how we finish what we started

a fall 🥳️planning party🥳️, featuring the magic of One Thing, on Sunday, September 8th at 2pm eastern

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. I’m a poet and an essayist, and my most recent books are the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I edited with the poet Emily Pérez. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!

This is the monthly intentions email, which goes out [usually!] 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.

As anyone who’s read this newsletter for a minute or met me in person knows, I love a plan. I love a list, love a system, love a strategy.

And yet: there comes a time when you have to stop making neat little lists and just commit to getting the thing DONE. (I am all caps-ing at myself, but maybe also at you, if you need the encouragement.)

At last year’s fall planning party, we had a ton of fun looking at our calendars, setting some big goals, and developing accountability strategies to achieve those dreams. (The round-up from that post is below, if you want to channel some of that magic.) But this year we’re going to try something a little different: instead of making a big PLAN, we’re going to talk about how we GET THINGS DONE. This is a little self serving, because I really need the nudge to actually wrap up (slash start then finish🤦) a bunch of small things. But I bet I’m not the only one who’s spent time making a really elegant to-do list when I would have been better off just picking one thing off that list and getting down to work. In that spirit, this fall is all about the magic of picking One Thing and settling down to work until it’s done.

If you want to kickstart a fall of GETTING THINGS DONE, join us for this year’s fall planning party on Sunday, September 8th at 2pm eastern. (I’ll share the recording and some highlights afterward if you can’t make that time, but there really is a certain magic to doing the work together.) Register here to join us. (And bring a friend! Planning is always more fun with a buddy!)

I’ve swapped out my August Little Projects for THINGS TO FINISH 😁

At this year’s planning party we’ll talk about . . .

• picking what to prioritize (Amy Shearn’s piece, Writing is About Making Choices, in Memoir Land, is a great resource if you’re overwhelmed by what to work on)

• figuring out what obstacles are in the way and getting past them

• and maybe just giving up on some things that have been hanging over us if they aren't actually the priority (or ways to muscle through things we don't want to write but have to for whatever reason).

Then we’ll all commit to one thing that we can FINISH in the next week or two, and we’ll make a plan to actually get it done. If you’ve got a bunch of little scraps and projects hovering around you and have been feeling overwhelmed, I think this will help you get going. And if you’re in the midst of a big project, we’ll talk about how to identify smaller, completable milestones to create a feeling of progress and momentum when the road ahead is long. Whatever creative work you’re doing, you’ll leave our hour together energized and inspired to start finishing what you’ve started.

so many resources for planning your writing life!

the round-up from last year’s fall planning party, if you’d like some practical tips for planning your writing life for productivity and joy

planning party round-up!

highlights from the summer planning party I cohosted with Jenn McClearen of the great newsletter Publish Not Perish

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

on starting small and getting back to your writing after a break

ways to start

on using what and how and why to guide your goal-setting

don't call it a resolution

❤️️ if Write More has given you helpful tips and encouragement for sustaining your writing life amidst the chaos, click the little red heart at the top or the bottom to help other busy, dedicated writers find us! ❤️️

this month in Write More . . .

🌟 “I feel that my pediatrician-mom-brain and my creative brain have finally blended” says neonatologist, writer, and mother of three Susan Landers, of the MomsMatter newsletter

🌟 writer and Raising Mothers founder Sherisa de Groot encouraged us to “Be open to being born anew each day”

🌟 writer and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson described how becoming a mother created urgency around the writing she’d hoped to get to some day: “I became a mother and realized that life was happening now.”

✨ we had a great chat about rituals and routines in our writing lives—the comments are full of great tips about how to get started

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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. (And you can pre-order my next book, The Good Mother Myth, which will be out in January 2025!)

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