Welcome to 2022, friends.
I’ll start with a small, grinchly secret: as much as I enjoy Christmas decorations, I really love the first undecorated days. Once we’ve put the tree and the stockings and the advent calendars away, the house feels so spacious. It’s the same space, but with all that extra room, it feels fresh and full of possibility. (So much space for activities, my husband and I both said.)
So I’ve been thinking about ways to make space in your life—not just for writing, but for the big thinking and creativity that make writing possible. So often our resolutions are about doing more. This year, I’m aiming to do less. (I’ve been very inspired by my 3 year old niece, who told her mom, my sister, that “I don’t have time to do anything I don’t want to do.” Unfortunately that mandate doesn’t fully work either for a little girl who’s been asked to help clean up or for me at work, but I’m trying.)
As we begin this new year, what can you clear away? What can you give up?
three ways to think about making space:
clear one small surface
I learned this from an Apartment Therapy spring cleaning challenge in March 2020: clearing just one surface can have a big impact on a space. (I’m not sure if I did any of the other items in that challenge! It was a wild time.)
Just before Christmas, I was tidying the desk in my little office at home. I’d been keeping a set of books I love, the comps for the book I’m writing now about motherhood and animals, on the desk as encouragement as I finished revising the proposal. I’d put them there so I could imagine my own book on a bookshelf next to them. I picked them up to wipe the desk and, as I was about to put them back down, thought, maybe it’s time for something new. I’m at a pause with the book right now (an agent’s considering it, wish me luck etc etc) and it’s time to think about what else I want to work on. I left a blank spot on my desk to make space for what’s coming next.
How can you make some space in your work area?
clear some space in your day
If you’re going to do more writing this year, you’ll probably to have to do less of something else. One way to start is by clearing little pockets of space. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big chunk of time devoted to writing. It could just be a little gap in your day where you’re only doing one thing, rather than trying to do a bunch of things at once. I’m a big believer in the no-phone walk. Even five or ten minutes when I’m just walking (and not also listening to a podcast and checking my email and seeing what’s happening on twitter and on and on) help clear my brain.
Where can you find a little pocket of time—maybe for writing, or maybe just for some restorative nothing?
clear some space in your brain
There’s nothing really magic about January 1. But it can be helpful as a reset to consider what you’re working toward and what you can let go of. Are there projects you’ve been working on that don’t serve you anymore? Guilt you’re holding onto?
Just before Christmas, I flipped to the first page of my 2021 planner and found my all caps list of GOOD IDEAS—and as I saw how many of my big plans had gone by the wayside, my heart sunk. What did I even do last year? I thought. What happened to all that ambition? I did a lot of things, and I think there’s value in counting them up, as I wrote about last time—but my real point here is that that guilt doesn’t serve us. Whatever we achieved, wherever we fell short—if we think we’re getting a fresh start, let’s let go of all that. So part of what I’m doing as this new year starts is letting go.
How can you make some space in your brain? What can you let go of? What ideas can you push aside? What projects can you put down?
What are you hoping for in this new year? Have you made resolutions? Picked a word for the year? Or are you just trying to make it through?
I’m planning to get back to a weekly schedule with the newsletter. I’ll include a mix of quick tips and ideas about writing and writing practice, like today’s newsletter, alongside prompts and interviews. If you have ideas for people I should interview (including you!) I’d love to hear from you. We’ll do a poem a day in April again, and I’ll be lining up some guest prompts this year. (If you have a prompt that’s worked for you, I’d love your contribution!) And if you have someone in your life who’s planning to get back to writing in the new year, I’d love it if you would share this newsletter with them.
a few of my favorite things
Emily Van Duyne, in her great newsletter Loving Sylvia Plath, wrote a smart piece on Joan Didion and how we talk about mothers who are writers, particularly when their writing takes them away from their kids. One snippet:
Whatever my personal neurosis is, Joan Didion didn’t buy it. She took her time as she saw fit and she wrote extraordinary books and people hated her for it.
After spending the last many days mostly home with my kids, and now that we’re staring down two weeks (or more!) of remote schooling, I’ve been thinking again about Emily Mohn-Slate’s piece from this summer about her relationship with her phone. What I love about this essay is that it’s not a simple “how to quit your phone” polemic, but instead raises big questions about connection and wanting to be present and also wanting to just check out sometimes:
The truth is that I want to enjoy the benefits of my phone without the costs swallowing me whole. I want its numbing mental insulation when I’m too exhausted to be present but too needed to rest. It may be part of the ruse, but I believe that by reading the occasional poem on my phone, I can feed the parts of me that the demands of motherhood starve, so that maybe that version of me will still be standing when my kids are grown. I want to be there, really there, when my children fall, without giving up the right to be in my own head, too. How do I do that?
Kate McKean is a constant fount of wisdom about writing and publishing, and I particularly liked this newsletter from November, Don’t Make Any Goals Next Year. Just Count Stuff.
I’ve been on the free list for How to Glow in the Dark for a while, and it was this post, Perfectionism Might Strangle Your Writing Career, that finally tipped me over into paying. (Anna Sproul-Latimer is super smart about all things business and writing—I can see why she’s such a successful agent—and she does an amazing job of previewing just enough content for free. If you don’t have a paying subscription, you’ll only be able to see the first bit; if you’re inspired to read more, you can get one month for $6 and get enough no-nonsense content to jump-start your new year. Or at least that’s what I did.)
When I’m feeling brave enough, however, I admit the Scary Thing, the hulking subterranean truth from which my Bréné Brown-y slogans sprout like deceptively smol mushrooms: Perfectionism is passive-aggressive violence.
Within book publishing (and, uh, everywhere), perfectionism is a weapon we use to harm ourselves and others. Our perfectionism—yours, mine—causes profound and often irreparable injury.
And one silly thing to end the first post of the year: I know lots of people (including me!) have found a lot of comfort through the pandemic in the Mountain Goats’s This Year, but as we head into 2022, I’ve been really into this Macklemore song. 2021 wasn’t everything a lot of us hoped, and maybe 2022 isn’t starting out as shiny and full of hope as we’d imagined. But next year’s going to be better than this.
What are you hoping for this year? What are you giving up to make space for something new? 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).
Nancy, so happy to hear your voice again. I am sharing this first post of ‘22 with my most fabulous writing friends!