Keys to Keeping On

This is from my September 2024 newsletter. Subscribe here to get monthly writing tips and first dibs on my workshops delivered to your inbox.

In last Saturday’s Writing with Consistency and Courage workshop, I was thrilled to watch people who had felt overwhelmed or a little lost in their writing projects arrive at breakthroughs. Hurrah! Sometimes it takes an assignment, a prompt, a time limit, a different environment, or another kind of prod to get words flowing. Once we overcome the initial resistance, everything that follows feels easier.

A favorite prompt from that workshop is:

• Write for ten minutes starting with the line, “We might as well begin with the ___________,” where the blank is filled with any word that relates to your work-in-progress.

(This line is borrowed from the opening of Kyle McCarthy’s short story, “Ancient Rome,” which appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 2017.)

I recommend creating prompts from your own work too. Doing so can help you fill gaps. It can reveal new details or meanings. For example, if you’re struggling to pin down a character’s backstory, you might begin a timed writing session with “What turned Aunt Ginny into a fighter was ___________.”

Here are some other strategies for keeping on—or beginning again—when writing feels difficult:

• Cultivate a writer’s identity. After all, if you write, you’re a writer. If you need convincing, you might tell yourself, “I’m just the kind of person who starts the day by writing,” or “I’m an essayist,” or “I’m someone who writes for 15 minutes every day” (depending on your writing goal). Just as you might acknowledge that you’re the kind of person who drinks coffee black or walks the dog twice daily, there’s no drama around defining yourself this way. It’s simply a fact.
• Embrace the fluidity of time and pace. When you sit down to write, anything can happen. You might write two pages in ten minutes. Or you might spend a half hour fine-tuning a single line. There’s no telling from one writing session to another how quickly or readily words will emerge. It helps to welcome all possibilities and outcomes.
• Keep lowering expectations. As essayist Lia Purpura says, “Very often we have to set up the conditions for surprise and freedom. You can begin to do that by lowering the bar. Really lowering it… Try to consider your work a ‘sketch’ for as long as possible. Ideally this will shake you out of your fear of writing ‘badly’ and allow for a deeper, more patient form of exploration.”

Finally, while the famous poem, “Integrity,” by Adrienne Rich is about much more than keeping on, it’s about that too. For many years, with respect to writing and other challenges, I’ve found encouragement in her first line: “A wild patience has taken me this far.”

You might also take heart, as I did, in the example of 82-year-old first-time novelist, Jane Campbell, whose book is reviewed here.