3 steps to plan your for productivity and rest in your writing life this summer

highlights from the summer planning party, plus 🎉 a cover and a pub date and a pre-order link for THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH! 🎉

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 pause and set some goals for our writing practice in the coming month. Last month, we talked about managing anxiety in a writing practice and, as Marie-Helene Bertino put it, “the inutterable magic of keeping one’s head down and listening only to the work.” This month, we’ll talk about planning your writing life through the chaos and fun and unpredictability of the summer months.

(Today’s newsletter is a little long because it is jam-packed full of summer planning goodness, some links I think you will like, and the gorgeous cover of my next book, so if it gets cut off in your email, you can click on the headline to read in your browser.)

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🍧☀️ Hello there! It is Memorial Day weekend and my kids each ate a King-sized shaved ice at the May Fair in our town before we came home and all collapsed from the heat, so it feels like summer time for real here! ☀️🍧

My kids are in school for a couple more weeks, but after that, the summer is all over the place—a couple trips, a bunch of half-day camps, two glorious weeks where they’re at sleepaway camp, a week in August where we’ll all be in Pittsburgh. It’s a ton of stuff I’m looking forward to, but it also means my schedule is chaotic in a way that is not always conducive to sustained creative work. I bet a lot of you are facing down a similarly unpredictable and changing schedule for the next few months, so I wanted to offer some strategies for making the most of the time we have this summer.

Hence the 🥳️planning party!🥳️ I hosted with

Jenn McClearen

this past week!

having survived my neglect and my 9 year old’s aggressive deadheading, the hydrangeas are once again getting ready to work their magic

You can watch the recording below in full, but I thought it might also be helpful to include some bulleted highlights. Here’s a run-down of the big ideas:

• start by thinking about the time you actually have this summer

  • what are your other summer plans? what other responsibilities do you have this summer?

  • how much time can you realistically spend on your writing each day or week? (Jenn shared that her very prolific mentor in graduate school never wrote more than 2 hours a day, which is a good reminder that most of us don’t have the capacity to put 8 hours in at the writing mines, even if we had somehow had the time!)

  • what’s would your ideal (but realistic) writing week look like?

• write down your big dreams

  • keeping your actual time and ideal schedule in mind, what are your dreams for what you’ll accomplish this summer?

  • it might be helpful to set 2 or 3 tiers of goals–maybe a baseline, a target, and a stretch goal

• create a menu of options for your writing work by thinking about the kinds of writing work you’re hoping to do this summer and what kind of focus that work will take.

  Start by listing . . .

  • what you’re hoping to draft

  • what you’d like to revise,

  • anything you’ll need to research (that could be content for something you’re writing, or it could mean looking for journals you’d like to submit work to)

  For each task, how much time will it take you to make progress? I’d divide it into three buckets: 

  • 10 minutes or less

  • 30 minutes to an hour

  • an hour or more.

The goal here is to have a bunch of pre-determined little tasks you can work on (find journals to submit to, collect articles or books you need for research) when you only have small chunks of time—and develop a clear sense of how much of your work really requires sustained concentration so you can prioritize that work when you have longer chunks of time to write.

June intentions

questions to consider as you plan your writing life this month:

• Once you’ve thought about your summer schedule and your big dreams, what’s the next deadline or milestone in a project? Find a place on your calendar—ideally no more than a week or two from now—when you’re going to complete something, whether it’s a big project, like a chapter draft, or something smaller but important, like revising a tricky scene or sending out a new batch of poems. (For bonus points, you can really *commit* to that deadline by sharing it in the comments!)

• What’s your immediate next step? What one small thing can you do today or tomorrow to move your writing project forward? (Again, feel free to share in the comments!)

elsewhere on the internet . . .

📣 This feels a bit like burying the lede, and I will share lots more soon, BUT my next book, The Good Mother Myth, has a cover and a pub date (1.21.25!) and you can pre-order your very own copy right now! (And maybe also a bonus copy to give to a mom you love?) You can read more in the instagram post linked below and order it right from St. Martin’s, from Bookshop, or anywhere else you love to buy books. (Pre-ordering from your local bookstore is honestly a huge help because it tells booksellers people are excited about the book.)

nancy.o.reddy

A post shared by @nancy.o.reddy

📚For Electric Literature, I did a reading list of 9 Books to Spark Your Creativity. If you’re feeling like you could use a little extra inspiration, I think you’ll really love the books on this list.

📖 The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, an anthology I co-edited with poet Emily Pérez, is 50% off at the UGA Press Sale through June 21 with code 08SALE. It’s a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts about the fraught and fruitful relationship between mothering and writing. If you’ve been enjoying the good creatures interviews here, I think you’ll really love the anthology. Katherine Indermaur, in a review at Colorado Review, called it “a necessary text for every mother laboring to make space for her writing in this world.” (And for 50% off, you could buy one for yourself and one for a writer-mother friend, and you could read and write together!)

get your copy of The Long Devotion for 50% off!

✨

Erinn Batykefer

, a dear friend of mine (we went to high school together but lost touch for more than a decade, back when you could actually do that, then became good friends when we lived in Madison at the same time), has launched a new newsletter with a concept I suspect will resonate with lots of Write More readers: being creative, and being stuck. She’s looking specifically at the “long pause”—a period of time away from your creative practice—why it happens, what it means, and how we might get unstuck. (And she’s looking to talk to people who’ve weathered a long pause, so if that’s you, you should reach out to her—the info is in the post below.) You can read more and subscribe here:

Welcome to the Long Pause

✍️

Lindsay Lusby

of Perilune Editing (you may remember her great guest post full of poetry revision prompts) is offering an online workshop, How to Write Your Artist Bio, on Saturday, June 15, 2024 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. eastern. Lindsay says the workshop is for “artists who are just getting started in their artistic careers, who lack confidence in their writing skills, or who worry they haven’t even achieved enough yet to fill a bio paragraph.” The keeping the class size is pretty small--capping registration at five--so there’s lots of time for more individual attention and brainstorming together during the workshop. There's a $150 registration fee, which includes the two-hour workshop, along with follow-up feedback & editing help. You can read more about the workshop here.

💡I’ll be leading a workshop about pitching at Small Works Philly on Sunday, June 2nd from 2-4pm, and I’d love for you to join me. My goal is that everyone will leave with at least one pitch ready to go, and the skills and encouragement you need to develop lots more. If you’d like to work on publishing personal essays, reviews, service journalism, and more but aren’t sure how to get started or where to pitch, this workshop will get you started. Register for the workshop at this link.

You can follow the Small Works Gallery on instagram, and you can email Heather with any questions at heather.b@philadelphiasmallworks.com. (They’re doing sliding scale tuition, so if that’s something that would make the workshop accessible for you, email Heather and she’ll help you out.)

And if you’d like to learn more about my approach to pitching and read an annotated successful pitch, I shared that here:

a poet learns to pitch (and you can, too!)

this month in Write More . . .

🌟 “Essays taught me to cull the world of my experiences for an image that was connected to memory and evoked unresolved emotions,” a good creatures interview with memoirist Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn, whose new book Loose of Earth is a must-read for anyone writing tough family stories or integrating deep research into personal narrative

🌟 “If you want to write, make time for the writing,” a good creatures interview with poet and memoirist Remica Bingham-Risher, who cites the example of Lucille Clifton having six kids and still doing her writing as tough love inspiration

✍️ “The quotidian details of life often inspire ideas for fiction,” says Mindy Friddle, whose new novel Her Best Self uses invented newspaper articles to develop her characters’ backstory; her piece offers two great writing prompts for found and invented texts

🌟 “Care can be a place of deep insight and epiphany, personal and otherwise,” a good creatures interview with

Elissa Strauss

, whose new book When You Care is prompting really exciting conversations about how we can actually value care work

🌟“I had to learn to work in very short stints, leave notes to allow myself to start quickly next time even when tired, and to let myself write poorly when I was exhausted so that I could edit it into something better later,” a good creatures interview with Erin Zimmerman, whose new book Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save An Old Science, is so beautifully written, you’d never guess she fought through the first draft just after giving birth to twins (!!)

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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.

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