Category Archives: writing process

Self-Sabotage: The Minefield of Shortcuts

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Yesterday, I slipped on a wet floor and banged up my knee. And today, I’m determined to baby it. So no yoga class, and certainly no race-walking or bouncing around to cardio videos. This is a huge break in my pattern of always physically trying to do as much as I can despite whatever minor discomfort I’m experiencing. But it’s time to face the fact that I’m older; my body is more compromised, and the last thing I want to do is let a small injury turn into a large one because I didn’t give it time to heal.

Meanwhile, my hungry mind is alluring me with alternatives. Maybe I can do a restorative yoga video, or try a flat, non-strenuous half-hour walk. Or find a spot where I can sit at the edge of the garden and pull a few weeds. Since my knee doesn’t really hurt that much, these messages sound tantalizingly sensible, even though I know I should make sure to be careful. Still, what’s wrong with taking a couple of shortcuts to make my day feel more settled and normal?

And is my resistance to having a day with minimal physical activity connected to knowing that if I don’t do any of these routines, I’ll have a lot more time–i.e. too much time–to face the blank page?

Sometimes I wonder if filling up my days with routines–even healthy routines–is one of the ways I sabotage my creativity. If I know I only have a couple of hours in my day that are designated for writing, I can easily fill them with smaller writing tasks like revisions, or submissions, or blogging, or marketing/political writing, or editing/reviewing work for others. And while all of these are important in my writing life, focusing all my attention on them can mean never getting to the next big project, especially if I convince myself that to tackle something larger, I need more mental bandwidth and bigger chunks of time. Yet a day like today, when I have a lot of open time, feels like one of those expansive western landscapes I wrote about on my recent trip to California. They are undeniably gorgeous and awe-inspiring, but they also leave me unsettled.

Even when I am more engaged in my writing life, another way I sabotage my creativity is going for the “easy out” when working on a piece, because I’m often just trying to get it done rather than really examining its total potential of where it can go–in other words, taking the shortcut. This isn’t because I have any real time constraint. I can always come back to something the next day or the next week or the next month, and often do. However, it feels as unsettling as an open landscape or open day to leave things unfinished for too long.

True confessions: I’m three-quarters into this open day, and I’ve cheated. A lot. Instead of facing the bigger contours and potential of the blank page, I made a batch of granola and put up a pot of dried chickpeas to incorporate into dinner. And I did take a slow 30-minute flat walk with hiking poles, and spent about 45 minutes on some very easy gardening, neither of which compromised my knee. But though I kept my focus on smaller writing tasks, I’m grateful that in addition to sending out two poetry submissions, I stumbled on some new and useful insights that helped me revise a couple of poems I’ve been stuck on (and that I’d previously sabotaged myself with by thinking they were finished). And I wrote this blog, which means, at least, that I’m accepting and acknowledging the pattern. So while I still might be seduced by the ease of shortcuts, I’ll make a point of treading even more carefully through the minefield.

 

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Centering Home

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Returning from vacation often brings me face-to-face with that moment when the world pricks hard enough to make me sit up and notice that I’m no longer in that carefully constructed bubble of paradise geared to distract me from my life. And this time felt harder than usual. The daily news, successfully willed to a microscopic wisp at the edge of my consciousness as I lay in a hammock overlooking the mountains of Kings Canyon National Park, started to burn at my skin again, its smoky haze penetrating the air like the remnants of a wildfire. And my to-do list, which I could easily reduce to a vague thought and make it sound almost pleasurable in my mind while walking through a grove of foggy sequoias, now felt gargantuan–a tottering avalanche ready to tumble at any moment and bury me in its angry cascade.

Usually I can counteract these post-vacation moments fairly quickly by pivoting back into routines, but for some reason, this time it took over a week to get my bearings. I just want to get back to my life, I kept telling myself, feeling more and more frustrated as the days slipped away but the tasks on my plate stayed constant–or grew. And that led me to question, What was this thing I was referring to as “my life?” What was it I was trying to get back to that wasn’t happening?

On each of those initial post-vacation days I was doing familiar things: walking or biking, gardening, cooking, catching up with friends I hadn’t spoken to or seen while away. And on the days I took the time to assess whether I’d enjoyed my day, I could clearly express gratitude for the many parts of it that pleased me.  So what was missing?

Note: I did not put “writing” on the above list.

However, I was writing on many of those days. Mostly, I was pulling out half-finished poems and chewing on them, making a few tweaks, and putting them away again, not feeling very satisfied, or, more importantly, connected to what I was writing. And because I had such a long to-do list, it was easy to get up after a few minutes and do something else, before giving myself the chance to really revisit what I’d been writing and reset my creative clock.

And being disconnected from my writing made me feel disconnected from my life.

A week after returning from my vacation, I had a writing date with my friend, Lanette, which meant that for two whole hours I had to sit with her on the porch of Barstow’s Dairy Store (a great place to write, if you’re in western MA) and keep at it. I highly recommend writing dates with friends (either in-person or on Zoom) as a way of getting going. In addition to enjoying a brief visit before writing, I couldn’t just tweak a poem or two and then get up to succumb to the call of the unpaid bills or the weedy garden, because at the end of the session I knew we’d be reporting to each other on what we’d done and possibly sharing some of our work. Even as I flitted from poem to poem and took several breaks for Wordle and its Dordle and Quordle variants, not to mention checking email and social media, I kept coming back–until I could look at a poem and remember why I wrote it and why it might still matter. And that helped me finally make the shift back to my creative center.

Since then, I’ve been just as busy with tasks, social and family stuff, but I’m feeling totally differently about my life. I’m now connected to my words and my reason for writing them–even as I might continue to sift through and change them. And that means I’m home.

 

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Looking Up

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I thought I would blog while I was vacation in California last week, but as Robert Burns said, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Not surprising. Even as I always bring my computer on excursions, as well as a notebook and pen and good intentions, I rarely write anything more than a few answers to emails that can’t wait when I’m away. But I do find myself doing some of the internal work that goes with the territory of writing, particularly in how I’m drawn to setting. The wide expanse of central California’s landscape with its sandy foothills, waterfalls, and high peaks evoked both the wonder and unease I often feel visiting the west. While it seems humanly impossible not to be awed by the desert wilderness and the open sky, as an east coast girl with firm roots in New York City’s concrete, I always feel a bit unhinged in all that open space. Ultimately, I want the closed in comfort of narrow paths hedged by trees.

California has trees. But not the same canopy that you’d find on the east coast, especially in the area I visited: Yosemite and Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks. It takes a certain kind of courage to hug one of those giant sequoias, even for an intrepid tree-hugger like me. Much easier to plant a soft kiss and whisper sweet nothings to a thin sliver birch than to try to slide your arm around the girth of a sequoia and realize just how small you are in the universe. “These trees are like dinosaurs,” my husband quipped. “They don’t even seem like trees as much as like prehistoric beings.”

Calling these notable groves the Land of the Giants was not overrated marketing hype. It took a full seventeen seconds to scan all the way up to the top of one of these beauties and back down again to our little corner of the planet.

And that got me to thinking–what does it mean to look up?. To take a step away from the comfortable landscapes of our lives into the unknown, a question that was enforced metaphorically by the intense fog we drove through to reach the park. Taking any creative risk is like driving through fog. We may not see the entire landscape of where we’re going in front of us; perhaps we can only see the vaguest contours, or a few inches of the road’s white line and a pair of headlights coming at us from the opposite direction, but we plod on ahead, focused only on what we can see, with the faith that if we keep going, the tops of the trees will slowly come into view.

 

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Babies, Blessings, and the Bird’s Eye View

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For the past five days I’ve been living with my daughter, helping to take care of seven-month-old Baby Manu while her husband is away. Like most of life, there have been moments of  joy, moments of challenge, moments of laughter, drudgery, frustration, profound peacefulness, you-name-it. The only thing certain about life with a baby is that there’s rarely a dull moment.

As a grandparent I feel blessed by having a lot more perspective than I had when my own children were young. In my years of early motherhood, whenever my kids screamed, I worried that not addressing on some immediate need they were expressing would scar them for life, the fog of sleep-deprivation only adding to my anxiety. Now, as I carry Baby Manu around the house and try with my old arms to satisfy his need for incessant “jumping” (i.e. lifting him up and down as he flexes his leg muscles as a launching point on my lap) I feel wiser and calmer–even when he’s screaming. And I’ve thought about how like writing, taking care of a baby is really just an exercise in plunging in and dealing with a lot of trial and error as I try to find that “true north” point of connection.

With Manu this might mean reading a book and taking stops between each page for jumping breaks, or tango dancing around the house while humming riffs from Raffi’s greatest hits or rap songs I’m making up on the spot–all on the theme of Manu: The Life. It might mean playing hand games, or making funny noises, or going through an entire array of animal sounds. Or taking a moment to put him down to play by himself, recognizing in my new found older-age wisdom that both of us could use a little time to chill.  “Little” is the defining word here. All of these activities have proven successful–but generally none of them work for more than 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

The writing process can sometimes feel similar. While I welcome the blessings of the time I feel “in the groove,” other times my words–and my brain–can feel jumpy and fragmented. These are the days I go into the garden to chill, just as I put Manu under his playstation, so he can shake his rattles and babble to himself without Grandma’s interference. And other times, when I’m struggling with trying to write that “one true sentence,” I realize I need to switch up the activity, which for me usually means putting a story aside to revise a poem, or putting the poem aside to work on another poem, or another story or essay until I find something I’m connected to enough in that moment to “re-see.”

But I’m counting my blessings and taking the “birds-eye view” as both a grandparent and a writer. Eventually Manu will grow old enough to tell me what he wants–and so, I hope, will my baby poems and prose in progress.

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Dayeinu

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some of the exercises from Julia Cameron’s classic book, The Artists’ Way. As my children are grown and I’ve been blessed with the luxury of retirement and the ability to structure my “Act III” life to center around creativity, the book doesn’t speak to me as much as it would to those who trying to pull off whatever tiny pieces of life they can from the morass of work and family demands to nurture their creative selves. Yet, I’ve found the process of “morning pages,” (brain-dumping three pages of long-hand uncensored meanderings before I get out of bed in the morning) useful. And I’ve been glad to discover that unloading my mind’s detritus in purposefully pedantic prose hasn’t seemed to affect my ability to write more creatively in other contexts, as I first feared it would. It actually can be liberating to write without worrying about creating flow or metaphor, a clear difference from other stream-of-consciousness prompt writing that I try to load up with gems I can later grow into poems.

I usually end my morning pages with an intention for the day. And while I know that an intention is simply a way of focusing on the day’s array of opportunities, rather than some set of goals I must meet or feel bad about myself for not meeting, the tightrope between goal and intention is a fine line to balance on. In the last few weeks, prepping for Passover (extensive cooking and curating a new Haggadah) along with trying to meet my self-imposed deadline of revising an old novel and submitting it to my publisher have made it difficult to get through my general daily list of writing/revising/submitting poetry or short fiction, playing the piano, taking a walk in the woods, doing a cardio or yoga tape, and meditating–creative and self-care activities that have become essential markers of my day.

Then there are all the other weekly to-dos to fit in: writing political calls-to-action and doing immigration justice work, editing/giving feedback on writing to others, spending time (in person or virtually) with friends I care about, cooking dinner, making sure the house doesn’t fall into utter chaos–and what I call admin: emails to answer, calls and texts to return, bills to pay. The list can be endless.

And, in the last six months, I’ve spent several afternoons each week putting all of this aside to babysit for my grandchild, Manu, which is the best thing of all. In fact, for this moment with Manu, I say what we say every year on Passover, Dayeinu: It would have been enough for us.

Julia Cameron talks about the importance of making dates with your inner artist that are geared solely for playing rather than to get projects done. And in my experience, there is nothing more purely playful as putting your whole self–heart and soul–into the space of a baby newly exploring the world.

So, today, even as I will still stress about being behind on deadlines, intentions, goals, whatever, I will try to remind myself–Dayeinu. Gratitude. It’s all good.

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Into the Vortex

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I changed some of the paintings in my bedroom a few weeks ago. Now, every morning when I open my eyes, this painting, by my late father-in-law Michihiro Yoshida, is the first thing to greet me.

I love the comfort of the deep blue, as well as the complementary blue/green, the side of the color palette that has always felt most soothing.  And while I’ve had this painting in the house for years, I’ve never looked at it so closely and consistently until I moved it into the bedroom. In addition to taking it in on first waking, I gaze across at it when I’m meditating, and sometimes, when I feel like I’m foaming at the mouth in frustration because whatever I’m trying to write feels like a stuck and hopeless endeavor.

I just gaze into that blue vortex and breathe. The writing may or may not come, but at least I start feeling a little bit calmer. And eventually, as if I’m standing with my toes curled on the cold mossy edge of a pond surrounded by deep green trees, I’m ready to dive in.

The act of writing, especially when we give ourselves permission to speak our truths–whether real or fictionally dressed– is like entering a vortex, a place where we might lose control of the carefully constructed selves we’ve fabricated to present to the unsafe world. Writing is like the cave journey I took a couple of summers ago in Oregon–how we walked down, down, down, the light evaporating into nothing until we were in a place that was so dark, all we could do was hold on to the rope and trust as we continued to take careful steps on the wet stones. And even when we flicked on the flashlight to get our bearings, all we could see were the dimmest of boundaries.

That’s what writing is about: dimming the boundaries; entering the vortex.

And when/if we can do this, or even take a few small steps closer to this state, we can be rewarded, as this painting reminds us, with the whoosh of our words rising out of us like the funnel cloud of eggs bursting forth from the center.

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Writing Retreats: Enforced or Otherwise

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Last Sunday, I had a stuffy nose, and since an out-of-town friend was coming to stay with me, I decided to test for COVID, even though I’d had it a month ago. And WTF, my test was positive! I couldn’t believe it, so I took a second test. Positive again!

So for the past few days (taking isolation seriously in order to try not to give it to my husband) I’ve had an adventure in my room–my own personalized writing retreat.

I love my room, which is where I both sleep and write, and has its own attached bathroom. I usually spend a lot of time here, but somehow it’s different when I know I have to be here, when the rest of the house is off limits except for a few brief masked forays into the kitchen, accompanied by hand-wipes to sanitize everything I might touch.

It’s kind of like facing the terror of the blank page.

After all, there’s nothing here but me, my books, and my computer. And I can only distract myself for so long with email, social media, and Wordle before the real work calls: poems to revise, poems to submit, a knotty novel that needs to be smoothed out, the last round of edits on my short-story collection, this blogging project, posts for Rogan’s list–the Call to Action site I write for (check it out on substack), articles and mailings related to my immigration justice work. In terms of COVID, I feel absolutely fine–healthy enough to write all day.

If only I could.

I’ve generally gotten a good jump start in the morning after a yoga or exercise tape and been able to write until my husband, the saint, brings lunch to the door. Then, a refreshing walk outside, a ritual I’m religious about that’s easy to do in a COVID compliant way in my unpopulated neighborhood. Hell, I even walked in yesterday’s Noreaster! It was, admittedly, unpleasant to forge through the wind with the soggy slush pouring down, but not as unpleasant as it would have been to stay inside all day. And I’m very much looking forward to going outside today when the sun is shining on the snow. The view from the window is already beckoning.

But after my walk, 9 times out of 10, the afternoon doldrums hit, and I don’t want to write a word.

Many people love writing retreats. They feel they get their best work with the quiet and peace of a new environment and uninterrupted time. But I’ve avoided them because to me a retreat means extra pressure on myself to produce. And when I’m in a new environment, I’m drawn to exploring it, rather than sitting somewhere and writing all day. If I’m going to go to Guatemala, I want to spend all my time seeing Guatemala, not a lined page in a notebook or a computer screen.

 

And, as I’m learning, I can’t even write all day in my very familiar bedroom.

But that’s just how I’m wired. If you’re one of those people who thrives from being creative in a place that’s free of daily household stress and chores, go for the retreat. I’d just advise being gentle with yourself on how much you get done.

And if you’re like me, or you can’t afford the luxury of a retreat right now, trust that there are other ways to get into your groove. We can delude ourselves by saying things like “I can’t write unless I have …. things you might not ever have like a cottage by the sea, a week in the woods with a bottle of whiskey, four straight hours of uninterrupted time, etc.

And then you might never write.

It might take a while to figure out how to create optimal writing space with what you do have. And this is going to be different for everyone. I’m looking forward to exploring some ideas in another post, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your comments on what writing conditions work for you.

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