I encourage you to give your writing what it needs, whenever you can. One friend writes in the morning, sitting on the sidewalk outside her apartment building, where with the sun on her face, she writes the day awake. Another friend can only write at night, after her child has gone to bed and all of her tasks (both for her job and her family) are completed. Some folks I know only really write in workshops or writing groups—their writing craves the company of others. These folks pay attention to what the writer inside them is asking for, and try to make those conditions available for their writing as often as possible.
We who survive trauma are endlessly creative and find our healing all over the skin of possibility: we paint and draw, we sing, we have open-hearted conversation with good friends or with anonymous folks online, we fight, we write, we run, we dance, we read the same book over and over again, we watch terrible TV, we drink, we use, we cut, we have sex that doesn’t serve us, we have sex that brings us into our bodies bit by bit, we use anything and everything to get us to where we are willing to see the awfulness through just one more day until we reach into a day that isn’t all about awful anymore. Sometimes therapy is an answer. Often and for many it is a very good answer. In the years I couldn’t afford the therapy I needed, I wrote, and I believe I had to write myself into a place where therapy (meaning the deep work of figuring out how to do true human connection through sharing, risk, transference and countertransference and all that) could even be a possibility.
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Maybe you’ve heard the recommendations. Write every day. Nulla dies sine linea: no day without lines. Julia Cameron says three unbroken pages every morning. Novelist Madeline L’Engle is to have said, “Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s only for half an hour—write, write, write.” Anne Lamott says to try and sit down at about the same time every day, in order to train your creative unconscious to kick in for you.
For me, being at the notebook in the morning, each time, is a returning to that place of presence and safety, a returning to that place of non-judgement and discipline, that place of structure and freedom. There are plenty of productive writers who do not write every day; Toni Morrison once told the Paris Review, “I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in-between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.” We do it when we can; if it works to write daily, then do that. If you can only really get writing when you’re around other people, then get thee to a writing group! If you write when your muse grabs you by the hair, then make sure you know where your notebook is when she starts hollering at you. Above all, try not to beat yourself up for not doing it the way “the experts” say you’re supposed to—because even the experts can’t agree.
There’s a book I love that I discovered while I was at a Hedgebrook residency in 2012—World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, by Christian McEwen. In this thoughtful, thorough book, McEwen describes how necessary it is for writers and other artists to slow down, feel our rhythms, be all the way in our lives. Through personal anecdotes and examples from writers and other creative folks, McEwen makes the case for a slower—rather than fast and multitasky—creative life: she describes the artist’s need to wander (literally and figuratively), to have space for silence and dreams, to do one thing at a time, to have space for deep connection with others and room in our lives for alone time. Not everyone will resonate with her arguments. I myself bought a copy of her book as soon as I returned from Hedgebrook and dip into its pages whenever I need to counter the voices in my head (not to mention all those business-coach types out there on the interwebs) clamoring at me to do more and go faster and do it all now now now now now.
Whatever your rhythm, keep listening to and honoring it. Write every day if that’s right for your work. Find what works for you for awhile, and do that. And then what works for your writing will change. And you will change, too. That’s just as it should be.
It’s not necessary to write every day in order to call yourself a writer. “A writer is someone who writes,” my teacher (and the founder of the Amherst Writers & Artists workshop method) Pat Schneider always says, quoting William Stafford. While many extoll the virtues of morning writing, you might work better in the slow energy of the afternoon, or the quickening of first dark. You might prefer just to write on weekend mornings, if you don’t do other work on the weekends, in order to have hours free and stretched out and open for your words. You might prefer not to have any set schedule at all, instead just following the pull of your creative urges, waiting for some writing to shove hard against the insides of your fingers, needing you to set it free into the world.
Write into your rhythm
Take ten minutes and write about dancing—any sort of dancing, whether you yourself like to dance or not.
Then take ten more minutes, and write into these questions: What would an ideal or dream writing life look like for you? Where would you write? What time of day? What would you write, if you suddenly found yourself living that ideal writing life? Try and get into the details, the specifics. Let yourself really see it, feel it, move into and through the possibilities.
All over the country, all over the world, illuminated by that insouciant yellow moon, bright, clever, curious children are being suffocated under the weight of the violence done to them. They are turning themselves inward. They are turning away from what they love, because what they love is used against them. They are learning to distrust their curiosity, their intuition. They are learning that there’s no room for wonder—how can you take time to explore the world when so much of your creative genius must go to keeping yourself alive and as safe as possible?
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I imagine what I might have been able to do with the last twenty years of my life if I hadn’t been, first and foremost, focused on surviving.
Yes, I know we are to be grateful for the places we get to, eventually. We are to be grateful that, eventually, we heal enough to find a way back into intimacy, find a way back into joy. We can find a way back into these bodies that have carried us around, even through hell. Eventually we find a way home, into ourselves and our real lives, if we are lucky and persistent and don’t die in the meantime.
Please hear me: this isn’t about self-pity. I just feel sad.
When we say they steal our souls, steal our lives, this is what we mean—they impact what we can do with our capacity, our incipience. They leaked their barrels of crude oil into the complex and nascent pool of us, they poison all of the very many different selves we had before us to possibly become.
And so, instead of having the chance to focus our energies on becoming one of those many selves, we must spend our years cleaning the slough, trying to remove the crude. We bring in big booms to collect and clear out en masse what remains of the spill. We clean off the bigger animals—the ducks and muskrats and deer and raccoons. One by one, we wipe out eyes, wash until most of the residue is gone. We clear away what died, spend years fertilizing, tending the soil, hoping life will return to the places that were decimated. We spread fire-retardant material, we post sentries and guards at the edges of the pond, trying to keep watch on all sides, wanting to keep out anyone who’d try to pollute us so badly again. Sometimes we are successful. Sometimes we are not—but the energy is expended just the same.
Regardless of what else we wanted to study and learn, we have to teach ourselves biologics, become environmentalists, scientists—we learn to develop little organisms that will feed on what’s left of the poison, that will consume what molecules are left in the water and will seek out the bits that fell to the floor of the pond, permeated the water, soaked into the sand, coated the tadpoles and minnows and frogs and turtles, got inside their mouths, ate into the grasses and pond marsh and tilted the ecosystem toward death.