Jayne Anne Phillips' Advice on Writing: The Pulitzer Winner on Sentences, Time, and Entering the Dream

Jayne Anne Phillips won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Night Watch, a novel set in and around a Civil War-era asylum in West Virginia. She wrote Machine Dreams, Shelter, and Lark and Termite. She started as a poet writing compressed one-page fictions in her twenties. She did not win the Pulitzer until her seventies.

Her writing advice comes from David Perell's "How I Write" podcast, an LA Review of Books interview, Famous Writing Routines, and her published teaching philosophy.

Inside the Material

Phillips keeps returning to a single phrase: "I'm inside the material following the sentences themselves deeper." Not thinking about the material. Inside it. When Perell asks what goes through her head while writing, she says: "Nothing is going through my head. I'm just focused on following it into the next line."

She describes the state the way a car mechanic or a cook might describe being lost in the work. Time disappears. The outside world drops away. "You're not thinking about anything else." The goal is not flow as a productivity hack. The goal is disappearance into the work itself.

A reader once told her: "When I read your work, I don't feel as though I'm reading about something. I feel as though I'm inside it." Phillips says that is exactly the effect she is after. When we read "I cross the street," we become the persona crossing. If the writing is good enough, we experience what happens to that voice as though it is happening to us.

The Spiral of One-Page Fictions

Phillips learned to write by compressing entire stories into a single page. Not prose poems. Fictions with a beginning, middle, and end, written in dense, metaphoric language, where "the entire story has a kind of spiral construction that moves out of the center like an oil well bursting."

The last line had to be perfect. It had to create "a kind of white space around it." The title transformed by the time you finished reading. These constraints taught her everything about compression, about making every word structural.

Here is the opening of "Wedding Picture," from her collection Sweethearts:

My mother's ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Under the cloth, her body in its olive skin unfolds. The black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth.

She wrote the whole thing in one pass, moved a few words around. The metaphoric language is "sort of limitless," but the form is ruthlessly tight. An exercise she gave students: bring in your parents' wedding picture. Write the photograph. Write the twenty years beyond it. One student brought a picture of the orphanage where he grew up.

Edit with Your Ears

"Language is a music." Phillips says you can hear where writing goes wrong the way you hear a flat note on a piano. Read the work aloud. The rhythm will tell you where to cut.

She writes line to line, thinking about internal rhyme, the sounds of syllables, the way the line sits on the page. This is a poet's composition process applied to fiction. Not poetry. But a poet's attention to the sentence as a unit of sound.

From Machine Dreams: "The fields surrounding the house were full of light. Scrub grass grew tall and the milkweed stalks were thick as wrists. Wild wheat was in the fields and the crows fed wheeling in circular formations."

"Thick as wrists" - you see it. "Milk syrup in the weeds was sticky and white. The pods were tight and wouldn't burst for weeks." Sexual, natural, physical. The power of the natural world rendered through sound.

The Ten-Year Wait

Phillips worked on Night Watch for about eight years. She had been thinking about the book for a decade before she started writing. A friend told her, fifteen years before publication, that she had mentioned the idea of a mother and daughter going to an asylum.

She does not plan books. She does not outline. She wrote the first ten or twenty pages of Night Watch - a twelve-year-old girl being hustled into a buckboard by a man she has been told to call Papa - and then stopped. "Okay, now what? I had no idea."

When she gets stuck, she does not panic. She goes back. She reads the last page. If that does not work, she goes back ten pages. If that does not work, she goes back to the very beginning and reads through to where she is. "That's how you know what to write next, because you have to be inside the material."

She retired from teaching in January 2020, right before the pandemic. The isolation became a strange gift. "This book almost became my refuge in the way that the asylum becomes a surprising refuge." The irony at the heart of Night Watch - that safety exists inside the walls of an institution while the outside world is chaos - mirrored her own experience of writing through lockdown.

Writing Is Practicing for Death

Phillips told her students: "Writing is practicing for death." Not morbidly. Writing is about transformation. The act of moving from wanting to write to actually writing involves a fundamental shift. You are no longer yourself. You are inside the work.

"I want to be aware," she says about death. "We don't remember birth, at least not consciously." Writing, for Phillips, is the practice of being present for transformation - the biggest one being the one we cannot rehearse except through art.

Children Are the Ultimate Outlaws

Phillips writes frequently from the perspective of children. Her literary heroes - James Agee, Faulkner - did the same. But her reason is specific: "Children are the ultimate outlaws. They don't see anything in context. It's all new."

A child's point of view is beginner's mind. The twelve-year-old narrator of Night Watch has no framework for what is happening to her. She processes the world through sensation, not analysis. If you can write that voice believably, "it does something no other voice can do."

Phillips grew up in a small West Virginia town where adults operated behind screens of secrecy. Children caught fragments of adult conversation. Gossip. Subtext. "There is this sense of a world underneath the world, a secret web of secrets." The child-narrator is an archaeologist of that hidden world.

The Rabbit Run Moment

At nine or ten years old, Phillips found a mass-market copy of John Updike's Rabbit, Run in her father's hidden stash of paperbacks. She opened it to the scene where Janice, drunk, loses her grip on her baby in the bathtub.

"It just completely blew my brains apart. I remember looking out the window and seeing the lilac bushes as though they didn't even look like lilac bushes."

She did not think "I want to be a writer." She did not think anything. It was pure impact. The power of reading something that makes the physical world look different afterward. She put the book back. She did not read the rest until years later. But the moment stayed.

The Dogged Persistence

Phillips has never thrown away a book. Maybe one story. "Once I start something, I feel this need to see it through because I feel it's there. I'm just not seeing it."

She does not write every day. She writes in spurts, weeks or months at a time. Between books, years can pass. But she does not abandon work. She waits. She falls back into research. She reads Civil War letters, diaries, books of photographs. She lets the speech patterns of another century wash over her without taking notes.

For Night Watch, she read a four-volume Civil War set composed of letters from generals, infantry, women in the South and North. "I wasn't sort of looking for things or writing things down. It was just sinking in." The voices of another time entered her ear. When she returned to writing, they were there.

Writing Cannot Be Afraid

"Your only responsibility is to write with compassion," Phillips told her students. "Beyond that, you have to just tell the truth."

She warns against thinking about the audience. "The minute you think about an audience, it immediately cuts you off from what's really happening, which is the book that you're trying to write." The same applies to worrying about how people you know will react. "The minute you start to write about someone, it's not that someone." Fiction transmutes the real into something new. That transmutation requires fearlessness.

Key Takeaways

• Get inside the material. Do not think about it. Follow the sentences deeper.
• Write compressed forms first. One-page fictions teach you everything about density.
• Edit with your ears. Read aloud. Listen for the flat note.
• When stuck, go back to the beginning. Read through to where you are. The work will tell you what comes next.
• Do not plan. Follow the work where it leads, even if that means years of not knowing.
• Write from the perspective of outlaws. Children see what adults have learned to ignore.
• Never throw away a book. If you started it, the story is there. You just cannot see it yet.
• Do not think about the audience. Do not think about anyone's reaction. Write the truth.

Phillips spent decades writing in the margins of a teaching career, raising children, and waiting for books to reveal themselves. The Pulitzer came when she was in her seventies. There were no shortcuts. Athens is a writing tool for writers who follow sentences into the material and want an editor that respects the music of what they find there.

This post draws from Phillips' appearance on How I Write, the LA Review of Books, Famous Writing Routines, and her published teaching philosophy.