loved this interview with Audrey Wollen (who writes beautifully insightful reviews for The Yale Review, the NYRB, and others), and her advice to indulge in your eccentricities as a writer:

A teacher once told me that some writers set their sights on a thesis and inch toward it, building up a stairway with steps of research and evidence, but that I skip ahead and just throw my writing very high into the sky, and once I’m up there, I have to figure out how to get back down again…

I think the most effective advice for me has been “Encourage the eccentricities of your own mind.” Our brains are really adept pattern-recognition machines, and we can reproduce patterns of thought really easily, and unfortunately, that is almost entirely what we are taught to do in school—and don’t get me wrong, there are great pleasures in patterned thought, long hallways tiled with perfectly fitted hexagons of thought—but it means, when writing, that we are often falling into pre-dug furrows. I try to practice the self-trust necessary to incorporate my own inner strangeness, sensory associations, sense of humor, and sense of despair into my writing, especially critical writing…The pleasure is trying to squeeze those eccentricities—that sometimes seem, on the level of argument, almost meaningless and hyperspecific to me—into the inherited pattern-machine of the sentence. Metaphor helps. Often, the most astute analysis can be found inside that underglow feeling.