The Updrafts – Notes on Streaking

BY NANCY REDDY

First of all, not that kind. When I’m talking about streaking in writing, what I mean is a sustained, regular commitment to a project or a practice. 

A streak could be an intense burst of activity over a shorter period or time, like National Novel Writing Month or Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer. Or it could be lower intensity over a long period of time, like a year-long commitment to “touch” a project every day, whether that means writing sustained scenes into a novel or just tinkering inside the document. (Allison K. Williams gave that advice in a recent column on Jane Friedman’s website, “How to Restart Your Unfinished Book,” in which she suggests “touching” the project as a means of “gently renewing your interest and energy until you’re ready to write.”) 

You can define a streak in whatever way helps you. It could be a daily practice, or a target of x number of writing days a week. I shared previously that submitting one thing a week is a goal of mine for 2021, so I’m counting those submissions, week by week, as a streak I’m working to maintain. 

Whatever method of streaking you choose, what matters is the sense of accomplishment and momentum that builds up as you maintain a streak. 

I’m particularly interested in what happens when you write every day. A commitment to writing every day, even if it’s just a few lines or sentences, lets the project live in your brain in a different way, so you can carry it with you and work out problems and generate new ideas when you’re going about your day. I read a great interview with Kathryn Cowles recently, in which she talked about writing a poem in the same place every day – and ultimately, doing that for a year. Writing every day can also often let you go deeper and weirder. Some of the wildest poems in my first book were ones I wrote during poem-a-day groups I used to do via email with friends. If you’re writing a poem a week for workshop, or waiting to be seized by inspiration, it’s easy to feel like each poem should be good and purposeful. But if you’re writing every day, eventually you just have to get weird and let your brain do what it wants, and if the poems’ terrible, that’s fine, because you’ll write another one tomorrow. 

If this daily writing practice sounds good to you, I hope you’ll join me for a month of poetry prompts in April, as a celebration of National Poetry Month. I’ll send out a prompt via email early each morning, focusing on revision, process, and play. You can sign up here. The first post includes suggestions about how to prepare for a month of daily writing. If you’ve got a notebook full of little poem nubs or digital drafts of floppy poems and half-starts, the prompts will help you shape them into something new. And if you haven’t been writing, I think you’ll find that a month of streaking is just the thing to kick-start something new.