The last post was a miscellany and I fear this may be one too, but hopefully a miscellany of substance. Remember how I randomly went down an E. B. White rabbit hole last week?
Well, Christopher and I were both attending the Southern Kentucky Festival of Books (which was delightful and not just because they had little pies made by the Pie Queen, the best of queens), and so we listened to White’s reading of Charlotte’s Web on the drive there and back. Yes, we’re those nerds.
In addition, the wonderful Karen Joy Fowler pointed me to the poem “Wondrous” by Sarah Freligh, which you can check out here. I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of my copy of the collection it’s from. Meanwhile, Terri Windling, the great and good, shared this letter of Kate DiCamillo’s about the book and loving the world as writers.
I promise, this isn’t going to become an all E. B. White publication. That is IT.
If you follow me on twitter and are also an occasional member of Insomnia Club, then you know that I sometimes randomly trawl through the results at various poetry websites when I can’t sleep. It’s one of my favorite ways to discover new poets. On the Academy of American Poets site, you can make anthologies—little collections—here’s my Insomniac Favorites.
So if you get nothing else from today’s newsletter, you’ll at least get some poems. I thought I’d answer a question that came in from Kaelyn in response to the last open Q&A call, since it’s pertinent to me, as I find myself suddenly (suddenly! betrayed! by! time!) with a book due in three months and the need to sit down and get it written.
What do you do if/when you’re struggling to put words down on a page, despite having a clear idea of what you want?
One way to approach this problem is to try to identify the cause of the avoidance. For me, different types of shying away tend to require different solutions.
If I’m simply busy, as now, and waiting for a book to imminently release… you know…
LIKE NOW. Well? Then I try to be a bit more gentle with myself.
Because there are some weeks here or there, like a release week or any book travel when you might be juggling events, but are certainly juggling EMOTIONS and for me personally? While I sometimes retreat into work, using it as an escape from stress, I also sometimes retreat from work at these times. To make words, I need to be able to be vulnerable, and so times when I’m necessarily doing the public part of this job a lot make that more difficult. As I discovered from my first foray into a bigger book festival over the weekend, I’m apparently out of practice at doing long days with scads of people, so it took a couple of extra days of recovery. Which is fine. I finished up some last edits, and did some administrative stuff. I took long naps.
I just try to account for these things and schedule around them.
So if you’re feeling exposed, or running yourself ragged, and just don’t have the space to be vulnerable… that can be one reason and you might simply have to wait it out.
Other times, I might THINK I know what I want to do with a given project, or I might know what I want from the entire book but not have figured out the immediate next thing or the immediate past thing in the manuscript. Sometimes, I can determine this by giving the last section I wrote a good think. I might do a new, more detailed outline. Other times, I simply have to worry at it on walks for a few days and then voila, usually in the middle of the night right before I start scrolling through poetry, there is the answer. The frustrating thing is that as you get better as a writer at listening to that little voice of your subconscious, your gut, and detecting when something isn’t quite there, this can happen frequently.
The good news is the upshot is that your gut is also better at signaling you’ve correctly figured it out.
I’ve written enough about burnout here lately that I don’t think I need to go there, but sometimes you can know exactly what you want to write and need to write and not have the gas in the tank. Again, there’s waiting it out, but if burnout is the cause, think rejuvenation. Rest. Whatever measures of it you can manage. Even if it’s just “nights off” (which I try to always do) or “one day a week off” or a massage, something like that. The self-care of it all.
But sometimes waiting it out isn’t the right call. Sometimes you don’t have the time and have to employ tricks. If you’ve taken one of my classes and procrastination has come up, then I’ll have shared this article about it.
The crucial excerpt, but if you have the free or paid articles read the whole thing -- it starts out talking about Douglas Adams and Margaret Atwood:
The psychologists Timothy Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois have discovered that procrastination isn’t about avoiding work; it’s about avoiding negative emotions. We procrastinate when a task stirs up feelings like anxiety, confusion or boredom. And although it makes us feel better today, we end up feeling worse — and falling behind — tomorrow.
This means that if you want to procrastinate less, you don’t have to increase your work ethic or improve your time management. You can instead focus on changing your habits around emotion management.
I felt so called out when I first read this, but it has helped me start asking, when I am deep in the throws of procrastination or workcrastination, what is the feeling I'm avoiding?
For me, it helps me to focus on how I'll feel after I do it. We all love having written, after all.
Maybe you’re hesitating because you know what you want, and there is no way it ever comes out on the page that way the first time, so you are avoiding feeling like you’ve failed. In which case, reframing is your friend. That clarity will be useful in revision. For now, try to suspend judgment and work on seeing the vision you have as a process with steps and stages. Somewhere along the way, you’ll hopefully fall in love with the flawed version of your perfect-in-your-head vision that is the best you can do. That’s reality.
The longer I write, the more intuitive about the process I become. Partly that’s just trusting my own process, knowing that even though I may hit that point where I am quite certain I’ve forgotten how to do this job, aka write a book, maybe even daily (but at least once per book in a serious way), I will get to The End. My brain has certain patterns and I can influence, but not change them. Working with them is better.
Jedi mind tricks? Also: crucial. We’re often just looking for new ways to do an end run around our brains when they’re being HUGE JERKS. One of my all-time favorite screenwriters is Ernest Lehman, who famously struggled to put the script of North By Northwest together, because he was largely stitching ideas for scenes and moments from himself and Alfred Hitchcock into a story. I’ll just share this anecdote in his own words:
“So I kept pressing forward, and Hitch, confident that I now knew what the hell I was doing, moved over to MGM from his home base at Universal, and started storyboarding the script with his art director, and casting the roles. And all the time, I’m sitting there in my office sweating the fact that I have no idea whatsoever why the hell they’re all going to Mount Rushmore! Why were these people heading to South Dakota? I had no idea! So, the last act of the script was blank. Actual blank pages! Then Cary Grant came on the picture with some astronomical salary, and I was still sitting there in my office with nothing but a partially-completed script. So I called up Hitch, and I told him we were in big trouble. He came rushing over to my office, sat across from me, and the two of us stared at each other. Finally, he suggested that we call in some mystery novelist to help us kick around ideas, but I didn’t like the idea. After all, I was getting paid by MGM to write the thing, and I felt that it would make me look pretty foolish. I kept saying, “God, what’ll they say about me upstairs?” and Hitch would say, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell them it’s all my fault. I’ll tell them I should’ve been able to help you, but I couldn’t — or something like that.”
“Then we went to his office — it was about six o’clock in the evening — and we kept talking about his idea, even discussing which mystery writer we should get, and, all the time, the right side of my brain was working, and suddenly, as I was listening to him — not really ignoring him — I said, “She takes a gun out of her purse and shoots him.” So where the hell did that come from? It just popped into my head. That’s the way it works sometimes: you’ve got a problem and, no matter what else is going on around you, the right side of your brain keeps working on it and then, suddenly, it pops out of nowhere. And Hitch took it right in stride. Even though I’d completely changed the subject and suddenly blurted out, “She takes a gun out of her purse and shoots him,” he didn’t miss a beat and responded, “Yes, the Polish Underground sometimes killed their own members, just to prove they weren’t in the Underground.” And I said, “Yes, but these are fake bullets. That’ll convince Vandamm that he has to take her away with him. Now that she’s a fugitive, he’ll decide to take her on the plane.” And, instantly, I had the whole last act.”
The “I don’t know what happens” or “what’s wrong” problem. You can be taking that time I kept mentioning above, actively doing things that give your brain the chance to work.
Your subconscious will work on it while you’re doing other things, and sometimes you just have to let that happen. Sometimes you have to walk away from your desk that day and say, “I may just have to abandon this. I have no idea how to fix it.” And voila, the answer usually presents itself as soon as you give yourself permission to walk away or give up. (Not for the faint of heart, but seriously, tricking our brains into cooperating is so much of the writer’s job.) Long walks are one of my favorite things to abandon desk and do to tackle story problems. Visiting an art gallery is a good one. Making a playlist. Have a reading vacation, where you use your free time just to read. Flip through picture books. Play outside. Binge something with a similar mood. More walks. Naps!
(Naps are a crucial part of my process. I know: #goals.)
Anyway, I hope something here helps. Worst case scenario and none of this does anything? Find an accountability buddy, doesn’t have to be a writer, but can be. Set some small goals and check in with them daily/weekly. Talk it out with them. Get yourself excited to work again, by hook or crook, as they say. (Why do they say it? No one knows.)
Eventually, time passes, and you’ll find your whee for the project. SEE, I brought it back to the post title.
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BOOK STUFF
Hi! I do indeed have a book out in a week. Booklist’s starred review says there’s “so much to love.” As in…
And if you haven’t read Not Your Average Hot Guy, begin your binge! If you have, have you left a review someplace? Have you preordered the new book or requested it from your library? Have you penciled the in-person launch at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7 p.m. a week from tomorrow (Wednesday, April 6) into your calendar? (Also, the best place to get signed books.) Have you registered for the online launch party with the most fabulous bunch of writers?
Many thanks for doing any or all of these things and here’s a good link to do so. And lastly: Whee! Thanks for reading.
What is the feeling I'm avoiding? Such a question to ask - like self-parenting the writer inside so you can get back to it and stop organizing closets, doing non urgent errands, etc.
I like this "what is this feeling I'm avoiding" -- it's definitely something to consider. What I'll take from this is "Somewhere along the way, you’ll hopefully fall in love with the flawed version of your perfect-in-your-head vision that is the best you can do."
Yes. Yes. You know I'm trying to write my first novel after years of stopping starting, or writing for other people, and I'm constantly like "but it isn't fleshed out." I'm trying to push forward and just get it on the page and so far that's working.
Thanks for sharing your insomniac favorites.. so we aren't supposed to doomscroll when we can't sleep?! Never. I haven't read Wallace Stevens since college, I loved the one you shared "The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm," which was new to me.
A friend of just launched a literary mag with some other friends, they have poetry: https://www.manynicedonkeys.com/_files/ugd/af8f94_11e901db25324468a30914cc2a3bee6e.pdf
I really like the one called Full of Grace.