Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My new book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

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Today’s tending features Stephanie Vessely, who edited the new anthology So Heavy a Weight: Creative Writers on Women’s Reproductive Health. I heard about the anthology from my friend Alyse Knorr (who did a great good creatures interview with her wife, the writer Kate Partridge), who shared it on instagram:

My essay “Barren” is being published in So Heavy a Weight: Creative Writers on Women’s Reproductive Health, which comes out August 26. (This also happens to be Women’s Equality Day— commemorating women’s right to vote). This powerful essay collection shatters the silence surrounding women’s reproductive healthcare experiences. My essay is about IUI queer family-building and my experience with infertility.

Contributors to the anthology include Abigail Thomas, Emma Bolden, Melissa Anderson, Jill Talbot, Marcia Aldrich, Chloe Caldwell, Sonya Huber, and more. I was excited to feature an interview with Stephanie about how this anthology came to be, particularly because it feels like it’s very much in conversation with The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, the anthology Emily Pérez and I edited together.

Below, Stephanie shares the story of developing the focus of the collection, as well as the difficult process of selecting essays. She also offers a prompt that invites us to write our own stories of misinformation or shame related to healthcare or our bodies, a topic I suspect will be generous for many, many of us.

So Heavy a Weight was initially conceived as an anthology about abortion. I had two abortions when I was younger, and I’ve spent the 18+ years since trying to work my way through my feelings about them. I was raised Catholic, where it was drilled into me that the worst possible thing I could ever do was to have an abortion. As a left-leaning adult, the narrative has always been at the other end of the spectrum—abortion isn’t a big deal, it’s “just a clump of cells,” etc.

The truth, for me, has always been more nuanced than that. I struggled for years after my abortions, and while I know it was the right thing for me at the time, and I don’t regret them, I’ve never felt relief, or any of the other things I’ve been told I would feel. This mixture of feelings has informed a lot of my writing on the topic.

Which is why the Marketing Director at Fulcrum approached me about putting together an anthology on the topic. She is a friend of mine from our MFA program, and she knew I was passionate about changing the way we talk about abortion in the culture.

But as we ideated about it, we realized we wanted more stories about women’s bodies and the multitude of experiences they hold. Eventually, we landed on the idea of making the book about women’s healthcare in general, one that would encompass the gamut of experience—miscarriage, menstruation, endometriosis, IVF, infertility, contraception, and more. We knew we wouldn’t be able to cover the entire spectrum of what women go through, but we wanted it to be as close to comprehensive as possible.

About a third of the essays were commissioned, and the rest came from a call for submissions. The more essays I read, the more I knew we had made the right choice. It’s not just abortion that needs to be talked about—it’s the whole of women’s reproductive healthcare.

Selecting the essays for the collection was challenging. The goal was to cover multiple topics from multiple perspectives, demographics, and ages. Which meant I had to make some difficult choices about which pieces to include. Many essays were rejected simply because I had already accepted several essays on the same topic, or because there just wasn’t space to include every well-written piece.

Overwhelmingly, miscarriage was the most written about topic, and from multiple angles. In Secrets, for instance, which was written by Sari Fordham and originally published in Pithead Chapel, Fordham writes about the quiet, excited anticipation of planning for a baby while at the same time going through the somewhat sterile process of finding out the pregnancy might not be viable. In losslist^TM, author Sarah Swandell creates a shopping list of items one might need following a miscarriage, like a container for passed tissue and a friend who can be your errands runner.

The fact that miscarriage was the most submitted topic (with infertility coming in a close second) was interesting, and not at all surprising. Like with abortion, I know so many women who have had miscarriages, or who have struggled to get or stay pregnant. And yet so many women still suffer through losses like this silently, and often, alone. So many of our experiences are unnecessarily shrouded in secrecy and shame.

Which is really the crux of the book—to break down these silences and shed light on what women go through. To help us all see that everyone is going through or has gone through something, and that we don’t have to carry it alone. We all just want to be heard and to have our experiences witnessed and understood. I hope this collection helps do just that.

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My new book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

Subscribe now

Today’s tending features Jean Hannah Edelstein, who I saw read from her new book Breasts: A Relatively Brief Relationship in New York earlier this summer. At that reading, where she read from the third section, about being diagnosed with breast cancer, Jean demonstrated one of the skills I most admire (envy?) in a writer: the ability to be devastatingly funny while also writing devastating material. I tore through most of the book on the train home. Reading the first section, Sex, I had that eerie smack of recognition, when a writer has named something you thought you alone had experienced. (“Girls could do anything, we were told, but we also learned that while we were doing anything it was important to be pretty.”) If you were a girl in the 80s and 90s (or honestly ever, I suspect), I think you’ll see parts of your own childhood and adolescence here; I’d read with a notebook beside you to capture the memories I’d bet will inevitably pop up.

I wanted to talk to Jean not just because the book is great, but because it’s such a slim volume—three essays, a single focus, 99 pages—which feels like a brave choice in a publishing landscape that so often says 70k words is the low threshold for what counts as a book. As Jean writes below, the book is complete as-is.

Below, Jean talks about the question that started the book, and she shares a prompt to invite you into writing your own story.

one question for Jean

I love the structure of the book, which is three longish essays all related to breasts–sex, food, cancer. I really appreciate how those three topics touch on the complexity of breasts and just being in a body generally! How did you come to that structure? The book is definitely on the slim side–did you feel pressured, either by publishing or just your own sense of what “counts” as a book to make it longer somehow, or did you always know this was the right size?

Jean

BREASTS began as an essay written in the rage and fug of my recovery from a bilateral mastectomy. My surgical incisions became infected and necrotic, which meant I had to have weeks of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which meant that I was out of work, on medical leave, for much longer than anticipated. ‘What are breasts even for?’ I thought to myself one day, and I started writing. This is all to say I didn’t set out to write a book, per se: I was just answering the question.

I sent an early draft to my agent, thinking she might be able to help me place it in a high-falutin’ journal. She suggested that there might be a book in it, and that we should take it to the editor I worked with on my last book. You see, this wasn’t my first memoir rodeo — I published one in 2018 — so perhaps that gave me, and my editor, the space to be a bit off-piste in terms of agreeing that it should be a slim volume. At 25,000 words (or thereabouts) I felt very clearly: I’m done. Done with the book, and also done with writing memoir, for now. I’d said enough about myself.

There was a freedom in not feeling that I was writing towards the standardized 200 pages because of the demands of the market, and I have to thank writers like my friend Katherine Angel (DADDY ISSUES) for establishing shorter non-fiction (dare I call it novella-length?) as a feasible form. I’ve found it interesting, too, that whereas some critics felt my previous memoir was too short at 65,000 words, that hasn’t come up with BREASTS. I think it is whole.

(But let me say one other thing, lest I seem unrealistic! I have a full-time corporate job that supports my family financially. I also don’t have time to write an 800-page book.)

BREASTS was eviscerating to write, but that made me feel like it was a better book than my last one, where I was more conscious of telling other people’s stories alongside my own. Having my breasts amputated because of cancer was a wholly disembodying experience, and I suppose BREASTS was my way of writing myself back into my body. And now that I’m there, I felt certain that I wanted to keep it to myself for a while.

if you’d like to try it out . . .

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My new book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. This is a long one—it’s full of good, practical tips about using Scrivener and images from my own projects to illustrate them!—so if it gets cut off in your email, just click the headline to read it in your browser.

Let’s talk about Scrivener. I had friends in grad school who used it for their dissertations and swore by it for organizing research and handling revisions. They admitted it had a steep learning curve and had attended multi-hour workshops to get them started, but they promised it was worth it.

I agree that Scrivener can be an incredible tool—and I also think that focusing on trying to learn everything it can do makes it too hard to get started. I’ve used Scrivener a ton in the last couple of years, for everything from organizing a poetry manuscript to starting a big nonfiction project to writing short articles. I think the best way to get started with Scrivener is just to pick one thing you want to do with it and dive in. So today I’m sharing four different ways you can use it, no intensive studying required! (Plus a bonus tip for how Scrivener can help reduce writing anxiety, if that resonates with you!)

Three notes: 1) If you’ve never used Scrivener, you might want to have the tutorials on hand to navigate the different parts of the platform. But don’t get bogged down! The whole idea here is that you can just get started and learn more as you go. 2) You can download Scrivener and try it out for free, and there’s an educational discount if you happen to have a .edu email address, and 3) If you want a more organized introduction to using Scrivener, runs a really great workshop. You can go to her website and sign up to be notified the next time she’s running it.

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My new book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now and you can buy it anywhere books are sold!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

❤️️ A quick favor, before we dive in: clicking the little red heart at the top or bottom is one good way to help other writers find this supportive community. Sharing it with a friend or online is another one! ❤️️

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Today’s tending features Brian Gresko, a writer, illustrator, teacher, and founding member of Writing Co-Lab. We’d previously featured Writing Co-Lab in this great piece by Sara Lippman about strategies for perseverance:

Brian’s here today to share an excerpt from their new book, You Must Go On, which is full of wit, wisdom, and encouragement for every part of your writing life. (And I’ve got a copy to give away! Make sure you read to the end for how to win.)

Below, Brian talks about the long, sometimes dark journey through a writing life—and how they learned to reframe what felt like failures and instead embrace that being a writer means you also get to be a “beautiful glorious little freak.” If you’ve ever felt a little [[[sad trambone]]] about your writing life, I think you’ll find a lot of encouragement and companionship here.

Brian, on turning inward and finding humor and community as an antidote to despair

Remember to Laugh, excerpted from You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing & Creativity

There was this point in mid-2021 that I was like, shit, what more can I do that I have not done already? Like, is this as good as my writing career gets? More like “career,” am I right?!

This was after years of event organizing within the New York City literary community which led The Literary Hub to nominate me for a “Best Literary Citizen” mock Oscar, alongside true stars like Levar Burton and Viet Thanh Nguyen, and yet still feeling on the margins of publishing society, uninvited to the parties where you see famous authors sharing photos online posing with one another in fancy attire.

This was after publishing numerous nonfiction pieces and still hustling as hard as ever for each placement.

This was after a long gestating novel had gone on wide submission to editors accompanied by stellar blurbs from three bestselling authors of name-recognizable acclaim, and failed to sell.

This was after a memoir written in the margins of that novel went on wide submission to editors accompanied by stellar blurbs from four authors with various publishing records, from bestselling mainstream to indie darling, and failed to sell.

This was after my agent called to tell me he was no longer working at the agency any longer, effective immediately, but to be patient as he transitioned to a new agency. Sadly, he’d been fired, and he wasn’t able to find another position.

What followed were some truly tough times. A low level depression, yes, for sure. But worse, nights of despair where I wondered whether writing was worth it at all. A few nights, I looked at the arc of my middle-aged life and thought that the world would be a better place without me.

The silent darkness did not provide any answers or comfort. No one thing brought me out of that cold funk. Some of what helped was unrelated to art and art making, it was reconnecting with friends and spending time with my family, it was searching for ways to be less alone during my largely solitary weekdays, and it was also honestly facing the fact that I had set a goal for myself – to, by the time my son turned ten, carve out a creative space that provided some modicum of income – and accept that I had not succeeded, not through a lack of effort or discipline or intention, but because my vision, energy, attitude, and work are as unsuited for corporate publishing as they were for my corporate job years ago at Hearst, or as they were for being a cog in the machine that is New York City’s public school system.

And that’s when I had to laugh. Because for all of the perceived setbacks, there were many wonderful actual accomplishments which I was choosing not to notice. The entire list above could be rewritten in the positive, and the things which didn’t happen could be reframed as desires on the part of my ego that were irrational or overly-needy, or aspirations for financial compensation that were unrealistic. Like, so what if The New Yorker or some other high-falutin magazine hadn’t called asking me to be on staff. Would I want that? I don’t subscribe to those kinds of stodgy publications anyway. And is that even something that happens?

Certainly not for most authors I know, many of whom struggle with the same feelings of anxiety and worthlessness, even if they’ve published books and gotten teaching positions in MFA programs and appeared on the cover of Poets & Writers Magazine. The reality is that our creative work will not fill the holes within us, we have to do that ourselves. Our creative work will not love us more or better than we can love ourselves. Our creative work will not justify our existence, we have to love ourselves enough to do that, breath by breath. Accolades are great but also hollow and fleeting; money is a drug we always want more of, there will never be enough; love without self-love is like flying without a safe place to land.

The medicine for these toxic desires is, I think, humor and lightness of spirit. It’s having a laugh at yourself in a good natured way, and regrounding into the sandpit of creativity where we’re all building castles that, like us, will one day disappear into the mist of time. It’s silly, really. Wonderfully so.

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Instead of looking outside of yourself for affirmation, can you turn inward? That requires bravery as much as putting your work out into the world does. That requires compassion too, for yourself, and for others, because everyone is going through this life without a manual, trying to figure their shit out or, more often than not, avoiding their shit. It’s a glorious, messy journey we’re on, and being a creative person means tossing the map out the window and following a compass visible only to you, if it's visible at all. How badass is that?

Today, take a moment for fun, and for humor. Take a moment to turn from the creative chase, to breathe. Go for a walk outside. Listen to something that makes you smile. Watch a comedy. Talk to a friend who you enjoy speaking with and spending time with. De-emphasize those external writerly demands of having something called a “career” – whatever that is! – and find joy in the fact that you are doing it differently, you beautiful glorious little freak. What a joker you are! What a fly in the sticky ointment of polite society.

I love that about creative people, I love that about you. Can you love it too? And laugh at just how ridiculous it all is, writers running around like chickens without heads, looking for something that they can’t see because it’s not in front of them, it’s inside of them and has been inside of them this whole time.

Keep at it. I’m rooting for you!

Brian Gresko is a writer, illustrator, literary journalist, and educator based in Brooklyn. They co-host Pete's Reading Series, Brooklyn's longest running literary venue, and co-founded Writing Co-Lab, an online teaching cooperative. They are the curator of 100 Days of Creative Resistance, which sent an email a day from a different writer on each of the first 100 days of the Trump regime. They recently published You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing & Creativity, a book of letters on why to write and how to keep at it in a world that wants you to shut the hell up.

🎉 comment to win your own copy of You Must Go On! 🎉

what do you do when you’re feeling stuck or demoralized about your writing life? share a tip or good idea below (or just talk about how much you loved Brian’s essay 😉) and be entered for a chance to win your own free copy of You Must Go On

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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, you can support me by sharing it online or with a friend, or by ordering my new book, The Good Mother Myth.

buy The Good Mother Myth!

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My newest book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now!

A quick favor, before we dive in: if you’ve read The Good Mother Myth, could you hop over to Amazon and submit a review? Even if you didn’t buy your book from Amazon, you can still review, and reviews help make the book more visible in the algorithm. Thank you!!!

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When I was in college, I went to so many readings, and they all followed more or less the same format: visiting poet gets introduced; reads some poems, bracketed by a minimal amount of commentary; answers a few questions from the audience. Many of them were great, and the experience of actually hearing the poets whose books I was reading in class expanded my sense of the possibilities for poetry. So when I started doing readings of my own, that’s the format I mostly followed.

It’s fine, but we can do better.

Three things happened in the lead-up to my events for The Good Mother Myth that have changed my approach to book events:

• a friend and I went to one of ’s Cocktails and Cannolis events in celebration of her great book The Sicilian Inheritance, where, partway through a great conversation, the moderator Jeannine Cook asked the audience to “turn and talk” to the people around them about a question related the book, and the room immediately came to life

• after I went to a really great, interactive event about Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage hosted by the Pennsylvania chapter of Postpartum Support International, I interviewed one of the planners of the event, and she shared that, before she became a therapist, she’d worked in sales, which had taught her to approach events through this lens: what does this audience want? based on that framework, she designed a bunch of ways for folks to engage (and was also smart about building parameters for that engagement—like, share one word—so that group participation didn’t derail the whole thing!)

• on a zoom call about our books, made a suggestion: think about who you want to be in conversation with. the nudge was specifically to think beyond other writers—she shared that she was doing an event with the midwife who’d delivered her second child!

and those ideas—bringing in people connected to the themes of the book, making space for the audience to engage with each other—have been at the center of my planning for events this spring. while publishing (and promoting!) a book has ups and downs, the events have honestly been all *up.* it’s been such a joy to get to hear from readers and be in conversation with so many smart people doing such important work.

💬 back to you: what great book events (or gallery openings or other gatherings) have you been to or hosted? what makes for a great event? what are you excited to try at a future event?

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a few pics from the Good Mother Myth tour

in Mikwaukee, at Book Drop MKE

in Pittsburgh, at White Whale Bookstore

in Madison, at an event hosted by the Wisconsin Book Festival

💛💙 a couple more Good Mother Myth events! 💙💛

I can’t leave without inviting you to join me at the events I’ve got coming up next week in California and in the DC area in April!

in Santa Monica—Tuesday, March 25th at 6pm

I’ll be in conversation with novelist Hannah Michell, reproductive psychiatrist and Mavida Health founder Dr. Sarah Oreck, and BOYMOM author Ruth Whippman at Zibby’s Bookshop. RSVP here(for free!) to grab your spot.

in Summerland—Thursday, March 27th at 6pm

Dr. Sarah Oreck and I are heading a little ways up the coast to the dreamy Godmothers in Summerland, CA. This is a ticketed event, and you can grab your ticket here.

in Los Angeles—Saturday, March 29th at 4pm

This event, in partnership with the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Middle Room Gallery, in LA’s Atwater neighborhood, features writers and visual artists in conversation about mothering and making art. I’ll be there with writers Nydia Armendia-Sanchez and Julia Kolchinsky and visual artists Dina Abdulkarim and Kaitlynn Redell. RSVP here(for free!) to grab your spot.

in Bethesda, MD—Tuesday, April 8 at 7pm

For this event, at the new Wonderland Books, I’ll be joined by Mikah Goldman Berg, Chapters Program Assistant Director of Postpartum Support International, Andrea Kleinbard, the DC Chapter President of the Chamber of Mothers, and Rebecca Gale of the Better Life Lab at New America for a conversation about the intersection of policy and maternal mental health. (In other words, wouldn’t it be easier to enjoy motherhood if we weren’t so stressed about finding and paying for childcare??) You can get the info here.

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, you can support me by sharing it online or with a friend, or by ordering my new book, The Good Mother Myth.

buy The Good Mother Myth!

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My new book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now and you can buy it anywhere books are sold!

I’d love to send you a signed bookplate for your copy of The Good Mother Myth! Just share the book anywhere you like, by writing a review on Amazon or Goodreads, telling a friend about it, encouraging your library to order, or posting it online, then fill out this form, and I’ll pop one in the mail as a thank you.

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. If you’ve ever worried that writing about yourself is navel-gazing or sentimental, I think you’ll love today’s guest essay, by poet Rachel Richardson about how an offhand comment from an influential editor blocked her writing—and how she moved past it.

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Today’s tending features Rachel Richardson, whose new book Smother is out now. I’ve admired Rachel’s writing for years, since I read her book Hundred-Year Wave as a new mother trying to figure out how to write about motherhood without producing the dreaded “bad poem with a baby in it,” as Joy Katz put it in an iconic piece in American Poetry Review. I loved how, in Hundred-Year Wave, Rachel was able to put Moby Dick and the history of whaling alongside nursing and careening through a McDonald’s drive-through in a minivan and make it all feel fascinating and epic in scale.

Rachel has a new book, Smother, out now, about raising children through climate change and all the other disasters that surround us. The book asks, How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Below, Rachel writes about how motherhood pushed her to discover “her most empathetic and most brutal selves,” and she offers a prompt for writing into the aspects of our identities that feel forbidden or dismissed.

Rachel, on writing the mother-ful poem

JDM automatically rejects any poem with the word “mother” in it

Those were the words I had written in my notebook. I had been taking notes, like the diligent aspiring poet I was, at a publishing panel at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One of the editors, J. D. McClatchy, of the storied Yale Review, had answered the audience question of whether there was anything he hated to receive in his submissions pile. Mother poems, he said, immediately and with glee. Anything with the word “mother” in it!

The year was 2009, and I had not yet become a mother, so I probably laughed in surprise, maybe felt slightly miffed on behalf of my gender, but didn’t think much more about his comment. I wouldn’t send him poems about my mom, then. Okay. Good to know. But the comment never quite left me because of its shrouded lesson that I hadn’t decoded: What was so automatically awful about a poem with a mother in it?

I dug up that notebook in 2020, ten years into motherhood, when I felt absolutely blocked from writing. The pandemic raged, so there was suddenly time to sort through all my years of thinking about poems. I went back, tracing my early education in the art, all the advice I’d taken in from poetry teachers and guides. I had never really followed McClatchy’s rule: once I became a mother there seemed no way to exclude this identity from my writing. My life was my material, and I saw the world from the position I occupied. But I didn’t proclaim it too loudly, either. The pressure between my artistic life and my parenting life was a source of burning frustration.

In McClatchy’s mind, I could now see, a mother poem was a sentimental poem. Whether the speaker was the child or the mother, if motherhood was invoked it became a poem of adoration and nurturing—or maybe resentment!—but never complexity of feeling, never surprise in the images. McClatchy (and many others, I now knew) thought that motherhood was a simplistic idea.

But wasn’t motherhood the site of all the most interesting conflicts? I loved my kids, but I wanted to run away to the forest. In motherhood I had found my most empathetic and most brutal selves, and they often asserted their claims in my body at the same time.

My book, Smother, began to be a book then. I had been writing about my life, but mostly I had tried to focus the lens outward: I told others I was writing a book about technology and wildfire. I finally realized I would have to bring myself in, and use McClatchy’s statement as fuel, not as a map of the landmines to avoid. Who else had written about motherhood? I was going to write the most mother-ful poem imaginable.

I have never had so much fun in an assignment—I collected dozens of poems about mothers, and eventually collaged many of them into a cento. Just the act of compiling all of this art made me feel I had gathered my people, and now I could see I had the bigger and more talented cast. I had Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Duncan, Sharon Olds, Saeed Jones. I had Louise Glück! Lucille Clifton! Sylvia Plath! Dismiss me, fine, but who could dismiss them?

At some point in this process I realized that I was writing with, and for, people who were interested in the real complex lives we could write from, rather than trying to gain approval from those who would assess my poems based on some external and likely patriarchal criterion for entry. I stopped thinking of my audience as a vague and judgmental general public, and suddenly I had a lot to say. I started writing poems directly to my women friends, calling them by name. I started invoking my poetry forebears—Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, C. D. Wright, and more—claiming a place in a conversation I wanted to join.

I let McClatchy’s words be the epigraph to my book, in which I wrote the word “mother”—I’ve just counted—23 times.

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, is out now and you can buy it anywhere books are sold!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. If you feel like you’re still flopping around a little and trying to find your Fresh Start New Year’s Energy (just me???), I think you’ll really love today’s piece by Tracey Gee, on the power of looking backward to set our vision for the future.

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Today’s tending features Tracey Gee, whose new book The Magic of Knowing What You Want: A Practical Guide to Unearthing the Wisdom of Your Desires, is out TODAY! I read the first couple of pages on my phone at the car dealership a couple weeks ago and was instantly hooked. (I’ve picked up some really bad phone habits in the last couple of weeks but sometimes they bring me great things like Tracey’s book!) I am generally allergic to self-help and being told what to do, but Tracey’s perspective is so thoughtful and smart. The approach of figuring out what you really want, rather than buckling down and powering through every item on your list, is one that really resonates with me right now.

I asked Tracey to share a bit of her approach that she thought would connect with writers in particular. Below, Tracey shares the story of working with a client to set a vision for a writing practice, and she offers a reflective exercise for us to try out. I know I could use a little reflective pause in these wild days, and I bet you’ll love it, too.

Tracey, on looking backward to figure out what you want in your writing life

What do you want in your writing?

My client approached me to think through her writing goals. Like many of us, what began as straightforward planning for the future quickly became hazy with feelings of pressure and overwhelm. So, instead, I asked her to describe an experience of writing—specifically, a favorite time when she felt focused and in the flow.

As she recounted this memory, it was beautiful to witness her reconnect with a version of herself that felt like her most creative and fulfilled self. Together, we identified the variables that made this experience so meaningful that she could recreate it in the present. I’ll also never forget when her face lit up as she said, “I want writing to feel joyful as it did then. My goal is joy.” Gaining this clarity about what she truly wanted in her writing, not just as a final product but as an exercise in joy, became a guidepost as she moved forward.

Before setting goals in the face of a fresh new year, it is often much more helpful to start with a look back. This reflective process allows you to connect with “past you” to gain insight before determining what “future you” might want or need. It’s a powerful way to allow yourself a glimpse into what you truly want and how you want to get there.

if you’d like to try it out . . .

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out next week. I’d love it if you would pre-order it.

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. The new year can be a really intense time for setting new goals and trying to finally buckle down—and if you could use a little corrective to that energy, I think you’ll really love today’s piece by , about how to rethink what it means to be “disciplined” in our creative lives.

Today’s tending features , whose book Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life beyond Productivity, brings together basically all of my obsessions—making space for creative work without buying into the kind of productivity hustle that so often turns that work into a grind. It’s warm, encouraging, and no-nonsense. Maria and I share a book pub day—The Good Mother Myth and Making Time are both out next Tuesday, January 21!—and I was so thrilled when she reached out to share some of her wisdom with us at Write More.

I wrote a little bit about Maria’s book at the end of last year. I especially loved her essays on undoing—ideas about creative practice that we should let go of in order to really be happier in our creative lives. Below, Maria shares why we should undo our ideas about discipline, and she offers an invitation to instead get “closer to what’s alive in you.”

Maria, on the need to undo our ideas of discipline in creative practice

You may believe you lack discipline, that it’s the missing ingredient between you and the abundant life. Yet even if you long for discipline, you resist her. In productivity land, this push-pull with discipline keeps you in thrall to your doing and not-doing.

The way I hear about her from my clients, discipline is punishment’s prim partner. Sometimes she appears as a buttoned-up, sexless scold in shoulder pads, tsk-tsking at any squishy capacity for commitment. She worships deprivation and going “all in” on a program for six- pack abs by summer. She’ll be the first to forgo extra guacamole and strike lattes from the budget when the money gets tight because small indulgences—she’s very concerned with “extras”—are her domain for control.

She’s a secular ascetic, accruing moral capital with all the strictness of a desert monk, without the aim for heaven. Heaven on earth with discipline means warding off the chaos for another day.

You must be honest about her productive appeal. She can be seductive in her intimidating way. She takes cold showers at five in the morning, and her skin glows from the benefits. She loves green smoothies. She is so composed. She draws straight, satisfying lines.

The word discipline is Latin in origin, likely arising from the earlier “disciple” and containing a cluster of meanings around learning and following.

Under the emperor Hadrian, the word took on special importance on the Roman frontier, where it was associated with obedience, duty, and especially faithfulness to the customs and beliefs of the imperial center in Rome.

Discipline was so valuable that a minor deity known as Disciplina, perhaps invented by Hadrian himself, appears during this time as an object of worship. Evidence related to the goddess has turned up at various fringes of the empire, at Hadrian’s Wall in Britain as well as in North Africa. Soldiers revered her for her virtuous balance of frugality, sternness, and faithfulness to their unit and the empire.

The further out you went from the center of power, the more useful reminders of where you had come from—what you were a disciple of—became. The soldiers needed to constantly remind themselves they were not like those guys, non-Romans.

So much so that it became useful to worship the idea of discipline itself, the act of remaining devoted when the object of one’s devotion was far away.

It has remained a favorite religion in military life. The motto of the US Marines is semper fidelis, always faithful. But it is a religion familiar to most of us.

You may have the urge to be disciplined—that is, to become a disciple of an intention you set, some core value or way of living. If you drift far enough away from the heart of that value or lose sight of your vision, you may soldier on, worshiping discipline itself.

To merely desire to “be disciplined,” to worship discipline itself, is a desire to subject myself to correction for its own sake. Maybe this has its uses. But I would much prefer to be a disciple of what is alive in me, to “stick to it” by following a thread of something: learning, or life, or intention.

We are all disciples of something, though not necessarily on purpose. Everyone is studying some corner of the world closely. Perhaps it’s how to make more money. It could be the bottom scroll on CNN or the fantasy of being a perfect partner.

Maybe you’re the accidental disciple of your family’s moods. Or you faithfully watch fantasy dramas into the wee hours because, in reality, you are a disciple of epic romance, longing to live romantically in your daily life. What is it you gaze at with rapt attention and form yourself in the shape of?

When discipline is on its productive, moral pedestal, whether you’re chasing it or fleeing it, you cannot see what you are really the disciple of.

What do you do when you believe you are not disciplined? I picture any and all activities we put under “laziness.” Lackadaisical scrolling, being sloppy with your time, money, and belongings. When you think you aren’t disciplined, that you must fight against yourself to acquire it, you forget your power as a maker.

I can see the times when I have been the most meaningfully disciplined; I kept my nose close to my subject. I let myself be formed in the shape of my loving attention. I said yes to being an eternal-student-of instead of a master-over.

Content taken from Making Time by Maria Bowler ©2024. Used by permission of Baker Publishing Group.

if you’d like to try it out . . .

Read more

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. This post is a really special one—Nell Wulfhart, the Decision Coach, answers a bunch of reader questions about making choices in our writing lives.

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Today’s tending features Nell Wulfhart, the Decision Coach, and instead of our usual one-question format, Nell answered 5 (five!!!!!) subscriber questions. I was so excited when I got Nell’s answers to the questions I’d shared with her because, where I would do a ton of hedging and “on the one hand, but” and “well, that’s really tricky because” (why yes I am a Libra) Nell just gives an answer. (This is why she is the Decision Coach and I am the friend you call to vent. I’m pretty good at pep talks, too, though!) I love that clarity, and I particularly admire the way it’s backed up with a framework for decision-making. Whatever choices you’re facing in your writing life, I think you’ll get a lot out of Nell’s advice.

Question #1: stay in writing, or follow a new career?

Ever since having my third child, I’ve been struggling to find the excitement and passion I previously felt for my established writing career (I’m a published novelist with bylines in major publications). I’m working on two writing projects currently and while I enjoy them, I find that they don’t have the real-world practicality of other career focuses, or even of volunteer work I do locally (including as President of our PTA at our local Title 1 public school).

For a few years, I’ve been kicking around the idea of going back to school to get a master’s degree in social work, with the ultimate application of becoming a therapist and/or working in and around school-aged children. What nags at me is that I know how much time and work that degree and setting up an entirely new career at the ripe (ha!) age of 44 entails as well as the fact that I feel like I’m “abandoning” my writing career and likely won’t have the needed time to finish the projects I’ve already spent years drafting (oh, the feeling of “failure” when met with non-completion).

Should I apply to the program and if so, what’s the best timing? My kids are almost 3, 6, and 9, so all school aged but obviously still a ton of caregiving work still demanded. Then again, life is short. I worry if I keep waiting, I’ll always regret not making this leap. Thanks for your insights, Nell!

Nell says:

I once had a client in her mid-50s who was in her second year of med school! It is TRULY never too late.

Sometimes projects (especially writing projects) don’t get done. And I feel you! I have several multi-thousand word stories mouldering away in Scrivener that I’m just….never going to complete. I hate wasted work as much as anyone, maybe more, but by reframing those projects as “writing practice” or “creativity exercises” it’s easier for me to let them go.

One hint that it’s time for a change is that you’ve been thinking about this change for a few years. If there’s an idea that’s been buzzing around in your brain for a long time, I’m here to tell you that the buzzing doesn’t stop until you try it out.

One piece of advice I give to clients in this situation all the time is to do a little testing before jumping into grad school. How much do you know about the day-to-day work of a therapist, or working with school-aged kids all day every day? Before committing to a master’s degree, it’s a good investment of your time to have some coffees with people who are already doing the job you think you want—ask them about the hours, the paperwork, the availability of jobs, the toll it takes on their mind/body/soul! Shadow people for a couple of days, if you can swing it!

The way we make good decisions isn’t by sitting at home and wondering if we want to do something; it’s by testing it out as much as we can. Gather all the info you can on these potential jobs and then, if you still think it’s a good fit, go for it! As for the best timing, my opinion on that is almost always ASAP. Let’s get the hard part over with so we can enjoy the good part for longer.

And remember, no decision is set in stone! If that passion for writing returns, you can always go back to it (and your kids will be older, which will make it easier).

TL;DR: Try something new.

Question #2: what to work on (or take a break) while a book is on submission?

Dear Decision Coach,

I have been writing novels and working towards the goal of getting them traditionally published for what is now becoming an embarrassingly long time. (I wrote my first novel in 2006 and sent my first query letter in 2012.) I got an agent, but we weren’t a good fit, so we parted ways, and I signed with another agent who I absolutely love. We went on submission two years ago with a YA novel that didn’t get picked up. Now we’re on month seven of submission with a second YA novel — still no takers.

I want to be working on something else while I wait, especially because I figure if this one doesn’t sell, I should have something else ready to go. Here are the options I keep oscillating through:

1. Continue work on another YA novel that I started in the spring. It’s very similar in tone to the one that’s currently on submission, so if that one gets picked up, it would make sense to have this one coming down the pipeline. On the other hand, it’s starting to feel like maybe I’d just be writing yet another YA book that no one wants to publish.

2. Pivot away from YA and revise this first draft I have of an adult thriller novel. My agent thinks this one could be timely and of interest to editors. Only problem? My agent, my beta reader, and I all agree that it needs a major plot overhaul, but I have absolutely no idea how to fix all the plotting problems. Every time I try to work on it, I end up getting nowhere and feeling frustrated.

3. Write a different adult suspense novel. I have some very vague ideas percolating, but there’s a good chance I might run into the same issue as with #2. Plotting twists and turns is not my strength, although I do love suspense novels.

4. Just take a break from writing novels this fall and refill my creative well. Work on smaller writing projects. Read. Watch films. Go places. Teach more writing classes. Try not to be so Type A and try not to feel guilty about “not making progress.” Try not to have a total mid-life crisis breakdown spawned by the fear that I will never achieve the dream I’ve had for myself since first grade, and that every day that goes by is a wasted day, bringing me closer and closer to death and the final admittance of my own failure. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but also… those are feelings I have sometimes.

I realize your answer might be a combination of #4 and “write the thing you feel most excited and passionate about; trust the creative process.” But still, I’m curious to know your advice.

Nell says:

Actually, I think you should write the thing you think will sell.

Selling something is what you’ve been aiming for for a long time. Selling something will give you the momentum you’re seeking. It’s time to pivot from YA. “If that one gets picked up, it would make sense to have this one coming down the pipeline” is NOT a good reason to write a new YA novel. If the one that’s out on submission now gets picked up, you can always go back and work on this draft. But don’t make decisions based on vaguely possible “maybes,”  the outcomes of which are entirely beyond your control.

Plotting is something I am also VERY bad at, but I have gotten around this problem by working with other people (either picking their brains for plot ideas over wine) or by plotting out something together that I then later go off and write. Hire a book coach. Steal an idea from your favorite thriller author. Hell, ask ChatGPT (for plot inspiration ONLY, don’t @ me!) But work on the thing your agent thinks can sell.

By the way, I think we need to make decisions for the people we are, not the people we aspire to be one day. If you’re Type A, just lean into it and harness those “get it done” personality traits to, you know, get it done.

By the way, I laughed your #4 description. Good writing!

Question #3: go back to a full-time job or pursue writing more seriously?

Hi! Thank you for this invitation. I’m just starting in my substack and committing to writing consistently. I have been fortunate to be on a mid career sabbatical this year and now have to choose between two paths as  I’m trying to make re my writing as I end my sabbatical:

1. Pursue a full time job again, this would allow me to have consistent income to hopefully keep writing but historically it has been challenging for me to do this, hence getting back to writing while on sabbatical not while in my previous role.

Or

2. Prioritize my time towards writing and honing my voice and support my life with periodic consulting work as I build and monetize substack, speaking etc. this might give me space to finally right the book I’ve wanted to write. The risk of course is financial… and monetizing what is currently a source of exploration and joy. It would be a big life change to be creator first instead of prominent salaried role!

Nell says:

So, this kind of decision is one I get ALL THE TIME. Do I quit the job I hate to do the thing I love that doesn’t pay now but maybe it could, one day?

The actual decision will depend a lot on 1) your specific financial circumstances and 2) your personality.

Let’s talk about #1 first. Do you have a financial safety net? Do you share bills with someone who makes a good income? If you do, then take some time and space to write the book you’ve always wanted to write. Don’t consult, don’t work full-time. Give the book a chance to manifest and evaluate after six months.

Now, #2. Are you a hustler?

Making a living as a Substacker, content creator, speaker, consultant, etc. is HARD and TIME-CONSUMING.

As someone who was a full-time freelance writer for many years, I will tell you it is constant selling, constant pitching, many jobs that you take just for the money and hate every minute of them, and virtually no job security. Sick for a couple of weeks? Too bad, no money for you.

And you’re doing all this AND writing the book of your dreams? It’s a tough sell.

Being self-employed is all hustling and self-promotion and it takes a lot of confidence and nerve. If those aren’t your strong points, then either stay in the full-time job and make a C- effort there in order to give yourself more time to write or find a less time-consuming job that gives you more time to write.

Also! One question you need to ask yourself here is “what do I want the most”? A portfolio career as a professional writer/consultant/speaker? Or to write a book? I love (and have!) a portfolio career, and encourage people to become self-employed all the time, but if you want to write a book more than you want a portfolio career, then you should arrange your life to meet that one most important goal, and not take a sort of Plan B approach that leaves you with a career that involves plenty of writing but no book.

[ed. note: I’d never heard the term “portfolio career” before this, but I love it. My understanding is that a portfolio career is one with many parts—maybe podcasting, freelance writing, consulting, editing—rather than one central role. I think the way Nell uses that term in the context of what you want the most and what you know about yourself (and your finances!) as a worker and a writer is really clarifying. Do you need a stable job that will make writing on the side possible and sustainable, or can you juggle lots of different roles and keep your writing in the mix?]

Question #3 variation: write full-time or get a job?

I’m trying to decide if I should try to make writing a full-time gig (have it pay the bills) or get a job so I don't stress but have WAY less time to write. I know this is such a personal thing to think about—I really want to go full time, but not sure what freelancing can look like.

I am trying to work out whether to build a freelance writing business or stay in a job I absolutely hate and which doesn’t pay enough and use my extra time to edit and do the find-an-agent thing with my novel.

Nell says:

Re: freelance writing business, this will take a long time to build and a lot of energy to sustain. See above! But it occurred to me—why are these the only two options? If you hate the job and it doesn’t pay enough, maybe finding a job that pays better and you don’t totally hate should be your first priority. I love finding a third option, and a new full-time job + writing time seems like a good solution because [again, see above].

Question #4: submit to contests vs publishers?

I’d love to hear more about submitting to contests for the money and recognition vs submitting your work to a publisher to see it in the world sooner.

Nell says:

Do both. I’m a massive fan of trying everything at once. That’s how you collect data, and spend less time waiting for other people’s stamp of approval. Just try every idea you have at the same time and see what works and what doesn’t. It’s the most efficient way to find the answers to your questions.

Also, just curious here, is there much money and recognition in writing contests? This is not my area of expertise but it seems like a long shot (traditional publishing is, too, but it comes with more credibility and prestige as far as I know). Maybe Nancy can chime in here.

[ed. note: I’m not really sure what to say re money/credibility/recognition and writing, other than lol/sob. I think Nell’s answer to “just try everything!” is a great one, and is definitely the path I’ve followed in my writing life.]

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Nell McShane Wulfhart is a decision coach. It’s a job she invented 11 years ago, and has been doing ever since. She only offers one thing: a single session in which she helps someone make a big decision. She has helped people decide where to live, whether to get divorced, what to name their baby, whether to get a tattoo removed, whether to take a job offer, when to retire, if they should have a kid, what color to paint the kitchen...and pretty much anything else you can think of. She’s coached mayors, Olympic athletes, hedge fund managers, students, parents, filmmakers, etc. New York Magazine said she has “an unvarnished warmth that lands somewhere between cool aunt and favorite camp counselor.” She’s also been a journalist, a New York Times columnist, and author. Read about Nell here, and sign up for her newsletter at decisioncoach.com.

You can find The Decision Coach podcast on Audible, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

💬 a question for you 💬

I love Nell’s no-nonsense approach to making decisions, and I’d love to know: what’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten? Who’s helped you untangle a tricky choice, whether it was in your writing life, or just generally?

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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, you can support me by sharing it online or with a friend, or by pre-ordering my next book, The Good Mother Myth.

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. If you could use some inspiration in the midst of a big project, I think you’ll really love today’s piece by Rebecca Stafford, about how she rewrote her whole novel—and learned to be kinder to herself in the writing process—after getting some tough feedback.

Today’s tending features Rebecca Stafford, whose debut young adult novel, Rabbit & Juliet, is out TODAY! I’ve known Rebecca since we were both young poets together, and she started quietly writing a young adult novel during the pandemic. (The first I heard of it was when she sold that book to an editor at Quill Tree, an imprint of Harper Collins! That editor was so excited about Rebecca’s book that she made a playlist to convey the book’s vibes.) Rabbit & Juliet is described as “Mixing the complicated queer love from People Like Us and the dark snark of Do Revenge”—how could you not love that?

Rebecca sold Rabbit & Juliet in a two-book deal, so right after wrapping up edits on that novel, she had to get down to work writing a whole new book. When Rebecca sent the draft of that second novel to her agent, though, she didn’t quite get the response she was hoping for. She’d known it would need some work, but her agent told her it needed major revisions, and got her an extension with her editor. So Rebecca was faced with the daunting task of having to rewrite the whole novel, and even with the extension, she had a pretty serious time crunch—one summer to come up with a totally new book. 

Well—drumroll!—she did it, and I wanted her to talk to us for the newsletter about how she kept moving past that tough initial feedback, and how she managed to basically write an entire new novel in eleven weeks. Below, Rebecca describes how she processed that tough feedback and provides some really excellent tips (with pictures!) for overhauling a draft of your own.

one question for Rebecca

I’m curious about both the emotions and the process as you rewrote your second novel. How did you move forward with the novel after getting that tough feedback? And how did you manage to rewrite the whole thing so quickly?

Rebecca

Oddly enough, the tough feedback was a relief.  I think I laughed when my agent called about the extension? I didn’t like my draft, and it wasn’t a shock to me that it was unworkable. I’d struggled writing it while teaching full time, and as the deadline neared my feet had swelled from the stress until I could barely walk. The phone call released me from pretending everything was ok. 

After the call, I realized two things. One, the book needed major work, if not an entire overhaul. And two, I couldn’t keep ignoring my struggles with time management, focus, and stress. My body was literally trying to make me sit down and rest.

So, I let go of my prideful insistence that I just needed to somehow work harder, and was evaluated for ADHD. Unsurprisingly, I was diagnosed with Inattentive ADHD. This was a sea change moment for me. Once I accepted that my brain works differently, I stopped upbraiding myself and my self-esteem improved a lot. With medication, I can work, write, and still have energy for things I enjoy. My anxiety and depression have lifted because I was playing life on hard mode and didn’t know it. 

At the same time, I got to work. My agent and her assistant gave me three main areas to consider from my draft. All of them were helpful, but one in particular made me excited to get started. She suggested a reason my main character wanted to attend a certain school – a particular teacher -– and this idea fused with an old idea I’d had about a certain kind of professor. 

For the first draft, I’d made a plan out of index cards, labeling each scene as a beat in three acts. This made me feel safe, but ultimately, I created a structure without considering the why of events, I wrote scenes because they were obligatory, and my characters made choices based on my plan, not their desires. I suppose it was a successful method in that I wrote a draft, but it also encouraged rigidity on my part. It definitely works for some authors, but I needed something that would allow me to explore more.

This time, I didn’t start by trying to outline. Instead, I reread the draft, then listed plot, character, and setting problems, a technique from Susan Dennard’s fantastic revision worksheets. This exercise confirmed what I knew: the plot was unworkable, the world undeveloped, and the characters flat. Next, I drew a map of the town and its surroundings so I could clearly describe it, and then listed each individual character’s desires, motivations, and  “misbeliefs” – a concept from Story Genius by Lisa Cron. 

To reconsider the plot, I wrote down the inciting incident of the novel – the only thing I was certain of -– and added the teacher idea into the mix. Next, I described that incident as part of a causal chain: there were the effects of that incident, then the effects of those effects, and so on. This carried me through about ⅓ of the novel, and ensured that scenes were happening for reasons, and not just because I needed them to happen. Only then did I make a rough outline of events using Scrivener’s corkboard. Finally, I essentially wrote a pitch letter to my agent, an exercise that helped me further understand the main character’s motivations. After my agent’s enthusiastic response, I got to writing. 

I wrote the new draft almost entirely from scratch, even for the scenes that were similar to the original draft. If I wanted to reuse a section from the old draft, I retyped it rather than cutting and pasting. This meant that (a) I really wanted it despite the labor and (b) I improved the language on the fly. My daily output ranged from 2000 words on great days to 250 on hard ones. I started on May 13 and I had the full draft for my agent on Aug 5, so that was about eleven weeks. I was on summer break during this, which made a huge difference to my energy and time. 

I’m grateful for this failure for forcing me to address my needs, both personally and as a writer. Working myself to exhaustion for a pat on the head and a gold star wasn’t sustainable, and neither was ignoring my ADHD. 

Finally, this failure taught me that I can fail and survive. There will be more failures in my future. Grand, spectacular failures! And that’s normal, and it doesn’t mean everything is over. It means I get to try again. 

[ed. note: Rebecca’s celebration of “grand, spectacular failures” reminded me of one my favorite picture books, Rosie Revere, Engineer; I wrote here about how much I love the book’s embrace of the “brilliant first flop” as a step in the creative process]

if you’d like to try it out . . .

Read more

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. I’m a poet and an essayist, and my most recent books are the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I edited with the poet Emily Pérez. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. If you’re looking for some creative inspiration, I think you’ll really love today’s piece by poet Karen Rigby, about using art to spark your writing.

Today’s post is a guest essay by Karen Rigby, a poet whose new book, Fabulosa, ranges from Dior to Endeavour Morse to Hieronymus Bosch. I was particularly drawn to the mix of keen observation and sharp analysis in these poems, which put, for example, Dior’s New Look in conversation with the anxieties of the atomic age. (More on that below!)

I was especially excited to feature this interview and prompt now because, in the swamp of mid-summer, I think it can be hard to find inspiration and mental space for writing, and the prompt Karen shares below feels like a really fun, approachable way to spark a new piece of writing.

Below, Karen describes how she came to write these ekphrastic poems about fashion, and she provides a really great, step by step prompt to guide you into trying out some ekphrastic writing of your own. (Karen’s a poet, but I think this prompt could guide you into writing a really great essay as well, so don’t let the line breaks scare you off!)

one question for Karen

I was so drawn to the ekphrastic work in your new book—poems inspired by paintings by Brueghel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, as well as by other art forms, like Olympic figure skating programs by Johnny Weir and Carolina Kostner. But I wanted to ask you specifically about the poems written in response to fashion, because I don’t think I’ve seen ekphrastic poems in that vein before. You have a beautiful poem, “On Marion Cotillard’s 2008 Oscar Dress” and another, “The Bar Suit,” in response to Dior’s 1947 collection. I particularly love the way that poem places us in the wild juxtapositions of that moment in history: “The year an editor crowns Dior’s collection / as the New Look, the Doomsday Clock debuts // on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.”

How did you come to those poems—ekphrastic poems inspired not by paintings or sculpture, but by fashion, which isn’t always thought of as an art form? And what kind of research (including close looking as a form of research) went into the writing?

Karen

Many of my favorite poems feature dresses, including Lynn Emanuel’s “The White Dress,” which begins:

What does it feel like to be this shroud

on a hanger, this storm cloud hanging

in the closet?

From that questioning invitation, her poem unfolds, and goes on to describe “an eczema / of sequins” which startles me every time. With only a few vivid words, she conjures inflamed, scaling skin. I think about the beauty of the dress, but also abrasion, and the tactile sensation of riffling across a sparkling surface.

It’s such an unexpected pairing of words. Now, contemplating a dress opens up new pathways. I’m reminded, as a writer, that a dress doesn’t have to be soft. We can bring a whole other textured language and contrast into a poem.

When it comes to the ekphrastic, I’m interested at the point where the poet brings in their own perspective, and their particular language, which then transforms how I’m seeing what they’re seeing.

Emanuel’s poem can be read in full as a sample .pdf on the University of Pittsburgh Press website. It’s from her collection Then, Suddenly, which I’d encourage everyone to read. To find even more poems, here is the Academy of American Poets feature “Poems for the Clothesline” which includes everything from shirts to couture and shoes.

When I was writing “The Bar Suit” I knew that it was an iconic Dior piece. I’d only seen it in vintage fashion photographs, and for all of its black and white glamour, that structured wasp waist seemed impossible. The otherworldly simmered at the edges.

I decided to look more closely, and found the suit on The Met website. The absence of any human model amplifies its eerieness. Noting the year, 1947, made me consider what else was happening at that time. That’s how the poem found its center.

While the creation of the “New Look” doesn’t seem to have much to do with the debut of the Doomsday clock, the two occurrences seemed to fit instinctively. A poem makes connections all of the time. Now here was a background for this suit to exist in. Here was a context for the dangerous feeling it evoked in me. In turn, that gave me the word “reactor” which I include in the line, “Inside meringue and black couture, the spleen / builds its own reactor.” Part of what I love about poetry is that it seldom ends where it began.

If you’d like to try it out . . .

Find a photo in The Costume Institute collection that strikes you.

• Write down a few initial impressions.

• Now go back. Where can you complicate details when you look again? Is there an “eczema / of sequins” moment for you? A place to add contrast amid the splendor? Alternately, is there beauty to find even when an item doesn’t appeal to you?

• Borrow language from another discipline, such as botany, industry, engineering, gastronomy, or dance. Are there connections to draw?

• When was the item made and worn? What surprises you about that period?

• Does the item remind you of a personal memory? A mood, fear, or desire?

• Is there a singular detail that invites closer study? Consider the honeycombed skirt in Ensemble.

• For more serious turns: what are we to make of costumes, such as those by Paul Poiret or the House of Paquin? When is fashion a celebratory tribute? When is it uninspired, exoticizing, thievery, or dangerous? What allures and repels? How might a poem challenge, query or critique in a clear-eyed way, while also moving beyond the initial gaze? Find a fashion piece that provokes, and examine your response to it.

• For a sideways, humorous approach: is there any fun note included in the accompanying descriptions that seem worthy of tracing? Or of stitching into a playful found poem? Consider “It was a popular conceit that the cantilevers of these bustles could support an entire tea service” in this Dinner Dress.

• For enriching vocabulary, find words or phrases that intrigue you enough to include them in a poem. Consider “stomacher,” “wands of willow” and “panniers” in this Court Dress.

I’d love to know what you find—feel free to share striking images, lines, or good ideas in the comments!

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Born in the Republic of Panama, Karen Rigby now lives and writes in Arizona. Her latest poetry book, Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024), is a Ms. Magazine “Best Poetry of ’23-‘24” selection. Her debut, Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), won the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She is a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, and published in journals such as Bennington Review and Poetry Northwest. On August 20^th Karen will be sharing work with poet Danika Stegeman in a virtual Notebooks Collective event.

a selection of prompts and inspiration for slow summer days

on walking and Real Things

a guest prompt, written by Eugenia Leigh and inspired by a K. Iver poem, for writing an opposite-day poem

on experimenting with anaphora

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.

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Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. I’m a poet and an essayist, and my most recent books are the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I edited with the poet Emily Pérez. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. If you’re juggling writing, a day job, and parenting or other caregiving responsibilities, I think you’ll really love today’s practical piece by novelist Katharine Schellman, who share tips for planning and outlining and using achievable word count goals as a way to get your writing done when you’re busy.

Today’s post is a guest essay by Katharine Schellman, a novelist whose most recent book, The Last Note of Warning, takes us into a speakeasy in Prohibition-era New York, where Vivian Kelly has to solve a murder after being framed. It’s a fun, twisty mystery with great character development and period details. (And it’s the third in her “luscious, mysterious, and queer Nightingale mystery series.”)

Katharine’s an incredibly prolific writer, and she’s also a parent of two young kids. As she shares below, she had to confront the same cultural narrative a lot of us struggle with: that mothering is the enemy of art. For Katharine, the answer to sustaining her writing along with parenting and working a day job is all about efficiency and planning.

Below, Katharine—who’s published 7 books since April 2020, with 8 and 9 on the way!—shares her method for doing so much writing, even without a bajillion uninterrupted hours to work or the unlimited childcare so many of us might wish for. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by trying to fit your writing in along with the rest of your life, I think you’ll really like her low-stress, helpful tips.

Katharine, on why you need less time than you think to write a book

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I knew the two big things I wanted to do next were write books and have kids. But every cultural narrative around me said that having kids would leave me almost no time to be creative, while every artistic narrative around me said that books required lots of time to get written. Real writers needed to write every day, in quiet, without worrying about caretaking responsibilities. They needed to think deep writerly thoughts without interruption and devote years of their lives to producing each work.

The books, I decided, would need to happen first. I had to get published before I had kids, or it was never going to happen.

But—and this won’t be a surprise to anyone who has been very attached to the idea of a perfect timeline—things didn’t happen in that order. My first child was born in 2016, when I was several drafts into a manuscript that was almost but not quite right. As the sole breadwinner for my small family, I took a year off from writing and wondered if I would ever get back to it.

Eventually, slowly, I did. That book became the one I queried, the one that got me an agent and my first book deal. I wrote another book, then another. I had another baby. I wrote another book.

My first book came out in April 2020. Four years and two months later, my seventh just hit bookshelves. My eighth book will be out in August, my ninth next summer. Along the way, I discovered that what I thought I knew about writing wasn’t true. I don’t need silence and solitude to write (though it’s nice when I can get it). I don’t need to avoid caretaking responsibilities or to spend years completing a single project. I don’t even need to write every day.

What I needed was to think about my writing differently: not in terms of what I couldn’t get done, but in terms of what I could. With kids and a day job, time to write is often limited. I had to be efficient with the time that I had.

Luckily, I also learned that you need less time to write a book than you think.

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It takes about 300 word to fill a single typed page. If you write 300 words a day, it will take about a year to write a book. If you write 600 words a day, that’s around half a year. At 900 words a day, you can finish a book in three to four months.

Here's where things get tricky: they need to be mostly words you will keep, which means getting organized about what you’ll write before you write it. You need a plan.

I like to outline my books in scene-by-scene paragraphs, and I think of that outline as a first draft. I’ll take two or three weeks to write it, using the time to develop both the bigger story arc and the individual character arcs. If I think of dialogue or descriptions when I’m outlining, I’ll put those in too. By the time I’m ready to draft, I can sit down to write each time knowing where to start and where I need to arrive. If I’m excited about a particular scene or having trouble getting through a transition, I can hop around and still know how everything will fit together when I’m done, making it easy to go back and fill in the gaps.

I can already hear the protests: planning will stifle your ability to be creative. You won’t be able to discover new things as you go. And to that I say: a plan is not a prison. In the same way you can (and will) change things from a first draft to a second, you can (and will!) change things from a plan to a first draft. A plan is simply a roadmap that lets you work more efficiently when your work hours are limited. Because creative work is work. And like any kind of work, we only have so many hours in a week to get it done. Having a plan can help you use those hours well.

❤️️ if you find Katharine’s low-stress approach to writing a ton helpful, click the red heart at the top or bottom to help other busy writers find us! ❤️️

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If you’d like to try it out…

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Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

We’ve recently featured some really great writers, including , who offered guidance about writing “housemates and roommates and strange uncategorizable friendships and mentorships,” (and whose novel Housemates is a 🎉national bestseller🎉) and Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn, who wrote about digging into the contradictions in her gorgeous memoir Loose of Earth (which was just featured on Zibby Owens’s Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books podcast!). Today we’ve got a guest post from Sara Lippmann of the new teaching cooperative Writing Co-Lab.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Today’s essay is a guest post by Sara Lippman, one of the founders of the Writing Co-Lab. Since Catapult announced it would be closing its classes (sob), I’ve had an eye out to see who would fill that void, and the Writing Co-Lab is doing so many great things—accessible courses on a wide variety of practical and craft issues, in a mix of formats from one day workshops in drawing a diary comic to a 4-month intensive course in the short story.

They’re doing a program this summer that I think will appeal to lots of Write More readers—the Co-Lab Summer Camp. If you’ve got your summer writing plan ready to go and are realizing you could use some more encouragement and community as you work away at those goals, I’d encourage you to check out the Co-Lab’s summer camp.

Below, Sara writes about grappling with her own early rejections and learning that she needed both to get down to work and learn from those rejections and do more to build the community that sustains a writing practice.

Sara, on the paradox of the artist’s life and learning to see creative work as a long game

The first story I ever submitted got picked up on its first shot. I was 25. The literary journal even had me at their college to read at their launch. I assumed this was the way it worked. I’d come from the world of glossy magazines (remember magazines?!) where deadlines activated me, and freelance checks sustained me (barely), and no one offered up content on fashion dos and don’ts without a contract in hand.

Of course, I was operating under the false assumption that input equals output. Work hard, and the work will be recognized – typically, through monetary compensation. I failed to see the privilege and entitlement, not to mention the patriarchal misguidedness, of such a capitalistic notion.

After that first taste of beginner’s luck, rejection set in. My uninspiring crop of MFA produced stories were met with rapid “no’s” or interminable silence. Sometimes, personalized notes slipped through, which I dutifully saved in an envelope as a teacher had recommended. If nothing else, I aspired to be a good student – and masochist.

As rejection compiled, I began to succumb to the tugs of self-pity. I sucked. I wallowed in my suckage. I should’ve considered medical school!

Cue the comparison game, the abandoning of projects, the long stretches of not writing. Of course, as much as rejection might have stung, all this drama was an expression of ego, of fragility, anxiety, and insecurity. It was self-serving. As if I somehow “deserved” recognition; in fact, I deserved nothing.

The artist’s life is a paradox: not for the thin skinned, and yet, a certain porousness is required to be alive to the detail, emotional landscape, nuance, and gesture of the worlds we write about. On the one hand, we’re told: don’t take it so personally. On the other hand, sensitivity is our superpower.

My grandparents fled Nazi Germany to make a life in New York, one rooted in the belief of possibility, that hard work pays off. The puritan ethic is, of course, a bill of goods. But I was spoon-fed the immigrant myth known as the American Dream. I’d subscribed to the tenet that success should be tangible and quantifiable. Only this is not how the world works. There is no meritocracy. When it comes to writing, there's a chasm between art and the marketplace. Intellectually, I know this. Emotionally, it’s a different story.

To strive and to want, sure – this is human nature. A friend asks, “Is it careerist to want to be read?” Of course not. Without readers, what we have is masturbation. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Readers complete the imperative. That’s the whole E.M. Forster gig: to “only connect.” Nor is it mercenary to want to be paid for one’s labor. For as long as capitalism survives, a person’s got to eat.

Reasonable goals, yet so much of this life is beyond our control. One thing we can do is stop surrendering our self-worth to the whims of submittable.

I needed to move past external judgment and take a cold hard look inside. Ask myself: what are you trying to say? Is it vital, urgent, necessary? I needed to get down to work. To own my voice and hone it and stop trying to conform to anyone else’s. To focus on the page, pure and simple. To learn from rejection. And I needed to do more to build and sustain community, arranging my life in accordance to how I wanted to live, absent of “should.”

Bernadette Mayer’s poem, “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica,” helped me reckon with all of this. “Be strong, Bernadette,” I told myself, in those tender moments:

Do not be afraid of your own heart beating

In AWP 2022 I moderated a panel called Nevertheless they Persisted: The Writer and the Long Game, with authors Steve Almond, Leland Cheuk, Christine Sneed and Robert Lopez. People spilled out of the room, swarmed the panelist table afterward. It was clear we’d struck a nerve.

I’m excited to continue the spirited conversation as part of the Writing Co-lab’s summer camp program with authors Danielle Lazarin, Hannah Bae and Richard Mirabella. Together, we’ll discuss candid strategies for perseverance even when it seems like that Magic 8-Ball is stuck, no matter how often we shake it, on “Signs Point to No.”

As Steve Almond says, “Your job is not to get an agent or a bestseller, it’s to outlast your doubt. That’s your job and try to enjoy the process or at least find meaning in it.”

Maintaining a Lifelong Writing Practice will take place on Wednesday, July 24^th, from 8-9pm. Hope you join us!

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if you’d like to try it out . . .

Read Mayer’s poem. (These are the opening lines; you can read the rest of it at the Poetry Foundation website.)

Be strong Bernadette

Nobody will ever know

I came here for a reason

Perhaps there is a life here

Of not being afraid of your own heart beating

Do not be afraid of your own heart beating

Look at very small things with your eyes

& stay warm

Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside

What is your way to keep going?

Leave a comment

Writing Co-Lab, founded in 2023 by Brian Gresko, Sara Lippmann, and Amy Shearn, is a teaching cooperative owned and operated by artists passionate about craft, community, creativity, and the joyous power of the written word. Co-Lab, short for cooperative laboratory, indicates our excitement and commitment to working together and with our students in providing educational experiences not seen within the traditional academic or continuing-ed landscape. Our teachers bring their unique experiences and voices to their classes, which cover a variety of topics, from preparing work for publication, to deepening discipline, trying new styles and techniques, and cultivating fun in the writing process. Taking time to develop your art is a deeply rewarding experience, and it is our privilege to help you on that journey, whether you are looking for renewed vigor on the way, or are about to take your first steps.

check out the Writing Co-Lab!

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.

Subscribe now

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching, caring for our attention, and approaches to creative research. Today’s newsletter features , whose novel Housemates is out today.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

Today’s tending is a piece by Emma Eisenberg, who I’ve admired for years as a writer and a creator of literary community. Her first book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, is an incredibly deeply-researched book of narrative nonfiction and makes use of the personal in a way that’s so smart and surprising. (If you haven’t already, go read and come back so we can talk about it! I really think the personal narrative comes in at exactly the right moment, and I thought about it a lot as I was shaping my next book, which also uses personal narrative alongside research.) Emma’s also the founder of Blue Stoop, a literary organization in Philadelphia, that’s been such an important space for community online and in-person for people in the region and beyond.

Emma’s new book, the much-anticipated novel Housemates, publishes today, and she was generous enough to talk a bit about why she’s drawn to writing about friendship and community. Below, she describes why these relationships fascinate her, and she offers a really fun prompt to use in your own writing.

Emma, on writing about friendship and communities of friends

I’ve always been interested in communities of people bound together in ways that are hard to describe and that’s what both of my books are about, it turns out. I read Sophie’s Choice by William Styron and my main takeaway was that it would have been fun and sexy to live in a boarding house in Brooklyn in the 1940s. 

I guess what fascinates me is the way that intense tight-knit communities become this testing ground against which people are able to find out who they really are and who they are not. My novel Housemates is about a queer group house in West Philly that exists within a broader neighborhood of queer (in the ethical and political sense) social life in the city. The house where they meet is made up of five housemates who seem to have formed a set of collective views on what is the right way to live, yet both of my main characters are chafing under this belief system. Moving away from the group and towards each other is how the story gets ignited, a story that ends up being about two people traveling in a car across rural Pennsylvania and making art together. They are not quite lovers, not quite family, and only sort of friends. 

In writing Housemates, I went looking for books that use this testing ground to magnificent effect. I found Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (employee and boss’ daughter wrestle each other in an apartment they now share?), Nell Zink’s Nicotine (a group house made of literal buckets of shit turns out to also be made of misguided ideas!), Raven Leilani’s Luster (mistress + wife and child share a house), Richard Mirabella’s Brother and Sister Enter the Forest (siblings as estranged housemates), and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different (a group of friends comes together to fight housing inequality, among other delightful and complex plot elements).

“Friend” and friendship” are kind of catch-all words for people that we don’t know how to define, and I’m really interested in that undefinable quality. Housemates and roommates and strange uncategorizable friendships and mentorships are fascinating to me because as a culture these are the people for whom we have no box, yet they are the relationships that often shape your life. You are wildly intimate with the people you live with – you hear them cry and come and fight on the phone with their mothers – but you’ve never met their parents or seen the place where they grew up and you don’t know what the office where they go every day looks like. We don’t have words for this kind of fellow feeling that is at once super close and super far away.

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if you’d like to try it out . . .

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Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching, caring for our attention, and approaches to creative research. Today’s newsletter features Mindy Friddle, whose novel Her Best Self will be out May 21st.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

😎🥳️a little note before we hear from Mindy: I’m teaming up with Jenn McClearen, who writes the great newsletter Publish Not Perish, to host a summer planning party via zoom on Wednesday, May 22nd from 7-8pm eastern. the change in schedule that often comes with the summer can be exciting but can also throw you for a loop, and Jenn and I have some great practical advice about how to make the most of your writing life in the coming months—while still getting to lounge by the pool, or whatever your vibe might be this summer. you can read more about the party here, if you like, or just go ahead and register here to join us. (and if you can’t make the party, I’ll send a recording a week or so afterward.) 🥳️😎

register for the planning party!

Today’s essay is a guest post by novelist Mindy Friddle, whose new novel Her Best Self tells the story of Janelle Wolf, a woman whose life has been upended by a mysterious car accident. As the book unfolds, we follow multiple characters who each have their own view on Janelle, and we uncover the ugly truth beneath the accident. This multiple perspective is further enriched by a series of newspaper articles included throughout the book, which tell the story of Janelle before her accident and hint at the troubling truth below the surface of this pretty southern town.

Below, Mindy describes how those newspaper articles came to be, and she offers two prompts for writers interested in trying out this intertextual approach for themselves.

Mindy, on using intertextuality in fiction

The quotidian details of life often inspire ideas for fiction; when you're building backstory for characters, you just need to know where to look. While drafting my latest novel, Her Best Self, I wanted to know more about the accident in protagonist Janelle Wolf’s past that completely upended her life. So did Janelle.

I’d written several chapters from Janelle’s perspective, and I’d discovered she’d barely survived an accident three decades previously when her car ran off a bridge. Until that catastrophic night, Janelle was known as a loving mother, an adored wife, a career woman, and a force in her community—a small town in Haven, South Carolina. Because she suffered a traumatic brain injury in the collision, she has little recall about the circumstances surrounding the mysterious accident, and she’s horrified at the rumors— that she’d tried to take her own life: “To some in Haven, I became the woman who had everything, who dared to be ungrateful, willing to end it all. To others, who averted their eyes at my stunted recovery, I became a shadow of what I once was, a creature to be pitied.”

My reporter’s instincts kicked in. As a freelance journalist, I’ve covered everything from hard news to frothy lifestyle features, so as a novelist I took notes as if I were on the scene of Janelle’s accident. In an article I drafted, I clarified the date and time, the name of the bridge and river, the weather, the direction Janelle’s car was headed. I imagined interviewing witnesses and authorities; I included a quote from the police chief.

Returning to the manuscript, it occurred to me to open the novel with that article, headlined “Local Woman Seriously Injured After Car Plunges Into River.” As a prologue, the article provides a cut-and-dried version of the accident. Janelle would add emotional context around those facts, as she grapples with what happened the night she lost her best self, the one she calls Janelle Before.

As I revised Her Best Self, I decided to intersperse other articles from the fictional small town newspaper, the Haven Observer. A profile of Janelle in the past, before the accident, “Janelle Wolf: Wife, Mother, Pillar of the Community,” reveals more about Janelle’s family, career, and community activities, and why she was once viewed by many in her town as the woman who had everything.

An interview with her frenemy, “Mary Rex: A Politician’s Wife Avoids the Spotlight,” a dozen years after Janelle’s accident, saddens and infuriates Janelle when she finds it a scrapbook, as she attempts to piece together the days leading up to her accident. Later in the novel, I included brief news articles about a missing person investigation, providing facts about the incident in an efficient way— the who, what, when, where, and how. The characters would provide the why, the human element behind those facts.

The fancy term for embedding these articles in the novel is intertextuality, the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. No doubt you’ve read novels that include letters and diary entries. But novels can include all sorts of texts, such as social media posts, poems, podcast transcripts, obituaries, medical records, and legal documents. Recent novels have run the gamut of intertextuality, from the Hollywood tabloids and paparazzi flashes that illustrate a reclusive movie star’s curated public persona in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, to the posts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s protagonist Ifemel, who moves to the United States and blogs about her experiences as a non-American Black woman in Americanah, to the magnificent poems by a fictional Irish poet who deserts his family, which Anne Enright herself wrote for The Wren, The Wren. Jennifer Egan’s award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad features one chapter told entirely through a PowerPoint presentation.

Intertextuality fascinates me, so when I come across any sort of document that piques my curiosity and hints at a human element I’d like to explore, I keep it in a file, to spark ideas about characters, noting how the texts might be included in a fictional tale.

For instance, I recently reported on a lawsuit about a woman suing a nurse for illegally accessing her medical records. The woman was dating the nurse’s ex-husband! The nurse had no idea the medical database she’d accessed recorded every instance of her snooping. What was the nurse looking for? A medical diagnosis to shame the girlfriend? Pregnancy or STDs? Or just morbid curiosity? The legal complaint hinted at the jealousy and turmoil in legalese language, a situation ripe for exploring in fiction.

if Write More has helped you in your creative life, you can click the little ❤️️heart❤️️ at the top or bottom of this post to help other folks find us!

Another rich source of material are neighborhood apps such as Nextdoor, which are often full of snark and drama. Here’s a thread from a neighborhood app I added to my idea file:

Ms. A: Someone cut my prize peonies! These new people moving in aren’t raised right.

Ms. B: It’s all those AirBandB people. The neighborhood is filled with strangers from God knows where.

Mr. C: People are stealing my cats.

Mr. D: You mean literally a cat burglar?

Mr. C: I mean someone is stealing my cats!

Mr. D: LOL. Cat thieves! K, dude.

This exchange provides humorous insight into a suspicious, territorial group—fertile ground for fiction.

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if you’d like to try it out . . .

Here are two exercises to generate new work or deepen works in progress through intertextuality:

1. Consider using all sorts of texts to inspire fiction. Local news, intriguing podcasts, community newsletters, and any documents that could serve as a springboard for characters, such as:

• School board minutes from a raucous meeting about book banning. Could the ready-made conflict and strident voices serve as suburban satire, e.g.  Tom Perrotta’s Little Children?  Are marriages and friendships tested? Or perhaps the issue forges unlikely alliances?

• An obituary that compresses the extraordinary arc of a life. Extrapolate from the facts and accomplishments to write about a character.

2. On the other hand, try creating your own document to explore an idea or find out more about a character you’re writing about.

• Conduct an interview with a character. Will this Q&A hint at a secret your character is withholding? A sense of pride or shame that hints at inner conflict?

• Write a character’s will and last testament. Does this heal divisions or create new fissures? Will a surprise bequest to a stranger astonish the character’s family? Or perhaps the dearly departed has left his entire fortune to an infamous organization that shocks and outrages your characters. Turmoil ensues.

• Create a DNA report that reveals a new sibling. How do your characters respond to this new family member? 

These sorts of texts can reveal conflict, illustrate misunderstandings, and illuminate yearnings. Chances are when you create such documents, you’ll find out more about your characters’ motivations. And you just might include your created text in your story or novel as well.

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Mindy Friddle's latest novel, Her Best Self, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on May 21, 2024. She is the author of Secret Keepers, (winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction) and The Garden Angel (SIBA bestseller, selected for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers). The South Carolina Arts Commission awarded Mindy a prose fellowship, and she has twice won the state’s Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives on Edisto Island, South Carolina.

Find Mindy at www.mindyfriddle.com, on Instagram at @mindyfriddle, or subscribe to her newsletter.

You can join Mindy on her book tour this spring and summer, across the Carolinas:

• Book launch at McConkeys Jungle Shack, Edisto Beach, SC | May 22 from 4-6:30pm.

• "Make a Scene, Why Don't You?!" | Virtual workshop sponsored by the South Carolina Writers Association | May 23, 12-1pm ET.

• In conversation with Jonathan Haupt at Pat Conroy Literary Center, in partnership with NeverMore Books, Beaufort, SC | May 23, 5pm

• Piccolo Fiction Event at Blue Bicycle Books, Charleston, SC | June 1, 5pm

• In conversation with Scott Gould at M.Judson Booksellers, Greenville, SC | June 4, 5:30-6:30pm. 

• In conversation with Dale Neal at Malaprop's Bookstore, Asheville, NC | June 5, 6pm.

• Fiction Addiction's Book Your Lunch with Mindy Friddle and Caroline Cleveland, CityRange Grill, Greenville, SC | June 11, 12pm

• In conversation with Michel Stone at Hub City Bookshop, Spartanburg, SC | June 12, 6pm

• In conversation with Rebecca Godwin at Litchfield Books, Pawley's Island, SC | July 26

• "Write Your Novel: Tips to Propel You from Inspiration to Final Draft" | South Carolina Writer Association's StoryFest 2024, Columbia, SC | September 27, 3:45-4:45pm. 

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.

Subscribe now

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching, caring for our attention, and approaches to creative research. Today’s newsletter features Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn, whose memoir Loose of Earth is out now.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Today’s essay is a guest post by Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn, whose new book Loose of Earth is one of the most skillfully constructed memoirs I’ve read in a long time. In Loose of Earth, Blackburn describes her childhood growing up as the oldest of five in an evangelical family in West Texas and how, when her father was diagnosed with stage IV cancer at 38, “it was like pouring gasoline on the Holy Spirit.” Though her parents were both college-educated and her mother was a veterinarian, they refused medical treatment and turned instead to faith healing, remaining certain right up until her father’s day that a miracle would cure him. (Blackburn’s writing about her mother in particular is a master class in presenting difficult characters in a way that feels both fair and clear-eyed, so if you’re writing hard family stories, I think you’ll really love this book.)

And behind that personal tragedy are issues of environmental justice, including the “forever chemicals” to which her father was exposed when he was an air force pilot. (Blackburn wrote about these “forever chemicals” and the EPA’s recent moves to regulate some of them in a recent New York Times guest essay (that’s a gift link, so you can click through for free.)) As someone who’s obsessed with structure, I was really awed by how Blackburn weaves together those strands. If you’re working on a project that integrates research alongside memoir, I think you’ll find Blackburn’s book an excellent model.

Below, Blackburn talks about how the skills she honed as an essayist came into play working on the memoir, and she provides a really wonderful prompt for integrating reflection and complexity into your writing.

Kathleen, on using reflection to dig into contradictions

In my twenties, I obsessively read literary essays. It was the early 2010’s and I inhaled Brenda Miller’s braided structures, Ryan Van Meter’s second-person point-of-view, Elissa Washuta’s experimental work, Ander Monson’s found-forms, and Maggie Nelson’s white space. My favorite was (and still is) the work of Eula Biss, whose essays exemplified paradox and uncertainty, leading her as often through bewilderment as revelation.

I am not a person of moderation, and I devoted myself wholly to writing essays. The tradition fascinated me. Here was a genre that privileged reflection over persuasion, doubt over thesis, the incomplete over the whole – what Michel de Montaigne described as “disjointed parts,” and Francis Bacon called “knowledge broken.”

As a graduate student in an MFA program, I joined my classmates in experimenting with form. Writing essays was also practical – they are short and conducive to the traditional Iowa-style workshop discussion. When I graduated in 2013, I found myself among a fleet of writers with newly minted MFA degrees all writing literary essays. But I had no idea how to write a book.  When I embarked on writing one, I discovered that the uncertainty and incongruity inherent in literary essays were key to writing a memoir, too.

Writing the story of my family’s radicalized belief and my coming of age needed the breadth of book-length project. In 2017, I initiated drafting a memoir – a genre I never imagined engaging with. As a young writer, I had become almost orthodox about my commitment to essays. It was a sign of growth in my craft that I realized the writer should avail themselves of all literary forms.

To start piecing together my memoir, I began with an image. Essays taught me to cull the world of my experiences for an image that was connected to memory and evoked unresolved emotions. For me, that image was a revival tent. The memory attached to it was of my family seated before a traveling evangelist praying that God would miraculously heal my father from cancer. It was important to begin with an image that was endowed with the desperation I felt at the time and the confusion I feel now when looking back.

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Contradiction drives essays. Likewise, it generates the tension in memoir. My parents both held college degrees in the sciences; my mother was a veterinarian. Yet she and my dad also claimed that supernatural healing was not only possible, but likely. Taking my cues from essays, I heightened the contrasts in my story. I juxtaposed scenes of my mother giving expert care to dogs and cats with memories of her speaking in tongues. I sequenced instances of my father’s deep tenderness with flashes of his temper.

The idea of resolving these paradoxes was intimidating, but the essayist’s tradition of yielding to uncertainty gave me access to the story’s complexity. In my memoir, I used reflection to dig into the contradictions. This was especially key when comparing my past point-of-view with my present. I looked back upon my younger self with curiosity and, at times, bafflement.  Rather than produce a convenient take-away, I explored multiple interpretations. The image of the revival tent was meaningful because it evoked my family’s desperation. And because it signified the landscape where my father had been exposed to carcinogenic chemicals his whole life. And because it was tethered to my family’s beliefs and deep love for one another.

The structure of the book was one of the last aspects I finalized. Essays, too, often proceed along the established line of their own logics, revealing their form through the writing process. Similarly, it was by writing the book that I uncovered its structure. I wrote as a kind of waiting for the structure to arrive. Meanwhile, I continued to emphasize complex images. From each image, the memories flowed.

If I had begun my memoir with pressures to produce a complete picture, wise insights, and resolved emotions, I would have run in the other direction. But writing essays taught me the page is a space for puzzlement, wonder, and paradox. Without this understanding, I would have flinched at points in my personal story that were knotted with irresolvable contradictions – the combination of brilliance and fundamentalism in my parents; the ambiguity of science and clarity of religious conviction; the irreconcilability of the past with the present. The brokenness of my own knowing.

I can’t overstate the creative possibility the tenets of the essay offered me as a memoirist. This liberation was what Cynthia Ozick was referring to when she defined the essay as “the movement of a free mind at play.” To this day, each time I read or teach literary essays, it feels like coming home. When I write them, I’m reminded of Ursula Le Guin’s words: It turns out you can come home again, so long as home is a place you’ve never been.

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If you’d like to try it out…

We return to some images – as readers, but also as writers – again and again. 

What image do you find you can't stop trying to write about? Put differently, what image keeps reminding itself to you? Take a few minutes to write about it again.

If you need a prompt to get started, feel free to draw some inspiration (or directly!) from some of these:

• There is no one story that returns to me over and over but there are these recurring images…

• Mom always says I….

• There’s a memory that keeps me awake at night …

• The thing about a story like this is…

Next, give the draft a walk about. A few hours or a few days. Then return to it and introduce some reflection that offers multiple interpretations of the image. The aim is to stage an encounter between the past and present. 

Phrases like the following can be helpful.

• The version of this story I usually tell is….

• For a while now, I’ve told myself that…

• At the time when this happened, I thought that…

• But as I write this now, I also think….

• I like to think that….but in reality….

• Every time I hear/tell this story, I say…But there are parts I don’t say, like…

Reflection should lead to heightened contrasts between possible interpretations of the image and attending memories with which you’re working.

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Kathleen is the author of the memoir Loose of Earth, (University of Texas Press April 2024). Her writing has appeared in Belt, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Iron Horse Literary Review, River Teeth, and elsewhere. For the last five years, she’s taught creative nonfiction at the University of Chicago and will be joining the English faculty at SUNY New Paltz in fall, 2024. She is married to the writer Michael William Palmer. Together they have a son and a few unruly pets.

You can find her on Instagram or at kdottie.blackburn@gmail.com. Come say hello to her at one of her upcoming events! Details are on her website.

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.

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Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching, caring for our attention, and approaches to creative research. Today’s newsletter features , a poet and graphic designer who recently founded Perilune Editing with writer Amber Taliancich.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Today I’ve got a special guest post by Lindsay Lusby, the kind of rare person who’s talented with both words and images. Her first book of poetry, Catechesis: A Postpastoral, includes beautiful full-color collages alongside poems. She’s also a talented graphic designer who’s made broadsides, tour graphics, bookmarks, and even the logo for Write More. Lindsay’s long been a writing teacher and has worked as a coach with poets who want personalized revision and submissions help, and she’s recently launched Perilune Editing with writer Amber Taliancich. Below, Lindsay shares some of the strategies she’s used with her devoted poetry coaching clients. If you’ve been wanting a little more body and intuition in your writing practice and especially your revision strategies, I think her warmth and guidance will help unlock something for you, too.

Lindsay, on honing bodily intuition in a writing practice

I became a poetry coach four years ago, at the strange and scary beginning of the pandemic that changed all of our lives, that changed our relationships to our work and our art, when I left a seemingly-secure job that I used to love for a new, very uncertain career path. These last few years have been full of revelations. But I think the most profound discovery for me has been how much I absolutely love coaching and mentoring other poets, how much true and deep fulfillment it brings me, especially because I feel like I only stumbled into it out of my own private desperation. It’s part creative guidance and strategizing, part therapy and cheerleading. And the moments when I get to witness a poet move past an obstacle that has been blocking them for years or reach a milestone they weren’t sure they’d ever reach—are truly exhilarating.

As a writing coach specializing in poetry, there are many different questions that my clients bring to me, but many of them are questions that live between the lines of a creative writing craft book. Not the what, the where, the when, or the why—but the how: How do I know if my work is good enough? How do you know when a poem is finished? Sometimes the guidance is more straightforward, but there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all answer. And then there have been some questions that require us to move past surface-level logic and dig down into the essence of how we listen to and hone our bodily intuition in our writing practice.

Those elusive elements that make a poem a poem are felt within our bodies just as much as (if not more than) our beautiful brains. And so it follows that much of the writing and revision process also lives within our bodies. If our brains are having a difficult time pinning down an intuitive process, something that moves just out of view the moment we think we’ve captured it, like a dream upon waking, I can almost guarantee you that this part of the process instead requires you to listen more deeply to your body—your heart and your lungs, your diaphragm and your gut, your arms and your legs—all those pieces of you that this humming electricity is constantly moving through. It’s the same general principle behind why taking a walk helps to refocus creative energies.

if you’d like to try it out . . .

to make decisions about structure for your poems

As a poet and an editor, what I look for in a poem’s structure is a pattern that both gives order to the words on the page and grants the feeling of movement—or freedom of movement. This is especially important to pay attention to when writing in free verse, where we are always essentially creating our own forms and structures. It’s more intuitive than it is strictly logical and it involves both looking at the poem on the page and reading it out loud—so in a way it’s an additional sense that is suspended between sight & sound. Like poetry feng shui. When reading a poem on the page, I’m both looking and listening for how the poem flows, whether the energy moves & circulates harmoniously or whether it feels blocked or obstructed in certain areas. And when I encounter even a little bit of the latter, I just move around the poem’s furniture until I feel like we’ve tapped into the poem’s natural sense of flow.

Couplets and tercets are the most basic building blocks for stanza structure. So when in doubt, I start with couplets. And if that doesn’t feel quite right after I’ve tried it out, then I’ll experiment with longer stanza sizes—tercets or quatrains. But my personal preference is generally for shorter stanzas because this allows us to insert more air or white space into the body of the poem, meaning that we avoid big blocks of text that, at times, can feel a bit impenetrable visually.

Line indents work in the same way! I often choose to incorporate a pattern of indents in order to unblock a sense of movement that the poem needs but isn’t achieving through stanza breaks alone. They can create a stronger sense of continuation from the previous line, so indents work especially well when paired with lots of enjambment—so we can have the benefit of line breaks, while simultaneously creating a sense that the poem is flowing unbroken—like waves. It’s all about experimentation and paying attention to what the poem is telling us that it needs.

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to recapture that 🌟first draft energy🌟 when you revise

We want to figure out how to approach revision the same way as writing a first draft, so that we can harness that same spark of inspiration & creativity and the power of that original momentum. Part of the problem is being able to reenter that same headspace you were previously in when you wrote the first draft of the poem. So try reading the poem draft out loud a few times to get that voice and rhythm back in your ears and in your mouth—that same tone, inflection, mood, and atmosphere. It’s like a very specific kind of guided meditation. Then write the current poem draft out by hand at least once to warm up your writing hand and further ingrain that poem’s voice in your mind again. Let it be a full-body experience—you’re embodying the poem draft.

Now starting with a blank page, freewrite for at least five minutes with a focus on only one particular line that needs revising or reworking. The one rule here is that you have to keep your pen moving the whole time. Set a timer and don’t put the pen down until the timer goes off. When the time is up, go back and read what you’ve written and see if there is a promising line you might lift out of this messy draft that will work for the line revision for your in-progress poem. Underline in a different ink color and make additional notes in the margins of your freewrite page. Then rinse and repeat!

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Lindsay Lusby is a poet, editor, writing coach, letterpress printer, and graphic designer who loves to experiment with all forms of art at the intersection of text and image. She is a maker of visual poems & zines, and a designer of broadsides & books. Her debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. The author of two previous chapbooks, her poems have appeared most recently in Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, New South, and Gulf Coast. She is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry.

Lindsay’s recently partnered up with Amber Taliancich to launch Perilune, which offers an exciting range of services for writers of poetry, prose, and hybrid genre work. They provide one-on-one coaching sessions, editing & manuscript consultations, broadsides & book design, graphic design for author events & book promotion, and—coming very soon—online workshops and professional development classes for writers & artists. Check out their new website and send them an email if you want to work together.

You can find Perilune on Instagram, Twitter/X, & Threads as @periluneedits, and on Blue Sky as @periluneedits.bsky.social. Lindsay’s on Instagram, Twitter/X, & Threads as @lindsaylusby and Blue Sky as @lindsaylusby.bsky.social. Amber is on Instagram & Twitter/X as @ambtali, and she’s also on Instagram as @little_printmaker.

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.

Subscribe now

Today’s post is in the tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. Previously in this space we’ve talked about pitching and caring for our attention, and we’ve had interviews and guest essays from writers including Cynthia Marie Hoffman, on writing an OCD memoir in prose poems; Sean Enfield on moving from poetry to prose; and Leigh Kamping-Carder, of , on reconnecting with your creative spark. Today I’m writing about strategies for creative research.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

Today’s newsletter is a little long, so if it cuts off in your email, you can read the whole thing in the browser. I’ve shared three opportunities to write together this spring—a zoom workshop on writing with creative research, a one-day workshop on pitching essays, and a one-day workshop on crafting vulnerability in creative nonfiction—and you can find all that information toward the bottom. (And I’ve got a coupon code for a 15% discount on the creative research course!)

I want to write today about methods for creative research, and because I think those two words together—creative research—are sometimes a tough sell, I want to start by telling you a story about my own most recent research project.

When I sold The Good Mother Myth last spring, I felt really confident that I knew what it was about. I’d spent years researching and writing and reshaping the outline, and I had a clear arc, seven chapters tracing the scientists (nearly all men) behind our bad ideas about how to be a good mom. After the book sold and I was writing in earnest, another question kept poking at me. I was writing about all these men, and I was reading their research and their letters and the scholarship that analyzed the impact of their work. But: these men who devoted their lives to telling women how to raise children correctly almost all had children of their own. Who was raising them?

We all know the answer to that, of course. It’s the wives. And the wives were there, too, in the research, and sometimes their children, though you have to look really closely to find them. But what were their lives like? What had they wanted, and how did they feel about their husbands traveling the world to tell other women how to mother while they were at home? What did they make of their husbands’ theories about how easy and natural and blissful it was, being a mother and being the sole creature responsible for soothing the children?

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I want to tell you a little bit about one of my favorite wives, in part because she was so hard to find. As I was reading about Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who coined the term “good-enough mother,” I kept finding references to his wife Clare, a social worker with whom he frequently traveled and spoke and with whom he coauthored several articles. But she was his second wife. Where was the first? I found Alice, the first wife, at the edges of the scholarship. She was, the sources informed me, an artist, troubled, prone to hallucinations and delusions. And when, after twenty-five years of marriage, Winnicott divorced her and married Clare, with whom he’d carried on a ten-year long affair, Winnicott’s productivity soared. He finally achieved the fame he’d deserved once he freed himself of the difficult first wife who shackled him, the biographies suggested.

Finally—truly, it took me so long, reading these scholarly accounts of Winnicott’s life—I heard it, and it was like a record scratch: I know this trope. Alice is Bertha, the crazy first wife locked in the attic, and Clare is Jane Eyre, who comes along to care for Mr. Rochester and be the good wife he really deserves. But who was Alice really?

I’ll leave the longer story for the book, but for now I’ll say: Alice ended up being one of my favorite figures, and there’s so much more to her than the “crazy wife in the countryside” stereotype. She went to Cambridge, worked in the National Physical Laboratory, volunteered providing art therapy during World War II, ran a pottery studio that produced dinner ware sold in a London department store. She produced beautiful paintings, some of which are still on display. She wrote tender letters to Winnicott describing the mare and foal she watched from the home she shared with her sister toward the end of her life.

It’s hard to square all that with the image I first came across of Alice as the difficult wife who dimmed Winnicott’s genius. And as I continued my research, I found that the other wives each had their own compelling stories, and I wove those in, the traces of their dreams and ambitions and the compromises they made because of who they’d married and the times in which they lived. The wives—their lives, their ambitions—became an important additional strand of the narrative, and learning about them helped me name my own ambition as an important throughline in the book.

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okay, but why should I use research in creative writing?

There are lots of good reasons to incorporate this kind of research into your creative writing. It can help widen the lens of a project that relies on personal narrative, whether that’s in poetry or prose. (Many, many of the poems in Pocket Universe, my most recent book of poetry draw on research into the history of birth, human ancestors, space, and more, and that research was essential in helping me think beyond my own experiences in early motherhood.) If you’re writing fiction, research can help deepen even imagined worlds.

There are also market reasons to weave research into memoir, of course—this is the whole thinking underneath ’s description of Memoir Plus as a category. ( makes a pretty convincing case that all memoir should really be memoir plus.) Practically, I’m sure The Good Mother Myth wouldn’t have sold as straight memoir—and that’s not the book I wanted to write, anyway.

The biggest reason to do this kind of work is to follow your own deep curiosity. So if you’re interested, start there: what are you obsessed with? what are you trying to figure out?

(And this doesn’t have to be huge meaning of life stuff, at least in your initial stages—I’m getting started on an essay about the Murphy Brown/Dan Quayle debacle and what it meant to me as the daughter of a single working mother in the 90s. What’s your Murphy Brown? What are the weird things you can’t stop thinking about?)

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Today I’m excited to share another entry in the new tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

In advance of a panel I’m moderating at AWP this weekend about poets writing prose, I wanted to round up everything I’ve learned about pitching. Below, you’ll find a mix of philosophy and tips, plus tons of resources and a genuine Pitch That Worked. This one’s a little long, in part because I’ve shared a full (successful!) pitch in it, so if it cuts off in your email, you can click on the headline and read it in your browser.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

I was never particularly Funny on Twitter™, and now I’m not really there at all, but I stand by this one:

Sometimes pitching really does feel like just taking all your best ideas and chucking them into space. But the thing is: that’s the only way you’ll actually know what lands.

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So many things about writing and publishing can feel really obtuse and unnecessarily complex, and I’ve found this to be really true as I’ve moved from poetry (a genre in which I have a significant amount of training) to prose (where I still sometimes feel like I snuck in and am about to be found out at any moment). In my MFA, we got some explicit instruction around submitting to literary magazines—write a brief, normal cover letter; keep a spreadsheet to track where you’ve sent things and what happens—and a kind of overarching philophy—the idea that submissions are the business side of writing, like doing your laundry. You have to do it, but you don’t want to let it encroach on your writing time.

But once I started writing prose, I discovered there was a whole other process I didn’t know anything about. It turned out that, in lots of places, you didn’t submit your work. You sent a pitch. The only problem was that I didn’t know what that was or how to write one.

There’s tons of good advice on how to write a pitch on the internet, and I’ll round some of that up below, but what I really want to offer is a kind of philosophy of pitching—how pitching can help refine your ideas and develop your sense of the audience for your writing.

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pitching is an engine for new ideas

One key difference between pitching and submitting is that a pitch is an idea. It’s not yet a finished product, or even a draft. It’s an outline, or a promise.

And to write a good pitch, you’ll need to learn to think not just about the quality of the writing but about the readers you’re hoping to reach and what you’re offering them. If you’re pitching something, you’re thinking about the fit between your piece and your target publication. So that means you need to be able to not just say what you’re going to write but also why now, why this publication and this audience, and why you should be the one to write it. 

Those are the key components for a good pitch (more on that below), and they also provide a framework that can shape your reading and generate new ideas. If you have a topic in mind, thinking about the publication, audience, and specific kind of piece you want to write can help you brainstorm possibilities. The same topic—say, pelvic floor physical therapy—could be spun out in a ton of different directions: a personal essay for a women’s magazine, an op-ed about difficulties accessing women’s healthcare and the pernicious expectation that our bodies will just be a little broken after pregnancy and birth, a piece of service journalism about why you might want pelvic floor pt and how to access it. (Can you tell I’ve pitched that idea around a ton? It hasn’t landed . . . yet.)

And this process can also go in the other direction: if there’s a place you’d love to be published or an editor you want to work with, see what they’re publishing and how your work might fit into that. Twitter used to be especially great for that—editors would just tweet out the kinds of pieces they were looking for. Has anything replaced that? Is that happening on Threads? Let me know if you’ve got good ideas for finding editors and pitch guidelines.

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Looking for series or recurring features can be especially helpful. (I really love the New York Times’s Letter of Recommendation and Vox’s Even Better series, though I haven’t cracked the code in either spot yet.) Once you’ve got your eye on a particular series or feature, read a ton of them, then think about how your work might fit in.

my best tips for writing a good pitch + a real, live example

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I’m excited to share another entry in the new tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.

Today’s newsletter features Cynthia Marie Hoffman, a poet whose new book, Exploding Head, I have been eagerly anticipating for years. I read some of the earliest versions of these poems years ago when we were in a writing group together, and they’re so spooky and so skilled and moving. (You might remember Cynthia’s work from when I shared her poem Seven Darknesses over the summer.)

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.

When I read the earliest drafts of the poems that would become Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head, years ago in our writing group, I was just transfixed. They were full of angels and terror and precise, unworldly imagery. They did something that I think poetry is uniquely equipped to do: they rendered a rich, vibrant world, one that is at once alien and deeply recognizable. (You can find poems from the book Birdcoat Quarterly, Image, and Electric Literature, if you want to get a sense of what I mean.) And when Cynthia started talking about the book as an OCD memoir in prose poems, I knew I’d want to hear more about the form of the book and how she’d written with the frame of memoir in mind.

You can find Cynthia on instagram at @CynthiaMarieHoffman and twitter at @CynthiaMHoffman, and if you’re going to be in Kansas City for AWP, she’s got tons of signing and events, and all that info is below.

Below, Cynthia and I talk about letting your obsessions steer your writing project, using spreadsheets and counting to revise a collection, and making a narrative arc out of your own life. And if you’re working on a collection of your own, Cynthia offers two sets of really wise and practical revision techniques.

one question for Cynthia Marie Hoffman

I know you’ve long been interested in the project book, and you’ve curated such great conversations with so many writers about that topic on The Cloudy House. I think it’s fair to say that your previous books have been projects–and I use that term in the very best way, as someone who also loves a poetry collection that opens a window into a particular world. So I was intrigued to see you talking about Exploding Head as “an OCD memoir in prose poems.”

What did it mean to you to call this book a memoir? How did thinking of it as a memoir shape your process as you drafted and revised the collection?

Cynthia

Exploding Head is about me. Which isn’t a mind-bending concept for a collection of poems, but I’m generally of the camp of poets who write from research. I’m fascinated by the boundless potential of subject matter that lies outside the self. Prior to Exploding Head, I wrote about tourism, architecture, birth, the history of medicine. My most personal collection was about my family genealogy (Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones), but even that is not as much about me as it is about the act of research.

Writing deeply vulnerable poems about my own OCD was uncharted territory. Framing the project as memoir helped me see the road ahead. And it was a way of announcing my intention to write toward something that ultimately equals more than the sum of its parts – not just a collection of poems bound together in a book, but what might binding them together make?

Memoir certainly doesn’t need to be chronological. I wrote poems about whatever aspect of my OCD occurred to me, and in whatever order. When I’d gathered about 30 or 40 poems, it was time to step back and have a look. For me, this crucial step involves identifying my obsessions (which, in a book about OCD, are pretty easy to identify!) and deciding to get really intentional about steering them.

I listed the poems by subject in a spreadsheet (I love spreadsheets!). And that allowed me to immediately visualize that I had too many driving poems, not enough angels, and I’d pretty much beaten the subject of death to death. A single category with a long list of poems looks bulky in a spreadsheet, and it will feel equally heavy to the reader. I wasn’t aiming for an equal number of poems in each category, but the balance (or imbalance) of ideas should support the overall argument of the book. So at this point, I was looking at my lists and asking myself questions like, “Is worrying about car accidents so important that it justifies including twice as many poems than those about guns?” I made cuts, combined poems, and generated new work accordingly, checking my spreadsheet frequently.

Then, I had to order the poems. For a long time, I struggled with the idea that the arc of this manuscript must be the story of how my OCD got better. So I looked for that arc in the themes of my OCD and in the categories on my spreadsheet. For example, if I put all the gun-themed poems together, could I find evidence that I progressively worried less about guns? The answer was no. Did I seem to rely less on counting compulsions? Nope – they’re still here! So what was the argument of this project? For a long time, I described it like this: “I have OCD, and I just want to tell people what it’s like.” But I knew that wasn’t enough. That’s not a book.

At the very end, after 8 or 9 years of writing and thinking about this project, I had the seemingly obvious idea of setting the poems in chronological order – in the order of my lived experience. When I finally sat down and read it that way, all the way through, I noticed something. The childhood poems were terrifically lonely and fearful in a way I hadn’t fully acknowledged in my own life. I saw that I had been very lost in knowing how to deal with my symptoms. But in the poems that occur more recently, in my adult life, the language was softer. There was clear evidence that I’d gained not only insight into my symptoms, which I know was hard-won, but also self-compassion. It was immensely healing for me to realize that in fact, I have gotten better. My arc had been hiding in the poems all along; I just needed the right order of poems to reveal it. And making this sort of discovery as you write – that’s what makes a book.

But once I had ordered the poems chronologically, I had a new problem. Since the poems were written out of order, I’d had to keep establishing the subject and the timeframe of each individual poem. But once all the childhood poems were together, for example, I didn’t need to keep telling the reader that I was a child. The poems could now rely more heavily on their intertextuality.

I had to do a lot of revision to fix it. I looked at each poem and asked, “what does the reader know on this page?” When the reader turns to that page in my book, what are they bringing with them from previous pages? (Do they already know I am a parent? Do they already know there’s an angel that stands in my bedroom at night?) Anything the reader should already know from previous poems, I would need to strike. Many more poems could now start in medias res.

Once I’m thinking about balance, intertextuality, and pacing, that’s when I know I’m writing a book. That’s when (hopefully) the project starts to become more than the sum of its parts.

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if you’d like to try it out . . .

I’m offering two sets of tips, depending on whether you’d like to try writing a series of poems or whether you’re arranging a manuscript (whether or not it’s a “project”).

If you’d like to try writing a series of poems:

Assuming you already have a theme in mind, the exercises below are a good way to generate ideas and to test the potential of your theme to yield a book-length collection. Pick one or try them all.

• Brainstorm a list of specific ideas related to your theme. Each one could be a poem. Push to come up with as many as possible. Can you think of 20? 50? 100?

• Brainstorm a list of possible poem titles.

• Stretch your idea of perspective. If your central topic is a flower, for example, perhaps the wind speaks in one poem, or the soil has something to say in another. My collection Paper Doll Fetus expanded significantly through persona poems, including giving voice to objects.

• Research! Read up on your topic. Watch a documentary. Take notes.

• Write an exploratory journal entry to interrogate your connection to the subject. Why are you interested in the topic?

• Make a list of questions you don’t know the answers to yet. Write toward the thing that troubles you.

If you’re ordering a manuscript of poems:

Try these strategies whether you’re ordering a project book or you’re collecting poems written over a period of time:

1.     The Pile Strategy: Break your manuscript into manageable pieces.

Print all your poems and label them by subject. Put all the “motherhood” poems in one stack, all the “climate” poems in another stack, etc. How many poems do you have in each stack? Are the stacks balanced or imbalanced? Does the balance or imbalance make sense? If not, identify where you need to write more and where you need to cut.

Choose one pile. Put all the poems in that pile in their best order. Then do this for the next pile. Imagine you are creating micro chapbooks. (I did this with my angel poems, for example, to see how the story of the angel evolved throughout Exploding Head.)

Now, reintegrate the piles. The poems in each micro chapbook will be split apart, but there’s a good chance the ideal order of poems for each subject will be retained. (For example, my angel poems are spaced out across all four sections of Exploding Head.)

2.     The Magnet Theory: Make decisions based on intertextuality.

Each poem strongly attracts some poems and repels others. Poems that rely the most heavily on information provided in other poems for impact and understanding have the strongest magnetic attraction.

Identify two or three poems that rely heavily on each other. Now, test their magnetic pull. How far apart can you place them in the manuscript and still maintain their connection?

Identify poems that seem to repel each other (on very different topics, for example). What happens if you put them close together?

3.     The Breath Test: Make decisions based on pacing.

Read your entire manuscript aloud from start to finish. I can’t recommend this enough. Block time to do it. Sit somewhere private.

You will hear yourself saying things out loud that you never noticed before, even though you’ve “read” your manuscript a hundred times.

You will also get a better feel for the pacing of the book. You’ll actually feel it in your body: your breath, your energy (where do you feel exhausted, where you do feel fired up?).

Don’t just do this once. Keep checking in on your pacing when you’ve reordered poems or made significant edits.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry: Exploding Head, Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, all from Persea Books. Poems have appeared in Electric Literature, The Believer, Image, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, WI. Read more at www.cynthiamariehoffman.com. You can find her on instagram at @CynthiaMarieHoffman and twitter at @CynthiaMHoffman.

If you’re going to be at AWP in Kansas City, you can find Cynthia signing copies of Exploding Head at the Persea Books table Thursday, Feb 8 at 11am. And on Friday, Feb 9 at 7pm, she’ll read at the joint Persea and Alice James Books offsite event at Casual Animal Brewing Company.

And if you’ll be at AWP, this is where you can find me. If you see me wandering the book fair, please say hi!

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram. 

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