Good morning from my guest room, where I’m wearing a mask and pretending I’m on fancy writing retreat while my kids do heaven knows what in the other room. In other words, I have covid.
(It’s very mild and mostly a nuisance in terms of my own teaching and my kids’ school, knock on wood, fingers crossed, thank goodness for vaccines and boosters and the good luck that’s gotten us all this far in pretty good health.)
So it’s a short newsletter today. I’ve been thinking about ways to get started, or ways to get back into writing if you’ve been away from projects, or are starting a new project, or just don’t know what to do next.
(As an aside: early in my MFA, one of my professors (hi, Jesse Lee!) remarked that every new book was a challenge. You had to learn how to write that book. At the time, I found that idea incredibly frustrating—like, I haven’t even written one book yet, and you’re telling me this never gets easier? Now I find it kind of inspiring—we never get to go on autopilot, so we’re all just in the muck figuring it out.)
Here’s one thing that helps me when I’m feeling stuck, or just don’t know where to start: I scavenge my old notebooks and find odd phrases or sentences that intrigue me and write each one on an index card. Your goal in doing this is not to find poem or story or essay ideas per se, but to find interesting images or bits of language—things that will make you want to start writing. So then you can use those index cards as little prompts during your writing time. Find a weird piece of language and see where it takes you.
If you need a little more shape for the task, you can use these index cards the way Bronwen Tate suggested when I interviewed her this past fall. You could pick 10 minutes or so a day when you’re going to write, then pick an index card and go.
Here’s how Bronwen talked about using pre-deciding in her writing practice:
Bronwen
There’s something Jessica Abel talks about, which is pre-deciding. [Ed. note: I interviewed Jessica Abel when I was writing this series at PANK and found it very helpful! Her emphasis on One Thing might be a useful tool for you if you’re feeling overwhelmed right now.]
You know, people often think like, oh I'm not getting work done because I'm a perfectionist or because I'm lazy or because I'm procrastinating, but I think often what kind of keeps people from getting things done is just the weight of decision. You know, it's like, of all the possible things I could be doing, where do I start? And I think that's sometimes why people really thrive in a workshop or a class setting with deadlines, because there's a structure there.
There's really something to be said for setting up some kind of thing, where you don't have to decide over and over again, but you've just decided once. And then you can revisit that, but just to say, I'm going to decide to do this for a while, and you don’t have to decide every single time you sit down.
Nancy
Someone wrote to me in response to the newsletter [hi, Annie!] that what they were doing was the night before they were writing themself a note about what they were going to write and then they were getting up in the morning and writing that. Does that align with what you're saying about pre-deciding?
Bronwen
Sure. I think there can be lots of different ways to do it. For a while over the summer, I did a Lynda Barry thing, which was that I just put a bunch of words in a cup. And then my thing that I would do in the morning was draw a word and write 10 images that came up from that word and then pick one of them to expand.
So that could be a version. Or it could just be, you know, I'm going to open up this thing and reread it and then add some notes, if I feel like it.
I think it can be really, really open. It could just be like, I'm going to sit with a piece of paper and a cup of tea and see if anything comes up, or I'm going to set a timer and freewrite. I don't think it necessarily has to be an outline or anything.
You’re just making it so all you have to do is enter that space. It's like setting the table for it.
I think this idea of “setting the table” for your writing practice is especially important in this late pandemic moment of exhaustion and burnout.
a few of my favorite things
Amanda Montei’s Mad Moms newsletter is great, and I particularly loved her most recent one, Vacation Moms:
I am reminded in such moments of something I knew even before the pandemic. Even before vacations were colored by the fear of getting sick or making others sick or what life would be like when we went home or whether this is just now the way things are now and always will be – tinged with a fear we try not to deny but have to ignore on occasion. I am reminded that to be a mother on vacation is to be reminded that mothers never get a vacation.
I read this piece, Stop Telling Working Women They Just Need an Equal Partnership at Home, by Bobbi Thomason in the Harvard Business Review, with a mix of intrigue and horror. Like, domestic labor is such a huge part of the gender wage gap, not to mention women’s overall exhaustion—and if equal partnership isn’t (one part of) the answer, it’s hard to know what is. I really liked this response, by [economist] Katrine Marçal, who frames the problem this way:
The problem I have with how we often discuss these matters is the following:
How do we expect men to do more housework if we present it as SHIT work?
Marçal suggests another way of looking at housework, from bell hooks:
“By learning housework, children and adults accept responsibility for ordering their material reality... Since so many male children are not taught housework, they grow to maturity with no respect for their environment and often lack the know-how to take care of themselves and their households. They have been allowed to cultivate an unnecessary dependence on women in their domestic lives and as a result of this dependence are sometimes unable to develop a healthy sense of autonomy. Girl children, though usually compelled to do housework are usually taught to see it as demeaning and degrading. These attitudes lead them to hate doing housework and deprive them of the personal satisfaction they they could feel as they accomplish these necessary tasks.”
(I feel so validated in making my kids sort their laundry, even though they’re incredibly slow and bad at it.)
Hope you’re all staying healthy and safe!
How is your writing going? How do you get unstuck? I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
Thanks, Nancy! 😘