ask for what you need

channeling Lauren Groff as we set intentions for October + so many great links & resources

Sep 25, 2022

Welcome to Write More! This is the monthly intentions email, which goes out the last Sunday before a new month starts. It’s a chance to fight the Sunday Scaries by thinking through your goals and intentions for your writing practice in the coming month and to reflect on your progress in the previous month.

If that sounds helpful and fun, subscribe here.

Hi there. Let’s get right to it today: this month, we’re going to think about how to ask for what you need in your writing life.

Last month we talked about avoiding the change of season temptation to revamp all your systems, and I suggested that you instead just make one small change that could help make space for writing. I wrote

I’d bet that what you need is not a better system but more clarity about what you’re working on and why it matters to you.

And we had a great interview with Heather Lanier, who’s so smart and balanced about her writing practice. Heather shared these thoughts about how she figures out what matters in her writing life:

So, what matters in my writing is whatever I’m working on that I’m excited about—or that I was excited about at some point and have since committed to finishing. What matters is devoting myself, in hour-long chunks each day, to that thing. I try not to prioritize what I can’t really control. I can’t control whether a piece is published in X journal, or if my book gets praised by Y reviewer. But I can commit each day to what I’m inherently driven to make, and try to see it through to the best of my ability. And I can make sure I’m sending work out when it’s ready.

So now that you’ve thought about what matters to you in your writing life, I’m going to suggest you think about what you need to make that writing happen.

My model for this (and for so many other things, she’s amazing) is Lauren Groff. When she was on the cover of Poets & Writers in 2018, she described the contract she and her husband wrote up before their move to Florida. “I told him that if I made this move for him, then here were my demands,” she said, and and she listed the elements of the contract: “I’m a writer. I’m going to continue to be a writer. I will never be a full-time mother. You will wake up with them. I won’t see you or the children in the morning. In the afternoons we’ll get a babysitter until I’m ready to come out of my office.”

My first reaction, when I read that, was: Who told her she could ask for that? When Groff first moved to Florida, when she wrote up that exacting contract, she wasn’t yet a bestseller, she hadn’t yet written Barack Obama’s favorite book of 2015 or given that amazing By the Book interview in which she asked, “When male writers list books they love or have been influenced by — as in this very column, week after week — why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives?” and then concluded “Something invisible and pernicious seems to be preventing even good literary men from either reaching for books with women’s names on the spines, or from summoning women’s books to mind when asked to list their influences. I wonder what such a thing could possibly be.”

So she didn’t make those demands on the basis of her fame or the huge dollars her writing was contributing to the household. She asked for what she needed to get her work done because she is a writer. Because the work itself it worthwhile.

Though I have mixed feelings about the specific contents of the contract, I’m always awed by the spirit of it, by Groff’s clarity about her needs and how unashamed she is about asking for it. And I think that’s something we can all learn from.

Asking for help—whether it’s time, feedback, or just encouragement—can be an important way of affirming the value of your work.

So what help can you ask for this month? I’d bet the kind of help you might need falls into one of three buckets: time, feedback, and encouragement.

I’ve asked for time in the past when I’ve gone away on writing retreats—sometimes official ones, and once, in February 2021, a dark part of that first pandemic winter, when I got an AirBnB for the weekend and wrote and didn’t talk to anyone (bliss). (If the idea of a self-designed writing retreat speaks to you, I got a bunch of great ideas from other writers and shared them in this UpDrafts piece, Wander & Rest: How to Make an At-Home Writing Retreat.) Asking for time could also be smaller scale—a Saturday morning to yourself, or a Thursday evening. Even a small chunk of time can help move your writing forward.

Feedback can come in many forms. You could ask for help on a full draft, of course, or you could talk through the idea for something as you’re getting started. You can also ask for a specific kind of feedback: you might want to know if a particular scene has rich enough details, or if the opening is engaging. I wrote about asking for feedback in this post, Show Your Work.

You might also just ask for encouragement. That might look like sharing a draft or an idea, or it might just be a conversation about how you’re feeling about your writing life.

The writing life can be hard and lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Asking for help builds connections.

What kind of help are you asking for this month?

elsewhere on the internet + more resources for your writing practice

Hearing a poet on the radio always feels like magic to me, and this recent episode of 1A with Saeed Jones was especially wonderful. (It definitely made the last stretch of a drive along the Schuylkill more manageable; if you know Philly traffic, you know exactly what I mean.)

If you’re localish to south Jersey, I’d love to recommend the Collingswood Book Festival, coming up on Saturday, October 1st. I’m reading at 1 in the Poetry Tent, and featured poet Joel Dias-Porter is reading from his new book Ideas of Improvisation at 3PM. Jeannine Cook of Harriet’s and Ida’s Bookstores will be in conversation with Jo Piazza at 11am.

Emily Stoddard’s Poetry Bulletin is a great monthly roundup of resources for revising and publishing poetry.

For Slate, I interviewed Chelsea Conaboy about her new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. We talked about the emerging science of brain changes in fathers, why maternal instinct is an outdated and unhelpful concept, and what she wishes legislators and policymakers knew about the caregiving brain. (And Slate put a really adorable baby in the image up top, if that helps persuade you to click on through!)

This past Wednesday’s newsletter featured an interview with poets Emily Pérez and Sara Moore Wagner about writing poems in a series. If it inspired you to give the poetic series a try, I’d love for you to join me at Murphy Writing Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway this January for my workshop The Forest & The Trees: Writing Poems in a Series. Early registration discounts and scholarships are available; the Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship is for writers ages 31+ and the Robert Hayden Scholarship is for writers ages 18-30, with at least two Robert Hayden scholarships designated for young writers of color. The scholarship application deadline is November 15. You can read more about the Getaway and the workshops being offered here.

Have you listened to the Here to Save You podcast yet? I think the big ideas—creative friendship, accountability, making space for writing in a busy life—will really resonate with readers of this newsletter. I especially loved the Taylor Harris and Jessamine Chan episodes—and Emily Pérez and I were lucky enough to be on recently and talk to hosts Annie Hartnett and Ellen O’Connell Whittet about our anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, gendered labor at home and running away to write, and why folding laundry is a scam. (You can find our episode at that link, or search for Here to Save You wherever you find your podcasts.)

I’m a huge fan of all things Virginia Sole-Smith, and I’m so excited for her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. I loved the way she talked about the importance of pre-orders in a recent newsletter. It can be so hard to name our ambitions, and the way she does it here is really inspiring:

Authors (especially women authors) often feel like we have to give some caveat in the preorder conversation about how we don’t really care about sales, we just want the book to find readers, or we’re only telling you this because the publisher made us and sorry, sorry, promotion is so gross.
Not me. I really care about sales.
Not because I’ll make so much money off those sales. (That would be nice, but you have to sell truly huge numbers of books for that to happen.) But my first book, for a whole variety of reasons I’ll be unpacking in therapy till I’m 90, did not sell particularly well. This is okay. People are sort of forgiving of a first book not quite finding its market. But my ability to continue getting paid to write books hinges quite a bit on how well this second book does. Book sales also have an indirect impact on other components of writerly income like speaking gigs and freelance assignments. These aren’t my full-time jobs (this newsletter is!) but I learned a long time ago that diversified income streams are key to financial stability and success as a writer. Also: I love writing books. I want to write more.
But there’s a bigger reason that I care about sales for Fat Talk. And that is: We will not make real progress on dismantling diet culture and anti-fat bias until this conversation reaches a broader audience. And until (this part is depressing but true) corporations are convinced that consumers won’t pay for fatphobia and will, in fact, pay for something better.

I just pre-ordered my copy at my beloved local indie, Inkwood Books, and I hope you’ll pre-order a book for yourself, too.

Share Write More, Be Less Careful

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. What are you asking for this month? What intentions are you setting in this season? Reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).

If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, I’d love it if you would share it or send it to a friend.