, letters form into words, which form into sentences, which form into lines that look militaristic as they march across a page until suddenly the whole thing bursts into a ticker-tape parade. I write like I eat — to make the sad times better and the good times sweeter. To sustain me. And I hope someday my words find their way into someone else’s mouth to sustain them. Preferably a mouth that is reading aloud to a set of riveted ears. And I hope they are loved by those ears and that mouth. And I hope that someday someone will take a bite of something somewhere, and think: “Oh yes, this is how she tastes.” I hope it’s delicious.