The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
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.
NANCY REDDY is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also co-editor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Brevity, and elsewhere. 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 in New Jersey.
The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
BY NANCY REDDY
I love a slow meditation about why writing is hard, and what that difficulty might mean – that’s probably why I became a poet, so I could obsess on a moment and dwell on it and distill it in language – but I thought, early in this relaunch of The Up Drafts, it might be nice to start with a few practical, actionable tips. By late January, late in the pandemic, don’t we all just want a quick fix?
Four practical tricks, if you’re feeling stuck, plus a slightly more philosophical bonus tip.
When it’s hard to get started:
Set a Timer
Having hours and hours to write, uninterrupted, is magic, but if you don’t have that now (most of us don’t, now or ever), do what you can with what you have. Set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes, and see what you can do. I have the browser extension “tomato clock,” and it counts down in 25 minute chunks, or pomodoros; seeing the time moving can be very motivating.
A quick example: last week, my older son was distraught about his art assignment and how complicated it was and how it was going to take him forever, and I told him to just set a timer and work on it for ten minutes and then, whatever he had done in that time, he could turn in and move on with his day. (Read: play Minecraft.) He worked for ten minutes, showed me how much he’d done, and then happily continued. A small amount of time – ten minutes or fifteen – is enough to get you started and often to overcome the inertia of not-writing.
A timer works especially well for showing you how much you can get done in limited time. If you only have 10 minutes, you can still use those 10 minutes to write. Victoria Chang wrote Barbie Chang in her car while waiting for her children at language classes and school pickup.
when you’re feeling stuck in the middle of a project:
Switch writing medium
If you’re lost in the morass of a word document, it can help to switch medium. A printed draft is easier to grapple with and mark up; you can cut it, tape it back together, and scrawl in the margins. I often find that if I can see the whole thing at once, as a set of pages spread out on the bed or taped to a wall, I can see where I’m circling the same idea or where I’ve managed to avoid, even over 6000 words, saying the thing I’m really trying to say. An example: Katie Gutierrez, whose novel More Than You’ll Ever Know is forthcoming in 2022, shared this picture recently of a printed draft of her book along with scissors, pen, and tape, an old-school cut and paste.
And sometimes even getting started in a Word doc can feel too hard. When I was writing my dissertation, the word doc often felt really high stakes, like I am writing A Chapter, so it has to be Good. (This is why I never write in nice notebooks – too much pressure!) Instead, I did a lot of drafting in Evernote, where you’re just opening a new “note” rather than starting with a fresh, official Word doc. The interface in Evernote was unfamiliar enough that I could tell myself I was just taking notes, just jotting down ideas. Then, I’d print out all scribbly Evernote “notes” and have text to work with for revision.
If the blank screen itself is stressing you out, switch to hand-writing. If a whole notebook page is too much, I’ll try a post-it or an index card. Sometimes I need more space, so I’ll use the large post-its I have taped to my wall to outline a project and see the connections.
when you’re struggling to clarify your ideas
Talk about it (even if it’s only to yourself)
When you’re writing, you’re working to communicate something, whether you’re telling a story, or figuring out a problem, or making an argument. But it’s easy to get so stuck in the particulars of word choice or so lost in the steps of a complicated argument that you lose sight of what you’re actually trying to say.
I used to share writing regularly with a good friend from grad school, and when I was getting ready to send something to her, I’d find places where what I’d written wasn’t as sharp as I wanted, or where I wanted her help. I’d start by opening a comment box and writing, “what I’m trying to say here is . . .” and, often as not, what I’d write, after I started talking to the version of my friend I’d conjured up, was what actually needed to go in the essay, so I’d just cut and paste from that comment box into the main document.
Talking to someone – even if it’s just yourself, even if it’s an imagined reader in the margins – is one of the quickest ways to get unstuck. Try explaining what you’re saying out loud, or record yourself with your phone or laptop. You can use the comments in a digital file; starting with “what I’m trying to say here is . . .”
When the words finally come:
Say Yes
One of my favorite moments from last summer’s #1000wordsofsummer series was Carmen Maria Machado’s discussion of how she’s taught her brain to make more ideas. In that newsletter, Machado wrote that she’s never struggled with writer’s block
because I am constantly nursing my obsessions: reading about what excites and interests me, rejecting ideas of high- and low-brow, letting myself indulge in narrative pleasures however and wherever they appear. And I’m constantly stumbling across ideas: riding the trolley, walking through my city, reading books, driving, cleaning. And the minute they come to me—no matter what I’m doing—I write them down.
It’s that final part – recording the ideas – that really matters. If you have an idea, if you have a sentence, if an image or a voice arrives to you, record it. Teach your brain that those words matter, and you’ll also teach your brain to make more of them. Sometimes this means pausing mid-run to type something into a google doc on your phone, or getting out of bed as you’re falling asleep to capture the sentences that have finally aligned when your brain relaxed. This summer, I’d been working on an article for a week straight and was in the horrible phase of drafting where I was sure I was just too stupid to get it all to come together, when, at bedtime one night, my brain finally clicked it all together. The words were running through my head, and while I might have sometimes told myself I’d remember it the next day, during my real writing time, I’d just read Machado’s newsletter, and I got up and wrote, and that nighttime drafting became my Poets & Writers article.
If you’re feeling down:
You have everything you need
This final tip is more of a mental reframe than a writing tip. It’s easy, especially with the way writing circulates online, to confuse writing with publishing, and to always feel like everyone else is doing more and having more success than you are. But the reception of your work – by editors, by readers, by reviewers and people who screen for fancy prizes – is largely out of your hands as a writer.
And more than that, it’s not your job.
It’s your job to write the best poem or essay or story or book that you can. It’s your job to make the weird gorgeous thing that only you can make. And here’s the thing: chances are, no one asked you for your writing.
You already have everything you need. As writers, our materials are simple: pen, paper, laptop. Maybe post-it notes and colored pens, if you’re feeling fancy. Time.
No one has to publish your book or buy it or review it in The New York Times. But that’s also a gift. You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to do your work. No one owes you and your writing anything. No one can stop you, either.
NANCY REDDY is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also co-editor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Brevity, and elsewhere. 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 in New Jersey.
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?
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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.
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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.
The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
—
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.
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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:
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 Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
—
BY NANCY REDDY
I love a list. I love the buzzy hum I get from crossing through the items I’ve completed, and I’ve even been known to start my list-making by jotting down the things I’ve already done, just to get a little jump start of completionist satisfaction. So it seemed to make good sense that I could apply this same idea to get my writing done: make a big list of all the writing projects I’m cooking up, then let all the energy of those combined good ideas propel me toward the finish line. At various points in the last year, I’ve made lists of essay ideas, lists of magazines where I’d like to publish, lists of research projects, lists that start with the triumphant all-caps HERE ARE MY GOOD IDEAS.
So why is it that, for a long time, I wasn’t actually taking those good ideas all the way through finished drafts?
Talking with Jessica Abel, a Philadelphia-based cartoonist, author, and educator, whom I interviewed via Zoom, helped illuminate a major error I’d made. Though I’d named lots of goals, I hadn’t actually made any of them a priority. Abel, who coaches creative folks working on a wide range of projects, insists that you can only really have one priority at a time. And I’m a convert: since adopting her maxim that you need One Goal to Rule Them All, I’ve been able to start ticking items off that big list.
I like to think of it as The Magic of One Thing.
Abel explains it like this: when you have two or three or four (or a whole huge ambitious list) projects you want to work on, but you split your time between those projects, it’s hard to make any serious headway on any particular project. Your time is fractured, and so is your attention and your energy. In contrast, she argues, once you have just One Thing:
If you’re spending chunks of time all week on the same thing, your brain is going to be working overtime on it. When you’re in the shower: brainstorm. When you’re in the car: things are clicking together. Have your notebook or voice notes app handy. You will have ideas. I guarantee it.
The magic of One Thing, in other words, isn’t just the power of hour after accumulated hour on a project; it’s that each hour of work is actually multiplied by the way the project takes up residence in your brain – when you’re seriously working on a project, your brain keeps at it, even when you’re not focused on your computer screen or notebook, on adding words to the project.
I’ve also found, counterintuitively, that One Thing feels more urgent than several. When I write down four projects I’m going to work on during a week, I can poke at each one for a bit, probably make a bit of progress on each, and end the week without any real clarity about the outcome of that intermittent work. But if I name just one or two things–projects with clear milestones attached–I feel more accountable to myself.
And completing projects creates its own kind of propulsive energy. When I spoke with Abel, she called this the “dopamine hit” of finishing a project. That’s certainly something I’ve experienced in the last few months. When I pitched this column at the beginning of the year, I could feel the sticky goo of all my good unfinished projects following me around and weighing me down. (I don’t think I’m the only one! Abel told me that she’s seen people get stuck in two different ways. While perfectionism and fear of failure can be obstacles at the early stage of a creative career, people who’ve had some success and are getting offers to work on lots of projects often end up being overcommitted and not being able to make headway with any particular thing.)
Abel also had some advice about how to choose your One Thing. Her article on One Goal outlines the key principles, and Her What’s Stopping You checklist is a great place to get started in thinking about your creative life more broadly.
If you’re really having a hard time choosing where to start, Abel suggests choosing “something that feeds your future self”–and letting go of projects that will lead you in a direction you don’t want to go. Many of us have half-finished projects we’re carrying around with us, and the time we’ve put into them can feel like an obligation to take them to completion; Abel calls that Idea Debt, and encourages the people she works with to focus their energy instead on completing the projects that will be most meaningful for them now and in the future, rather than the ones in which they’ve already invested a lot of time.
For longer projects, One Thing often requires identifying milestones – carrying out X research, creating an outline, drafting the proposal, writing a chapter, and so on. Breaking up a project like this allows people to still have a sense of momentum and completion.
Talking with Abel also helped me in my ongoing struggle to rethink the relationship between creativity and productivity. When I asked her how she thinks about productivity, Abel responded that most of the time when we talk about productivity, “it’s about literally producing stuff without any regard to what the stuff is. And to be more productive means to take the same amount of time and put more things in there.” While there are parts of our life where this might make sense – fold more laundry, answer more emails, and so on – Abel argues that creative work actually requires more blank space. Abel suggests the “really crucial reframe” of productivity culture and insists that we instead think about “creating margin, not about doing more stuff.”
I wrote a bit about ways of tracking time and quantifying progress in an earlier column, and here, too, Abel had insight. She said that, if you’re invested in measuring your work, it’s preferable to think in terms of time, rather than word count. Abel says that “my experience shows that counting words tends to be not helpful. Because what’s the quality of the words?” Instead, she says she’s seen that just putting time back into the project can be enormously helpful. Even if you only have 15 minutes a day, she says that can be “a way to get yourself unstuck and get back in touch with your project.” (I’ll come back to measurement in a few weeks because this link between creative work and the capitalist language of outcomes and products is a current obsession of mine!)
If you’re interested in learning more about Jessica Abel’s creative work, or her work with coaching folks who have gotten stuck in their creative lives, her website is full of helpful resources. I completed the Creative Compass Minicourse, and she frequently offers both free webinars and the paid Creative Focus Workshop. Even getting her email blasts functions for me as a kind of regular “hey you! What are you working on?” which is the kind of no-nonsense nudge I really thrive on.
As Abel puts it, her work is less about creative productivity and more about “building a resilient and sustainable creative life.”
So what’s your One Thing? What project can you invest 15 minutes in today?
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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 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
I began this series wanting to think about what it means to be stuck in your writing. People get stuck for lots of reasons: a hard new project, rejection, fear of failure, lack of time. Jessica Abel, a creativity coach I interviewed for an upcoming column, says that people who already have a track record of creative success often get stuck because they commit to too many projects and get scattered. (Her “What’s Stopping You?” checklist might help you uncover the obstacles in your way.) Hannah Rule, a writing studies scholar who I interviewed for a previous column, describes freewriting as one way into generating new ideas, and she also described a more social approach to brainstorming, when she asks her students to pass papers around the room and comment on each other’s ideas for research projects.
But sometimes I think being stuck originates in places outside the writing.
I was really struck by poet and memoirist E. J. Koh’s description of this phenomenon: “It’s not that I’m stuck in my writing; I am stuck somewhere in my living.” When she’s stuck like this, she writes, “Then I do what I fear doing. I must make amends with my mother, or I must challenge my terror with flying, or I will do that thing I do not want to do.”
Koh’s piece made me think about the non-writing things that help me sustain a writing practice. They’re actually pretty simple: plenty of exercise and enough quiet space in my life so I can hear my brain work. Because my utter lack of hand-eye coordination made team sports and gym class torture for me, it’s taken me until well into my adult life to think about my body as much more than a house for my brain. But, like many of us, I have a brain that spins and spins, and I’ve found that a run goes a long way in bringing it back to a manageable hum. My sister, whose brain is similarly busy, has recently taken up meditation, and she recommends the UCLA Mindfulness app. (Apparently, my dad, who’s also taken up yoga in his late 60s, recommended it to her; may we all be so full of surprises.)
And exercise can also provide a space away from the computer or notebook to let my brain work on a problem. When I was at the Vermont Studio Center this past summer, I’d write inside my studio until I just couldn’t go any further, then go for a run along the rail trail; several days, as I moved, the problem I was working on unstuck itself as I passed over bridges and through fields. (I recommend using the voice recorder on your phone to capture those sentences, even if you look like an oddball talking to yourself in the middle of a trail or street.)
I’ve learned, especially since having kids, that in order to be an even halfway decent human being, much less a writer, I need a not-insubstantial amount of time to myself– and I’ve learned that “by myself” means also the absence of digital distractions. When I walk to spinning or barre at the exercise studio in my little town, I leave my phone at home, and the quiet of that half-mile walk each way is truly restorative. (It also means that I can’t Instagram my early-morning exercise, which is good, because no one really likes those people, anyway.)
Other people have different answers to this question of how to make a writing life. At a recent event at the Penn Book Center, Carmen Maria Machado and Jaquira Díaz were asked about self-care and revealed that their practices both include therapy and sex. When I asked people on twitter, I was struck by how many people’s answers included nature, like novelist and poet Valerie Nieman’s comment about “hiking solo – the only voices are the ones in my head.” Twila Newey’s reply, that she refuels through “walking, reading, gardening, staring out windows, the beach, birds & the moon” made me think about the value of non-productive work, that what looks like staring or wandering is often actually part of the writing. And though defending “doing nothing” as a pathway to increased creative work might not be quite what Jenny Odell had in mind, I’m finding myself especially receptive to arguments for creating open spaces in our lives.
So, if you’re feeling stuck, you might think about what practices or habits or breaks in routine–all the parts of your life that are distinct from but intertwined with your writing life–could help you get unstuck. As Hannah Rule points out, “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!” What do you need to make your writing life?
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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 Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
—
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.