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Why I Write
Into the Weeds
An illuminating reflection on the creative process from acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and translator Lydia Davis
When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that the question makes her uncomfortable. Maybe she would rather not know. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why.
In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn’t exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended.
Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, patient inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new.
When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that the question makes her uncomfortable. Maybe she would rather not know. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why.
In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn’t exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended.
Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, patient inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new.
- GenresNonfictionWriting
152 pages, Hardcover
Published September 16, 2025
11 people are currently reading
308 people want to read
About the author
Lydia Davis
352 books1,466 followersLydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize.
Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”
Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.
Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.
The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”
Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).
Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”
Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.
She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.
Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."
Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”
Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.
Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.
The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”
Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).
Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”
Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.
She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.
Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 21, 2025
To travel into or with Lydia Davis's brain is a journey worth being on.
October 30, 2025
Dear Lydia Davis,
Is that the right way to begin? “Dear Lydia” is too informal; it implies an intimacy that, as strangers, we do not have. “Dear Ms. Davis” is too detached, the start of a curt, courteous reply to a formal complaint, for instance. But “Dear Lydia Davis” is not right, either—it is awkward, no one speaks like that! It is as though the name has been automatically filled in by a program dedicated to delivering emails en masse. (Should en masse be italicized? Is that respectful to the French or merely pretentious?) Avoid the problem by editing the phrase, thus: “a program dedicated to composing mass emails?” Similarly, avoid the problem of your name, and my relationship to it, by using a different greeting altogether. “Hello,” I can begin, but oddly the informality strikes me as more impersonal still, the studied casualness that might begin an interaction with a chatbot. (A digression: of all the writers working today who might find a creative response to the rise of AI chatbots, you would be the one whose response I would most like to read.)
I am reading, have nearly finished reading, your most recent book, “Into the Weeds.” (The question of audience, which you discuss at length therein, occurs to me now—if I am writing this to you, a brief precis (précis? précis?) of the book is unnecessary. But if I am writing for a larger audience, if in fact I doubt you will ever read this, surely some summary is called for?)
On page 79, you use the phrase “comprised of.” I had to set the book down for a minute after reading that. Surely the great Lydia Davis had not committed such an error? Surely the great Lydia Davis knows the form should only ever be “comprises.” Enter Google. (What did people do before Google? They used dictionaries. Shamefully, I admit that no dictionary is close to hand.) Google tells me that some people (the implication is clear: some sniffy pedants) object to “comprised of” since the preposition is redundant. Sniffy pedant I, I assume it to be a modern development, a literary laziness caused by rubbing close shoulders with “composed of.” But no, Google tells me that the “technically nonstandard” usage dates back to the 1700s, and that no less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary has included it since 1874.
On page 109, you refer to Hemingway’s short story “A Quiet, Well-Lighted Place.” This is seven pages (the book is not long) after you have discussed how you, for many years, mis-remembered the contents, and even the title, of a story by Raymond Carver. (You did not specify how long the mis-remembering went on. Your phrase was “for so long;” “for many years” is my own recasting.) The Hemingway title struck me as awkward; it had an extra syllable. Five lines down the page, you describe the “clean, well-lighted café” in which the action, such as it is, takes place. But of course: the story is called “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” not a “Quiet” one! (Again, Google provides this clarification. What would I have done before Google? I would have had to find a copy of Hemingway’s short stories.) Has the great Lydia Davis tripped up again, or is this what is called an “easter egg” for attentive readers?
Most books these days are poorly edited, I feel. I am tempted to say that a more attentive editor would have caught both the technically nonstandard usage of the verb “to comprise” and the titular error of one of Hemingway’s best-known stories. Perhaps they did. This is, after all, a book published by the redoubtable Yale University Press, with offices (the title page informs me) in New Haven and London. Perhaps there was a lively exchange of emails between you and your sniffy pedant of a London editor. Perhaps the emails will be transmogrified into a short, or medium-length, story in your next collection. I will be looking.
I am, yours sincerely,
Evan Pengra Sult
Is that the right way to begin? “Dear Lydia” is too informal; it implies an intimacy that, as strangers, we do not have. “Dear Ms. Davis” is too detached, the start of a curt, courteous reply to a formal complaint, for instance. But “Dear Lydia Davis” is not right, either—it is awkward, no one speaks like that! It is as though the name has been automatically filled in by a program dedicated to delivering emails en masse. (Should en masse be italicized? Is that respectful to the French or merely pretentious?) Avoid the problem by editing the phrase, thus: “a program dedicated to composing mass emails?” Similarly, avoid the problem of your name, and my relationship to it, by using a different greeting altogether. “Hello,” I can begin, but oddly the informality strikes me as more impersonal still, the studied casualness that might begin an interaction with a chatbot. (A digression: of all the writers working today who might find a creative response to the rise of AI chatbots, you would be the one whose response I would most like to read.)
I am reading, have nearly finished reading, your most recent book, “Into the Weeds.” (The question of audience, which you discuss at length therein, occurs to me now—if I am writing this to you, a brief precis (précis? précis?) of the book is unnecessary. But if I am writing for a larger audience, if in fact I doubt you will ever read this, surely some summary is called for?)
On page 79, you use the phrase “comprised of.” I had to set the book down for a minute after reading that. Surely the great Lydia Davis had not committed such an error? Surely the great Lydia Davis knows the form should only ever be “comprises.” Enter Google. (What did people do before Google? They used dictionaries. Shamefully, I admit that no dictionary is close to hand.) Google tells me that some people (the implication is clear: some sniffy pedants) object to “comprised of” since the preposition is redundant. Sniffy pedant I, I assume it to be a modern development, a literary laziness caused by rubbing close shoulders with “composed of.” But no, Google tells me that the “technically nonstandard” usage dates back to the 1700s, and that no less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary has included it since 1874.
On page 109, you refer to Hemingway’s short story “A Quiet, Well-Lighted Place.” This is seven pages (the book is not long) after you have discussed how you, for many years, mis-remembered the contents, and even the title, of a story by Raymond Carver. (You did not specify how long the mis-remembering went on. Your phrase was “for so long;” “for many years” is my own recasting.) The Hemingway title struck me as awkward; it had an extra syllable. Five lines down the page, you describe the “clean, well-lighted café” in which the action, such as it is, takes place. But of course: the story is called “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” not a “Quiet” one! (Again, Google provides this clarification. What would I have done before Google? I would have had to find a copy of Hemingway’s short stories.) Has the great Lydia Davis tripped up again, or is this what is called an “easter egg” for attentive readers?
Most books these days are poorly edited, I feel. I am tempted to say that a more attentive editor would have caught both the technically nonstandard usage of the verb “to comprise” and the titular error of one of Hemingway’s best-known stories. Perhaps they did. This is, after all, a book published by the redoubtable Yale University Press, with offices (the title page informs me) in New Haven and London. Perhaps there was a lively exchange of emails between you and your sniffy pedant of a London editor. Perhaps the emails will be transmogrified into a short, or medium-length, story in your next collection. I will be looking.
I am, yours sincerely,
Evan Pengra Sult
September 21, 2025
Lydia Davis’s latest offering is a departure from her usual “short short” stories in that it is a response to a rather prosaic and hackneyed question that often makes an author at a book reading Q & A session blanch: any question addressing the author’s motive for writing or the writing process. Her contributing lecture to the Why I Write series at Yale University is significantly more entertaining than other transcribed lectures or speeches of a similar sort if only because Lydia Davis’s train of thought is—quite naturally—so beautiful and meandering, yet concise, that there is wisdom on virtually every page. And somehow the amalgam of anecdotes about what she is reading and how her mind works while she is reading results in precise examples, examples which I very naturally relate to, of how she creates and why. The printed lecture comes across as a unified whole, but often reads like an amalgam of Lydia Davis “short short” stories; it can be read in small doses, even though it is short enough to read in a sitting.
A confession: I adore Lydia Davis and would pay to read a copy of her laundry list (Or her epistolary “short short” on Who Give A C*** toilet paper, Stories Our Strangers, pg. 304). I have all her books, including a hard-to-find edition of her first collection of “short shorts.” Since I am prone to reading weighty tomes, often in a foreign tongue, I naturally radiate to a master word crafter in my native language, American English, when my brain is winding down at the end of the day. I love getting lost in the subtle and yet complex simplicity of her paragraph-length short stories. I very lightly star the ones that really affect me with a pencil mark in the table of contents so that I can revisit them with minimal trouble. Then there is her phenomenal translation of Madame Bovary and her exquisite ideas concerning translation in various languages, French and Dutch most prominently. Davis does read German, but—to my knowledge—has yet to translate it for publication; her struggles with German are beautifully illustrated in the closing pages on Into the Weeds and segue perfectly with her other ideas.
Above all else, Lydia Davis reminds me of the need to both read deeply and consider my words carefully when writing. Too many of us, with age, just read one book after another without approaching any one text with intense scrutiny, like one would do in a graduate program. While I enjoy posting reviews on Goodreads to keep my writing sharp, the format often dissuades me from addressing a particular nuance in a text and riffing off it in favor of a more general approach, which I see as a pitfall. I started a Substack, Bartleby the Sailor, largely, to address this very concern and love Into the Weeds precisely because she advocates for this type of approach. A reader’s goal, especially a reader who writes—in my opinion—is not to amass a girth of knowledge from reading prolifically, but to understand the ideas and sentiments being conveyed and gain inspiration from what one is reading to later create a text of one’s own. Reading or—more emphatically—rereading, Davis’s take on the absolute salutatory effects of revisiting works one once read in one’s youth is virtually identical to my own sentiments:
All of us had read it before, but when you reach your sixties and seventies, as we have, a book you can truthfully say you have read may actually have been read by you so long ago that it is as though not read.
--Into the Weeds pg. 6.*
As with any compilation of essays, I read most of them both to attain insight into authors I already know well as well as authors I don’t know at all. Into the Weeds spurs my memory of authors I hadn’t read in decades (neither had Davis) like Knut Hamsun inspiring me to maybe pick up Hunger or Pan again, or find the Hamsun book she was mostly referencing in Into the Weeds, On Overgrown Paths, (1949)—a book she was reading as she composed parts of her lecture—where the disgraced author awaits a verdict on his trial for Nazi collaboration. And she encapsulates why the mundane thoughts of a nonagenarian Nazi sympathizer might still result in admiration or inspire her own thoughts and writing.
As with many writers with whom I feel an affinity, Davis’s train of thought often leads me, the reader, to divert and think of something related to what she wrote. Thus, her passages on obscure writers who walk incessantly immediately made me think of Robert Walser, whose book of short prose pieces Prosastücke von Robert Walser (Verlag Rascher, Zürich, 1916**) I happened to be reading at the same time as Into the Weeds; when I am at my most efficient, I juggle three books. Thus, I was very gratified that Davis mentions Walser some pages later as her meandering thoughts loop back to him.
Into the Weeds is a delightful digression into the mind of one of America’s finest living authors and translators. Treat any book she publishes as a gem.
---------------------------------
*As I transcribe Lydia Davis, my MS grammar check lights up with suggestions. Of course, Davis knows better than MS grammar check. There is a method to her syntax, which is the reason she is the Queen of the Short Paragraph-length story.
**My copy of this book is the one owned by Walser’s first English translator, Christopher Middleton. It had struck me while reading it how similar the meandering styles of Davis’s lecture and Walser’s prose pieces are. I felt that her mentioning Walser was a fortuitous omen that there is meaning in the universe.
A confession: I adore Lydia Davis and would pay to read a copy of her laundry list (Or her epistolary “short short” on Who Give A C*** toilet paper, Stories Our Strangers, pg. 304). I have all her books, including a hard-to-find edition of her first collection of “short shorts.” Since I am prone to reading weighty tomes, often in a foreign tongue, I naturally radiate to a master word crafter in my native language, American English, when my brain is winding down at the end of the day. I love getting lost in the subtle and yet complex simplicity of her paragraph-length short stories. I very lightly star the ones that really affect me with a pencil mark in the table of contents so that I can revisit them with minimal trouble. Then there is her phenomenal translation of Madame Bovary and her exquisite ideas concerning translation in various languages, French and Dutch most prominently. Davis does read German, but—to my knowledge—has yet to translate it for publication; her struggles with German are beautifully illustrated in the closing pages on Into the Weeds and segue perfectly with her other ideas.
Above all else, Lydia Davis reminds me of the need to both read deeply and consider my words carefully when writing. Too many of us, with age, just read one book after another without approaching any one text with intense scrutiny, like one would do in a graduate program. While I enjoy posting reviews on Goodreads to keep my writing sharp, the format often dissuades me from addressing a particular nuance in a text and riffing off it in favor of a more general approach, which I see as a pitfall. I started a Substack, Bartleby the Sailor, largely, to address this very concern and love Into the Weeds precisely because she advocates for this type of approach. A reader’s goal, especially a reader who writes—in my opinion—is not to amass a girth of knowledge from reading prolifically, but to understand the ideas and sentiments being conveyed and gain inspiration from what one is reading to later create a text of one’s own. Reading or—more emphatically—rereading, Davis’s take on the absolute salutatory effects of revisiting works one once read in one’s youth is virtually identical to my own sentiments:
All of us had read it before, but when you reach your sixties and seventies, as we have, a book you can truthfully say you have read may actually have been read by you so long ago that it is as though not read.
--Into the Weeds pg. 6.*
As with any compilation of essays, I read most of them both to attain insight into authors I already know well as well as authors I don’t know at all. Into the Weeds spurs my memory of authors I hadn’t read in decades (neither had Davis) like Knut Hamsun inspiring me to maybe pick up Hunger or Pan again, or find the Hamsun book she was mostly referencing in Into the Weeds, On Overgrown Paths, (1949)—a book she was reading as she composed parts of her lecture—where the disgraced author awaits a verdict on his trial for Nazi collaboration. And she encapsulates why the mundane thoughts of a nonagenarian Nazi sympathizer might still result in admiration or inspire her own thoughts and writing.
As with many writers with whom I feel an affinity, Davis’s train of thought often leads me, the reader, to divert and think of something related to what she wrote. Thus, her passages on obscure writers who walk incessantly immediately made me think of Robert Walser, whose book of short prose pieces Prosastücke von Robert Walser (Verlag Rascher, Zürich, 1916**) I happened to be reading at the same time as Into the Weeds; when I am at my most efficient, I juggle three books. Thus, I was very gratified that Davis mentions Walser some pages later as her meandering thoughts loop back to him.
Into the Weeds is a delightful digression into the mind of one of America’s finest living authors and translators. Treat any book she publishes as a gem.
---------------------------------
*As I transcribe Lydia Davis, my MS grammar check lights up with suggestions. Of course, Davis knows better than MS grammar check. There is a method to her syntax, which is the reason she is the Queen of the Short Paragraph-length story.
**My copy of this book is the one owned by Walser’s first English translator, Christopher Middleton. It had struck me while reading it how similar the meandering styles of Davis’s lecture and Walser’s prose pieces are. I felt that her mentioning Walser was a fortuitous omen that there is meaning in the universe.
December 15, 2025
"Got to do something about that.' I really like that reason.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews