Craft

Craft – Veterans Day – The Heart of War

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By Michael Ramos

I am an Iraq War vet. And I write a lot about the military, my war, and more importantly—at least to me—what I call the after.

My first publication was in the Sun’s Readers Write and while I was stoked, I started to worry that people would gravitate toward my work when I started telling my stories because it was new, and they wanted to know about war. I didn’t want a free pass. I wanted people to respond to my work because of its artistic merit. But then I realized being a war vet wasn’t special and neither were war stories.

The problem with being a war vet writer is that warriors have been telling war stories for actual millennia. I didn’t want to tell the same old stories the same old way because then no one ever changes the way they think or feel about anything. So, when I think about what stories I choose to tell, I think about whether I am bringing anything new to the conversation. If not, the answer for me is to not tell a particular story.

You might think that is stifling, but I think the opposite is true. I am free to pursue things that haven’t been talked about or seen. What I mean is that most people by now have some idea of what a patrol is or looks like, what a gunshot or gunfight looks or sounds like, or an explosion, most people know the military members, those who have served together see themselves as brothers or sisters. Most people assume that as a veteran of Iraq I am morally injured or callous to suffering. Indeed, in the early days people felt the need to tell me why I was wrong for being in Iraq or how awful I must feel for all that I had done. Of course, I don’t remember seeing those folks shitting in a hole next to me or bored out of their minds with me, but whatever. Needless to say, people have seen or read enough to think they know everything about war, and I want to challenge that.

I don’t focus on the conventional war stuff that everyone has already seen or read that’s too easy. I want my reader to understand the heart of war.

The heart of war is different than the machinery of war. The machinery of war is what you see on screen and read in the hero books.  The heart of war is the bone deep tired of being awake for days looking for enemy contact and the sorrow of aging and enjoying the highs and lows of life in the after while your friends are the same age they were the day they died in some dirty shitty piece of earth or in the car after making it home from the battlefield.

I want my reader to be tired, so tired that their body aches from lack of sleep and wearing 75 pounds of gear everywhere,  an ache that you feel in your bone marrow and the near constant headache and buzzing in your head from not resting and never being able to escape the background noise of war, not the gunfire or explosions or screams or whatever you imagine, but the static hum and beep of the radio that’s always receiving word from higher and the fast-paced, high pitched squealy creak of Amtrack treads crushing sand into powder,  and the soft splash a booted foot makes into that powder and the swish of dirty-stiff Cammie pants rubbing together as someone walk towards you and the creak of a rifle sling and the pop of a twenty year old kid’s knees as he sits next to you as you both lean against a Humvee tire and the smell of tire rubber and  diesel and the whiff of salty sweaty BO and dirty feet and dust and realizing it isn’t him—well, it may be him—but that smell is you and missing showers and clean clothes or at least clean socks and peace and quiet but you have a nice, chalk-moist poundcake that you can’t wait to enjoy and in that blissful moment after tearing open the package and halving it with him you hold that half a MRE pound cake in your dusty grimy hands and take a bite. Only you don’t taste the exhilaration of chocolate but sand, or maybe gritty sand with a hint of chocolate, but it’s a poundcake—how lucky are you to get the chocolate pound cake and not peanut butter crackers or some lame shit like that—and you revel in the joy of that millisecond near escape.

I hardly ever see people write about that or see that kind of experience in the movies. I hardly ever see anyone talk about two or three junior personnel and a supervising NCO standing around oil drums and the sweet and sour smell of diesel burning human shit or the weightless relief of being able to take a piss without fear of being blown up.  

But even then, those things might be familiar to an outsider. I remember a comment a friend and mentor made about a piece I wrote called “Sleep.” In the particular image—I focus on image like an Impressionist painter or poet rather than a traditional scene—I talk about how my Marines and I are fine during the day, but the dreams—not always nightmares—the replay of every moment happens at night. He said to me that as different as our lives and worldview might be, as foreign as these experiences are to him, he could relate to the things coming back at night. He went on to talk about an accident that he had had and how his replays of the events happened at night.

Who would have thought that a civilian and a war vet could find commonality in an experience? I think that the way I handled the experience, translating it into a still image where you can almost see and feel the terrifying closeness of the dark, humanity’s primordial fear, helped bridge a perceived gap.

I say perceived gap because a common trope of the veteran writer’s experiences is their unknowableness. But I reject that unknowableness. On close scrutiny, we see that humanity is humanity and our experiences at the emotional level are similar if not the same. Besides, as a writer like all other writers, my job is to translate my experiences and have another human being understand me at an emotional level.

I am not the trauma hero, I am not the redeemed hero, I am not even a hero hero. I am a human trying to make his way in the universe.  Sure, the experiences of war, and of being a vet, can be overwhelming and suffocating and fun and exhilarating, so I use the page to reflect that reality. Long sentences, short sentences. Sound and cadence, visceral detail, point of view and time shifts—no real magic or arcane knowledge there—all work to immerse and overwhelm my reader so they can get a glimpse of what it’s like. But what I care most about is when the reader is finished with my work they can say, I don’t know the particulars, but I know that emotion.

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Michael Ramos is an Iraq War veteran writer and the Assistant Director of UNC Wilmington’s Publishing Laboratory. He focuses on dispelling the myths about war, warriors, and veterans and bringing military and civilian communities together through the power of writing.  His work has been published in the Sun, Fourth Genre, Slice, OAFNation.com, and In Love…and War: The Anthology of Poet Warriors. 

Discovering the Available Means: On Reading and Writing in Quarantine

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The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

“Is anyone writing now?” a friend asks me via text. “Are you?”

I have not been writing, not in the way I want to, not in the way of my Before life. Writing this column has been hard because I want to offer ways to help, and I cannot seem to help myself. The magic’s gone out of my old tricks. When I think of the rushing-forward, word-count driven, One Thing-obsessed, target-locked-on-the-horizon way of writing that animated me even a few months ago, my chest goes tight and my brain gets muddy. The words just stop. I’ve been reading and running and baking and teaching on Zoom and answering students’ emails. I’ve been trying to help my older son with his subtraction and playing board games with my younger son, who insists on playing Battleship, even though he doesn’t yet know all his letters or numbers or understand the concept of a grid. We watch so many movies, and when we’re all cuddled together on the couch, I can mostly forget my fear that the old life will never come back.

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When I was in graduate school and teaching intermediate composition, I’d start the course with a list of definitions of rhetoric, a word that’s most often deployed with a sneer, as if all attempts at persuasion, all effort expended in the service of selecting words were automatically suspect. My favorite definition, or at least the one I keep returning to now, is also one of the oldest: Aristotle’s maxim that rhetoric is the ability to, in each case, “discover the available means of persuasion.” The translations I find online mostly use the verb observe, but I prefer discover, for its emphasis on action and changeability: in each case, the available means are different. They shift each time we look for them. Each time we attempt to persuade, we search anew. 

And writing right now feels like that, like a new search through unfamiliar materials. For most of us, the time and space and material conditions of our writing lives have shifted immensely. What are the available means for this new version of our lives? 

//

I have been trying for two weeks now to write about what’s helping me – about my new available means. One thing that helps is broadening the scope of what I’m willing to count as writing. As C Pam Zhang wrote in a recent craft newsletter for Lit Hub, 

Walking is writing. Crying is writing. Talking to a parent whose health you fear for is writing. Cooking is writing. Lying prostrate on the rug and watching sun stripe the wall is writing. Your lover’s hand on yours is writing. Your dog is writing.

For me, this is both true and not true. Much of what I’ve been doing–rearranging tiny spaces in my house, making lists of the items in the freezer and what we can make for dinner with them, the endless laundry–is decidedly not-writing, is instead just trying to busy myself and keep the hum of panic in my brain down. But some of my non-writing activities are writing: long runs, chopping things for dinner, mixing dough and watching it rise, certain kinds of reading, standing on the porch with milky coffee while my kids stomp in the puddles in our now-quiet street. What distinguishes the two, for me, is that, in the latter group, my body is just occupied enough to let my brain work. While running or slicing onions or weighing out flour and water, I am in my body and I can hear the part of myself that writes surfacing again, for a moment. That kind of work can’t be quantified in the way I’ve come to like, but I can feel my brain inclining again toward writing, and that will have to do for now. 

//

In the ancient world, the men who taught the art of rhetoric were largely forbidden from practicing it themselves. The most skilled teachers of rhetoric were not themselves citizens and so could not speak in public spaces. I find that very moving now, for reasons I still cannot fully articulate. It is dangerous to romanticize anything about the history of rhetoric, bound up as it is with the history of empire and exclusion. But I have come to realize that much of what I miss about the old life is the casual social contact of public spaces: greeting colleagues and students in the hallway, the awkward shuffle for the sink and paper towel dispenser in the campus bathroom, chit chat with other parents at school pickup at the end of the day. (If what you miss most is a clue to who you are, what does this say about me?)

Though those kinds of casual public spaces are closed to us for now, reading helps me because it reminds me of being in touch with other people. Last week, I read a bad book, or at least a book that disappointed me by falling flat after a strong first couple of chapters, but I was able to pinpoint what I thought had gone wrong and felt a certain writing part of my brain click back on. I read Jennine Capó Crucet’s My Time Among the Whites, a book that’s so smart and well-written, each essay tracking multiple threads that come together in sharp and unexpected ways, and I remembered the vital kind of thinking that happens through serious writing and reading. I’ve been reading The Sewanee Review’s Corona Correspondences, and I love best the ones (like Lauren Groff’s, Danielle Evans’s, Chloe Benjamin’s) that give a kind of intimate account of this new life. This kind of reading is a way back into writing. When I read, I remember what words can do.

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Because the available means – the empty blocks of time, the coffee shops with other people noisily working away – of my writing life have changed, I’ve also been rethinking what my writing process looks like. 

So instead I’ve been trying to sneak up on the writing. I open a document and play around in it. I scrawl a few phrases, standing at my desk, before going to bed, because that isn’t Writing, it’s just making notes. At some point last semester I’d pilfered the end of a pack of large post-it paper from the supply closet on campus, and a few weeks ago, I hung the last two pages horizontally on the wall with painters tape to make a large timeline for the book of narrative nonfiction I’m writing. I’ve started adding chapter titles and notes to the paper. When I make a new connection, I add it in pencil. I draw arrows between the ideas. 

This practice has a lot to do with the way I wrote when I was teaching high school English in a demanding charter school system and driving to work in the dark and returning home too exhausted to have a thought. I mounted Ikea curtain rods on the walls of the spare room and used the clips to hang poems so that even when I wasn’t writing (or Writing, in the serious, focused way I wanted) I could be in the presence of the poems. Then, as now, I often got up early to have a few minutes to feel like a writer before the day began. Because I didn’t have long, and because the rest of my life was full of other demands, it helped to have the words right there, as soon as I entered the room. I’m reminded also of Melissa Stephenson’s description of writing in “confetti time,” capturing snippets on hotel notepads and index cards in ten and twenty-minute increments. (Her Lit Hub essay details the index card method, and it’s the kind of low-pressure exercise that I think would help many of us now.)

So these are, for now, my available means: the fragments of attention that become available through certain kinds of tasks, reading that reminds me how words make worlds that connect us, and being with the writing in whatever small ways I can.

Are you writing now, dear reader? How?

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.

Do Now: Writing (or not) Through School Closures and Social Isolation

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The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

When Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans in August 2005, one of the many sites of wreckage was the classroom in Orleans Parish East where I’d just started my second year teaching 9th grade English. As I left school that Friday before the storm, I’d been so hopeful. I’d spent the week before school started preparing my classroom, and the matched desks I’d pilfered from teacherless classrooms down the hall were lined in neat rows, eliminating the squabbling over desks’ style and broken-ness that had plagued my classroom the entire year before. The air conditioner, an enormous unit that hung from the ceiling and was always more loud than efficient, finally worked, which had rarely been true in my first year. I’d covered the old green chalkboards with bright white showerboard, and the room glowed with the light of all those good intentions. 

I’d been such a bad teacher in my first year– unprepared, uncertain, unable to effectively teach my students, who arrived in high school with serious reading difficulties and complicated lives. I spent the whole summer between my first and second year reading books on pedagogy and literacy and planning my lessons. And on that last Friday, I stood in the doorway of my dimmed classroom and watched as my students sat and wrote at their desks. On the whiteboard at the front of the room, an overhead projector displayed the opening journaling activity, called a Do Now.

Hurricane Katrina remade New Orleans, and it remade my life. But hurricanes are, for better or worse, clear in their damage. Their approach can be charted on a doppler, their aftermath mapped and quantified. This new disaster is slow-moving, its consequences as yet unknown. Its course can still be shaped. Quarantine and social distancing are the best tools we have, and they seem to be slowing transmission in New York City and elsewhere.

//

So what do we–as writers, as people who need our art as a way of being present to the world – Do Now?

Last week passed in a haze. It was technically spring break for the university where I teach, and my kids had been sent home from school, and the weather was nice, so we spent most of our week on walks around our neighborhood, looking for signs of spring and taking pictures of the crocuses and dogwoods and magnolias. I baked bread. My children watched too much TV and mostly didn’t fight. 

But this week, as it’s clear that this period of social distancing is going to stretch on for quite a while, I’m trying to figure out what shape this new part of our life might take and how writing can still fit into it. 

I woke up this morning worrying, and I sat at my desk in the dark and wrote it down: I am afraid this will go on forever. And it helped a little, just a little, as it often does, to have that worry outside my body and written down.

Here’s what I’m doing so far: I’m setting the alarm for 6 each morning and coming to sit in my office and write. I’m mostly journaling, which is unusual for me, but it’s what I can do for now, and I think it’s likely that I’ll want to remember later what this time was like, in all its odd detail. Sari Botton’s recent piece, Why I’m Giving Myself Permission to Keep Writing at This Time, makes a case for writing through this crisis:

So that settles it: My story matters, and so does yours. I’m giving myself permission to write as I feel called to through this dark time. And if you need permission from someone other than yourself, I’m giving it to you, too. I’m not shirking any responsibilities to do it. I’m helping others out, staying connected to loved ones, making donations to helpful organizations as I can, doing my job. But when I am so motivated, I’m going to take a moment to write about what is happening, inside me and around me. I will tell myself first what I think and feel, and maybe later, share it with the world.

(Botton’s article also has a really comprehensive list of resources for writers, including prompts and virtual readings, if you’re looking for encouragement and community.)

Courtney Maum’s recent newsletter considered the question of how and what we write right now as well, and I was particularly comforted by her advice to “scale back.” As she writes:

Scale back. 45 minutes is the new 8-hour work day

Everyone’s ability to work is going to be affected by a slab of different factors. Whether you have kids running around at home that you’re suddenly supposed to educate, whether you yourself feel sick or are struggling with anxiety, whether you have lost such a significant portion of your wages that your livelihood is at risk. While I think that doing absolutely nothing is appropriate right now, severing ourselves completely from our identity as creators leaves room for depression and helplessness to seep in.

Can you find 45 to 90 minutes each day to work on something creative that fuels you? This time shouldn’t include social media, e-mail answering, or Zoom calls, this time is for you and your art.

Gone are the long hours at a coffee shop, but I can get an hour or so each morning alone before I start the day with my kids. And if I get that time–if I insist on it, sometimes waving my kids back out of my office while I write– I’m a little more myself in this uncertain and unsettling time.

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Months after Katrina, when I was able to return to my classroom, I could see the waterline about waist-high on the white board and the walls. Below that waterline, the room was filled with silt, notebooks, and books that the water had scattered across the room as it receded. All those neat desks had been toppled, their contents strewn across the linoleum floor. Above the line, in my own handwriting, I could still read the words I’d written on our last day: the date and the Do Now.

None of us knows what this disaster will make of us, if anything we can write or make now will make sense on the other side of this. As agent Kate McKean wrote in her newsletter this past week, there’s no way to predict what editors will be buying or what readers will want to read when this is over. Instead, she says, “What you can do right now is write the thing you want to write.” Let’s try.

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.

The Speed of Writing: An Interview with Hannah Rule

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The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

Hannah Rule is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in first-year writing, writing and embodiment, a survey of composition studies, and the teaching of writing. I first came across her work in 2016, when I attended a panel at an academic conference of writing teachers and researchers, the Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention, where she presented research that attempted to capture the writing process through video recording her own hands on her keyboard as she worked. This video– mundane as that may sound–was fascinating, and the image of writing captured in real-time, with all its pauses and backspaces and bursts of energy, has stuck with me for years. I think of it often as I’m sitting at my own keyboard, particularly when my own hands are still. Since then, she’s published articles that examine how writers interact with their writing environment, as well as how students use freewriting, and her book, Situating Writing Processes was recently published. The open-access version is available through the WAC Clearinghouse, and the print version is forthcoming from the University Press of Colorado.

Her new book, Situating Writing Processes, calls up an idea that many of us take for granted– that writing is a process and requires brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing–and makes it new again by considering the “physical, material, and located dimensions of processes.” In other words, Rule is interested not just in how writers get from ideas in their head to a finished product, but in how the physical world enters into that process. As she puts it in her article “Writing’s Rooms,” she’s interested in “the environmental minutiae of where writing takes place—the walls, desk, objects, and tools; the bodily movements, interruptions, and sounds of keys clacking.” Given how deeply Rule has thought about how writers actually write—where and with what materials and through which distractions and at what speed—I wanted to interview her to help me think more about writing and speed and how to get unstuck.

Reddy: My background in creative writing trained me to think of freewriting as a way of accessing the unconscious – something like the kind of automatic writing that the surrealists practiced. The more contemporary version of this is Julia Cameron’s “morning pages,” which Cameron describes as “three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning.” Many of the people I know who do morning pages or who use other freewriting practices describe it as something like clearing their throat or running the rusty water out of a faucet until something drinkable comes out. I’m curious how you think about the purpose of freewriting in your own teaching? When you ask students to freewrite, what are you hoping it will do for them?

Rule: I think I’m about to take the scenic route here, but I promise I’ll get to the question of purpose! I became a Peter Elbow fan and eventual freewriting evangelist while I was working on my doctorate at Cincinnati. I was reading a lot of his work; I found his writing so alive and intellectually admirable (he has this way of thinking out loud in loopy but coherent fashion). Elbow’s own struggle with academic writing in graduate school was what led him to freewriting, as a matter of survival really – something to do when doing seems otherwise impossible. Just write and don’t stop. He also came to see freewriting as an antidote; he thought students’ language was deadened, flattened by school. Writers, he thought, should shed all outside influence, silence the noise of others, discover their thinking in their own words.    

I found freewriting enabling – in grad school I started writing emails to myself of utter freewriting nonsense about a conference or research paper I was drafting. I still do this. I “wrote” some beginnings and hard parts of my recent book in Google Docs, using the speech-to-text feature (because at times even physically typing felt too hard). I very much like having writing started (I am the living embodiment of that Dorothy Parker quote about hating writing but loving having written). My teaching mentors were always talking about and having us do freewriting too, so it became a big part of the composition classes I was teaching. I dutifully described to my students what freewriting was and what it did; I learned about directed freewriting and “center of gravity” to help students work with their freewrites.

I was always curious, though, about what my students were actually doing when I gave them freewriting instructions. I’d basically stare at them, sneak looks over their shoulders, examine their facial expressions, speak to them like a yoga teacher to urge them into a “free” state of mind. Are they really riding the waves of language or were they crafting sentences that answered my question, that satisfied my expectation? This is what lead me to my 2013 study of a freewriter and to affirm that that freewriting is far from natural, easy, or automatic. I think of it now more as an invitation, a deliberate habit. If it’s tapping the unconscious, it’s a repetitive, express, intentioned effort to do so. And we’re never free as writers, of influence or fear or others. So I find myself more actively these days trying to push writers to write on their toes, to subvert the assumptions they have for writing (especially writing in school, that it must be careful, developed, deliberate, correct). I tend to prompt freewriting-type exercises now more with pace (quickwrites) than with “freedom.”

Reddy: In your article on freewriting, “The Difficulties of Thinking Through Freewriting,” I was interested in the moments when you had to intervene to coach your student about what to write. It made me think about what we believe freewriting is doing – especially as opposed to other practices that might help us come up with or clarify ideas, like talking or doodling or visualizing, or even just thinking without committing anything to paper. Why is freewriting such a canonical part of invention, and why do you think talk is more often reserved for revision? Is this primarily about how we think about ideas, property, individual genius – or are there other things at play as well? (Perhaps there’s just not been a Peter Elbow of brainstorming chat, for example. ;)) 

Rule: Yes, more Peter Elbows! I think that part of the value of freewriting is in the volume of tries you get at articulation, the chance that you’ll discover a phrase or word that can be lifted out as a seed to continue growing in a draft.

And yes, I agree, freewriting and invention practices (like cubing or webbing) reinforce writing as a matter of words and individual brains in isolation. At the same time, many teachers of writing have stretched this idea for me – I’m thinking of Patricia Dunn’s Talking Sketching Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing, Sondra Perl’s Felt Sense: Writing with the Body, Karen LeFevre’s Invention as a Social Act. I’ve definitely made invention more social, I think, recently: with my research writing students, I do an activity where we all write a potential research question on a sheet of paper anonymously. We pass our sheets, read what’s there, and add a totally different question or reframe one already written. We repeat this passing and adding many times. I compile the sheets as a book of potential, and we return to it in various ways as students eventually commit to a project. Mostly I like how this practice prevents students from deciding their direction too soon – often freewriting and other invention practices too quickly close off possibilities and crazy (good) ideas! 

Reddy: One of the things I’m trying to figure out across this series is what we mean when we talk about productivity in writing – and speed is certainly part of that. Part of the reason why your typing video stuck with me so much, I think, is that it really resonated with something I was trying to teach myself at the time – that writing actually isn’t typing, or that it’s not just typing. I often have to move from computer to notebook or post-it note, or get up and walk around until I can think better – and sometimes that thinking better takes actual time, like months or years. And part of what’s interesting about the freewriting protocol you describe in your article is that it does actually insist on some amount of speed, or at least fluency: writers are told to not stop writing, even if they don’t have anything to say, but to instead write something like “I don’t know what to say.” So I’m curious how you think about speed and fluency in writing, perhaps especially in freewriting or invention, but also across the writing process. What does your research show about the impact of continuing to just write, even if you don’t know what to say? 

Rule: In those hands-to-keyboard recordings, I think I was trying to see some of the most basic movement of writing but also, as you say, acknowledge how terribly limited that view is. Writing isn’t just in the space between fingers moving and fingers stopping. I’ve talked about this in my research with what I’ve called “romping.” Writing isn’t contained in the mind or in the relay between mind and page; it rather romps all over – into cars, classrooms, night shifts, nurseries, showers, walks, laundry, chats, everywhere! But romping is pretty antithetical to how we tend to picture productivity – when does writing as romping tip over into procrastination or avoidance?  

There is something to that freewriting mantra, just keep writing. But I think it’s in a wider-reaching momentum. There is this great book, Understanding Writing Blocks, where the author Keith Hjortshoj talks about writing as a nonstop invitation to stop: writers can stop at any time; they can stop after a sentence or word; after a bad review or an uncomfortable blocked session, or simply in favor of doing something else. Successful writers, Hjortshoj says, are those that have figured out how to stop stopping, to make a habit of not stopping. I think that’s brilliant. The trick is to first spin the plate of writing fast, and then keep it going.

So I’ve been thinking about the virtues of sometimes “hurrying up.” In writing instruction, going fast isn’t something we value basically at all. I mean, the whole paradigm of teaching writing as a process was the recognition that writers need more time, lots of time and space to draft and develop what they want to say and how to say it. But I think sometimes hurrying up is good! When I first start a project or revision, it’s best when I hurry up and start right away, without thinking about it. Avoiding delay makes continuing to write feel much less Herculean. In my classes, now I often time writing activities: I give a question I want to start discussion with, I ask students to turn to their neighbor and see if they can name two potential answers in 30 seconds. For invention in my personal essay class, I ask students to list 10 things that bother them in 60 seconds. The point isn’t if we can meet the goal; the goal is attempting to beat the clock. Writing feels weighty and serious, but I think this no-stakes hurrying can be a good way to trick us into creativity or into saying something we wouldn’t have otherwise.

Reddy: You’ve spent years and years now researching how other people write – and of course, you’ve also been doing your own writing all that time. Could you talk about your own writing process, and perhaps how researching process and the materiality of process has shaped how you write? And since this is a series in part about getting unstuck – what do you do when you’re feeling stuck in your writing?

Rule: One of the coolest results of my research is the responses. People have confessed things to me about the weird things they do, about what they can’t write without. I love thinking about this stuff. And certainly I have considered my own ways—I am, for example, a writer who needs minimalism whereever I am. I cannot bring myself to even deal with books I’m quoting (all of my reading has to be separate and compiled into notes).

I’ve also come to appreciate, though, that what we alone do as writers, or think we do, is only a tiny sliver of what’s going on when writing is emerging. Process is about habits, arrangement, curation but it’s equally about accidents, improvisations, making do, catching a little time to jot while we’re waiting on line or at the mechanic. Processes may be more reaction than ritual or control, more a team sport than a solo performance. 

Reddy: Now that you’ve completed your first book, what’s next? What’s happening in your writing life?

Rule: I’m recharging after the book! I’m also early on in a project on annotation as writing (rather than a private record of reading). And in my teaching, I find myself worried a lot these days, about the stakes of everything: how can we move the needle on information literacy, combat fraudulent news and misinformation, undermine the impoverished ways we “debate” online and in media, resuscitate evidence and agreed-upon facts? Who will tackle these issues if not writing teachers? 

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.

Done vs Good: What I’ve learned so far about getting unstuck

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The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

Courtney Maum’s widely praised Before and After the Book Deal includes wisdom from writers, agents, editors, and more, including this terrifying bit from novelist Rebecca Makkai: “If you are 100 percent happy with your manuscript, it’s probably a sign that it’s bad.” (That is not where I thought that sentence was going to end!) She elaborates, saying, “It takes forever to write a manuscript. So when you finally get through it, you think, ‘It’s finally done!’ It’s not done. I wouldn’t send it out until you get the feeling that it’s finally—finally—done for the third time.”

I imagine this is a good way to produce a novel that’s a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But, applied more broadly, it’s an even more excellent way to just never finish your book. To perhaps never finish an essay or even a sentence.

It’s been a month since, inspired by the dread I felt at reading everyone else’s accomplishments and regarding my own moldering pile of drafts in various stages of generation and revision, I stood in my kitchen and worked up the idea for this series. I hoped that if I dragged my own bad feelings about my writing life up to the light via the magic of a biweekly deadline I’d be able to get myself unstuck. And I thought that sharing my struggle, as well as what I learned from interviewing and reading the work of other people who’ve studied creativity and the writing process would be valuable for others, too. 

So far, I’ve written a bit about productivity and accomplishment, and what all that end of year accounting might mean, and I shared my own struggles with ambition and why my first reaction when I won a big poetry prize was shame. I’ve got good stuff lined up – an interview with writing studies scholar Hannah Rule, who talks about the value and limits of freewriting, and the way that writing “romps all over – into cars, classrooms, night shifts, nurseries, showers, walks, laundry, chats, everywhere!”, and another interview with cartoonist, author, and educator Jessica Abel, whose insistence that you pick just One Thing as your creative priority has already helped me wrap up some long-term, seemingly intractable projects. 

I’d like to spend a minute here, one month into this project, thinking about how to get the work done. Rebecca Makkai’s words struck me so profoundly because they align to much of what I was taught in graduate school: revise, revise, revise; ask for feedback and then revise some more; assume that what you’ve done is never good enough. I get where this perspective comes from–but I also think it has the potential to be profoundly silencing.

For right now, I’m embracing an alternate approach: Elizabeth Gilbert’s pronouncement, in her book Big Magic, that “Done is better than good.” Those words come in a section of the book in which Gilbert discusses realizing, after she’d finished writing a novel, that a minor character was flawed. She realized she had two options: she could tear the entire novel apart and spend perhaps a year rebuilding it, or she could just call it a day. And she decided to publish the book, flaws and all. She had other books to write. The one she’d written was good enough, and out it went into the world. 

It’s an approach that likely sounds blasphemous to those of who came to writing under the austere star of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, which urges – on page 4, in my copy! – that, when you find the weak points in your work, “you must demolish the work and start over!” Had Dillard been writing Gilbert’s book, she would have ripped out that minor character, reworked the whole novel, and emerged from a cloud of dirt and detritus a year or two later, transformed. 

One thing that I’ve realized in writing this series is how much of my own stuckness is related to that imperative to perfect the work, which can be a laudable goal–and can also be a way of never quite doing the scary, hard thing.

Here are a few ways I’m focusing on getting to done in the coming months: 

One Thing: I’ll write more about this in an upcoming interview with Jessica Abel, but her focus on committing to One Goal to Rule Them All has allowed me to clear two really hard, messy projects off my desk. Abel insists that you can really just have one priority, and then buckle down and see that project through to completion. This doesn’t mean that there’s just one thing you want to do–just that you’re really only actively working on one project at a time. The post hyperlinked above is really helpful in clarifying what One Thing you should work on first. 

One realization that has made One Thing work really well for me is that it’s not just about what you’re “working on” but what you’re actually going to complete in a given period of time. So it’s not enough to say I’m “working on” an article this week– I have to commit to a particular measure or milestone for that project. Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal does a nice job of articulating three ways of thinking about milestones in writing projects: word count, time, and content (x section of a chapter, for example). Right now I’m in a content stage, but I’ve found both word count and time to be really helpful when what I need is to put brainpower into a project to see where it’s going. 

Connecting Goals to Time: The specific language for this comes from Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s series for Inside Higher Ed on productivity for junior faculty, but it’s applicable for creative writers, too. In this particular column, Rockquemore describes a practice she calls the “Sunday meeting,” during which you write out all your tasks for the week and consider the actual amount of time they’ll require. I’m really good at a to-do list, but moving from task to time has helped me to see how big projects can take shape in time. Towards the end of last week, as I was desperate to finish a scholarly article I’ve been working on for 6 months or several years, depending on how you count it, I looked at my revision notes and figured if I worked with serious focus for three more hours, I could knock it out. And I did. 

Moving forward, I’m writing my One Thing in my planner (the Get to Work Book; I adore it, and the 2020s are on sale now, if you still need a planner for the year) and noting how much time I think it will take. Then, as I work during the week, I record, right in the planner, how long I’m working on it and check my estimate against the actual total. It’s really helpful to see writing projects as finite and completable. 

Systems for Accountability: I’m a highly organized person. I love a task list, and I love a calendar. In most spheres of my life, I am what Gretchen Rubin would call an Upholder. But one thing I’ve realized is that, for this stage of my life and for the writing I’m doing now, I need more accountability, so I’m joining one of the writing groups run by my university’s Faculty Academic Writing Network. I won’t get feedback on my work, but what I will get is a regular writing date and the accountability of telling colleagues about my goals and the progress I’ve made. (And, bonus: I’m joining digitally, so I can do it my jammies, or what my longtime work-from-home husband calls his “work pants.”)

Since I’m talking about accountability, and I hinted in the last column about big, scary projects, I’ll name my current One Thing here: I’m going to finish the proposal for my narrative nonfiction book, a mix of personal experience and research into the trap of “natural motherhood.” I’ve been working on it for two years now, and I’ve done tons of drafting and researching and brainstorming and structuring – so now it’s time to move forward with the proposal. I’m clearing the decks so that I can finish it–a draft of it, at least–this month. 

I don’t know if, at the end of the month, it will be good. But I do know that, before it can be good, it has to be done.

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.


Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens: On Modesty, Ambition, and Shame

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The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

When my mother was a girl, she wanted a sewing machine so she could make her own clothes. Each day for a year, she packed a single apple in her lunch bag and saved the coins her mother gave her until she had enough for the Singer Touch & Sew she’d wanted, with its push-up bobbin and decorative stitches. And that year, on her prim single-apple diet, she’d grown so slim that all the clothes she sewed herself were tiny. I can almost see her now, in the breakfast nook of her childhood home, pinning patterns to fabric and selecting with great satisfaction the dashed-line contours of the smallest size.

How many women’s childhoods are full of stories like those, tiny fragments where the moral is both unsaid and startlingly clear? A girl wants something, and to get it, she must make herself so small she almost falls off the page. 

When I got the email saying my first book of poetry was a finalist for a big national prize, my first thought was: oh, that’s a nice boost. I’ll never win, but it’s a good first step. The story I’d learned about the first book was a kind of hero’s journey: it took years and along the way you had to conquer the many dragons of near-misses, the finalist and semi-finalist lists, you revised and rewrote, and the heartbreak of it worked an alchemy, until finally, just as you were about to give up entirely, your manuscript became a book. I was just starting. I’d sent the manuscript out just a few places, and this was the first round in its revised form, perhaps two years out from my MFA.   

So when I won, the first thing I felt was a thick sludge of shame. I’d cut the line. I knew so many poets who hadn’t gotten their book yet, and I’d skipped ahead of them. But more than that: winning revealed the scale of my ambition. I’d wanted a big thing. I’d entered the contest and sent off my work, knowing the odds were overwhelmingly against me, but also believing I might win, believing I might deserve to win. So once I won, everyone would know that about me, that I’d dared to want something that big.  

Being a poet is, in many ways, ridiculous. The things so many of us want–a book, more books, an academic job at a living wage in a livable place–are both nearly impossible to get and also, sometimes, change little about the material circumstances of our lives if we achieve them. One of the first things I did, after my book won, was to look up previous winners–not just the big name ones who get prime spots on the prize website, who’ve gone on to win all the other big prizes, but also the ones I’d never heard of, who maybe never wrote another book after that. I don’t know quite what to say about this instant self-defeating impulse except to wonder who else shares it and where it comes from.  

One of the keywords of my childhood was ladylike. To be ladylike meant to follow the rules, speak politely, cross one’s ankles beneath the dinner table, pass the salt and pepper together, say thank you, thank you whenever anything was offered. To be ladylike was to be modest, to not call attention to one’s self or one’s accomplishments. To be ladylike was to be small. I think my mother – who raised me mostly by herself for most of my childhood, who described herself in those years as a “flaming feminist” – would be appalled to hear me say that. But the lesson – be small, be still, don’t brag – was, I’m sure, embedded in her childhood as well, her upbringing by a German Catholic mother whose view of the world and the correct ways to be a woman in it was fixed and unrelenting. Go to mass, go to confession, be pretty but not exceptional. Be smart but not audacious. 

What is the lesson of these small stories? I was a girl who was taught to be small and grew up to want very big things. When I got some of them I didn’t believe my luck. But more than that, I didn’t believe I deserved it, that my work had earned the space.

This is all, obviously, a really excellent way to get and stay profoundly stuck. 

In the last column in this series I wrote about all the end-of-decade counting up writers were doing on twitter. My favorite thing on twitter so far in this shiny new year has been, on New Year’s Day, Rachel Syme’s “shoot your shot” thread:

The thread’s full of people – largely women, by a quick scan of profile pics – naming their big and small dreams and cheering each other on. 

When I learned to whistle, my grandmother told me that “whistling girls and crowing hens always come to no good end.” It’s probably true that she genuinely disliked whistling and believed it to be unladylike. But there’s also a broader caution in that little rhyme about calling attention to yourself–being too bold, going beyond what the feminine allows. So all those women out there, declaring their ambitions on the internet for anyone to see: they’re all whistling, loudly and unapologetically. 

I believe there’s power in this whistling, this act of naming our big dreams. Though “manifest” calls up an automatic eye-roll from me, Leigh Stein’s recent newsletter, Manifest yr dreams in 2020, managed to convince me in just a few paragraphs. In the newsletter, Stein describes the “vision boards” she’s created at various points in her career, and right up top is the one she made shortly before selling her memoir, Land of Enchantment. It’s simple and bold: it’s got a big picture of Reese Witherspoon from Wild in it, along with the words “More Money” and “Power.” When I first read it, I shuddered a little at the woo-woo of it, but even more than that, at the audacity of claiming MONEY and POWER. It scared me a little. I love it. What scary big dreams do you have this year?

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.

All That Accomplishment: An Introduction to the Up Drafts

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The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

At the end of 2019, it seems like all of writer-twitter was consumed with counting up the decade’s achievements. There’s a variety of approaches: the straightforward list, the list with mock-items sprinkled in, the list that ends with a kind of coy wink, but everyone, it seems, felt compelled to count. (Except Morgan Parker, who tweeted the extremely accurate assertion that “this decade I did a lot.”)

Can you hear the buzz of anxiety beneath all that accounting? It’s useful to be able to prove quantitatively what you’ve done – but I also wonder why there’s such widespread obsession with proving ourselves. Okay, I don’t actually wonder – economic anxiety and the ever-escalating precarity of journalism and literary publishing seem like obvious culprits – but I do think it’s worth interrogating all this counting. When you count your accomplishments, is there some number that is enough? 

The counting that’s stuck with me the most slightly predates the current new decade fever. In Real Simple Taffy Brodesser-Akner (of GOOP profile fame) spends a full paragraph counting up the many successes of a very good year: 90k words published in The New York Times for 12 different stories, 40k of a new novel (sold before its completion), the publication of one of the most talked-about novels of the year, Fleishman is in Trouble, as well as a number of friends and family-related activities, which I skip over every time I read it because really I re-read that paragraph to be daunted and inspired by Brodeser-Akner’s relentless hustle. When I re-read the article to write this essay, though, I realized I’d misremembered. The phrase I’d heard as central to the essay – Brodesser-Akner invoking all this accomplishment, as if she’s rubbing her hands beside the warm fire of her word count – isn’t in the essay.  Brodesser-Akner’s actual phrase is the somewhat more muted observation that, in lieu of the zen mindfulness we’re often encouraged to aspire to, “I had accomplishment, which was my own form of peace via a longer game.” (Once you’ve published nearly 100,000 widely-read words in The New York Times, I guess you don’t need to add all this to your accomplishments.)

In any case, I love invoking accomplishment as an alternative to productivity. I’ve been very productive at many moments in my life: writing a dissertation in a frenzied 18 months, during which I also conceived and birthed a second kid and went on the academic job market, for example. But thinking in terms of productivity–obsessing over word count or crossing items off a task list–can also mean substituting busyness for meaningful work. 

As we start this new year in a new decade, I, too, am full of resolution and big ideas. Lately, for every thing I can count as finished–meaning published, or at least submitted–there are at least twice as many half-starts and dead ends. When I think about writing–all the essays I’ve started, the new book I’ve written a scrappy 25k of words and a query for–my brain gets stuck in pudding. 

I’m starting this series, a bi-weekly exploration of why we get stuck and how we can unstick ourselves, in the hopes that I’m not alone and that what I’ve learned about the writing process and the trap of worshipping productivity will resonate with others out there in the writing-ether. 

It feels scary, in this moment of internet-intimacy, to be taking a stance other than victorious or beaten-down but about-to-be-triumphant. Instead, I’m saying this: I’m stuck, but I’m working on it, and in the next several weeks, we’ll explore what it means to be stuck together. I’ll share what I’ve learned about accountability and process and switching writing medium when it gets hard, and I’ll share interviews with experts who can provide insights into creativity and writing process. 

This series takes its title from a line from Anne Lamott’s widely-anthologized “Shitty First Drafts.” Lamott’s idea is that in your first draft, you’re just getting it all down, so that’s your down draft, and then you can go back and fix it up, making that your up draft. In these essays, I’ll be sharing my Up Drafts, the place where I’m working out ideas. In doing this, I’m thinking also of the joy with which my younger son creates: as I write, he’s finishing a drawing of a dinosaur (that’s me) walking a dog (we don’t have a dog) and carrying a baby dinosaur (there are no babies in our house anymore). He works on his drawings with a single-minded focus, but then he finishes them. He doesn’t obsess over color or line placement. He draws one dinosaur, then another; one joyous stick-family under a yellow sun and a heart, then another: all these accomplishments. He gives his drawings away, and then he gets back to work. In this new year, I’m trying to do that, too. 

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.