Getting Unstuck with Ramona Ausubel
May 26, 2026 at 03:30PM
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Ramona Ausubel’s latest book, Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, is a companion for writers at all stages of the process, offering doorways into, through, and out of writing projects. She is also the author of three novels and two short story collections.
Ausubel, who is a professor at Colorado State University, has taught at Tin House, The Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, The Community of Writers, Writing by Writers, the low-residency MFA programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Bennington. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The New York Times, and The Oxford American, among many others.
Creative Nonfiction Podcast host Brendan O’Meara recently spoke with Ausubel for Episode 528 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a conversation in which they talk about finding joy in the writing process, being resilient in the face of friction, and developing your voice as a writer. This excerpt from their conversation has been edited for clarity.
—Krista Stevens
Brendan: Why do you think people are so attracted to the idea of being a writer in the first place?
Ramona: I love that question. I feel like there’s two parts to it. It’s an essential way to communicate, and it’s totally different from talking to somebody. You get to form the whole thought as a writer all alone before anybody else is involved, tuning into your own thoughts and feelings, the language, the music of the language. All of that is so personal, and then you get to pass it over, but you had that time with yourself first. But then, yeah, there’s the tweed jacket, elbow patches, the cabin on the moors. You’re looking out in the fog, and maybe at some point you put on your wellies and go for a walk, but all you have to do is think and read and write all day long, which sounds just lovely, and is not the life of any writer I’ve ever met.
Brendan: It takes a lot of resilience and perseverance to be in this game for any length of time. What do you owe your resilience and perseverance to?
Ramona: I just really, I really love being in the work. The whole thing is being in the process, what I’m thinking about, the way an idea is evolving, the way I’m coming to understand characters if I’m writing fiction—that’s it. I just keep going back to that, and I also think the reason that I wrote Unstuck is because I think I’m good at coming up with ways through, and if I have that “I don’t know what to do next” feeling, my instinct is, okay, cool, let’s be mad about that, eat a cookie, and then it’s time to say, “How are we going to solve the problem?” It’s a cool puzzle. Let’s try this and that. I started to keep track of all of the “let’s try this” things, and pretty soon, there was a lot of them, and now they’re in a book.
Students constantly ask, so what do you do about writer’s block? You keep writing, you find a specific and small entry point and you continue on. There is no moment when that stops happening to you. For the most part, most of us have to say, okay, I’m in this dark place, it’s all foggy, I can’t see anything. What do I have? I have a sense of who this character is. I have a sense of the space of the world, and there’s like, 100 flashlights hanging on the wall. Why? I don’t know. Let’s see what we can do with all of those things. It’s just that next little step, and the next little step opens it up a little bit further, and you might get to another stuck place that’s different than the one before. But again, you’re going to look at what you have and keep moving forward. There’s 101 ways of creating that one small step forward, so that it doesn’t feel like a giant impossible task. But it’s a continuous act of discovery, which is not only not a problem, but a good thing. It’s the fun part. So not knowing also means that you get to discover so much more. You just have to keep asking again: Where am I? What am I interested in? What would be the next most fun thing, and what do I have in front of me that I can work with?
So not knowing also means that you get to discover so much more.
Brendan: What’s been your experience of running into that resistance, and then the temptation to try the shiny new thing, be it a new story or something else, instead of sitting with something ugly?
Ramona: So many writers have something in the drawer. I’ve been reading Elizabeth McCracken’s book, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction, which is fantastic. She talks about a lot of novels she hasn’t published, and she’s a terrific writer. So, if Elizabeth McCracken has six novels in a drawer, everybody gets to do that. If you come to the end of a thing and you feel like, my heart’s not in this, I don’t want to finish this book, maybe this book was just practice for something else. There’s absolutely no shame in letting that sit. Maybe you come back to it later and figure it out, you unlock it. Maybe you don’t. No writing is ever wasted, so whatever it turns into, whether it lives out in the world or not, it still matters for you, and for what you can write next. The only way to finish something is to keep coming back to it.
You have to write every single one of those pages, and you have to revise every single one of those pages over and over, and that requires a kind of persistence—just choosing to do it—even when you don’t understand it, because you won’t understand it all the time.
I also am a real believer in having another project at the same time, so that you can take a break from the big thing that’s scary. You can say, I’m going to write this short story because it is safe. It feels like I’m floating in a swimming pool on my little swan floaty, and I’ve got my bag of potato chips, and it’s all going to be okay. That is really different than trying to write an entire novel. Many times turning to a short story has saved me and saved the novel.
Brendan: And when did you feel that you were ready to write a craft book?
Ramona: I didn’t intend to do that at all. In fact, I started the earliest iterations of what became Unstuck when I was teaching in a low-residency MFA program. And then they said, “Oh, as faculty, you also will give a craft talk,” and I thought, oh no, I can’t give a craft talk. I can’t. I’m still too new, and I’m not that kind of writer. And then that same day, I had three different students come up to me and say, “I have to ask you a question. You talk about revision, but what do you mean? What is that like?” And I thought, actually, I do have thoughts about that. That’s something I pay a lot of attention to. And so I wrote a talk called “Eight Drafts in Search of a Story,” and there were eight different points of entry. That grew as I taught in different places, and I started to have these kind of different doorways. There were doorways to getting started, doorways through, as in continuing through that long middle, doorways up, about getting some perspective, especially on a long work—which is so hard—and then doorways out, about finishing and moving on. And as I started to see those separate sections (I probably had 50 of them) I thought, hmm, I wonder if this could be a book.
Brendan: I think it’s door 60 that really gets to finding your voice as a writer, which can be a years-long journey of synthesizing and metabolizing all your influences. How do you coach people to find their own voice and to be patient in finding it?
Ramona: It is such a lifelong process, and I feel like it changes all the time. Your voice is not a fixed thing that you finally trapped in a jar, that’s never going to get out. You’re growing older, and you have new ideas and new ways of seeing things, and things sound different to your ear. It’s trusting what you’re interested in, learning, and “following your weird,” as Jim Shepherd says, which is my favorite writing quote.
Brendan: In door 48, which is about reading, you say that students are often afraid that they’ll copy someone else, or that they’ll be unable to tell the difference between inspiration and their own voice. In almost every case, we become clearer about our own perspective the longer we keep writing. But it’s a long game, and being in it gives us a chance at developing into a truer sense of ourselves, which is always evolving.
Ramona: Inviting those outside influences in—the more you open your arms to that and have lots and lots of things coming into your brain, the more interesting and textured your own thinking becomes.
Listen to the full conversation below.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/05/26/cnf-pod-excerpt-ramona-ausubel/
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