writing through a season of sludge

setting intentions and goals for August + ways to write when you can't write

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 fight the Sunday Scaries by thinking through your goals and intentions for your writing practice in the coming month and to reflect on your progress in the previous month.

If that sounds helpful and fun, subscribe here.

(We’ve had a ton of new subscribers recently! Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here.)

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Hi there. I’m still thinking a lot about stuckness and getting unstuck and being okay with thinking and writing and moving slowly. I’ve been thinking a ton about this bit from my recent interview with Keri Bertino, where Keri talked about the darkness that often comes right before you a big breakthrough and about asking for help when you’re struggling with your writing. I thought I’d share it here, in case anyone else is in a late summer slog:

I was working on a novel revision this spring and just got to a point where I just had lost faith in the project. I’ve found that very often those moments come right before we're about to level up on something. It makes it sort of a dark point, where I really don't know if I can answer why I'm doing something.

And this is why it's so important, I think, to have a community of writers, because you need people in your life, who you can make this ask of and they will not think you're crazy. I texted my friend and was like, I am teary in the library right now, I am feeling so stuck and dispirited. And I asked, can I meet with you tomorrow and just talk out what I'm trying to do? And I said, I need you to do two jobs while you're listening, like number one midwife and cheerlead for me, but the other part is also have your bs detector on because what I am afraid of right now is that I'm trying to pull a fast one on myself or my reader. If there's something here that's not true or not actually logically connected, I need to either know that that's not the case or where it is so I can address it. And so we sat down the next day with coffee and she and I just talked and she took notes, for me, for an hour and by the end of it, I figured out all of this stuff that I just sort of needed to talk through out loud. I have been happily working ever since, but without that friend, you I could have just stayed in that point of despair or project abandonment for months. Instead I got it over with in basically two days. It just saves time and it makes the hard parts shorter and less hard.

reflecting on July

In the July monthly intentions email, we talked about writing in summer time, which is so often a mix of little fractured bits and perhaps some longer slow days, if you’re lucky.

How was your July? What did you learn about writing into little bits and pieces of time, or working with longer stretches?

writing in a season of sludge: a couple quick ideas for August

warm-ups and little rituals

I was talking with my friend Emily recently about writing process, and she shared that one thing she’s learned from the musicians she knows is how important warming up is. She was saying it’s made her realize how lucky she is as a writer, that her requirements, in terms of time and space and materials, are more modest—but it made me think: a warm-up! That’s what I need!

So one thing you might consider for August is developing a warm-up practice for your writing. I wrote earlier this summer about having a simple today/tomorrow wrap up, where at the end of my work time, I write myself a quick note about what I’ve done, followed by a note about what I want to work on the next day. That’s helped me to recognize the progress I am making, especially when the work is slower and more conceptual and a writing session doesn’t produce a volume of words. I’ve been experimenting with taking this today/tomorrow wrap-up and extending it into a warm-up for the next day by actually writing myself an assignment at the top of the next page in my notebook. That way, when I sit down, I know where to start. Another option for a simple warm-up would be to spend a couple minutes re-reading what you did the day before. I know some people use morning pages as a kind of warm up, too.

You might also think about developing a little ritual. At different points in my writing life I’ve started writing sessions by lighting a special candle, doing some accupressure exercises, or doing a quick meditation. Right now, I’m listening to the same song on repeat, and I save that song for writing; it seems to signal to my brain that we’re about to get started writing.

Any good ideas for warm-ups in your writing practice? What rituals do you use to help yourself get started?

switch up the medium

Another strategy if you’re feeling stuck: switch up the medium. If you’re used to writing on your computer, try working longhand, or the reverse. I find that sometimes a Word document feels too much like I’m Working on my Writing, and switching into another platform like Evernote or google docs alleviates the pressure. (Evernote is especially helpful because it feels so casual—I’m just writing myself some little notes, rather than trying to do Serious Writing.) Recently, I was struggling to articulate some ideas, and I figured out a specific person I’d want to explain them to and opened up a blank email and started to writing to her, which was a helpful reminder that writing is about sharing ideas with people, rather than retyping the same phrases into a laptop until you scream or cry or walk into the sea.

make it smaller

One last idea: if writing feels hard right now, just do one small thing. I’ll share a bit I wrote about that this past fall:

When I’m not making the progress that I want with a project, it’s often because the project is too big and I haven’t figured out how to make it smaller. So here’s this week’s focus: do one small thing. Your small thing might be a particular scene you’ve been wanting to write. It could be to flip through an old notebook and collect lines and images for new writing. You could read the poems you’ve written recently and write yourself a list of assignments for new work. If there’s a place you’ve been feeling stuck, make your work in that place smaller.

Mason Currey wrote something similar recently, in his newsletter Subtle Maneuvers:

Keep setting small, manageable goals, and then savor the feeling of accomplishing them. If you’re not accomplishing them, set smaller goals! Writing requires a weird mix of cockiness and humility (or maybe debasement is the better word). You have to believe that you have this rare, precious gift and also treat yourself like an incompetent baby who gets an ice cream if he writes one sentence.

So go write one sentence! Then get yourself some ice cream or sherbet or water ice or whatever delight will help you keep going.

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upcoming events and workshops

With poet Dilruba Ahmed, I’ll be leading a free workshop on online teaching, Cultivating Community: Reflections from the Zoom Classroom, on Wednesday, August 17 from 4-5PM. It should be fun and interactive, and I’d love to see you there.

That workshop is via Blue Stoop’s Wednesdays on the Stoop, which are free drop-in sessions on a variety of writing topics. There are so many other great upcoming offerings—I’m especially interested in Eshani Surya’s Mapping the Body on August 24 and Incorporating Research into Storytelling with Katie Bennett on September 14. If you can steal away for a bit on Wednesday afternoons, I really recommend checking out the lineup!

I’ll also be teaching Foundations of Poetry for Blue Stoop via this fall, starting in mid-September. We’ll meet for 8 Wednesdays from 6-8PM via zoom. You don’t have to live in the Philadelphia area to participate; there is financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties). Whether you’re just getting started with poetry or looking to deepen your practice, you’ll gets lots of generative prompts, practical strategies for incorporating writing into your life, and encouragement from a supportive community. I’ll share the course listing when it’s live, but feel free to email me if you have questions. You can read more about Blue Stoop’s courses here.

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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. Have a victory or an epiphany in your writing life you’d like to share? A struggle you’d like help with? Reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy). 

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