the worry is not the work
the magic of Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland and learning to listen to the work, plus a rescheduled date for the in-person pitch workshop in June
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 keeping your writing at the top of your to-do list. This month, we’ll talk about worrying vs doing the work.
I finished Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino’s knockout new novel, on the way home from teaching at a workshop in Florida last month. Now, it may be that I always cry more easily on planes, but the last section of the book just really got me. Marie really writes like no one else—she talked recently somewhere about how people always ask her about her surrealism, but really she’s just trying to be as accurate as she possibly can, and all the elements that read as weird or surreal are how she gest there. I met her at Sewanee years ago, when we were both fellows, and she read her O. Henry-winning story, “Exit Zero,” a title which I either didn’t catch or hadn’t lived in New Jersey long enough then to get. I can’t for the life of me find it online, but I hope you’ll be intrigued enough by this description to track down a copy of the 2016 O. Henry Anthology and experience it for yourself: a young woman inherits her father’s house after he dies, and she has to care for the unicorn that’s living inside.
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In any case, I love Marie’s writing, and if you haven’t read her books, I hope you’ll read and love them, too. But what I really want to talk about today is a sentence from her acknowledgements, which I read on the plane, then scrawled into my notebook in all caps while waiting at the baggage claim:
The inutterable magic of keeping one’s head down and listening only to the work.
Somehow that sliver of a sentence just crystallized something in me: there’s the work, then there’s not-the-work. I immediately, even with one eye on the baggage carrel, started drafting a mental t-chart: the work and not-the-work. But then I thought no, it’s more like concentric circles: the work itself, a nearby circle of ancillary things, then the outer universe of not-the-work. Here’s what I mean:
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The center of the circle is where the magic is. Whether it’s a poem or book or an essay, that’s the heart of what we’re doing here, and that’s the part we need to protect. All the other stuff—social media, sharing your work, talking about the writing you love—all of that is wonderful and important and affirming. But it’s not the work. And then, of course, there are all the other things—worrying if the work is good enough, feeling envy of other writers’ work and success, fearing that your book will be published and disappear with a poof. All of that can feel like the work, but it’s not. The worry is not the work.
If this makes sense to your brain, a suggestion: make your own set of circles. What’s in the center? What is, for you, the work right now? What are the valuable related activities? And what goes out into outer space, as far from the work as you can send it?
May Intentions
three questions to consider as you set priorities for your writing life this month:
What is your work this month? What’s magic about it? Why does it matter to you? I’ve gotten into the bad habit of making long lists of things I could be doing, or would like to be working on, but that’s not the work. I’m going to start May by getting really clear about my work for the month.
What not-the-work worries/distractions/fears do you need to send out into space this month?
💡let’s get your good ideas out into the world: in-person pitching workshop Sunday, June 2nd from 2-4pm💡
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. (This was rescheduled from April.) 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:
this month in Write More . . .
✨ “I believe that creative ideas come to us from a higher place, and it’s our job to bring them out into the world,” a good creatures interview with speaker and writer
✏️
shared some great strategies for revising poems from the body and finding the right shape for a poem. (lots of readers especially loved her theories about stanza shapes, so if tercets vs couplets is a hot topic for you, you’ll want to check that out 😊)✨ “this time has allowed me to see that I am a better parent and person when I actively pursue what brings me closest to myself, and that’s making art,” a good creatures interview with cartoonist, writer, and illustrator Emily Zilber
previously, on worrying and doing the work anyway
elsewhere on the internet . . .
💕 I talked to
for her Cave of the Heart series about, among other things, my “jazz hands” approach to ending a poem and how I’ve have to learn new strategies in prose:There are important genre differences–I’ve had to learn to be more direct in some ways in prose, while in poetry I think you can get away with leaving a lot of mystery and being like, “Reader, you figure it out.” (I think of that as the kind of “jazz hands” ending to a poem. The editors I’ve worked with in prose have not been impressed with that move, and I’ve had to learn to spell out my thinking a little more and make connections more explicit than in a poem I would have left more open.)
✍️ And I started writing a column for Writers Digest about writing newsletters. (It’s newsletter-ception!) The first one, Should Writers Have a Newsletter?, is up now. (You can probably guess my answer! I’d love it if you would click on over and read anyway. 😉) The next column will be about low-stress ways to get started with a newsletter, so if that sounds helpful, keep your eyes peeled.
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.
If Write More has helped you in your creative life, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend.
So glad I stumbled across your newsletter. So many great things to chew on, will be asking myself where the magic is in my work this upcoming month. Also, it’s so nice to find another fan of Bertino. 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas is a yearly read for me.
Nancy, this headline caught my eye as I've been thinking a lot about worry and how it impedes my real work, the work of my Zone of Genius (which is my ability to convey in words what is in my heart and soul and connect with other hearts and souls, whether through fiction or essays or how I live my life). I write about it in my Substack newsletter this week. And when I saw your drawing of circles, I thought, yes! I need to do this, too. You see, a big problem for me is that my day job for three plus decades has been corporate writing and journalism, I see that as the "work" and my fiction writing/creative essays have fallen by default into the "hobby" category and that is no longer what I want. I can't bear to have what I love to do with language relegated in this default category. I am 64, divorced after a long marriage, just lost my mom who believed in my writing more than anyone--if not now, when? (As I shared in the Good Creatures interview you so kindly offered space for me to write here). I am still struggling to live in that Zone of Genius. But these May intentions--they will bring me closer. The whole idea of intentions that are ONLY dedicated to the creative writer Amy. I also write the very long to-do lists, for every category of my life. I know what's magic about my real work--this work of creating from my heart--and I have a novel that is ready, I believe, to venture out into the world. I hesitate, though, even though I've revised it seven plus times and brought in a wise developmental editor and the reviews of many trusted writer friends. Is my hesitation rooted in the work itself or somewhere inside me worry festering...that I am not good enough, that I somehow don't deserve this? Thank you for getting me to think about all this morning. May is the month I want my novel to fly out into the world, gain its wings. And worry will keep it grounded.