First Draft Thoughts: Mindfulness

Today I dread writing.

I’m 60% finished with this book, square in the saggy middle, and aside from a few tentpole scenes, I have no idea what comes next.

Years ago, when I was much more inexperienced with this feeling of dread, I would let the anxiety win. I would stop returning to the page. I would finish nothing.

Now I see it for what it is: a necessary but temporary discomfort on the way to having a finished draft.

Doesn’t mean I feel it less, or that the duration is shorter than before. Often not. Often it feels worse than it ever has. Often I toil for days or weeks before I finally break through.

But I know now that if I keep working and sit with the discomfort long enough, there’s a finished book at the end of it all.

This process-this sitting with discomfort thing–is actually what made meditation and mindfulness make sense for me.

I’ve practiced meditation for years. Sometimes I find it helpful, but often I’m just going through the motions, meditating because I said I would meditate, but not really finding the flow.

Now I get it: it’s not about finding the flow, it’s about learning to sit with discomfort. Practicing sitting with discomfort, even.

Writing first drafts (this is the year of first drafts) is a whole lot of discomfort, in my experience. And I’m hoping that by learning how to sit with that discomfort, day after day, a little bit at a time, I’ll also get better and faster at drafting, and treat it with understanding and compassion rather than judgment and dread.

Unanswerable Questions

I started 2024 with big ambitions, hopes, goals, and all that other stuff that comes with the start of a new year. Three days in, I was hit with a debilitating migraine. Now all of those carefully made plans for January need to be re-assessed.

This is annoying, but it's also life.

I'm also hitting the midpoint of a book, and I'm wondering if I have made a disastrous mistake 13,000 words ago. Is it better to write through this draft as-is, or will it be better to go back and rewrite the book from that point forward.

This is also annoying. It's also life.

I've been taking a lot of stock of my writing life recently. I've been in this industry for over a decade now. Many of the writers I started with have moved on to new lives, new hobbies, new careers. I, myself, have also tried on new lives, new hobbies, new careers. I don't get excited about things the way I used to. Or panic the way I used to. I've hit a stretch where there's a comfort in the routine of writing. Even on the bad days.

I always thought I would hit a place where I had all the answers, if not through experience, then through osmosis. But the truth is, I don't know how to write a book today any more than I did twelve years ago. I've been agented for eleven years, and I still get nervous sending things in.

I still stress about whether I've made a mistake 13,000 words ago, and fret over if it's better to fix it now or continue as-is and see how it plays out.

The difference between me now and me then is that I now know it doesn't matter. There is no wrong choice. The best choice is the choice that gets the draft finished. And if it needs work after the fact, even a substantial rewrite, then that, too, is just life.

Writing Thoughts: Supportive Care for Writers

Today, I miss being a college student.

Not being young, exactly--I was officially a grown-ass adult when I went to college--but the support system. I enjoyed being on campus. I enjoyed the community. It lent a structure to my life that I've been unable to provide for myself thus far.

I wonder if a lot of neurodivergent creatives feel this way. Because the ones I'm friends with really flourished in college for this reason. They were able to, for a short amount of time, devote themselves wholly to their work, without having to worry about supportive self-care tasks. Everything is within a walking distance. The small community is built around learning and skill-growing.

I'm waist deep in a book right now, and I'm in that mad sort of place where if I think about it too long, I will talk myself out of every decision I've made, decide the entire book is wrong, and try to rewrite it from the ground up. I've done this before to books, and those books never see the light of day. They have 27 chapter ones, but that's it. That's all there is. And it's probably all those books ever will be.

So I have to be super careful at this stage not to think too much about the thing while at the same time moving forward with the writing of the thing. It's easy for me to become so zoned in on the writing that I forget those important care tasks--like eating and drinking. You'd think by now I would have figured out some magic trick to work all this out, but I haven't. It's still something I'm working on.

2023: A Year in Review

Goodbye, 2023!

My word of the year for 2023 was Deconstruct, and I don't know if I did that intentionally or if it just sort of happened, but a lot of structural things happened this year that allowed me to really look at the what but also the why and the how.

I've talked openly here and also on social media about my health struggles, and 2023 was also a challenging year in that I've had a frozen shoulder since July. There's some neck and spine stuff, too, that have made it pretty awful to sit at a desk and type. So one of the challenges I had to contend with this year was deconstructing my writing process and rebuilding one that wasn't entirely based on fingers-on-keyboard typing.

Let me be the first to say: dictation did not come naturally or easily to me. It really got to a point where it was either learn how to write books in a different way or come to terms with not writing them at all. I'm glad that toward the end of the year, I settled into a new process and it felt like it wasn't entirely wasted effort.

I also had to deconstruct how I think about my books, and publishing, and all the things that can go wrong when you're a writer. There's a never-ending supply of shit to worry about, and I was burned out from worrying about it all. So now with the help of a therapist, I worry about it less. Or try to, at least.

In addition to choosing a word for every year, I also choose one aspect of writing to study for a whole twelve months. In the past, I've studied character, queries, pitches, and intimacy. This past year, I studied and practiced dictation. (I will practice it even more in 2024.)

In 2024, I'll be studying fast drafting, finishing, and discipline.

I didn't finish any books in 2022. I finished 2 books in 2023. I want to finish more in 2024. I want to reset that habit of finishing, because the past few years have messed it up a little bit.

If you're on the fence about whether you should choose a word of the year or an area of focus for writing in 2024, I can't say enough good things about it. Especially if there are areas that you know needs work--Taryn and I both groaned when I told her I was thinking of making drafting/finishing my focus for the year, because we knew that was an area I needed to focus on.

Anyway, on to the stats!

2023 Stats:

Words Written: 105,567
Books finished: 2
Books published: 0
# of days written: 212
Longest writing streak: 5 days
Average words per day: 733
Average minutes per day: 43
Most productive days: Mondays and Wednesdays
Least productive day: Sunday