Start Where You Are

another pandemic spring, keeping the momentum going

Because I don’t garden, the fact that things grow back feels like a miracle to me. I’d admired my neighbor’s peony bush through much of the spring last year, and when they cut it right to the ground, and I was a little sad about it, and then I felt silly, because who who has feelings like that about someone else’s garden. Imagine my surprise when it grew right back up again.

I feel a bit like those peonies right now, doing my best to burst back up through the dirt, despite everything. Or maybe I just want to feel that way.

I’m working on a long project now, a book-length narrative nonfiction project, that I’m alternately excited about and sure I’ll never finish. Part of what’s hard is that I’ve been working on it for years already, and I feel a little panic that I’m not done already, especially when all around me, so many people seem to have written faster. But of course I had to work through each part of the process to get to where I am now. I’m trying to remind myself to start where I am. Each day, I pick up the thread and take the book a little farther.

Thanks for reading as the newsletter transitions from daily poetry prompts to biweekly essays and interviews about writing process, creativity, and productivity. I’ve got some interviews lined up that I’m really excited to share, and more ideas, as always, about how to maintain a writing life in a difficult, distracted time. For right now, here are a few quick ideas - things that are helping me write right now. I’ve written enough by now to know that every book feels impossible until it’s not.

• Write first. I put this on a post-it in my planner because I really need that reminder - before I open my email, before I do a quick check of twitter etc etc, I need to write first.

• Count your work - and give yourself credit for everything. I’ll write more about this in an upcoming newsletter, but for right now, I’ll say that tracking my writing time and my words is helping me maintain a sense of momentum with the long project I’m working on. (And if you look closely at the picture above, you’ll see I’m often not fast! My high school typing teacher would be horrified by 245 words in 3 hours, but I also did a lot of reading and thinking, and it helps me to count time and words to give myself credit for all of that.)

• Fix it later. I loved this piece by Eva Recinos on self-doubt and self-editing, and it reminded me that I’d read that Celeste Ng keeps a note above her desk that just says “fix it later” as a way to remind herself to keep going and not try to perfect the first draft. This bit from Recinos’s essay was especially helpful for me:

  When I’m working on a piece, I sometimes find it useful to write notes in bold, like “expand this section” or “make this fancier,” when I am in a groove of just getting rough ideas down on the page. I don’t want to interrupt my flow, but in the back of my head there are those doubts that tempt me to self-edit—the self-doubt is telling me, “You’re definitely not writing this the best way possible.” But marking my notes and moving on assures me that I can come back to it and do it better later.

  I don’t have to get it down perfectly the first time. And neither do you.

  

A few other notes and interesting bits:

• Philly’s 215 Festival is happening now, and on Saturday from 1-3PM eastern, Emily Pérez and I are co-hosting the very first event for our anthology, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which will be published in Spring 2022 by UGA. The event will include a prompt and some writing time, followed by a reading by three of our great contributors, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Kendra DeColo, and Angela Narciso Torres. You can read more and sign up for free at this link.

  

• This year’s #1000wordsofsummer runs from May 31-June 13. It’s a daily writing challenge run by Jami Attenberg, and it’s developed into an incredibly lovely supportive online community. You can sign up to get free daily emails with encouraging words and practical tips from Attenberg and other guest writers.

• In July, I’ll be teaching for Murphy Writing’s Midsummer Online Writing Getaway. I’m leading a workshop titled “Hermit Crabs and the Art of the Nonfiction Essay” in which we’ll play with different forms for the personal essay. The full list of workshops is online here. If you enjoyed the April prompts, I think you’ll love the Getaway.

How is your writing going? I’d love to hear from you about projects you’re working on, challenges you’re facing, tips that are helping you keep going through it all.