Hello, fellow writers!
What does your writing life look like as we enter these last few weeks of 2022?
I’m in the first stages of a new project, which has me thinking about my development as a writer. What tricks have I learned to keep myself motivated through the unique challenges of beginning again?
The kinds of effort needed to launch a new writing project seem particularly well suited to this time of year, with darker days encouraging us to spend more time indoors and the winter holidays encouraging us to pause and reflect.
I hope that sharing these ideas will be of use to you next time you’re preparing a leap into a new project or perhaps even if you’re feeling stuck in an old one.
Give yourself time to “glean.”
Even as an undergraduate English major, I knew that last-minute writing was not for me. While envying friends’ tales of nervy, caffeine-fueled all-nighters, I needed time to sift information I’d discovered while preparing an assignment.
As a double-degree student with various work-study gigs, I often felt impatient with my time-consuming prewriting process.
I’m still impatient.
Even after years of noticing how much easier writing is when I have rudimentary ideas to play with on the page, I’m just as apt to force myself to write before I’m ready.
But, inspired by Agnès Varda’s wonderful documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), I try to embrace prewriting time as “gleaning.” It’s allowing myself to look over my materials again, picking up the shining bits that catch my eye, making notes, fostering connections.
The image reminds me that, with a bit of faith and forbearance, I’ll soon have a solid bundle of ideas gathered. Then I’ll write faster and more confidently, too.
Move! (Or, sleep!)
These imperatives work particularly well after a period of gleaning. And it was again during my undergraduate days that I discovered the trick.
I’d stuffed my head full of information, but couldn’t seem to get to that creative place of synthesis. In frustration, anxious about my looming deadline, I went for a long walk.
And, wham!
Wouldn’t you know? The idea I needed smacked me right between the eyes when my mind had wandered to something else.
The next year, I was a graduate student writing a master’s thesis when I described my previous “aha!” moment to my housemate, a mathematician friend.
He told me that I’d experienced “subconscious processing,” something that he actively relied on. But when he was stuck on a problem he couldn’t solve, he took a nap.
More often than not, he woke to find helpful thoughts percolating, apparently suggested by his unconscious mind. Being physically active can get your mind moving purposefully as well.
Several years later, I remembered that conversation during my dissertation writing, when I found I needed to keep a notepad by my bed.
I was writing in the early mornings into the early afternoons before working jobs in the late afternoons and evenings. With little time to spare for contemplation, my thoughts for the next day’s writing often woke me at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.
Leave a thread dangling.
Even if I ended up feeling a bit sleep deprived while dissertating, those wee-small-hours insights were a gift when I was under the time crunch of getting the thesis done.
They propelled me back into my work when I was next at my desk, surmounting the challenge of getting into the flow of a new writing session.
Absent a midnight flash of inspiration, it helps not to finish your work entirely the day before.
I often choose to leave something small undone. That way, I can accomplish an easy task to overcome my inertia when I’m ready to focus again. Maybe it’s a paragraph without a concluding sentence, or a roughly sketched idea that I can polish quickly and move on.
The dangling thread helps me pick up where I left off.
Ventriloquize.
This next tactic is a variation on freewriting, because sometimes when I can’t get going at the beginning of a project, I need to do more than just try to write “automatically.”
My internal censor is not so easily disarmed.
But I’ve never had trouble writing field notes, my fingers zipping over the keyboard to keep pace with my thoughts. Often in such moments, I’m motivated by emotion, anxious not to forget any detail, venting about something upsetting, or marveling at an unexpected observation.
When I’m stuck, sometimes it helps to channel my feelings into a kind of exaggerated persona, writing with a chatty voice or a testy one, anything to get preliminary thoughts on the page.
Later, I mine the text for useful bits—and erase everything else.
Read fiction.
Finally, my favorite suggestion of all: a nice cozy winter treat! I love reading novels, and I’ve long been convinced that they nurture the writer in me, too.
I just finished Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. It’s a masterful display of storytelling prowess, in which she reveals the task she’s set herself at the very beginning—to tell the protagonist’s story again and again as though she were multiply reincarnated in the same life.
A little doubtful still at page thirty-two, I was fully engrossed somewhere by one hundred ten. What amazing creative problem solvers some fiction writers are!
At the very least, it’s inspiring.
After gulping down the last chapters in a rush to the denouement, I was intrigued to learn that the novel has a “companion,” if not quite a sequel. Atkinson must have been preparing for it because she left dangling threads of her own at the first book’s end.
Realizing that, I felt more securely vindicated than ever in my fiction habit. See? We writers share strategies across genres!
I’ll be curious to witness how she catches her threads up in the next narrative. And now I know what I’ll be reading on the plane to visit my family for the holidays.
Happy holidays to you, and happy writing! I’ll be in touch again in January. Best wishes for a healthy, fulfilling 2023.