Hi, all! Happy Friday. How is your writing going this week?
I’ve been thinking this week about an interview I did with writing studies scholar Hannah Rule in this series’ previous incarnation at PANK. In a discussion of freewriting, Hannah told me
There is something to that freewriting mantra, just keep writing. But I think it’s in a wider-reaching momentum. There is this great book, Understanding Writing Blocks, where the author Keith Hjortshoj talks about writing as a nonstop invitation to stop: writers can stop at any time; they can stop after a sentence or word; after a bad review or an uncomfortable blocked session, or simply in favor of doing something else. Successful writers, Hjortshoj says, are those that have figured out how to stop stopping, to make a habit of not stopping. I think that’s brilliant. The trick is to first spin the plate of writing fast, and then keep it going.
I love that: a big part of being successful as a writer is figuring out how to stop stopping. So if you all you do is keep going, you’re already a success.
What one small thing did you do this week?
notes and reading suggestions
All of my suggestions this week are from writing newsletters I like, in case you’re looking for more encouragement and inspiration.
Novelist Matt Bell has a great newsletter (Writing Exercises from Matt Bell), and I particularly like his Hunting Weasel Words exercise for revising prose. Bell defines “weasel words” as “the empty calories of sentence writing, little bits of filler that, while technically correct, either don’t add anything meaningful or prevent you from writing the best sentences you can.” He gives this advice for how to hunt them out:
Your exercise this month is to hunt and exterminate as many weasel words as you can in a draft of a story or essay or chapter you’ve already written. The easiest way to do this is to use the Find function in whatever software you use to look for one word at a time, moving through each instance of each weasel word, deciding whether the word can be cut or improved upon wherever it appears. If you gave up the weaker word for another, what else might happen to the sentence? What possibilities appear, once you start looking, and how can you take advantage of them?
Courtney Maum’s Maumalog is a great combination of writing advice and publishing insight. Her newsletter from this past week had some much-needed perspective on time and why we’re not falling behind. Also, she wrote about how she color-codes her planner, which I love.
I’ve shared Leigh Stein’s newsletter before here, which always includes a mix of practical tips and no-nonsense straight talk about writing and publishing. Her most recent newsletter talked about how waiting for the perfect conditions to write can keep you from getting your work done:
The reality is that if you're waiting for your perfect conditions to magically happen, you'll never write.
Only you have the power to change your habits and to shift your mindset so that you aren't waiting for the perfect conditions but accepting that writing is hard and doing it anyway.
She’s also returned to keeping a spreadsheet for her writing, which is something I’ve tried many times and never been able to stick with. (I’m just a pen and paper kind of writer, it turns out !) If you’ve found a writing spreadsheet to be a useful tool, I’d love to hear from you!
Joanna Penn Cooper and Jessica Mesman write Melancholy Moms (subscribe for the name alone!) and this past week, Joanna sent a newsletter that ended with a really lovely poem, “A Benediction,” that ends with these beautiful lines (I hope you’ll click through and read the whole thing):
Your assignment for today: Light a white candle. Step
outside and study the quality of the sky. Look around
your feet for tiny purple flowers in the grass. I’m bending
down to look you in the eyes, checking in on child you
and 13 year-old you and 21 and present day. All
the versions at once. I place my hand upon your crown
and wish you miel. Good enough is plenty. Honey,
do what you can. Love your own good self.
What one small thing did you do for your writing this week? I’d love to hear about your writing. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
My one little thing this week was to write a letter to my poetry manuscript to talk through what its goals were and how the poems were speaking to each other. It helped refocus my attention on my main goal. It also served to make me feel like my manuscript had a thread and helped me identify poems that needed to be written.