remember what works

a new season doesn't always need a new plan

A quick note today, friends, with a few good ideas and one luminous paragraph (not mine) for inspiration.

I love a plan, and I love a system. Transition moments like this—from spring to summer, from the regular schedule of the academic year to the looseness and variation of the summer months—often spark a desire in me to Make a New System or find new charts, new stickers, new routines. There’s value in that impulse, particularly when it helps me get clarity about my big goals,¹ but it can also reinforce the feeling that how I’ve been doing things is wrong, and if I want to reach those big goals, I first need to become a brand new version of myself.

Instead of a new routine, let’s start by remembering what works.

When I think of what works, for me, I remember the summer between the two years of my MFA, which I spent writing poems in a tiny, cobwebby carrel at Memorial Library in Madison.² Each morning I’d get up, pack my lunch and pour myself coffee in a travel mug, and take the bus to campus. I’d unlock my grim little carrel, with a window overlooking the perpetually under-construction fountain at the center of the plaza, and open my notebook. I’d check my notes from the day before, then write until mid-day.³ After lunch, I’d walk over to the SERF, the decidedly unfancy campus gym, and go for a run on the track perched above the basketball court, then take the bus back home.

It was a magic time, a routine that made space for the weird poems I was writing to grow.⁴ It couldn’t have been, actually, more than a couple weeks (I spent six weeks of that summer working in Tulsa), but the rhythm of it taught me how to work. And that’s the image I draw on now, when I’m trying to return to a regular practice.

pansies in a south Philly windowbox, both because they’re beautiful and because walks are another thing that works

Here’s what works for me:

• protected blocks of writing time on my calendar

• defined but flexible goals for a day and/or week

  • in prose, this often means word count, though it’s sometimes milestones or content (i.e. write x scene or describe y concept from research), and in poetry, it can be a production goal (i.e. a poem a day, a poem a week) or a list of topics or ideas I’m working from

• a process log

  • this is a term I learned from Keri Bertino, who describes it in this interview, but looking back, I can see that’s what I was doing, that summer in Madison. I was drafting poems, but I was also keeping lists of new ideas and what to do next, which makes it easier to get started again each day. Keri keeps an actual notebook specifically for this purpose, but it can be as simple as two or three sentences at the end of a writing session about what you did and where you’re going next.

    counts as writing: an interview with writer & writing teacher Keri Bertino

• a place to work outside the house

  • even leaving aside the distractions of home, one thing those weeks in my carrel taught me is the value of a feeling that I’m Going to Work when I write, so that the trip to the workspace (bus rides or walks are great, if that’s possible) is part of the preparation, and then the trip home gives you a little more margin for the last idea to unspool itself.

• community that helps me feel accountable

  • that can be anything from co-working (another shout-to Erinn Batykefer and Emily Mohn-Slate’s Ass in Chair Collective’s Monday writing sessions, if you’re looking for a way to get writing on your calendar) virtually or in-person to a text thread of word counts to emailing drafts

✨ as promised, one gorgeous paragraph ✨

This is from the Author’s Note at the back of the paperback reissue of Ann Napolitano’s Within Arm’s Reach. It follows a paragraph about feeling “like a failure with a F” after her first two novels didn’t sell.

One morning, despite knowing better, despite having given up, I found myself sitting at my kitchen table writing a story. I remember shaking my head, thinking, Why? But I felt better, in those moments, than I had in months: lighter, more myself, more alive. I returned to the story the next day because I wanted that feeling again, if only for a few minutes. The act of writing lifted me out of the foggy sadness I’d been living inside, and I discovered that the repetition of the practice cleared the fog away. This was revelatory to me, and it changed the way I looked at writing. Up until that point, I’d considered writing as a train that traveled toward a destination. Publication was the main goal. Proving to the people in my life that I was supposed to do this was another. But alone at my small kitchen table, I realized that writing was turning on lightbulbs inside me that were otherwise dark. I was more myself, more of what I might become, while I was writing. I knew then that whether or not I ever published a book, I would continue to write for myself. I can’t explain in words how liberating that was, how grateful I am to have that information even now.

A bit later on, Napolitano writes, “On my best days, I am alone with the book I’m writing, aglow.”

I’d love to know: what works in your writing life? when do you feel aglow? 💡

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1. One more shout-out for Dan Blank’s Creative Clarity exercise. My most recent round showed me that some of the things I’ve been worrying about and putting work into . . . do not really matter to me that much.

2. My impulse here is to find a picture so I can show you just how grim this spot was, but I didn’t have a smartphone then and wasn’t on instagram, so my life was much more spottily documented. I think that lack of documentation is part of the magic—I was just in the carrel, writing, not thinking about what I’d post about how I was in the carrel. If you’re curious, though, I did find this article from the Wisconsin alumni magazine, though the lighting in that photo is better than what I remember.

3. I’m reminded also of Annie Dillard’s caution, in The Writing Life, that “appealing workplaces are to be avoided.” The library is a block from the terrace and the lake, where I spent many lovely afternoons drinking beer and playing dominos or Uno and just generally hanging out; fortunately, the carrel offered none of those temptations.

4. These were, mostly, the poems that became my chapbook Acadiana. All the saints and sibyls and other oddballs of the south Louisiana bayous where that collection is set needed space to appear to me, I think.