“Above all I love these long purposeless days in which I shed all that I have ever been.”-Vita Sackville-West
Write every day. This has to be the most common advice given to new writers. One is supposed to put one’s butt in one’s seat every single day in order to become a better writer. Like exercise or learning a new instrument or language, writing requires practice. In a very unscientific survey of writing advice, I googled “write every day” and got 8,600,000,000 results that ranged from an app, a book, a class to a Master Class (tm) and a Zen Habit.
What about the days when one is sick, working non-stop, tending to one’s children, depressed, etc.? Octavia Butler worked menial jobs and woke at three in the morning to write— in the face of dyslexia and racism. In only two years, while working as a doctor six days a week and charging nothing AND recovering from tuberculosis, Anton Chekhov published 176 stories, as well as writing his first full-length play, Ivanov. During the eighteen (!) months that he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold off the family car, pawned his appliances and went into debt, leaving his wife to raise the kids and tend to the house and finances. I can only imagine the toll on that marriage.
There’s no graceful way to discuss my own writing in the same breath as that of the above writers, so imagine, if you will, an intermission here. (I’ll insert a “button” to remind you to subscribe, if you haven’t already.)
This newsletter is the closest thing I have to writing lately, and some day I hope to get back to really devoting myself to another book. I did write and publish three of those things. But every cell in my body knows that it’s not the time for me right now. I need this break, this years-long (lord help me), unfocused, publishing-averse break. My divorce, Covid, my new partner’s brain surgery, my three jobs, and my move have made finding time for writing seem like trying to squeeze in candlemaking or recreational yodeling. First I need to tend to the basics.
And then there’s the more amorphous, uncomfortable reasons. Winter has typically been the time of year when I find myself lurching between hyperactive mom-editor-friend-dervish and numbed out couch potato, bleerily filling in Wordle or watching garbage TV. I long for some kind of middle ground, but life will have none of that. December tends to be a raft of mixed messages: buy/don’t buy! Rush/slow down! Host an idyllic, instagram-worthy holiday/don’t keep up with the Joneses! Yes, March is just about done, and I’m settling into the new house. But— it’s mud season! And seriously, there is much work to be done. I need to write my final foreword for The Best American Short Stories and a guest post for another Substack newsletter. Commissioning and editing for Plympton beckons constantly. Things at HPE are hugely busy.
There are moments when I think I learn as much from my clients as they do from me. One client is the luminous Paula McLain. She introduced me to the power of the word “and.” Maybe we don’t need to choose between dogmatic discipline and guilt-ridden slothdom. Maybe we need both. These are volatile times that cause for changeability. Maybe we need to take it moment by moment, and forgive ourselves our less productive times. Perhaps we should embrace the spirit of “write every day” while allowing ourselves the latitude to take breaks when necessary and to leave time for family and love and work.
At some point, one realizes that one may not become a genre-shaping MacArthur fellow, a legendary playwright and the person largely considered to be the world’s best short story writer, or the first Colombian to ever win a Nobel Prize. At some later point in life, one realizes that this is ok. More than ok. This realization is its own form of liberation.
If you know me, you know that I’m all about chucking dogmatic rules. But if I were to name one that I’ve applied to everything I’ve written and edited, it’d be this: one should never apply any rules to every moment or every person or every piece of writing, period.
This is so true. And it may just be particular to me, but I've also found that reading is especially important during the downtimes I'm not writing. By that I mean fiction. I think for years with my non-fiction writing and research, I largely stopped reading fiction except when on vacation or sporadically. And it wasn't until I had the freedom to devote full time to my fiction that I realized how important it is for me to 'keep the tank full' as it were, because reading your peers or even the classics (like Chekhov) keeps your mind alert to all the elements of the craft. And that makes a huge difference when the time comes to start composing from scratch... (rewriting is a whole different thing).... Thank you for this post!
Oh my god Heidi thank you for this gift of permission! Writing or not writing involves so much guilt and self-flaggelation and comparison angst--and yes--when life slaps us upside the head do we really need to feel bad about taking a break to handle it all? This is so beautifully said and I needed this as i launch into a week of surgery for a kiddo and yet another book delay. The book about being twenty something will be done by the time im sixty!