17 Ways to Break Back into Your Writing Project

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For most of this year, and obsessively this summer since coming home from France, I’ve been working on my mystery novel. But summers have not, historically, been my best time for getting work done.

Summers are usually my time for letting work lie fallow. Summers are for hanging out with my kids. Summers are for family trips and family reunions. Summers are for swimming in really cold water. Summers are for campfires and marshmallows flaming at the end of pointy sticks.

Then, every year, inevitably, summer begins to draw to an end. Lately a few of my friends have remarked on their sense of fall already in the air, but this morning was the first morning I really noticed it for myself. It wasn’t raining this morning, the sky was blue. But there was a nip in the air. I turned on the heater in my cabin (just for a minute!) before I settled down to write. On my forest walk, I picked up a scarlet leaf.

This year is also, I remarked to my husband, the first late summer of many (since 1998!) that we have not been sending one of our own children off to school. No new paper or pens, no new backbacks, no pleading (from already fully kitted-out daughters) for “new school clothes.”

Maybe you’re the sort of person who greedily jumps straight back into a writing project, without hesitation. But if you, like me, have some difficulty re-entering a project (for me, it’s more like having to carve my own battering ram and then break down the door), here are 17 suggestions:

  1. Remember how you felt as a little kid, getting new school supplies? Remember how eager you were to use them? Take yourself school shopping and buy a new notebook and pen. Don’t do anything with them the first day! (Remember your mother telling you that you couldn’t use them until school started? Remember how eager that made you–or am I just weird?)
  2. The first day back–don’t “write,” just list details, images, or issues that you want to include in your writing project. (List 20 or more!)
  3. Write a list in which each line begins with I could write about ….
  4. Try listing what you will definitely NOT write about.
  5. Tell yourself that you’re NOT going back to your writing project, that this is just an experiment. Just play.
  6. Put a foil star or draw a fat red star or some other symbol on your calendar for every day you work. Hang this up where you can see it from your writing desk. Think of putting the star up as a reward for having written.
  7. Speaking of “play,” think of a beginning pianist practicing scales or simple songs (interesting that we “play” music, but don’t think of writing, usually, as play). Try writing out someone else’s poem or paragraph, just for practice. “Play” on the page.
  8. Draw a picture or a map of what you want to write.
  9. Set a timer–timers make great, non-judgmental bosses. At least for me, when I set a timer, I seem to click “off” that part of my brain that throws up a lot of resistance.
  10. Keep the timed writings short–no more than 15 minutes, but as little as 5 (or even ONE) if you’re having a lot of difficulty.
  11. Robert Maurer in One Small Step suggests simply holding the journal on your lap for a minute. I haven’t had to resort to this, but I think it would work in extreme cases. Just hold your notebook or your laptop for a while, as if holding yourself or whatever that small part of yourself is that is having difficulty getting started. Don’t deny it.
  12. Write an email to someone very very good at encouraging you. In this email, describe your project. (You don’t have to send the email.)
  13. Imagine writing the whole thing in one line per day, for instance on Twitter.
  14. Skip the opening line. Go straight to the second, or even later. (You can write the first line later.)
  15. Write an acknowledgments page. Thank all the people who will help you with this project, all the people who are waiting eagerly for it.
  16. Write something–even if only a few lines, or for a few minutes–every day, even weekends or holidays, for 3 days straight. Or 40 days. (Don’t forget your star!)
  17. Write the dedication to appear at the beginning of your writing project. This is for my mother, who read all of Agatha Christie, at least twice. 

I’d love to read it!

Edward Harkness: The Law of the Unforeseen

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Our reading at Elliott Bay Books is only one week away! Here’s a poem from Ed’s newest book. I’ve discovered that you can find him all over the web, including Verse Daily and Terrain.

 

One of the things (or two) that I love about Ed’s poems is their range. He strikes me as a thoroughly Pacific Northwest poet, and yet he weaves in  his international rovings, musings about historical and fictional characters, and observations of natural phenomenon from all over the globe, and he does so in such a way that I feel as though I am there, too.

Here is a short poem that gives me that sense of a wholly unfamiliar place (to me), now made knowable.

 

Ed Harkness

 

ICEBERGS NEAR TWILLINGATE

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, en route
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

 

from The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2018)

Where You’ll Find Me

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On Friday, August 16, at 7 p.m.,
I will be reading from Body My House at Elliott Bay Book Company.
I’m thrilled (of course) and very very grateful to poet Ed Harkness and Elliott Bay Books for inviting me.

Wouldn’t it be lovely
if about 50 of my nearest and dearest friends could join us?

(Yes, it would!)

Bethany

 

Writing the Labyrinth

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Some experiences seem beyond words. That’s how I’m feeling about my week in Chartres. And yes, I know it was a writing workshop, and that I should be perfectly at home, writing about it. But.

So I went to Chartres for a writing workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. I wasn’t expecting a  spiritual workshop focused on Chartres Cathedral and its nearly 1000 year old labyrinth (and its 2000 year history, pre-current cathedral). Even had I known that the labyrinth would be a central aspect of our week, I don’t think I could have fathomed how profoundly meaningful this location was going to become for me.

I’ve walked labyrinths before, and I have always found meaning in them. At a Courage to Teach retreat years back (my youngest daughter wasn’t yet in school, so I know it was at least 15 years ago), I encountered a lavender labyrinth and one of the reasons I remember the event is because I wrote a poem about a conversation I had with a friend while standing in that labyrinth. (Did we “walk it”? Did we know that was a thing?)

Thanks to my dear friend Janet, I attended an Episcopal Women’s retreat in 2015 and again (I think) in 2016, at St. Andrew’s House on Hood Canal, and walked their labyrinth. At the first retreat I learned about the history of labyrinths, even about Chartres, though I had still barely scratched the surface. At St. Andrew’s, the labyrinth is outdoors, in a wooded area, and it’s lined by white rocks and shells. I wrote about this labyrinth, too. (Not a successful poem, but one I put through numerous drafts.)

When my mom was in care, I sometimes stopped at a nearby church, St. Hugh’s,and walked their labyrinth. It was always comforting and peaceful. In Ireland I walked a number of stone circles, and at least one actual labyrinth, on my mom’s 85th birthday, as it happens (and, yes, tried to write about it).

This past April during Holy Week my church put down a canvas labyrinth in the sanctuary (apparently, they had done this before, without my clocking it), and I signed up to facilitate a 2-hour slot, and I walked it, of course.

So I am not unfamiliar with the labyrinth structure and spell and movement.

You can find labyrinths all over the world, by the way, by searching this link: https://labyrinthlocator.com/home.

If the other labyrinths were difficult to get into words, the labyrinth at Chartres is proving impossible.

But here I am, typing away and…trying.

I think the best experiences in our lives are exactly like this. I’ve never been able to do a great job, for instance, in writing about my daughters’ births, and I know I have much to do before I’m finished writing about the deaths of my parents. Perhaps some people can be glib about world hunger and climate change and homelessness and the current state of American politics…but I find them daunting. Does that mean I shouldn’t write about them, that I have nothing to say? Or that what I have to say doesn’t fall out of my pen, polished and perfect?

That a subject calls us to write about it and yet proves difficult to capture, is not a reason for us to avoid it. If anything, that’s how you know that you must keep approaching, keep circling, keep trying to put the words down.

Maybe it isn’t a blogpost. Maybe it’s a 30-page essay about tears and healing. Maybe it’s a book.

If you feel called to write it, no matter your conflicting feelings, then I want to encourage you. I am willing to bet that there’s someone out there who needs to hear it.

Me, for instance.