Jayne Anne Phillips didn’t plan on writing a Civil War novel. But over time, the idea kept pulling at her. She’d already written about Vietnam in Machine Dreams, and Korea in Lark and Termite. The American Civil War felt like the missing piece. Years of research followed—war diaries, asylum records, photographs, battlefield visits—and eventually, Night Watch took shape. When it was published in 2023, ten years after her last novel, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
That slow, immersive approach has defined Phillips’s career. She doesn’t write fast, and she doesn’t work from outlines. Her novels begin with a voice, a sentence, a fragment of atmosphere—and she writes her way forward, sentence by sentence, until something takes hold. “I compose line by line, as a poet does,” she’s said. “I never know what the final arc of a novel is. I’m really inside the material.”
Phillips broke out early, with Black Tickets, a story collection released when she was twenty-six. The stories were sharp-edged, lyrical, and often unsettling—snapshots of sex, violence, and longing in working-class America. Critics compared her to Faulkner and Carver. But she soon moved toward longer, more expansive fiction. Since then, she’s published seven books—each one stylistically rich, emotionally layered, and deeply rooted in history, family, and place.
Phillips grew up in West Virginia, taught writing for decades, and has said that her novels are part of a single arc. “I see my work as a continuum,” she said. “I don’t think I could’ve written one book if I hadn’t written the one before it.”
Jayne Anne Phillips’ daily writing routine
Phillips writes slowly. She builds her sentences line by line, as a poet does, and never begins with an outline or a roadmap. Every novel starts the same way: with a line. Sometimes that line ends up buried in the middle of the book, but it always carries the DNA of the story. “Everything about the material is inside the language,” she said. “And it’s a question of getting deep enough into the language to understand it and sustain it.”
She rarely knows where a book is going. For Phillips, fiction is an act of excavation, not construction. She descends into the material, letting intuition guide her deeper. The process is slow, recursive, and intensely interior. “You’re always out there without a net,” she said. “Or at least I am.”
She writes during the day, never at night, often in front of a window. She works in three cities and writes by hand and on computers—laptops and desktops alike. But always, she prints her drafts. She distrusts machines. She needs to see the ink on the page, to feel the rhythm of each sentence. Revision happens on paper. It’s where she reenters the material and listens for what’s working—and what’s not.
The middle of a novel is always the hardest part. She might be pulled away by teaching, by life, by the demands of a decades-long career directing Rutgers University’s MFA program. But even when she’s not actively writing, the book lives in her. “I feel as though I have a book in mind all the time, from the moment I start it,” she said. “Even if there are periods of time I’m unable to write.”
When she’s working, the pressure is intense. She pushes herself to get as deep into the project as possible. She’s persistent. She’s a worker. And she believes the work will pull her back—if the language is compelling enough.
Phillips has said her writing is “like being led by a whisper.” She doesn’t mean that metaphorically. She likens it to an auditory hallucination—something just at the edge of hearing, something that compels you to follow. It’s a process both deeply mysterious and utterly methodical. She does reams of research, especially for her historical novels. But she doesn’t plan out themes in advance. She doesn’t begin with questions. “I want subconscious or unconscious understanding of the work to affect the book,” she said. “That’s where the mystery is.”
Her books are immersive, often nonlinear, and obsessed with history—not just as a setting, but as a force. She believes fiction has the power to bend time, to locate a reader inside a world that’s passed. “History tells us the facts,” she said. “Literature tells us the story.”
War, in particular, has been a recurring presence in her work. Machine Dreams traced its legacy across generations of a West Virginia family shaped by World War II and Vietnam. Lark and Termite turned to the Korean War and the real-life No Gun Ri massacre. And Night Watch, her Pulitzer-winning novel, explores the trauma and aftermath of America’s own Civil War. “Civil wars are the wars in which a country ravages itself,” she said. “And the legacies of these wars can last 200 years.”
Still, she doesn’t think of herself as a political novelist. Her interest is in perception: how people think, how they dream, how they survive what’s unspeakable. She writes about childhood because children are, in her words, “the ultimate outlaw characters.” They see everything without context. She writes about victims because she wants to remember them. And she writes, above all, for the language—for the feeling of discovering something she didn’t expect.
“I’ve always said writing is practicing for death,” she said. “Because in writing you experience a kind of transformation. You take on different identities. You access something beyond the self.”
She’s not particularly interested in recognition. For years, few of her neighbors even knew she was a writer. But her work speaks for itself. It carries the weight of history and the rhythm of poetry. And it stays with readers long after the final page.
As she once put it: “The story within the facts is the key to empathy. We are narrative beings. We think in narrative. Through narrative, we can feel ourselves inside the history of another time.”
And that, for Phillips, is reason enough to keep going.
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