writing practice

Resurfacing: What’s Happening When the Writer Isn’t Writing

February 20, 2020 By Carrie Lamanna

color photo of a white woman face up, just under the surface of the water. She appears to be struggling to breathe. This quote from Adrienne Rich's poem Diving Into The Wreck is in the bottom right corner: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

I love blogging because it allows me to share my ideas with my writing community in quick, readable chunks and get immediate feedback. Blogging should be low-stakes public writing, and maybe it was 20 years ago when it was mostly teenagers sharing their angst on Live Journal. But today there are professional bloggers with fancy websites and a team of graphic designers making them look good. Writers who regularly appear in the New Yorker are publishing on Medium. It feels like the bar for self-published online writing has been raised higher than I can ever hope to jump.

I put so much pressure on myself to make every blog post witty and smart and beautifully designed that I always fall short of my expectations and ultimately can’t sustain the effort for more than a few weeks. Then I pile on some more guilt making it harder to get back to writing. When I’m away from my blog for any length of time I feel the need to explain why, to have a good excuse as if I were late to work and about to be fired. I feel this pressure to resurface with something that’s the blog equivalent of the great American novel. And so I stay hidden longer because the pressure is too much.

Why can’t I just say “I’ve been away because life, because reasons, because shit happens. Why can’t I just say “I’ve been away and now I’m back.” Why put so much pressure on posting to my blog when I have no publisher, no deadlines, no money on the line? Where are these expectations coming from? Who’s setting them?

Part of this is my OCD, which makes me feel an intense sense of obligation to everyone including imagined blog readers. But it’s also about the way our culture defines what it means to be a writer. I’ve lost count of how many author profiles I’ve read that begin with some version of this idealized writing process: the writer gets up at 6, walks the dog, reads while drinking their coffee, and then heads out to their writing studio at 8 for four hours of writing. Then lunch, four more hours of writing, dinner, then more reading before bed. It’s always some version of this. I’m not sure when these idealized writers do laundry, buy groceries, pay bills, or even shower, but I’ll save that rant for a future post.

My point is, we think (even though we know better) that all successful writers have perfect, uninterrupted days of writing. We imagine them crafting sublime sentence after sentence for hours at a time. But how many times do they check Twitter? How much time is spent staring at the cracks on the ceiling or making another cup of tea? How many days are spent producing little to no writing no matter how much time they spend at their desk? The writing community touts the value of doing the work, but we don’t talk much about the fact that doing the work, more often than not, doesn’t result in publishable writing.

I have dozens of half finished blog posts. A whole folder of notes for my memoir. A third of that work will make it to readers if I’m lucky. And that’s OK because it’s part of the process. Being silent publicly while writing privately (or even not writing at all for a time) can be the process. We have to take time to dive into the wreck, to use words for ourselves, as tools to discover and shape our realities, to find out what’s broken and how it got that way. And sometimes we have to stay underwater for a long time before we resurface.

The technical ease of online self-publishing has sped up distribution but it hasn’t sped up the act of writing. I have been trying to make my writing process match the speed of the internet, and that is setting myself up for failure. In fact, for those of us without a team of people, blogging has placed extra burdens on us. We are our own web designers, photographers, editors, typesetters, and marketing teams. It’s easy to get caught up in concerns about creating a brand, SEO, and social media marketing. Did you know all your Instagram posts should use a consistent color palette and filter? Well, they should. And mine don’t. And they never will.

So, this post isn’t perfect. It might not even be mildly interesting, but it’s published. I have successfully resurfaced. My goal is to publish a post every week, but the bigger goal is stop grasping at perfection, to stop feeling guilty if I skip a week. To rediscover the joy of writing, the pleasure that blogging should be.

I’m back. Did you miss me?

Do The Next Write Thing

May 3, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna

a color photo of my tiny writing desk in the corner of my dining room.

My mantra recently has been “Do the next right thing.” I came across the phrase when reading about addiction recovery, and it has become essential in helping my manage my anxiety and OCD symptoms. It’s also become the centerpiece of my new writing practice these past few weeks.

While I am not an addict (don’t get it twisted, people), I’ve found quite a few similarities between my mental health journey and the stories of those recovering from addition. The strongest connection is the need to be in control of everything all the time—to be the smartest, in-charge one in the room. Admitting that I am not in control of the universe (or even my tiny corner of it) is terrifying and can lead to despair and depression.

The way out of that trap, for me, is to take my focus off of next month or next week or even tomorrow and put it on what I can do right now to move forward—the next right thing. For example, when I look up from my computer and look around the room I see the house is a wreck. My son’s pajamas are strewn across the couch (because the living room is where you get dressed, obviously), the side table is piled high with junk mail and school handouts, laundry that needs folding is everywhere. I could go on about the toys all over the floor and the boxes of Girl Scout supplies I’m always tripping over, but I won’t do that because that wouldn’t be the next right thing. My instinct is to curse my life, lament that I am 45 and still don’t have my shit together, and to then spend the next two hours putting together an elaborate month-long plan for how I’m going to clean and declutter the whole house. But that wouldn’t be the next right thing either. What I should do (and I will do as soon as I finish this post) is spend 15 minutes clearing the dirty breakfast dishes, picking up the toys, and throwing out the junk mail. That would be the next right thing. It’s not the sexy thing or the thing that will make me feel (temporarily) powerful and in control, but it is the right thing that will lead to the next right thing because once I have some clean surfaces, I can fold some of that damn laundry. If I keep my focus on the next right thing, in the hour before the kids get home from school I will actually accomplish things that make the house cleaner.

Writing is like this too. What I want are week-long writing retreats in the woods and a well-lit cozy home office where I can start my day with meditation and hot lemon water before I settle in for my uninterrupted morning writing session. That’s a lie. Hot lemon water is stupid (fight me). I want coffee and lots of it. Everything else I want, but it’s my fantasy, not my reality. What I actually have is my messy house and a tiny discount store desk shoved into the corner of the dining room. I could bitch and moan about how I can’t write like this (not that I would ever do such a narcissistic thing) or I could do the next write thing and sit down for an hour and finish this blog post to you. Which I’m doing. (Where’s my cookie?)

Look. Here’s the thing. Art is not something that happens separate from the rest of our lives. It’s just like clearing the table or scrubbing the toilet. It’s something we have to make a regular practice. Something we do in the midst of the chaos. These past three weeks my next write thing has been to publish a post a week. So far, each attempt has begun on Monday, been interrupted at least a dozen times, and then finished on Friday. But it’s getting done. If I’m lucky, the published post is beautiful and sexy, but the process of writing it certainly is not. Most of the time it’s pretty damn ugly. As I sit here in the dusty dining room corner, my face is unwashed, my hair is in a ponytail, and I’m still in my pajamas.

But the work is getting done.

And I want it to keep getting done, so I’m raising the stakes and inviting you to join me. Starting next Friday, May 10 at 10:00 am Mountain Time I’ll be live on my Facebook page to write in my tiny corner for 30 minutes. And I’ll be there every Friday after that. If you receive my Friday newsletter, you can use the time to respond to the weekly writing prompt or you can use the time to work on whatever writing you have been putting off. It doesn’t matter. Just do the next write thing for 30 minutes. That’s how the magic happens—unkempt, in the corner, 30- minutes at a time.

Writing is Messy, Communal, and Scary

April 22, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna

Overhead photo of a woman's hands typing on a green typewriter. To the left is an open notebook, a stack of letters, and flowers. To the right is a latte and a cookie on a blue plate. The text added to the photo reads "Writing doesn't look like this."

After neglecting it for months, I promised myself I would start posting to my blog once a week. My first post was just over a week ago on Saturday, so I haven’t exactly achieved my goal yet. At least it’s progress. (I’ve been told I need to focus more on small wins instead of focusing on how I fuck everything up. Not sure I’m doing it right, but I’ll keep trying.) The thing is, I don’t have a plan for what I want to say to you today. I just know I promised to write, so I’m writing.

Maybe that’s how it has to start. You sit your ass in a chair and write even when you don’t have anything it say. Of course that’s how it has to start. I know this. I have a damn Ph.D. in writing studies. Writing is a process of discovering what we have to say, not a delivery method. The final published work might be about delivering our completed message, but the process of creating that message—the actual work of writing—is knowledge production. We know more after we have written, even for just five minutes, than we did before we started. Even when we sit down with a clear plan for what we want to write, the process changes things. It’s fascinating to watch this process unfold with an author who’s working on a novel. Characters they thought were villains unexpectedly reveal themselves to be heroes. A coward turns out to be the bravest one in the story. No matter how much they plan and storyboard, fiction writers can never be sure how a story will end until they write the last word.

Fiction writers don’t invent their characters—they get to know them through the writing process. When we write about a nonfiction topic, we learn as much through the act of writing as we do through the research process. When we write about ourselves, we get to learn who we are. But that process is unsettling to say the least. We aren’t fictional characters after all, and realizing that maybe we don’t know everything about ourselves is downright scary. And the fact that we are sharing our recent self-discoveries with a public audience brings the fear level from “damn scary” to “fucking terrifying.” When I hit publish on my previous post about my struggle with anxiety and OCD, I felt like I was standing naked in the middle of the busiest street in town with TV cameras and cellphones pointed at me. In reality, maybe 100 people even bothered to look twice at that post, and most of them were friends and family (hi mom!), so my fears might have been a bit exaggerated. But it doesn’t matter. In my head the fear is real. It makes me feel alone in this world, and more often than not, it stops me from writing.

I don’t want to be alone in this process. I want you to come along with me so it doesn’t seem so scary. The romantic notion of the writer alone in her ivory tower is a myth that holds us back. Writing happens in communion with others. Sure, you have to sit down with pen or keyboard each day and put words on a page, and that has to be done alone. But what happens before, after, and in-between the writing requires people.

I would never have finished my dissertation if it weren’t for a friend who invited me to her house in Michigan for a weekend. She provided another friend who was struggling to finish and me with rooms of our own. We spent the morning writing with our doors closed. At lunchtime we came downstairs to a wonderful meal she had prepared for us. We ate and got some exercise while she read our drafts and provided feedback. We then went back upstairs to revise before heading out to dinner together. We did this for two days. I wrote about a third of my dissertation that weekend after struggling for almost a year to write more than a few good pages. At the time it seemed like magic, but the magic was simply doing the work in the company of other writers and friends who supported and believed in me. When I quit my academic job and decided to start writing memoir and creative nonfiction, I knew I would need that sort of support again, which is why I jumped at the chance to join Janelle Hanchett’s first Renegade Writers group. We’ve had two face-to-face retreats now, and both have been magical.

Obviously, it’s not possible to go on a writing retreat every weekend. (Who would do that laundry I’m always bitching about?) But it doesn’t mean we are doomed to struggle alone either. I’ve found that something amazing happens when we share our writing process with others. We realize we are not alone. Friends and family I would never have suspected of having any interest in writing confess that they too want to write a novel, a memoir, or start a blog. They too thought they were alone, that sitting down to write was scary because they didn’t know what to say and were afraid to show it to anyone, that everything they tried to write turned out a hot mess, and what difference did it make anyway because they would never have the time to be a “real” writer. This is the bullshit we say to ourselves when we try to write in secret. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I didn’t know I had you to read it—even if “you” is sometimes only my friend Jill and my fellow Renegade writers.

I stopped writing when I stopped reaching out and sharing with my writing community. Once I started getting outside my own head, my writing fears didn’t go away, but they stopped controlling my process. My fears became something I could lift and set aside for a precious moment instead of a crushing weight on my chest. Over the next month I’ll be sharing more of my writing process here and on social media. It’s going to be a weird ride, but I’m ready for it. It’s time.

Doing the Work: What the Writer Learned

April 24, 2018 By Carrie Lamanna

The first thing I learned after a week of writing every day for 30 minutes is that while I want my writing space to look like this photo of a woman sitting in a cafe with the perfect cappuccino and serene mood lighting, I can write almost anywhere. I mean, I wrote in a moving car that was transporting two jabbering kids and blasting Nirvana. This was an important practical lesson for me because one of my main excuses for not writing has always been lack of a clean (quiet) well lighted place. Once I realized I could actually make the writing happen, I learned a few other things worth mentioning.

Writing is hard. “Well, no shit, Sherlock,” I hear you saying. And truthfully, I already knew this. If it were easy, I wouldn’t have these dry spells where I dread writing so much that I can’t make myself do it unless I invent a writing challenge and then announce on the damn internet that I’m going to write every day for 30 days. But here’s the thing about doing hard stuff. We don’t do it because it’s hard and we are masochists. We do hard things when there is some sort of reward at the end that is worth the effort, and there are definitely rewards for sucking it up and doing the work of writing. If we are really lucky there’s the reward of publication and getting paid for our work. But even after a week of just free writing for 30 minutes a day, I have been reminded there are smaller, personal rewards to sitting down and exploring an idea through written language. What follows are four of those rewards.
I’m happier when I write. I’m not happier while I’m writing because see number one, but I am definitely happier when I’m done. My mind is clearer and I feel a sense of calm. I’m better able to focus on the rest of the day, or if I write before bed, I fall asleep faster because I’ve worked thought my thoughts for the moment and am ready to let my mind rest. I don’t resent the housework or the errands or the thousand other things a have to do to call myself a responsible adult. Well, at least I resent them less than when I don’t make time to write.
I learn about myself when I write. In just this past week of writing I’ve had moments when I wrote a sentence and stopped cold because I didn’t know that was how I felt about something. It’s a weird moment where I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time immediately followed by a deep sense of connection with this me I have just discovered. She was hidden somewhere inside just waiting for that moment when I would sit down and allow her the space and words to speak. Maybe this is why I’m happier when I write—because all of me feels valued and acknowledged, not just the parts I can acceptably express at the dinner table or while chit-chatting with other parents at the playground.
There’s some truth in the saying “write drunk, edit sober.” Truth be told, I have never written drunk, but there were times when a glass of two of wine helped quiet the doubts in my head long enough to get some words on the page. When I was writing my dissertation, I was consumed by the anxiety of what my advisor would think or whether my arguments were good enough to be published in some academic journal that four people would read. It was exhausting, and I needed to let go in order to get the writing done. I was writing with an editor and a critic in my head, and they needed to shut the hell up,so I plied them with wine. This writing challenge has helped me achieve that open state of mind without the booze. The key has been setting no guidelines about what to write. All I have to do is set my timer for 30 minutes and start writing. I have no obligations to readers, editors, or teachers. I am just exploring an idea to see where it goes. If it sucks, I can hit the delete key later. That’s what the sober editing is for.
Sometimes I write some good shit. No really, it’s true. It’s so easy to get fixated on the hot mess that is a first draft we forget that if we look hard enough inside that mess, more often than not, there lives a witty turn of phrase or a perceptive analysis of a political or societal issue. Anxiety and self-doubt make us forget we are human and know how to use language. Writing helps us remember.

If you’ve been writing with me this week, let me know how it’s going. What have you learned about yourself and your writing process? And if you haven’t been writing, join in at any time. Even if you only do it for a week, I can promise you won’t regret gifting yourself those 30 minutes of writing each day.