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📝 Jessica Bruder’s Writing Routine

📝 Jessica Bruder’s Writing Routine

"There’s nothing like making a hot cup of coffee and firing up my laptop when most people are winding down."

Famous Writing Routines
November 27, 2023

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

Jessica Bruder is an American journalist and author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2020.

My best story ideas are the kind that have haunted me with questions each night.

Jessica Bruder '00 | Amherst College

One of the best writing tips Jessica Bruder has received in her writing career didn’t come from some literary great, or some workshop, or some course. Instead, it came from Linda May, an Amazon warehouse worker (who Bruder later wrote about in Nomadland).

“She told me about working in an Amazon warehouse, how she often felt like quitting,” Bruder recounted in an interview with PBS. “Whenever that feeling came on strong, Linda asked herself, ‘Can I do this for just ten more minutes?’ The answer was always, ‘Of course!’ This was a strategy she’d picked up from Alcoholics Anonymous, but it works for writing, too. It’s a great way to flatten resistance.”

Born and raised in New Jersey, Bruder graduated from Amherst College in 2000 and received her Master of Journalism from Columbia University in 2005. According to her college profile, Bruder’s career “zig-zagged all over the place,” experimenting with poetry and editing the literary magazine before she fell in love with narrative nonfiction after she graduated.

After spending a few years writing for The New York Times, WIRED, New York and Harper’s Magazine, as well as publishing her first book, Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, Bruder start working on her next project; a nonfiction book documenting older Americans who had given up tradition housing, following the Great Recession, to adopt van-dwelling lifestyles.

I was living in a van as a journalist, as research for my book Nomadland. Over the course of three years, I followed Americans who had been squeezed out of traditional housing and moved into vans, late-model RVs, even a few sedans. I drove more than 15,000 miles — from coast to coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border. And night after night, I bedded down in a new place, whether a truck stop or the Sonoran Desert. Sometimes I stayed on city streets or in suburban parking lots, which rattled me in ways I’d never expected.

In ‘Nomadland,’ the Golden Years Are the Wander Years | The New York Times

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