you're never going to get *caught up*, and that's okay
a calming question for times of upheaval + setting intentions for November
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 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.
There’s a little joke I like to tell myself every October—sure, this week is busy, but next week, I’ll get caught up. And this October was a little wilder than usual, with an unexpected week and a half in Pittsburgh with my mom as she recovered from surgery, combined with a couple of high-visibility things at work that have had me scrambling and feeling a little frazzled all month. (My mom’s doing really well in her recovery. Thanks so much to everyone who commented and sent messages.)
So I finally came to the realization: I’m never going to get “caught up,” whatever that even means. And that’s totally fine.
I love making a list and a plan and a strategy, and it is so satisfying to chug through all those items. But it’s also really easy to tick things off and lose sight of the big picture. I’ve answered so many emails at work, but have I connected with friends that I love or listened to my kid as he plays the new song he’s invented on his guitar? I’ve prepped lessons and responded to so many student essays, but have I done the hard work of digging back in to the research and thinking of the next book I’m dreaming of?
This may very well be obvious to lots of you, but a major downside of the checklist approach to productivity (and, by extension, life) is that it flattens everything: grading is listed right alongside emails I need to send and essays I watch to pitch and hangouts I want to plan with friends. In the busiest seasons of life, it’s always my impulse to try to settle down and tear through a bunch of work—but the danger of that is losing sight of what actually matters.
So that’s the question I asked myself at the beginning of October, when it was clear my month would not take the shape I’d planned on: what matters this month? I wrote it really big in my planner (ily, Laurel Denise, there are new stickers out this week that I bet you’d love) and it was honestly incredibly clarifying. This October, it was just two things: helping my mom and running a committee at work. Everything else—prepping my classes, keeping my kids fed and in clean-ish clothes, etc etc—would happen, or I’d ask someone else for help. But it wasn’t the top priority.
If you’ve got a busy and/or tumultuous month ahead (lol who doesn’t)1, I think asking yourself at the outset what matters instead of what has to get done might help.
how do we figure out what matters?
What matters this month might be a specific set of tasks—say, a deadline or a project. But it might also be a practice—sitting down with your notebook or a draft and seeing what happens—or a feeling—say, trying to hold onto a bit of calm among *all this*.
I’m still thinking about how I’ll answer this question for myself this month, but especially as I head into a stretch of book promotion, it’s been important to try to ground myself into how I want that to feel. I am truly so proud of this book and so excited to get to start sharing it with readers—and I’m trying to hold on to that feeling, instead of getting bogged down with the inevitable stress and anxiety and comparison that often comes along with book promotion. (And! I’m organizing so many great events, in-person and online for the spring—I don’t have the full lineup to share yet, but I’ll link the details for the pre-order bonus below.)
💭 But first, I’d love to know: What matters to you this month? 💭
🥳️ join Maggie Smith and me for a Good Mother Myth zoom party in February! 🥳️
My next book, The Good Mother Myth, is coming out January 21, 2025, and if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, I think you’ll love it.
, one of my parenting-writing heroes, called it “enraging, validating, and in its own way, deeply reassuring.” If you love your kids but suspect that the motherhood industrial complex is kind of a scam, this is the book for you. Your pre-order makes a world of difference in generating buzz and getting it into bookstores and into the hands of readers.And as a thank you for pre-ordering the book, we have two really exciting bonuses: a signed bookplate and an invitation to a zoom party on Sunday, February 23rd at 2pm eastern on caregiving and creativity cohosted with
, NYT-bestselling author of We Could Make This Place Beautiful and the forthcoming Dear Writer. A suggestion, if you, like me, find holiday shopping stressful: order an extra copy for a mom you love, then attend the zoom party together in the new year!
You can order it anywhere books are sold—online through Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, but the best way to support a writer is to order directly from your local independent bookstore, where a real live bookseller will take a look at the book and hopefully be inspired to stock a couple more!
After you pre-order, enter your info at this website to get the bonuses.
this month in Write More . . .
🌟SAD GROWNUPS author Amy Stuber talked about being a debut writer at 55, breaking away from perfection in parenting and writing, and writing for the joy of it
✨Decision Coach Nell Wulfhart offered such great advice about how to make decisions in our writing lives; one thing that’s really stuck with me is her advice about when to make a big change that’s been calling you: “As for the best timing, my opinion on that is almost always ASAP. Let’s get the hard part over with so we can enjoy the good part for longer.”
🌟HOW TO CAPTURE CARBON author Cameron Walker talked about surfing, science writing and storytelling, and learning to ask for help in writing and parenting
🎂to celebrate my birthday (weekend 😉) I gave away a bunch of recent favorite books and we talked about what we’ve read recently that’s stuck with us. the books have all been mailed, but the comments are a treasure trove of reading suggestions
and elsewhere on the internet . . .
For The Millions, I talked with
about her knockout new book LOVING SYLVIA PLATH and all the ways we’ve gotten Plath wrong, including by missing how funny and bitchy and petty she was; click through for my favorite Plath story, about the time she ate an entire meatloaf while visiting W. S. Merwin and his wife at their French country houseFor Electric Literature, I rounded up some of my favorite newsletters on creative practice—not craft guides or how-tos, but smart ways of thinking about process and productivity, featuring
, ’s The Isolation Journals, , Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist, , , , and ’s .Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.
If Write More has helped you in your creative life, you can support me by sharing it online or with a friend, or by pre-ordering my next book, The Good Mother Myth.
I can’t imagine there’s any point in talking about the election here except to say that I, like Alexandra Petri, endorse Harris which has the wild side effect of making me, like her, braver than actual billionaire cowards.
Oh I love the idea of focusing on ‘what matters this month’. And it might help with the struggle to let go of never being able to get everything done. I think, particularly as women, we’re conditioned to think we’ll rest or have time for the things that are important once everything on our to-do lists is done, but that day will never come!
Nancy, thank you so much for this post. I have been feeling so very overwhelmed and have been trying to push my way through one daily to-do list after the other. I love this reframe - asking myself "what matters this month." Thank you!!