What Happens When A Writer Loses Her Jump

“Mental toughness doesn’t make you invincible, it makes you adaptable.”

— Lauren Johnson, sports psychologist for the Yankees

Mindset and Performance: A Drama In 3 Acts

Losing The Jump

Most of you probably don't know this about me, but I used to be a competitive figure skater.

I didn't quit skating because it was too expensive, although that was part of it. And I didn't quit because I was moving away from my rink and my coach, although that was part of it too.

I quit because I lost my jump.

A jump I could land in my sleep (the notorious Axel, if you must know), a jump my body was trained to land. A body that would get to the rink at 5:30 in the morning to jump and fall and fall again, a body my single mother and grandparents had scrimped and saved to have molded by coaches that cost $1/minute. A body that contained a heart that loved skating as much as that girl from The Queen's Gambit loves chess.

I had to quit doing the thing I loved most in the world because my mind had convinced me I couldn't do it.

Despite the heartbreak of walking away from the sport my family and I had invested so much in, my years on the ice taught me a very hard and important lesson about how much our mindset plays a role in performance. It's a big part of why I became a writing coach in the first place - we're the scribe version of the sports psychologist. It mother-loving KILLS me when I see a talented athlete crumble to pieces simply because of the games their mind is playing. It kills me when I see writers do it, too.

As I tell the writers I work with: 99% of your problems have nothing to do with your craft. It's your inner critic and the fear, self-doubt, comparison, perfectionism, and resistance that you have to watch out for.

This past weekend, my husband and I were glued to the TV, watching Nathan Chen rocks his quads and get a fifth National title - what the what?! My husband was a hockey player, but he respects the toe-pick. (Cue The Cutting Edge in-jokes). The former ladies two-time national champion, Alysa Liu, was one of the first women to land a quad in competition, but this year she'd had a growth spurt and ended up in 4th place, no longer able to land the quad that had given her such an edge. At only 15 years of age, she'd lost her jump. Boy, do I remember how shitty that feels. One minute, your body knows exactly when to snap in and out of those revolutions in the air and the next you're having your ass handed to you by a piece of ice.

A skater can lose her jump for a lot of reasons, such as an injury or growth spurt, but one of the easiest ways you can lose your jump is getting psyched out.

Just watch former champion Gracie Gold's performance at this year's nationals and you'll see that in action. Watch her body as she skates to the center of the rink before her long program. Watch how terrified she is.

Performance & The Mind / Body Connection

Out in the Cold: Letting Your Mind Win The Gold

Skaters aren't afraid of falling. Hell, that's just a day at the rink. So what is it about those jumps that make them hesitate or pop out of the revolutions? They know they can land it, their bodies know they can land it, but their minds say NO. They get stuck in a story they're telling themselves, in comparison, in anxiety that results in a spiraling panic.

Right when they need to be most in tune with their bodies, at the height of their flow, they let the inner critic in: suddenly, the skater ditches her body to hang out in her head--which has no idea how to maneuver on a blade thinner than a pinkie nail.

The bulk of the work I do with my writers is training how to get our bodies and minds communicating, how to turn that NO to a YES, how to build up the courage to go for that quad, even if we're not certain what will happen once we get into the air.

Quick: what does flow feel like in your body? What does it feel like when you're running on empty? Next: How often do you force yourself to write when you're on empty? Yeah? How's that going for you?

It takes training to get your jump back - or to land it in the first place. No skater slumps into the rink once a week around noon, doesn't stretch, has an hour to spare, and expects excellence. It's the same for us writers: if we want to be good, to be better, to reach our goals, we need to train.

We need to develop mental toughness and the ability to adapt to whatever life throws our way so that our writing isn't the first thing that goes out the window when life gets messy or complicated.

At the same time, we need to bring more ease, spaciousness, playfulness, and curiosity into our practice. Discipline might look like recognizing that you don't have a single story fragment to work on, that your well is dry, and so instead of opening that document and forcing your words out for the day, you instead court flow and patiently wait for your story or character - your jump - to get back into your body.

Trust me when I say that pushing yourself when you've got nothing will end in tears.

My coach told me to lay off the jump. That I was developing bad habits by attempting it when I wasn't squared away mentally. He wanted me to work on other skills - my skating craft, my other jumps, my spins. I ignored him because I so desperately wanted that jump back. I should have heeded my coach's advice. Not only did I lose the jump forever, I lost skating too.

The last time I attempted the Axel was in competition. I fell on my ass while "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago played over me, in a costume my mother had hand-sewn each sequin onto. I looked up and saw my coach shake his head - he would stop working with me not long after. He knew I didn't have the mental toughness to skate across ice dyed with the Olympic rings. I knew that too.

I don't want you to be out in the cold like I was with your writing, standing alone in the center of a block of ice realizing, this is it, it's over before the music even stops playing.

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How To Get Your Jump Back As A Writer - Or Land It For The First Time

Finding Gravity

Writers who’ve lost their flow (their “jump”) tend to respond in one of two ways: they either push themselves too hard and end up creating a misery of bad habits and dissapointments or they give up entirely, skating off the ice for good. Below are a few ways to get your “jump” back:

• Watch my favorite skate of Nathan Chen's: What would it feel like and what would it take for you to feel and perform this way in your writing seat? Journal and see what you come up with. What shifts might need to happen, what limiting beliefs are keeping you from finding your place in the air?

• Find your center so you can find gravity with meditation. A little mindfulness for writers goes a long way.

• Fill the well. You can’t write on empty.

• Court flow by getting curious. Rather than push yourself (that never works), see if you can reconnect to what makes you write in the first place, re-identifying with the spark that induces flow.

• Being a world-class athlete takes training and discipline. I like a simple habit tracker to help me see really clearly whether or not I'm getting my butt in the chair (and on the meditation cushion, too).

• This podcast with the Yankee's sports psychologist, Lauren Johnson, was killer. Ignore all the weird advertising for Bitcoin at the beginning. If you don't have time, no worries: I'll be writing a blog post about this soon. She's got some REALLY nifty and simple takeaways to get your mindset back on track and your butt in the chair, as well as healthy ways to measure and track growth and success. Big ups to my writer who sent this my way - you know me too well!

If your story or characters feel out of reach, just remember: they're right inside you. Your body remembers. Trust it. Trust yourself.

If you need some help in the kiss and cry, click below:

Why Being Curious Will Turn Your Writer Self On

“A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.”

— Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

Curiosity is an invitation to loosen up and show up: for this moment, this year, this life.

Curiosity courts flow.

Curiosity invites spaciousness and repels constriction.

Curiosity is playful. For craft and story, it's an invitation to the magic "If" to the powerful character development inquiry "Why?"

Curiosity is magical. Synchronicity! Enchantment! Wonder! Possibility!

All these things await when you get curious.

Curiosity is permission

All of my books are filled with things I’m curious about and just need an excuse to go down the rabbit hole with. Instead of feeling like an armchair traveler in the spaces I long to explore, I’m suddenly given permission to go deeper. I’m just doing my job and sometimes that means obsessively reading about reincarnation or learning paramilitary strategies used by the French Resistance.

Being curious for my writing fulfills that part of me that loves efficiency and focus. I get to go really deep, indulge in my obsession of a thing, put on the skin of a character who gets to be an expert in it and not feel like I’m wasting time. Please note: Being curious is never a waste of time. I’m just one of those people that likes a reason to do something. Being curious, whether it’s for your writing or not, is paying attention, and, as Mary Oliver said, “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Quick:

Write down three things you’re curious about.

Are these things showing up in your work? Why not?!

This is the perfect opportunity to indulge your curiosity - and write it off on your taxes!

I find that when I invite what I’m curious about in my work-in-progress, I create richer characters, stories, and worlds simply because my book is full of things that light me up, turn me on, and flood me with energy.

All of that shows up on the page in tangible and intangible ways. Got a flat character? Give her your obsession and see how interesting she becomes. Boring setting? How about your book takes place in a setting you’re into: radio stations, Budapest, your favorite coffeehouse. Plot going nowhere? I bet if you went down the rabbit hole of what went down on Apollo 13 - like you want to - you might get an idea or two.

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How Getting Curious Led To My Biggest Book Deals

I was in a writing class where the teacher had a simple prompt: “Write the first chapter of a book where a character has a problem.”

The first thing that popped into my mind was a jinni stuck in a bottle. I wrote the scene - which lead to a fantasy trilogy for HarperCollins, the first of which was Exquisite Captive.

I even took that prompt in a totally different direction when I got curious about a tabloid magazine cover with a reality TV family pictured on its glossy front page. I wondered what it would be like to be on that show and not want to be, but to be a minor given no choice in the matter. This led to my very first book deal, a two-book deal with Macmillan that began with Something Real, a novel about a girl who is stuck on her family’s reality TV show. It also resulted in the PEN Discovery Award and critical acclaim—all because I got curious in a CVS line.

I think I can rest my case that curiosity is a writer’s secret weapon, no?

Curiosity Is Dangerous

“You might say that if it were not for Eve’s transgression, humankind would still be abiding in the uncorrupted Garden of Eden. Or, if you relate to the story as I do, you would say something else. You would say that Eve looks awake—curious about everything, at home in her body, and in vibrant communion with nature.”

— Elizabeth Lesser, Cassandra Speaks

The oldest stories have told us that curiosity is dangerous, a sin, the ruination of all—and that curiosity began with woman. Ladies, take a bow.

I like how Lesser turns the old tired story about Eve on its head, how she infuses it with truth and throws out the lie those old scribes were scribbling about womenfolk. The great sages all equate paying attention - just another term for curiosity - with being awake, present, enlightened.

So basically, Eve beat Buddha to the punch.

According to myth, the goddess Hera gave Pandora “the most dangerous gift of all, a woman’s curiosity” (Lesser, 36). I say we own that gift, amplify it, use it like it’s our favorite mug or sweatshirt. It is a gift. And it is dangerous - it shakes things up. It creates more space for women in this world and for characters who have questions about the ways things are and ideas about how they could be.

I like dangerous. The best kind of art has a little danger in it: audacity, grit, and swagger on the page, that’s what I like. You don’t get that without being willing to risk one of your nine lives when you sit down to write.

Curiosity As Writing Process

I have a way of working with writers to own their process, understand it, and make it work that I call You Have A Process. We get really curious about how they write, what happens when they flow, when they’re stuck, what sparks them and turns them on or off. This is intensive, transformative work that invites the writer to discover how she works best - not how some craft book says she works.

It’s an inherently feminine approach (this is not a binary - we all have the feminine within us). We talk a lot. We go deep. We look at the stories we tell ourselves and have been told. We get specific and then we test it all out in the laboratory of the writing cave, with our books as the experiment.

It’s a highly effective approach to inviting satisfaction into your writing process, to actually finishing your book, to enjoying the process because it is yours and it works.

One writer I worked with discovered that dialogue is her way in. She didn’t know that whenever she got stuck, she always got unstuck by getting her characters talking to each other. So guess how she starts off her writing sessions?

Another writer I work with was frustrated by her process. She hated how meandering it was. How much she had to journal and think out loud to get anywhere. But as soon as we followed her through the seed of an idea to its fruition—using the very process that works for her—she realized her problem wasn’t her process: it was comparing what worked for her to seemingly more productive / efficient ways so many craft books talk about.

Now? She’s jamming on a great book and enjoying her process along the way.

What these two examples have in common is that we got curious. We didn’t impose new structures, rules, strategies. We just looked at what was already working, how the writer works, and what wasn’t feeling great. We came up with tools to help each individual writer access her own inner wisdom, tools that she already knew worked for her when she was stuck or flailing. Then, we worked to help her trust what she knows to be true: she has a process, the process works, and her writing and creative heart are better for trusting it.

Stay tuned for my upcoming course on this, or email me to connect about one-on-one mentorship.

Why The Old Ways Are Making Writers Stuck

·       The culture (predominantly masculine) likes: deadlines, outlines, a plan, a clear product, PROOF. It likes us to hustle for our worth.

·       The feminine (intuitive) likes: SPACIOUSNESS, exploration (not necessarily with a specific end in sight, say, the New World), discovery, synchronicity, enchantment, ease, playfulness, POSSIBILITY.  With the feminine it’s the means, not the ends that our true satisfaction comes from. 

·       When we focus on a masculine approach ONLY, we miss out on the deliciousness of exploration. And the thing is, if we impose ways of writing that don’t work for us, if we force that, we just get more stuck. We dig our own holes. And then we wonder where in hell we got these shovels in the first place.

·       Note: We need integration of the masculine and feminine so that we can enjoy the process and write the stories of our hearts, but also have the discipline to get them out into the world. Having a holistic approach, a dedicated writing practice, and the tools to access your inner wisdom when you get stuck or bombarded by the inner critic will help you get closer to your writing goals…and enjoy the journey along the way.

·       Holding space for the process, listening, acting as a vessel or, as Anne Lamott might say, “the designated typist” is where the real juiciness comes in.

Now might be a good time to ask yourself if you’re forcing a linear, rational, masculine approach when you secretly long for more expansive, open, exploratory work.

Here’s the kicker: when you do things that feel good and intuitive and yummy, you’re actually being more productive, courting flow, and getting the results you’ve been hoping for. Forcing yourself to write in a way that others say is “right” but is wrong for you only results in madness.

Curiosity = Adventure & Access

My curiosity as a writer has given me unprecedented access to people and places I could never had had otherwise.

My upcoming biography of WWII spy Virginia Hall, Code Name Badass, got me security clearance to visit the CIA and access to de-classified intelligence archives in London. My most recent novel, Little Universes, allowed me to get on the phone with one of the nation’s top astrophysicists to talk all things dark matter. What?!

My books have taken me as far as the Moroccan Sahara and as near as my innermost self, as I explore the things I’m confused, saddened, or angered by.

When we engage our curiosity, we allow our books to be our teachers. This is where curiosity gets really interesting. I firmly believe that the books we’re jazzed about at a particular time are there to teach us something. Maybe it’s about ourselves, others, writing, the world—but it’s something. Often a few somethings.

Now might be a good time to ask: How is my book my teacher? Get curious. This will deepen your relationship to the work itself, and invite in unexpected possibilities for story, craft, and process.

“A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them...Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you.

”

— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

I wrote a whole blog post about Twyla Tharp’s concept of scratching for new ideas. You can check it out here.

There are so many ways to get curious, whether you’ve got no idea, a new idea, or feel stuck.

Curiosity is the key that unlocks flow. It’s the “Drink Me” bottle of writers the world over.

““Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ”

— Rilke

Curiosity Gets You Unstuck

A few years ago I found myself adrift. Very Dante: Midway on my life’s journey I found myself in a dark wood, the right road lost.

For the first time in what felt like forever, I didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to write. I was panicking, sitting in a Brooklyn coffeehouse surrounded by writers, all of whom looked very in flow and productive (but, let’s be honest, were probably just on Twitter).

I opened Wikipedia and decided to type in the first thing that came to mind - the thing I was most curious about at the moment: “The Circus.” This led me down a fantastic Wiki hole of circus history, my fascination growing with each click. By the end of that writing session, I had a whole plot for an inter-generational saga about a Russian circus family. It’s a big, ambitious project, one that is on the back burner while I wrap my mind around the enormity of the research (and language barrier) involved. But I can’t wait to write it. I’m so damn CURIOUS.

I call this my Brooklyn Coffeehouse Eureka Moment, and this strategy has served me every time I’m scrounging around for ideas. I bet it will offer up story gold for you, too.

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“Make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Make. Good. Art.””

— Neil Gaiman

Be The Mad Scientist

Curiosity is concerned with questions, not answers. It loves why, why, why. Questions = ENERGY, the more questions, the more energy, the more discovery = the richer your stories are.

When you invoke curiosity, mistakes are welcome. They tell us what’s not working so that we can discover what will work.

Some of the most curious people in the world are scientists. I’d argue they are perhaps the most curious people. We have much to learn from them and how they approach their work.

Scientist:

A science experiment that goes wrong is seen as important data that ultimately furthers research. Scientists know what doesn’t work and they are CURIOUS about why it didn’t work. They “work the problem.” (See the famous scene in Apollo 13 when they realize the astronauts are running out of air. That’s working the problem).

Writer:

A writing experiment that goes wrong often results in the writer hating on themselves. They feel frustration, overwhelm, like they’re behind. They aren’t curious about why something didn’t work, they’re focused on the next thing they think will work, and focused on beating themselves up. THEY DON’T WORK THE PROBLEM. So the problem just gets bigger.

How To Work The Problem When You’re Stuck On Your Story

A Few Journal Prompts

o   How do you get curious as a writer? (Research? Collage? Sidewriting? Tarot?). These are tools to draw from when you’re stuck.

o   How do you experiment as a writer? Or do you play it waaaaay too safe?

o   Go down the rabbit hole of your story / thing you’re curious about – what do you find there?

o   What do you do with what you find?

o   When do you notice yourself feeling panicky and overwhelmed, like the book is taking too much time, that you’re wasting time, etc.? What do you do when this happens? What could you do instead?

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Curiosity Improves Story & Craft

Curiosity = Story Gold

When you follow what YOU are curious about, rather than looking at the market or trying to impose a story on yourself, you will discover something that is fresh, intensely yours, addictive, and DELICIOUS. That’s a book that’s hard to NOT write and one a reader will find difficult to put down.

I have much to say about how approaching your work-in-progress with curiosity will have a tangible effect on the page - and if you become a newsletter subscriber and snag my Unlock Your Novel workbook, you’ll begin getting wildly curious about your characters and creating emotionally resonant plots as a result.

Curiosity As Inner Work = Mindfulness For Writers

Often when we get stuck it’s because we’ve stopped being curious. We’ve become Serious Writers Who Have Outlines and Plans Dammit.

This stuckness can result in a dry well, a creative desert. The way out? Curiosity, of course. Just like Alice, you have to escape what’s dragging you down by sliding down that old rabbit hole.

Rather than jump into shame, problem-solving, guilt, etc. when encountering fear, the inner critic, failure, overwhelm, and other creativity gremlins, we can get curious about what’s going on with our creative lurches and stumbles – this is a much more skillfull, workable approach then many of the ones we commonly reach for.

o   Step One: Get into the body. What does it feel like, this constriction. Get to know this feeling. It will be your red flag when you are going off the rails, a reminder to invite some gentle, mindful curiosity into the situation.

The R.A.I.N meditation method will help greatly with this.

o   Step Two: What information are you gathering? “What’s the next right thing?” Go do that.

Curiouser and curiouser....

Your Relationship To Curiosity : Word Contemplation Practice

Read through this short contemplation, then close your eyes and work through it. Alternatively, you can grab a journal and begin engaging in some free association with the word CURIOUS - mindmapping, doodling, random notes…all is welcome.

• Think of the last time, or a particularly vivid moment, when you felt / experienced CURIOSITY. It doesn’t have to be related to writing, though it could be.

• Bring the fullness of this memory to mind in as vivid detail as possible. Picture yourself in the space, using all five senses. Really arrive there.

• When you’re ready let the background of the memory fade and home in on the physical sensations of your body in this moment of curiosity.

• What does curiosity physically feel like in the body? Do you experience a quickening, a rise in body temperature? What’s happening in your chest or the tips of your fingers? Listen to your body.

• While still holding your attention on the body, take a look at your mind. What quality of mind does curiosity cultivate within you? Do you feel bright, manic, muddled, whirling, peaceful?

• Make these feelings and images as vivid and specific as possible. You are encoding, like a kind of muscle memory, what curiosity feels like for you.

• Now, let all those images fade and take a moment to sit with what it feels like to be CURIOUS with your eyes closed. If you’ve been journaling, then set that aside, close your eyes, and just feel the sensations in your body, not attaching any stories or images. Just feel into curiosity.

When you’re ready, jot down insights, impressions, and questions in your notebook or journal.

You may notice that the same sensations you feel when you’re curious are similar to the ones you feel when you’re in flow.

Coincidence? I think not.

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In this month’s Well Gathering, we got into all things CURIOUS, as it’s my guiding word of the month for January (and one of my two words for 2021 - the other is SOURCE).

You can snag the workshop recording, First Line Workout worksheet (one my absolute favorites!), and lecture notes on my newsletter subscriber portal. Not a subscriber? Become one here.

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See you down the rabbit hole….

2020 Is Your Teacher

One of the most useful tools I’ve discovered in working on developing a healthy writer mindset is re-framing challenging situations by simply asking:

“How is [ fill in the blank ] my teacher?”

This is mindfulness for writers: Viewing everything we do with attentive and kind curiosity so that we can get under the hood of our process and practice. It is only through this dogged effort of inner work and flexing our emotional intelligence muscles that we position ourselves to do our best storytelling.

When you begin working with this concept, you’ll see how this simple question works wonders in all life situations, from a difficult boss to an illness to the loss of a loved one.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When we get curious about the tough stuff—rather than resentful and frustrated—we pave the way for real workable solutions (and avoid a lot of unnecessary stress and pain through needless worry-on-a-loop). When we begin to see challenges as teachers, we take an active, rather than passive role, in our story.

• A publisher with terrible author care could teach us how to better advocate for ourselves simply by being so awful we MUST get over our fear of confrontation or risk our books not getting the visibility they need to reach our readers.

• A scathing review or critique partner’s critical notes could be our teacher for any number of things: teaching us how love ourselves and not care about outside approval, or how to grow a thicker skin.

In the above situations, we don’t usually think about what we’re learning, and how these happenings are invitations to growth. No, we freak out, call our best friends and narrate the drama, take to our beds and consider quitting writing altogether, or we turn the anxiety inward, which can result in plummeting self-confidence, depression, and a dry creative well.

Asking how challenging people and situations can be our teacher is more than seeing the silver lining. This questions isn’t about listing the things to be grateful for, such as the loss of work enabling you to have more time with your partner or kids. When you ask, “How is 2020 my teacher?” you’re seeing how the events of this year (and your responses to them) are shaping the person you are, illuminating parts of yourself that might need some work, and challenging you to grow.

A Case Study

Let’s say you didn’t write at all this year. You just couldn’t, not with the world being a dumpster fire. For many writers, this would be a cause for guilt, shame, increased self-doubt—you name it.

Writer A might respond by quitting altogether, or forcing themselves into a punitive writing practice to make up for lost time. She is, of course, side-eyeing all those assholes on Instagram who finished five books this year and also managed to learn how to make sourdough bread from scratch.

Writer B might list all the other important things they did and recognize that it’s okay not to write when the world is upside down. Perhaps they’ve already forgiven themselves and they’re not sweating it—they’ll try again next year. They felt that self-care was paramount and that meant not doing anything that required plots and action scenes.

But if Writers A and B were to ask, “How is 2020 my teacher,” both may draw the same conclusion: 2020 showed me that when there is chaos in the world, my writing is the first thing to go.

The takeaway lesson for Writer A might be that she recognizes that when she lets writing slide, she feels awful. Her mental health plummets, she loses her connection to self. So 2020 taught her—by showing, not telling—that in order to avoid losing her writing when she needs it most, she’s going to have to dig deep and figure out just what it was that caused her to let something so precious slip away. Maybe, after some deep journaling, she realizes that 2020 taught her that if she doesn’t have a dedicated time to write each day, the words won’t get written. Maybe it’s also teaching her she has to look at the weird guilt she feels when she wants to write instead of make dinner for her family. Why does she deny herself writing time, but protect the “me” time of her loved ones? Curiouser and curiouser.

Writer B might realize that she’d needed a break from writing and that only a pandemic would have broken her iron resolve to publish or die trying. Maybe before COVID, she’d been obsessed with her career, no longer caring about the heart of her stories so long as she could get a book deal. Maybe her relationships with her family—and herself—suffered and she was miserable all around. Perhaps 2020 revealed to Writer A that her true priorities aren’t book deals but being an active character in her own story. In 2021 it’s imperative she strike a balance between the two (writing and family) so that she can show up fully for all of her life.

Working with This Question

When you ask how something—2020, creative dry seasons, a particularly challenging book—are your teachers, you’ll want to have a journal handy. Note that while this is deeply helpful to work with while you’re experiencing a situation, it’s also very useful after the fact. I’m sure we’ll be feeling the ripple effect of 2020 for years to come.

1. Think about the last challenge you faced. How did you react in the moment? What was your takeaway after the fact?

2. Note the usual reactions you have to tough, stressful, challenging situations. Do you usually call someone immediately to rant? Do you take a run to clear your head? Do you indulge in a vice or two? Perhaps you have the anxiety on an endless loop. How does that make you feel? Is it workable? Is it a skillful use of your creative bandwidth?

3. Now, pause. Take a breath. Then ask, “How is [fill in the blank] my teacher?” 2020 would be a great thing to go with. You could also ask about your WIP, your writing in general, or your self-doubt. Your inner critic. Your fear or jealousy.

(Spoiler alert:

everything in the cosmos is your teacher.)

4. Journal: writing and writing and writing until you come to some of the lessons you’ve been given. Of course, like any good teacher, the lessons will reveal themselves over time. But there’s likely at least one or two things right off that you know you’re learning about yourself, your place in the world, your desires, your shadow side.

Snag my free Get Clear Workbook to do a deep dive into your process, practice, and goals.

5. Lessons don’t mean a thing unless we take them to heart and put them to action. So to really integrate the knowledge you’ve gotten, you’ll want to think about what steps or actions you might take. For example, if 2020 taught you that you can’t write when there are people around, it might be a good time to clear out that guest room nobody’s using and turn it into an office—with a door that closes and locks.

Professor 2020

No one will deny that 2020 was a shit year. For many writers, this year could be marked as a wash, as a lost year.

But whether you wrote a whole book or a single word, I know there is much that this year taught you, all of which you will be able to put into practice in 2021 and beyond.

• What did it teach you about the kinds of stories you want to tell?

• What did you learn about your relationship to your writing?

• What did it teach you about the importance of story in our lives?

• What did it show you about the kind of writer you are…and the kind you want to grow into?

• What did it teach you about your desires, hopes, and dreams?

• What did you learn about boundaries—with yourself and others?

Whether it’s getting clarity on your real priorities, on the kinds of stories you want to tell, or your relationship to your work, let this be the year that acted as a refiner, burning away what’s not working in and around you, and leaving behind a writer who is ready to put words that do right by the miracle into the world.

And that is how the student becomes the master.

Slow Is Fast

2020 has been a rough year, there’s no way around it. And yet as it begins to draw to its inevitable close, I find myself re-thinking the notion of power and, specifically, personal power. (Oh, that trendy self-development phrase!)

Publishing can make a writer gal feel powerless. So can the market. So can a paper shortage due to COVID-19. And a book that came out right when the country went on lockdown - and one coming out next Fall.

And yet: I don’t feel nearly as powerless as I would have had COVID happened a few years ago. What’s that about?

A few questions worth asking yourself (they yield wonderful fruit):

What would it mean if I believed I was powerful?

What would it mean - how would I live my life differently, if I truly believed that my words mattered?

How would that belief shape my approach to my craft and process moving forward?

Scientific Proof You Are A Powerful Being

If you're reading this, you've gotten through some pretty rough stuff, haven't you? All the hurts and disappointments and confusion and mess: you're still kicking.

And here's why:

The energy inside your body is the equivalent of thirty hydrogen bombs.

True story. Read that again. Let it sink in.

That, my friend, is POWER. You've got an arsenal of potential in you, which means you can absolutely 100% finish your book.

Maybe you're on the millionth revision of a manuscript or it's just a dream inside you. Either way: you've got this.

The seeds of what is going to be are growing inside you right now.

Here's why I know:

I did some time traveling recently, back to the pits of confusion and despair in spring 2017. I'd written a blog post about transitions in the creative life, and how tough they can be. I re-read it the other day, then re-posted it, along with some fresh insights. The cool thing? The seeds being planted during that transition have either fully bloomed now in 2020, or are beginning to sprout. How cool that future Heather could see what past Heather couldn't. This is how we trust the process. A post like this is proof pudding there is something good on the other side.

Slow Is Fast

In astronaut Scott Kelly's memoir Endurance (highly recommend!), he shares a saying the Navy S.E.A.L.s use that he found to be effective during intensely dangerous moments in space:

Fast is inefficient.

Slow is efficient.

Slow is fast.

I share this today in the spirit of PLENTY, my guiding theme this November. I know many of you are overwhelmed. Writing feels impossible. Or you feel like you need to write like you're running out of time. You’re in a manic state of trying to figure out what the world wants you to write, you’re terrified there are even fewer seats left at the table, you’ve stopped trusting your inner compass.

Or you look at your WIP or your NaNo goals and you think: I can't do it. 

Not enough time.

Not enough bandwidth.

Not enough. 

But if you apply the S.E.A.L. adage - and I suspect they know what they're talking about in terms of living in a crisis situation 365 days out of the year, as we all are now - then you actually realize that you have permission, you have a mandate to go slower. 




Margaret Atwood says, "A word after a word after a word is power."

Not a book after a book after a book. A bestseller after a bestseller after a bestseller. 

A word. 

After a word.

After a word.

However many words you've got in you today, be it five or five hundred or five thousand: that's power.

That's enough.

That's PLENTY.

You're doing the best with the tools you have. 

So go slow, soldier writer.

You’ve got this.

Befriending Your Scarcity Complex

I took a picture of this doorway a little over a year ago in Santorini. That feels like a different lifetime, traveling outside the United States pre-COVID, but I love this image and wanted to share it with you because I dig how it feels like possibility.

Like all you have to do is walk through the doors being presented to you. Walk towards YES.

Right now, for me, YES feels like showing up for the hard stuff. The shadow work. This isn’t a post about tarot, but it’s worth mentioning that my card for 2020 was the Devil. I wasn’t happy about it. The Devil represents over-indulgence and addiction. Sometimes it can be a hint that you need to loosen up a little and have fun, but I didn’t think that’s what it meant for me.

It took me a long time—nearly half the year—to realize what my wee beastie, my devil, was: my scarcity complex. Once I noticed that, I couldn’t stop seeing how, in one way or another, scarcity was running the show.

Shadow Work

While there are always areas I can grow in, a big part of the work I'm being asked to do this year (by my heart, my tarot cards which stalk me with very consistent messages, and all my inner work) is to ditch anything that reeks of scarcity. A tall order in these times, with so much uncertainty.


Anyone else having a hard time trusting that if you leap, there's a net that will catch you? Scared that there are only so many nets and there might not be one when YOU look down?
 

As I peer more closely at this wiley little gremlin, I'm beginning to see that ditching our scarcity mentality is about trusting ourselves. 


Trusting in our worthiness. Trusting that our words matter. Trusting that we matter. Trusting that we have something to offer this world, and that there are people in the world who need what we have to give.


Permission to show up for yourself. In the writer's seat, in the moment when we indulge in comparison (hello, Instagram FOMO), when we have a book idea and then see a book just like it. When Self-Doubt, the Inner Critic, and their good friend Fear come out to play.

When we read our work and believe it to be terrible.

Saying YES to Your Creativity

I came across these wise words by Mary Oliver recently, and I feel like they really speak to me - to all the ways I might be saying NO to my creativity because I'm scared it won't be enough to catch me when I fall.

When we give our creative work power and time, we're signaling to ourselves and those around us that we believe there are enough seats at the table. Enough shelf space in the bookstore. Enough great ideas for all our beautiful minds.

Power and time is a great big freaking YES to creative leaps. Our work and our devotion to it - and the writing life - make up the net that will catch us when we fall.

There are enough nets. And we will weave more if anyone finds themself short one. We can hold each other.
 

Now, when I have a decision to make - about my creativity, my writing, my life in these uncertain times - I'm beginning to ask myself this question in order to banish scarcity and other mindset gremlins:
 
How can I trust my inner wisdom in this situation?
 

How can I trust...

• The knot in my stomach
• The bad vibe
• The niggling feeling
• The warm YES, shackles off, I'm doing this feeling
• The NO
• The not knowing and the being OKAY with the not knowing
• The gut feeling
• The tight chest
• The not-feeling-it
• The FEELING
• The jazzy, zippy, yummy electric currents
• The body
• My own direct, lived experience
• The proof in my personal pudding

Are You Shackles On or Shackles Off?

Author Martha Beck talks about the concept of tuning in with your body and recognizing if it feels “shackles off” (yes, hot, free) or “shackles on” (no, cold, imprisoning) in many of her books. While there are many strategies, it can be very simple:

1. Get a baseline (see below)

2. Use a statement for the thing you’re deciding about doing or not doing. Example: I am going to grad school.

3. Tune in to how your body feels. Is it the shackles on or off feeling? Is your body saying NO (shackles on) or YES (shackles off)?

4. Trust your body. It bypasses your inner critic like nobody’s business.

How To Get A Shackles On / Off Baseline

Martha Beck Inner Teacher / Essential Self Exercise

I often refer to this as “calibrating our inner compass to point to our North Star.” Connecting to the body and bypassing the mental terrain where the inner critic, the shoulds, and your mother live

“ Psychological suffering always comes from internal splits between what your encultured mind believes and what feels deeply true to you.”

— Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity

This following exercise in Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity – I’ve simplified here for our purposes:

Step 1: Say the following to yourself….

I am meant to [insert something you don’t like doing] “I am meant to call my health insurance company.”

Step 2: Notice how the body feels when you say this.

Step 3: Say the below to yourself.

I am meant to live in peace.

Step 4: Notice how your body feels when you say this to yourself.

Working with these phrases, you can begin to really feel and listen to your inner teacher. The first sentence is always whatever activity you want to explore for an integrity gut check, and the second sentence is always the same.

This first time through, you’re establishing ground zero for how your inner teacher / essential self / integrity feels when it’s in and out of alignment. You can keep coming back to this ground zero when you need to refresh your memory.

This work establishes your baseline for shackles on / off. I am meant to live in peace (or a more resonant sentence of your choosing), will give you specific physical sensations of YES. While your opposite, that will be a NO. The YES or NO sensations will likely vary in degree in intensity depending on how how stakes the situation is for you.

Once you have this baseline established, either of these approaches (shackles on/off or the “I am mean to”) should help you greatly when trying to trust your gut, no matter how large or small the choice at hand is.

---

Listening to our guts, moving toward YES, doing the hard inner work....

This is the trust fall we have with ourselves. Our writing. The universe itself.
 
Leap.
Fly.
Land.

Tarot For Writers

Me, at a magical shop in Seven Dials, London

““The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.””

— W.B. Yeats

Why Tarot Is Great For Writers

I’ve had a tarot practice for a few years now, a daily habit that helps me get in alignment for the day and allows me to create some structure around the inner work I do on both myself and my books. Sure, it’s woo, but I’m a firm believer in finding tools that help a gal access her own inner wisdom, modalities that enable me and my writers to understand ourselves better so that this wisdom can make it onto the page.

Tarot was something I at first avoided: having grown up in a religious home, I’d always been told it was the devil’s work. But I’m older and wiser now and have thoroughly jumped on the tarot bandwagon—it’s recent popularity makes it easy to explore the practice, with gorgeous decks for any and all personalities, as well as wonderful online teachers and resources (not to mention some terrific books).

Whether you've played around with the cards or not, it's a really fun and enlightening (and tactile!) way to do both inner exploration and work on your characters and story. It gets me away from the screen and helps me tap into that well of divine feminine wisdom. The images and archetypes of the cards call up our own ancient understanding of the story of being human—the universal struggles and triumphs we all face.

Guided Introspection

I have a friend who says tarot is “guided introspection” and I like that definition. It’s not prophetic. It’s not fortune telling. You make your own magic. To me, the cards are almost journal prompts: I ask a question that is thoughtful and intentional. Then I shuffle the deck and pick a card or do a spread of cards (always facedown).

Each day I pull one card with the query, “What do I need to know today?” This is often called a “daily draw.” Sometimes I journal about it, other times I don’t.

Whatever card I get is an invitation to inquiry. That’s it.

I’m a bit of a spiritual misfit, so I think of tarot the same way I’ve come to think of all things spiritual: “It’s a mystery!” (I’m channeling Geoffrey Rush from Shakespeare In Love here). To me, it doesn’t matter if my cards have a spark of divine inspiration, a push this way or that from the universe or if they are only ever simply tools to help me better engage with my subconscious.

Sure, it’s uncanny how often they are spot on. The more you work with the cards - especially once you’ve found a deck you love - the better able you are to see the layers in the messages, the connections between cards, the shape of the story of your life.

My cat, Circe, with the Spacious Tarot deck - one of my favorites!

Beginning A Tarot Practice

Tarot can seem overwhelming at first. There are a lot of cards and you won’t be familiar with what they mean. Have patience and just get to know them better. Each deck comes with a little book that will give you a basic interpretation of the cards, but what’s more important is what the images bring up for you. That’s why it’s so helpful to get a deck with imagery that really speaks to you. There is something out there for everyone. (More on decks later).

Each little book will also have some spread suggestions, so you really can just dive in and go for it.

• While there are tarot apps, I do not recommend them. I find that I get the most out of the tactile experience of seeing the cards, shuflfing them, laying them out. I like the energy I put into the deck and like to think that something alchemical might be happening through that (admittedly, that is super woo - but I like woo). In this way, tarot has become one of my go-to ways to fill my creative well.

Having a book is really great for deeper and more insightful understanding of the cards (I also have some recommendations below for that). The books will also help you draw more connections with your work.

For example, you might look at which card represents your protagonist and then do a deep dive into that card to see if your research sparks anything for your story.

The main thing is to simply spend time with the cards. Over months of daily draws or spreads, you’ll begin to forge a relationship and understanding of them. Plus, it’s super fun.

Journaling With Tarot Cards

I love to get some good introspection on and I’ve found a wonderful bridge between tarot and my journaling: Mary K. Greer’s Write From Your Heart practice.

In short, you begin writing in your journal, then shuffle your deck and pull a card. Write some more. When you’re ready for a boost of insight, pull another card. I do about five cards.

When I’m journaling in this way, I approach it like Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. It’s stream-of-consciousness. Usually I do this for myself, but you can absolutely do this for your book. Maybe you’re stuck, maybe you aren’t sure about next steps, or you’re trying to understand your protagonist better.

Seriously: Get ready for some big insights.

Tarot For You & Your Characters

Below is a tarot spread I created for my most recent novel, Little Universes. It helped me get much deeper into my complex heroines' hearts - and I really enjoyed doing it for myself too. I made this spread up myself because there were specific questions I needed answered for my characters. Carrie Mallon (of The Spacious Tarot fame) made up this little graphic for me when she shared the spread with her tarot devotees when the book first came out. Side note: Making up your own spread is a wonderfully creative act!

A tsunami plays a big part in the book, so I went with a wave shape and then I based the query on the age old meditation question - it's actually an incredibly powerful practice to work with this question. I was inspired by Rumi too: "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."

Whoa. Right? Right?!

Sometimes when I get stuck in a book, I do this or other spreads and it almost always opens up some line of thinking I hadn’t explored before.

Internet Resources For Tarot



Susannah Conway: Best online tarot classes EVER. She is amazing. The 78 Mirrors Course is for practitioners who are familiar with tarot already, but I suspect her Daily Guidance is a great intro. I love her! So brilliant and creative.

Carrie Mallon: My go-to gal for interpretations. She’s the co-creator of a deck I ADORE, The Spacious Tarot. Her Instagram and newsletters are fabulous. I adore her interpretations of the Wild Unknown deck, but you can use those for any deck—I certainly do. Play around on her site and get to know her. I also did a Skype reading with her and it was FANTASTIC. She’s the real deal.



Decks

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are decks that are called “tarot decks” and some called “oracle decks.” Get a tarot deck. While oracle decks can be fun, they won’t give you the deep and long term insights that tarot will, simply because oracle decks are each their own thing. They’re not based on the archetypes and Jungian psychology that underscore tarot. It’s much harder to make connections over time with them, and apply them to you and your work.


It’s generally considered best to start out with the Rider-Waite-Smith, which is what everything is pretty much based on. Get the Centennial Edition - the colors are prettier. These will familiarize you with the foundational archetypes of the tarot.

I also really dig The Modern Witch Tarot Deck as a starter deck. Super fun and totally gorgeous. It’s very close to the traditional meanings and can be a great entryway into tarot - a little more accessible, if you will (and less patriarchal and WAY more diverse). For example, The Hermit card is a gal with her laptop - as writers, we so get that.

My current deck love is the Shadowscapes Tarot - it is perfect for creatives and beautiful and gives great insights. I bought it at a witchy store in Edinburgh called The Wyrd Shop, like you do. 

Shadowscapes Hermit Card - see how different these depictions are?!

I just got a new deck and think it's PERFECT for storytellers, as it's based on fairy tales and folklore from around the world (and it's gorgeous!): Tarot of the Divine.

The Wild Unknown was my true gateway drug for tarot once I learned more about the cards - it’s a powerful deck, but it’s very different from the traditional RWS deck, so it’s not one to start with. It is the one that really spoke to me for the longest time. But! It’s messages are really blunt - it’s a punch in the vag sometimes, so just be ready for some BIG truth bombs.

I also adore The Spacious Tarot - its co-creator, Carrie Mallon, is my go-to gal for readings and tarot wisdom. The Tattoo Tarot is also great fun. 

Go on Pinterest to check out different kinds of decks - it’s so much fun to see what’s out there, and to compare interpretations in all the different illustrations. Instagram will have a lot, too. There’s a #tarotforwriters hashtag, even!



Which deck do I choose?

It’s a personal choice, but I think most tarot people would agree with me that you’ve gotta start with the Rider-Waite-Smith because EVERYTHING is based on it, or in conversation with it. Tarot can feel intimidating at first because it’s 78 cards and they all have different meanings. You don’t have to memorize them all at once! I still don’t remember what half of them mean. Keep an easy guide handy nearby (all decks come with their own little white book). If you start here, then all future decks will make a lot more sense. 


If you really want to dive in, I’d get the Rider-Waite-Smith Centennial Edition (same as the regular, but prettier, with Smith’s original coloring). At the same time, get a deck that really speaks to you. Usually you fall in love with the illustrations online or in a store and it just…calls to you. Get that one, too. Again, see my recs above as a starting off point, but have fun exploring!


Rider-Waite-Smith “Clone” Decks: These are decks that follow the same structure and concept of the original cards. So the illustrations might be VERY different, but the scene depicted, the message of the card, is the same vibe. Clones include Aquarian Tarot and the Uusi Pagan Otherworlds, as well as The Modern Witch Tarot and the Eight of Coins Tattoo Tarot. Shadowscapes is kind of a clone, but also very unique. I’d say it’s a hybrid. 


Non-clone decks would be the Wild Unknown, one of the most popular decks in the world right now, the Naked Heart tarot, and the Spacious Tarot (see above). 



Eight of Coins Tattoo Tarot Fool Card

Where to get decks:

You can get them in a lot of places, but I recommend checking out your local witchy store first. Support your local woo! To be fair, many stores don’t have a great stock, so I often buy most of my decks online. You can often get them through your local bookstore, Barnes and Noble, or - if it’s a newly created deck - the artist’s website.

But I feel like when I get cards from a physical place, it tends to make that deck a little extra special.



Books On tarot

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (Rachel Pollack): The tarot bible. A must-have. There’s a new edition (the yellow one) that is the whole thing in one book. Back in the day, it was two volumes. 


Modern Tarot: Connecting with Your Higher Self Through The Wisdom of the Cards (Michelle Tea): The book kicks ass. Michelle is a writer outside of this book, so she really gets the whole creative deal. Her interpretations and illustrations take all kinds of diversity into account. She has great interpretations with funny asides, and she’s not afraid to get vulnerable and share her own story to help you. Also, she has fun weird, witchy activities for each card, if you want to play Sabrina for a night. 

Tarot for Your Self (Mary K. Greer): This book is AMAZING. Very in-depth and really helps you develop a relationship with the cards. Admittedly, it can feel like a deep dive if you're just starting out, so I'd recommend this once you have a solid practice or are really committed to going all in.

The Creative Tarot (Jessa Crispin): A book for artists who do tarot. Lots of fun activities and interpretations, though, honestly, I never use it much. To each her own!

Podcasts Featuring TAROT

Biddy Tarot: This is how I first started to really learn about the tarot world. There are lots of great interviews and insights, as well as tons of resources. She also has a website and deck.

Interpretations

There are many interpretations for the cards and it depends on the reader and the deck / deck creator. What matters is what the card means and brings up for you. However, understanding classical interpretations and intersecting them with things like psychology, history, etc. can be deeply rewarding for your introspection.

The Uusi Pagan Otherworlds Deck



The Queen of Wands

A fun thing to do is figure out which of the tarot’s court cards you are. The court cards represent aspects of ourselves—and sometimes the people in our lives. They’re also great archetypes that can help you as you’re building your characters in your books. (Fun exercise: go through the court cards and figure out who all your characters are AND your fave characters in the books you love). 

Tarot teacher Susannah Conway (mentioned above), took the trouble of figuring out the Myers-Briggs for each of these cards (you can learn all about that in her 78 Mirrors Course, which I am obsessed with). No surprise to me, my court card is the Queen of Wands - INFJ, baby. Even if you’re not an INFJ, the Queen is a card card to prop up in your writing area because she’s basically the patron of us lady writers. Read on for more (this is all from Susannah Conway, btw).

The Queen of Wands


Motivation: The Embodiment of Passion and Creativity
Myers-Briggs: INFJ
Keywords: vibrant, warmth, sensual, visionary, magnetic, dramatic
Element: Water of Fire
Wands: Active/yang energy


”She is the witchiest of the four queens. Strong-willed and confident, but that fire is tempered by water energy, so she’s not too full on. (The wands are the fire element of the cards, representing creativity, passion, action, and energy). 

Self-expression is her obsession and she inspires others to let their creativity flow. She teaches us how to embody our creative power and recognize our own magnificence. She encourages us to trust our desires and live out our creative dreams.

She has a tendency toward the dramatic. The shadow side of her might result in lethargy, a lack of direction, or impulsiveness. But she’s strong and she’ll overcome those tough times. 

The Queen of Wands reminds us to give in, or to give up our dreams.” 

---

I also really love Carrie Mallon’s take on the Queen of Wands in the Wild Unknown deck (in this unique deck, the Queen is known as the “Mother of Wands”). Carrie has her own deck now, but her interpretations of these cards have been incredibly popular. Find those here. I use these interpretations for any deck.

As you’ll see, interpretations can vary.



An excerpt from Carrie on the Mother of Wands in The Wild Unknown:

”The queen radiates the energy of the suit of wands from the  inside out. Devotion is one of the keywords I associate with this card:  she is clear about her passions and devoted to nurturing them. Others  gravitate towards her inner warmth. She sets a keen example for living a  creative, passionate, radiant life.

In many decks, the Queen of Wands is shown with a sunflower.  This symbolizes her blossoming life force. She knows who she is and  lives securely from her glowing center. She is not oblivious to the  hardships of life – she is willing to stand up completely for what she  believes in, even if that is risky or uncomfortable. But even so, she’s  an eternal optimist, always oriented towards the good in herself, and  drawing out the good in others. 

In a reading: The Mother of Wands may be asking you to follow her example. Practice  gratitude and protect the things that matter to you. Keep your attitude  bright and good things will come your way. Live with your whole heart,  be devoted to your path. You’re not here to half-ass things. Let your  zest for life color everything you do!”

Hermit card from The Wild Unknown

Wherever your tarot journey leads you, I hope it brings wonderful insights into both you AND your characters.

Whatever helps, right?

Add this to your meditation or mindfulness for writers practice, and creative well will be overflowing!

How To Take A Writer's Sabbath

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music.
Your days are your sonnets.”

— Oscar Wilde

It wasn't until January 2020 that I finally started taking a weekly Writer's Sabbath. Since then, my life and my creativity have been immeasurably better.

Put simply: Having a weekly Writer's Sabbath has given my creativity and mental health a boost unlike anything since I began a serious meditation and mindfulness practice.

Every Saturday I take the whole day off. I do not write or coach or teach. I do whatever my heart fancies. I don't run errands that aren't exciting and creative to me. I don't clean. I don't even cook that much.

I follow Walt Whitman's advice: "Dismiss whatever insults your own soul."

This is why people rarely receive emails, calls, or texts from me on Saturdays. You won't see me on social, unless I'm feeling arty and want to post a photo I took on Insta. I don't schedule anything. Not even fun things because I don't want to be beholden to anything or anyone.

My Writer's Sabbath make me feel like the above photo, which I took on a visit to one of my favorite places in the world, the Los Angeles Public Library (main downtown branch), my childhood library. I look forward to it all week. It's the one day that's mine and, even though it's just one day and I work pretty hard on all the other ones, it really is enough to refill my well and keep me going.

I specifically use the word "sabbath" because it's truly meant to be a day of non-work, of rest, of filling the well and nourishing my spirit.

I have no agenda on this day. I don't have to do anything arty or intellectual or go through my TBR or whatever. I just wake up and do whatever I want.

One sabbath, I read a whole romance novel. Another, I binge-watched Killing Eve (I rarely watch TV during the week, so this is a rare treat). I'll wander through my house and pick up random art or poetry books and read them. Last week, I read part of a book on the Romanovs because why not and I took a bath while listening to an audio book. Among other delightful things.

My clients who have kids aren't usually able to take a whole day like this, but I encourage them to grab a set amount of hours to themselves, in agreement with a partner. Or let themselves off the hook for chores, cooking, and the like. It's a day to be more gentle on themselves as a parent and to also have zero pressure to write. They read the whole paper when they get up, or have that afternoon glass of wine. They're good to themselves.

It's not just about the day itself: it's a sabbath mindset. It's recognizing that in order to be creative, we need to give ourselves space and quiet and rest. So even if you don't get the whole day, your mind is sabbath-oriented, and so you still get some much needed R&R.

If you're running on empty, now would be a great time to introduce a sabbath into your writing practice.

Make no mistake, the sabbath is working FOR you, even though you don't have to lift a finger.

How To Take A Writer's Sabbath / Access Sabbath Mindset

As writers, we often forget what Oscar Wilde said about our life being our art, about our days being sonnets. Many writers have frazzled, harried days, dump themselves in the writer's chair and expect some magic to happen. But if you haven't been filling the well (sabbath, meditation, etc.), then it isn't fair to YOU to expect flow. So sabbath mindset is an all-week thing. It's being intentional about taking that sabbath and organizing your week accordingly to ensure you don't cheat yourself out of it. (Something is always coming up, no?). It's putting your sabbath on your calendar and making it non-negotiable.

To me the sabbath is a sonnet, a day where I actively enjoy my life and myself.

Here are my best practices, whether your sabbath lasts all day or just a few precious hours:

• Do it every week, ideally on the same day (consistency is key to keeping a habit!). Make it non-negotiable. Schedule it.

• Don't write or work on your book on this day, unless it's to do something yummy like build  a playlist or Pinterest board. You'll be amazed how nice it feels to have one day where you don't put pressure on yourself to be creative. To not have that guilty game with yourself I know so many of you play. ("I should write, but...")

• Write a list of what "insults your own soul" and don't do those things on your sabbath no matter what. Could be grocery shopping, going to a party, email. The more clear you are on this, the easier it is to set yourself up for success throughout the week. You do the grocery shopping earlier. You call that friend who yaks your ear off the day before. You turn down invitations if they're for your sabbath.

• Get support and accountability. If you have kids, arrange for someone to give you a bit of time to yourself ahead of time. If you're a workaholic, ask a writing friend to keep you accountable. If you have a boss from your day job who has no boundaries, put up a vacation responder every sabbath and let them know you won't be available that day.

• Don't plan anything for your sabbath. Don't sneak in big projects for the house and pretend they're creative. Don't set up expectations for how the day will go. Just wake up and see where the day takes you.

• Be curious. Take good care of you. Be lazy and have fun.

• If you feel resistance to taking a sabbath or immediately assume you couldn't possibly find the time, I encourage you to explore that. Why is it hard to give yourself one day?

Benefits

• The best and biggest exhale you'll have all week. It's such a relief when my sabbath (Saturdays) roll around.

• Increased flow. (This is why I talk about this so much on the Flow Lab!)

• Filling the well to set your writing practice up for success in the next week. (Can't run on empty, my friends!)

• More inner expansiveness for optimal story brain: Seriously, even if I did the laziest, consumer-based stuff all day, I almost always get great ideas on my sabbath. I think by relaxing and not writing or thinking about writing, things can arrive. Sort of like if you look for love you can't find it, but then it finds you the minute you stop looking.

• Happiness. Seriously, I'm just happy on that day. I look forward to it all week long and I enjoy it. (If I don't enjoy it, it's because somehow I broke my sabbath rules and it killed the vibe).

• With everything going on in the world, it gives me more ways to explore what's coming up for me. I might spend a good part of the day journaling or doing a tarot spread or taking longer walks than usual.

If You've Got No Creative Juice

The sabbath is just one of many things I help the writers I work with integrate into their creative lives. So many of my writers are struggling to hold onto their creativity right now. If you’ve got no creative juice, then it’s time to get proactive.

Here’s to filling the well and dismissing whatever insults your own soul-

We’re not your average Jane’s writing group.

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Why You Should Keep Writing When The World Is Burning

Dearest Writer:

Don't stop writing.

The world is burning, but:

Don't stop writing.

Everything is uncertain and terrifying, but:

Don't stop writing.

Why? Why do words on pages or stories about made-up things (if you write fiction, which I know most of you do) even MATTER right now?

A thought experiment:

Think of one person in your life who isn't a writer. Who might not have much education. Who has trouble articulating their feelings and thoughts. Think about how that person feels when they read a book and recognize parts of themselves in it - and understand themselves and their place in the world more because of it. Think about how books can help them feel seen and known. Or how these books can open them up to new ideas and ways of being. This can happen in ANY kind of story. The lightest comedy can erase hate. Just look at Glee. I saw with my own eyes people in my life become less intolerant simply because they liked a story with characters who were different than them, characters they came to love and root for. And then, in their real lives, people like those characters? Well, suddenly they weren't "other."

Back when I lived in Boston, I was the Volunteer Coordinator for the Prison Book Program. (A worthy organization to donate to, by the way!)

I received so many letters from Black men--many of whom had been put away in their youth--seeking books. Some wanted practical things like legal aid, while others just wanted a good story. They wanted to get out of the cages our society had put them into through the pre-school to prison pipeline. Books were that escape.

So we need everything you've got, writers. They need it.


Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. This is the spacetime juncture we all find ourselves in right now amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest in the United States that was a LONG time coming.

It can feel like writing is pointless. Like your stories or words--maybe even YOU--are pointless. Spoiler alert: Your words and your stories and * especially * YOU are necessary and important.

So is our fight for justice and the words we choose to take part in that fight with. But your writing and your fight are not mutually exclusive.

Stories are empathy machines and this world needs empathy now more than ever.

Stories are sanctuaries - and this world needs those too.

Whatever you write--whether it's topical or escapist--a reader somewhere needs it.

The past few days, I've been switching between romance novels for escape and books on race. I've been reading non-fiction and fiction that helps me get into the world of my new book. I've been reading poetry. I've been reading the Times and I've been reading my own work-- books written long ago whose characters are my comfort food.

So whatever you're writing: keep writing. Or give yourself permission to take a break if you need it--not too long, though. The world needs stories.

Of course, writing is not ALL one must do.

But this is what I can speak to. I encourage you to seek Black voices in the creativity space to go deeper with how you can use your words in the fight against injustice and to gather their wisdom on creativity.

One great place to start is by following Kate Johnson, a Black meditation teacher and writer who led a retreat on the intersection of spirituality and race that I attended in 2017 as part of my meditation teacher teacher training. You can find her here.

Writer Rachel Cargle has a wonderful Instagram with TONS of valuable resources to both educate and activate in the link of her Instagram bio, as well as a great feed. I've found this to be immensely helpful as I've navigated my role as a White woman in all of this.

Make no mistake: an ignorant writer is worse than not writing at all. So we educate ourselves, we write, and we fight.

There are so, so many ways to get involved and I trust that you wonderful writers are all delving into those options. The key, of course, is to be active characters, just as we strive to write active characters.

Passive protagonists never make for a good story.

To go deeper into how you might align your words and your values, check out this post on How To Write A Writer’s Artist Statement.

To your words-

Scratching

“The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message, thumping away in my head: “You need an idea.””

— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

Writer, tell me if you can relate:

You're in a writing funk.

The problem isn't so much snatching away a few minutes here and there to write--or maybe even a few hours--the real problem is that you just aren't feeling it. Sure there might be reasons (pandemics, an unfilled creative well, writing life trauma), but really you

Just. Aren't. Feeling. It.

You're reading craft books, you've covered the pages of multiple notebooks with reams of notes on possible projects. Nearly all of your sentences to anyone who will listen start with, "What if..."

What if I wrote a story like, um, like Romeo and Juliet, but in Mars?! Or, no wait--Romeo and Juliet ON A SUBMARINE.

Story ideas come and go, and maybe for a minute there you're really digging something. But then suddenly you're...not. They all sound stupid and pointless and you feel like maybe you should write something really IMPORTANT because, you know, pandemics.

The whole part of the process where you're between projects and you haven't committed to the idea for your next one (or even HAD it yet) is DEEPLY uncomfortable.

Just check out the quote at the top there by choreographer Twyla Tharp.

Up until quite recently, I've been in this place—and it’s not the first time I’ve been here. In fact, this is the first stop I make in my writing journey when I want to write a new story.

It’s not an issue of lacking creative wellness. I meditate and walk nearly every day. I have a writer's sabbath once a week. I mean, I literally created something called the Flow Lab. I had scores of ideas because the well was filled and yet...nothing. I felt like a daemon in His Dark Materials that hadn't settled on its form yet. One day, I'm positive I'm writing that WWII novel I literally went to Germany to do research for. The next? Tired of Nazis. I am FOR SURE writing a book about star-crossed lovers. A week later. UGH, this book is crap. Etc.

Scratching

In her book The Creative Habit, Tharp talks about this process better than anyone I've ever read. She calls it "scratching." Seriously buy this book and read the whole thing, but ESPECIALLY read the whole chapter on scratching. (While you’re at it, get the book Art and Fear.) I turned to Tharp again recently--as I turn to this book often over the years--for some comfort. It reminded me this is all very normal and necessary and I'm not alone.

This whole phase where you're searching for an idea is part of the process and one that you can bring a lot of intentionality to. Rather than turning to desperation or moping, you can actively show up for this stage.


A friend passed this Nick Cave quote along to me at just the right time, when I was feeling pretty alone in my writing funk and I reposted it a few days ago on Instagram:

Below is what happens during this stage for me, and it always happens this way because it's my process, but the thing is that I FORGET it's my process until my husband tells me I do this every time.

I share it in the hopes that if you're going through this, you can get some ideas for how to scratch on your own.

A Study In Scratching

1. I finish a book and either it's been accepted or rejected by my agent / editor. Now I have to write something new. Because I'm often juggling multiple projects, I usually have a WIP to fall back on while I'm searching for my next idea. This makes the whole process less uncomfortable because I get to be writing and working on something while looking for the next thing. Except this spring I DIDN'T HAVE ANOTHER PROJECT TO FALL BACK ON. Suddenly, I was in the No Man's Land of story ideas.

1. At first, this was exciting. Yay! I can play in my creativity sandbox and see what I come up with! I do writing exercises, I read poetry, I work on craft. I commit to an hour a day instead of 3 hours for writing because I know that 3 hours of scratching will just make me anxious.

2. I latch on to the first good idea and I'm FULLY COMMITTED. Until...I'm not. Then I start rapidly cycling through ideas. I bring out my trusty cigar box of index cards, filled with story ideas, that I bought at a voodoo shop in NOLA. Oh YES! I forgot all about that great story idea I'd thrown in there! I start working on it, but....no. It's not "the one."

3. I decide that the reason I can't focus on an idea is because of the chaos in my outer life. I begin rearranging furniture, throwing things out, organizing, cleaning. I make a lot of soup. I believe FIRMLY in the Gospel of Soup and that all crises can be weathered with a pot of soup. (We currently have A LOT of soup set aside in the freezer).

4. Throughout this time, my mind is whirling and whirring and I'm trying not to think about the market or that I promised a specific book to my agent by a specific time and now I hate that book idea and that time is getting closer. I start saying, "Merde" under my breath. A lot.

5. Despair settles in, but because I've been here before and I also have a healthy writer wellness system in place, I keep meditating and doing mindfulness work through all this discomfort, and keeping my weekly writer sabbath. I also am sure to be gentle with myself. I don't usually watch much TV, but during this time, I allow more of that. More down time. More binge reading. More gentleness in general.

6. I remind myself, again and again, that this is the season I'm in, that seasons change, that I just need to lean in and let this be uncomfortable. It's going to be okay. I have proof in this pudding: It's always okay in the end. An idea always comes. A story always tugs my sleeve. It's just taking its goddamn TIME about it, is all.

7. So I'm showing up and being mindful and filling the well and sitting with this uncomfortable uncertainty. I'm feeling kind of enlightened about the whole thing. I just REALLY MISS WRITING. I miss it! I miss writing a book! Telling a story! Living in new worlds with characters I love.

8. This is all made worse when triggered by comparison (someone I know gets a book deal etc.) or some sort of rejection in the industry (a book I have out doesn't do well etc). The only thing that saves me here is my mindfulness practice, which is why I harp on all the writers I work with to practice. We don't practice for the good times, we practice for these tough moments, so we can be ready when they come and not lose our shit. 

9. Throughout this time, I'm working hard to be intentional (which is my number one rule for all writing, whether you're in this stage or drafting or revising). Show up. As Picasso said, "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." An hour a day of scratching. More reading throughout the day. More walks. More permission in general. I try to clear my schedule more than usual.

10. And then: EUREKA! The story comes. Out of nowhere or maybe it's been there all along and I just needed to see it in a certain light. Something clicks. I can see why this is not only the right story for me, but the right story for me RIGHT NOW. Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean you have to write it. I have to feel really jazzed and jazzed for a while. I have to want to WRITE the story, not just think about it.*

    
    *As of press time, so to speak, I think I HAVE found my next project. Ask me in a month if that's still true.

“A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them...Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you.”

— Twyla Tharp

Me, meditating in the Word Garden at Highlights Foundation during the Secret Garden retreat I led in 2019.

One of the things I tell the writers I work with is that we have to think about writing as seasons.

Sometimes, you're in a really prolific, working season. Other times, you're a fallow field, taking a rest and waiting for ideas to plant themselves in you. All of that is good. All of that is the path.


Getting the book deal isn't the path. Those are ephemeral and they aren't writing. They're selling - two different things entirely. So the PATH of the writer is writing and creating and dreaming up stories. The PATH is the goal. So you can chill out because you've already achieved your goal, so long as you're still scratching and, eventually, writing in earnest.

We don't look at a fallow field and think it's a lazy piece of shit or that it's uninspired or that it's never going to amount to anything. We see it for what it is: earth, resting and regenerating.

During these scratching periods, I often begin questioning my place in the writing world and the world in general. This is all healthy. It's a time for reassessment.

Each new project is an invitation to challenge yourself, to create something new and to integrate who you are right now into your art. It's normal. It's part of the process. I literally do this every time.

So the first step is recognizing that this is your season: the season where you are waiting for something to bloom. Once you name it, you can work with it.

“As Pema Chödrön, the meditation teacher, says, “When we realize the path is the goal, there’s a sense of workability.””

A Few Scratching Ideas To Get You Going That Work For Me

Be intentional. See below to download my Writing Cave Sign In Sheet. When you're in scratching mode, sign in to your cave for an hour and do any of the below, or your own scratching activities.

• Meditate every day for at least 10 minutes. Meditation works the same muscles you use when you're in flow. It calms you the fuck down when you're in a creative panic. There are answers in the silence. You just have to listen.

• Take a writer's sabbath once a week. A whole day with no writing or scratching. You need to keep that well filled and you need to give yourself a break otherwise you'll go into a creative tailspin. Speaking from experience here.

• Read Poetry. One, it will help you improve your craft. Two, it will get you in the mood. Go through an anthology or pick a poet and read one of their collections. This is an excellent way to begin scratching.

• Do tarot spreads. Ask questions about yourself, your life, stories, etc.

• Go down the rabbit hole and get curiouser and curiouser. If you're thinking about textiles, just go down that hole. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote what she felt was her greatest novel by simply indulging in her interest in gardening when she was scratching for an idea. Just stay off social. Stick to Wikipedia.

• If you have a hobby that really helps nourish you, do that too. I make soup and do tarot and play with my cat and nerd out about whisky and Scotland.

• Take walks. I wrote this post on how walking is a game changer for loads of writers and thinkers, including yours truly.

• Read. Pick up whatever is striking your fancy. Read outside your genre. Read omnivorously. Read, read, freaking read. Seriously. It's literally your job.

• Use this time to grow in your craft and lean in to your writing community. Get some mentorship. Take a class to grow in a particular area of craft.
  
  
  Here's to your scratching!

Walk This Way

This post originally appeared in my Mindfulness Monday column on the Vermont College of Fine Arts blog

One of my favorite practices as a writer is walking. I’m not at all alone in this.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

 ”

— Henry David Thoreau

“I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.”

— Hemingway

It’s been calculated that William Wordsworth, whose poetry is rich with natural imagery and public spaces, walked as much as 180,000 miles in his life (six and a half miles a day beginning at the age of five – what?!).

Walking has been a part of my writing process for years and years. Somehow, it always does the trick when I need to shake out the cobwebs, reboot my system, or find some inspiration. Without fail, a walk will help me sort out a tricky plot problem, give me a cool new story idea, or provide a line or scene that I’ve just got to get down on the page as soon as I’m home. There’s a reason walking works, and it’s worth making an effort to bring more of it into your process.

In this post, I’ll be getting into WHY walking is so helpful for writers (this great New Yorker article outlines some of what I’ll be sharing below) and then I’ll be getting into some practical things you can do to bring walking meditation into your writing process to increase flow and focus—and maybe get some of those Eurekas! you’re hoping for on your WIP. I even have a handy video tutorial!

Why Walking Is A Magic Potion For Writers

What is it about walking that is so helpful to us as writers?

• Chemical stuff in the body. Namely, your brain gets more oxygen. Think improving focus and memory.

• Ever had an Aha! moment while walking? That’s because the act of walking promotes new connections between brain cells.

A fairly recent study has shown that walking actually helps us have innovative ideas and strokes of insight. This is because the mind is allowed to wander freely and things can naturally bubble up (more on this later, because this is somewhat counter to what I’m going to tell you about traditional walking meditation practice). Maria Popova has some great insights about walking as creative fuel on Brain Pickings that’s worth a read.

Where we walk is important too—think green. Think nature. Think expansive. This is because nature gives rise to tuning in more to the senses. To paying attention. And this is what meditation is all about.

Walking Meditation For Writers

In his New Yorker review of Frédéric Gros’ book, “A Philosophy of Walking,” Adam Gopnik asserts that walking “is the Western equivalent of what Asians accomplish by sitting. Walking is the Western form of meditation.”

Gros seems to agree. In Philosophy he says: “You’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood.”

Walking is actually one of the four postures of meditation suggested by the Buddha. It’s as legitimate as sitting. So it’s a great option for those of you who aren’t ready to hit the cushion or chair just yet. (Although, if my mile-a-minute monkey mind can do it, so can yours.).

What I love about walking meditation is that it’s a great head-clearer. Sometimes, I’ll just set my meditation timer and do five minutes of walking meditation between hour sessions of writing, just to get my body moving. It really helps. It doesn’t have to be this big deal. Get up and do the practice for a few minutes. You’ve got to start somewhere. Longer walking meditation sessions—twenty minutes or so in a backyard, if I’ve access to one, or in a living room if the weather isn’t playing nice or I don’t have a yard to use—is great for going deep. It’s a proper meditation session and very often yields enormous results. Some of my biggest life choices have come as a direct result of walking meditation.

How Walking Meditation Is Different Than Taking A Stroll

When I go for a walk outside, that’s a walk—not walking meditation. The meditation practice is very intentional, along a short, set path. You go back and forth, focusing entirely on the feel of your feet moving across the earth. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says to, “Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”

Your object of meditation is the feel of your feet moving. So when your mind wanders, you actually want to bring it back to your object of meditation. Now, this is counter to what that study earlier in this post said is so great about walking and creativity: it allows your mind to wander freely. True, we do bring the mind back to its focus for the meditation, but I haven’t found this to be a creative hindrance because it’s working my flow muscle (That’s because what’s happening in your brain when you meditate is the same thing that happens when it’s in flow. I talk more about that here).

I’ve found that walking meditation gives me laser focus and calm. In fact, this same study I mentioned earlier about the connection between the free-floating mind while walking and creativity says that if you want laser focus, an ambling walk isn’t actually ideal for that, so walking meditation is PERFECT for you procrastinators or very distracted writers out there.

So, if you’re looking to clear your head, regain your focus, re-align yourself: a traditional walking meditation session could be just the thing.

If you really want to have your mind wander freely or play jazz with walking meditation, you can still do the traditional set up, but then allow your object of meditation to be what we call in the Insight Meditation tradition “Choiceless Awareness.” This means that you allow your mind to notice the different things around you: sound, like, a thought, a feeling. You stay with that thing until the next thing comes, and so on. In this way, you allow yourself the openness and expansiveness of a stroll, but you’re more intentional about the process.

How To Do Walking Meditation

 

Thich Nhat Hanh Technique

In a profoundly moving interview that Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh did with Oprah a while back in which they discussed many things, he spoke quite a bit about walking meditation as a means toward self-realization. I really love his technique, and I share it here with you. (I can’t recommend watching the interview enough. It just might change your life).

• He says that when you walk, you should take a few steps and think to yourself, I have arrived, arrived, arrived in the here and the now. Then in your next few steps think, I am home, I am home. This is to instill a deep knowing in yourself that your home is in the here and now. I tried it and really enjoyed practicing this way.

I always do walking meditation with my writers when we’re on retreat together, and the writers really dig getting to learn more about this practice. Slowing down is really, really good for us writers. And getting out of a chair is good too.

Walking meditation can open up a lot for you, and create space in the clutter that comes into our minds in such a chaotic and busy world. I hope this practice brings you all the Ahas! and focus and flow you long for.

Hold Your Seat

Note: This post was originally published on October 14, 2017 on an old blog of mine. I'm posting it below in its original form (I no longer live in NYC, there's a global pandemic currently on, etc.)

 

A couple days ago I had an experience that happens all too often as a meditator (and writer who enjoys silence while ruminating) in NYC. I sit down on my cushion all ready to get my calm on when the jackhammers start right outside my window. Oh to live in Brooklyn in 2017 when everyone and their mother is gut renovating buildings or tearing them down to build overpriced condos. I’ve lived here for over four years and – I shit you not – there has been construction in close proximity to my building pretty much every single day. As a writer who works from home, I’ve had to make relative peace with this.

I am now an expert in white noise sound mixing and, when that fails, I push in the earplugs. Construction symphonies are an annoying soundtrack when you’re writing, to be sure, but they’re really REALLY crazy making when you’re trying to meditate. There’s a reason (most) monasteries are way up in the mountains, accessible only via dirt paths wide enough to let a yak through, and why writers fantasize about cottages at the end of the world to finish their novels in.

So here I am on my cushion and I have two choices: give up on sitting until much later or roll with it and hold my seat. Keep in mind that after sitting, I’ll have to start writing and, so, unless I’m going to pack up and go to a coffeehouse, there’s not a whole lot I can do to control this situation.

If there’s one thing being a meditator has taught me, it’s learning to be in the present, to accept what is happening without allowing events to control my emotions or hijack what little chill I have.

When we’re on the cushion, we practice this in various ways: instead of railing against my neighbor’s loud music or the jackhammers or the roar of loud trucks going up 20th, I try to just acknowledge what’s happening and return to focusing on my breath. If I feel annoyed, I sit with that feeling. I let the emotion be there, locating where it rests in my body (usually my chest and throat) and just ride it out–instead of letting the emotion ride me. In meditation, we call this “holding our seat.” It means that we don’t throw in the towel if a meditation session is uncomfortable. We stay even if the jackhammers start or we have an uncontrollable itch between our shoulder blades or we’re suddenly experiencing strong emotion.

We stay on the cushion. We stay in the present. We don’t bail. We hold our seat.

On this particular day, I held my seat. I accepted the situation as it was and by the time the gong rang on my meditation timer, it was all good. Sure, it would have been nice if the only sound was a bubbling brook and bees buzzing in warm sunshine, but I bet even then I would have found * something * to take issue with. And there’s this, too: we don’t judge our meditation sessions. If our minds were racing the whole time, okay. If we experienced enlightenment, okay. As long as we held our seat, it’s a win. The same goes for writing.

As long as you hold your seat and don’t let distractions or not feeling it pull you away from your writer’s seat, the writing session is a win.

As it was, I opened my eyes more relaxed, centered, and grounded than when I sat on the cushion thirty minutes before, and I call that a win.  I stood, stretched, then sat at my desk, opened Scrivener, and started writing from that place of relative balance. The jackhammers eventually stopped, but I didn’t. I wrote for hours.

Before I started meditating, I would have let my anger and frustration over that noise build. I would have abandoned my plans for meditation and gone into a whole inner rant about fuck this city and why can’t these rich assholes stop building condos and it’s impossible to live here as an artist, I can’t handle this noise and my apartment is too small and now I’ll never write another book and so I won’t be able to pay rent and I’ll be evicted…and…and…The incident might have ruined my whole day and certainly would have made it damn near impossible to focus on my book once I sat down to write. I would have worked myself into an emotional tizzy, allowing one jackhammer to instigate an existential crisis.

But because I’m committed to my practice and because meditation is training for life, I was able to simply see those jackhammers as part of the landscape of Now. And, like it or not, I was in that landscape, too.

As so often happens, what I experience on the cushion has a ripple effect in my writing life. I’m working on a couple of books right now, both of which I love and both of which are complicated for very different reasons. In those moments when I’m staring at the screen and feeling that familiar tension and frustration arise (why can’t I figure this character / plot out?!), I have my training on the cushion to fall back on.

I allow myself to feel that inner turmoil, locating it in my body and accepting it as part of the landscape. I don’t let it run me or turn into the spark for a wildfire of shame, anger, fear, comparison and the million other frustrations that can happen when we’re sitting in front of our screens. Just like when the jackhammers started when I was on the cushion, I accept what’s happening now–and what’s happening now is I have no idea what to write next. But because of my training on the cushion, I know that this snag is temporary because everything is impermanent: the good and the bad. I know this frustration won’t last because nothing lasts. I know, as when I sat on the cushion, that if I hold my seat and accept what’s happening, I will be the better for it.

And so will my writing.

Halting Your Thought Traffic

“Who am I,
Standing in the midst of this
thought traffic?

”

— Rumi

As we struggle to focus and write during COVID19, mindfulness and meditation are more helpful than ever to help us manage all the thought traffic that leaves us stuck creatively. These practices are what bring us back to ourselves.

Writer wellness = Intention + Devotion x Community

My husband’s grandmother went to mass pretty much every day of her life, and I think there’s a lot to be learned from that devotion. We can also consider the intentionality a dancer brings to the barre in class each day, even if they’re a prima ballerina, or how a musician will work their cello eight hours a day. As writers, we can build strong artistic habits ourselves. But it must start with devotion.

So how do we cultivate intention and devotion?

• Showing up.

• State out loud why you are or aren’t writing that day in order to set your intention and keep yourself honest. (“I’m writing today because…” or “I’m not writing today because…”).

• Gratitude (check out the hand blessing meditation on the recording): For your hands, your literacy, this writing tool you’ve got, your imagination, etc.

• Ritual: Light a candle, read a poem, do something that makes your time at the page sacred, set apart

• Transitions: Meditate beforehand, or do some kind of ritual (as above) to ease from non-writing time to writing time

• I spoke about how doing the Morning Pages from The Artist Way is a great practice, as well. You start your day off with words and emptying your mind. Win/win.

But a key practice? TRUST.

How do we trust ourselves as writers?

How do we cultivate authority and ditch arrogance? Basically, how do we know when to trust our guts and ignore feedback that doesn’t resonate with us.

As usual, my answer comes back to meditation and mindfulness.

The more that we tend to our minds by creating more inner expansiveness, and the more that we listen to our bodies, the better we’re able to understand where our North Stars are pointing. We can feel if something is tight and constricted (that’s a NO) versus warm and open and loose (that’s a YES). By decluttering our minds, we create more space, more bandwidth for our creativity. And the more we create, the more we set a foundation for trusting ourselves. We begin to know what works and what doesn’t. We have our own direct, lived experience to look at as opposed to just taking in what the million craft books and classes and talks tell us we “should” do as writers.

Even with my own advice, you have to try it - don’t just take my word for it. And if it doesn’t work for you, then ditch it!

Below is one quick mindfulness tool to begin cultivating some inner awareness, tending to your spaciousness. If you're like me, your mind is going a mile-a-minute all the time. You're running numbers, rehearsing for a conversation, lost in story lines or personal drama, going over the To Do list, obsessing about your career or social or - sometimes, if you're lucky - thinking about your new book.

It's a lot of thought traffic. All of this runs us, and runs us down. It's exhausting. And it doesn't cultivate the inner spaciousness we need to get our stories onto the page. This is where a bit of mindfulness comes in handy.

 

Hit Pause

• As soon as you become aware of your thought traffic, first note it: "Thought traffic." As in fantasy novels, when you name something, it loses some of its power over you.

• Direct your attention away from your thoughts and onto the physical sensation of your clothes on your body. Your hair on your head. Curl your toes or flex your feet to feel the ground beneath your feet. What does the jewelry on your body feel like, that weight? Notice the temperature - warm or cool.

• The Pause can last as long as you wish. Even if it's just ten or twenty seconds, it's a mindful break in your thought traffic.

• Do this every time you become aware of your thought traffic.

• It might not seem like much, but what you'll notice is, over time: less thought traffic. More inner spaciousness. It won't happen all at once.

• Don't take my word for it. See for yourself. Give yourself the gift of being truly aware of your one wild precious life.

• Note: You can also hit Pause with sounds. Tuning into the sounds around you. I find external objects of meditation easier for The Pause, because it really launches you out of your headspace, but you can absolutely do this by focusing on your breath - 5 or 10 ten nice intentional breaths or just focusing on your breath for a bit as you breathe naturally.

• If you struggle even noticing when you need to hit pause because you’re a victim of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “habit energy” - habits that you do without thinking - then be practive and either set alarms on your phone to have some intentional pauses or always pause when you’re in a transition (such as when you go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, stand up, etc.).

I hope this helps as you navigate the ups and downs of the writer’s life! Courage, dear hearts.

Let It R.A.I.N

This past Sunday, the writers I was on a call with finally let the tears fall.

After weeks of being in quarantine during a global pandemic, they finally had a TOOL to work with the emotions they were carrying. I led them through the R.A.I.N meditation, which is an incredibly effective and healthy way for dealing with emotion.

I say “meditation,” but it’s really a mindfulness tool that can be done in real time, when you’re activated in some way - distressed, anxious, sad, or feeling any feeling at all.

The R.A.I.N Method

R = Recognize (I’m having a feeling)

A = Allow (I’m going to let myself feel this feeling, rather than compartmentalize or push it away or distract myself from it. Even if this feeling is unpleasant, I’m going to sit with it and feel it).

I = Investigate (I’m going to get curious about what this feeling physically feels like. Where do I feel it in my body? What does sadness or fear or anger or peace physically feel like? I’m going to just sit and investigate the physical sensation of the feeling. I’m not going to attach a story line to it (why I feel it or how I shoudld feel about feeling it or who I want to blame for me feeling it).

N= Nurture (After I’ve felt the feeling - and by now, it probably holds less intensity and heat because I’ve born witness to it and let it play out - I’m going to give myself a little love. Maybe I put my hand on my heart and say, “You are enough. You’re okay. Good job being human.” Or I’m going to do some lovingkindness for myself (“May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I be in flow.”)

This is a great practice to do on the spot or on the cushion. We explored how it felt to be writers during this time, wanting to write, but maybe not having a lot of bandwidth for that. We shared our experiences, and I offered some thoughts and suggestions.

The key is that we need to let ourselves feel what we’re feeling so we can give voice to that on the page.

Being present with what we’re feeling right now is how we hold space for the world’s feelings too. We have to be in it so that we can later articulate this collective experience with specificity and meet the world’s needs for our words.

“It’s good for the world for a writer to bear witness, and it’s good for the writer, too. Especially if she can bear witness with love and humor and, despite it all, some fondness for the world, just as it is manifesting, warts and all.


All of this is to say: there’s still work to be done, and now more than ever.”

— George Saunders in a letter to his students during the pandemic

One of the questions that we dug into was from a writer on the call who asked:

“If I can’t write my novel right now, should I write anything that’s coming up?”

I suggested they check out George Saunders’ letter to his students in the face of the pandemic, which was absolute word medicine to me. I also mentioned he did an interview about it on Cheryl Strayed’s new podcast for writers, Sugar Calling.

George’s letter was a great answer to this question, but we got into some practical tips:

• Journal - Jot down feelings, impressions, word lists, whatever you want

• Bear witness to what’s happening because in the aftermath of this, it’s us writers who will be on the front lines, helping a world that is shell-shocked and confused.

• Write emails or letters - the epistolary form is great for flow! Save them all or take pictures of anything you mail out.

• I suggested doing some fun things like flash fiction (I like to copy Erin Morgenstern’s prompt for her Flax Golden tales).

“What are some tips for being on screen all day, then having to go and write on a screen? I’m burned out!”

My suggestions for this are:

• Create transitions between screen time events and especially between not writing and writing. I like to use meditation or stretching or a walk as a transition so that when I sit down to write, I’m fresh and more expansive.

• Rituals are helpful too: Ring a bell before you write. Draw a tarot card. Read a poem. Say a prayer. Something that makes THIS time on the computer sacred.

• Write in a different place than you do your other work. (If possible). Or at least clear other work from the space when you’re writing.

• Try using a notebook more for note taking and side writing.

• To save your eyes, I recommend the free f.lux blue light app. I have it on my computer and it’s a lifesaver.

• Disable Internet. Use the laptop just for writing when it’s writing time.

The most widely recognized teacher of this method is Tara Brach, though the method was conceived by mindfulness teacher Michele McDonald. Brach is a meditation teacher and trauma therapist who has also written one of my favorite “dharma” (Buddhism) books - Radical Acceptance. She has a slew of resources on RAIN, which you can access here.

For a writer’s bent on the practice, you can listen to my RAIN meditation for writers on Insight Timer.

Really, at the end of the day, writing is about intention + devotion. Put those two together and you’ll be right as R.A.I.N.

I’m rooting for all of you!

Suggested Reading

Radical Acceptance (Tara Brach)

Burnout (Emily & Amelia Nagoski)

The Monkey is the Messenger (Ralph De La Rosa)

Tea and Cake with Demons (Adreanna Limbach)

Eff This! Meditation (Liza Kindred)

What It’s Like To Have A Book Come Out During COVID19

My new book, Little Universes, came out today. On a day in the middle of a global pandemic, when all bookstores and libraries are closed, much of the world is in some form of quarantine, when readers spend more time devouring updates on the CDC website than novels, when getting a package in the mail is a cause for stress and Lysol wipes.

I’ve done one signing: I wore gloves while I signed a cart of books, pushed toward me from a safe distance by a masked bookseller at my local indie. There will be no book launch, no events, no pictures with my cheek squished next to readers holding my novel in their hands. That’s as it should be: My book is pubbing on the week that COVID19 is projected to hit my country the worst thus far.

The woman it’s dedicated to—my best friend—is a nurse whose hospital does not have a mask for her to use during one of the worst pandemics the world has ever known.

My sister, who inspired much of this story about sisters, is a single mom trying to homeschool two kids. My entire publishing team is in New York City, which is expected to be pummeled by the pandemic this very day, trying to keep themselves out of medical tents set up in Central Park while also somehow finding the bandwidth to promote a book to a world that is falling apart.

The only person in my family who will likely be able to read my book is my dad, who’s a truck driver who loves audiobooks. The last picture I got of him was a selfie in a laundromat in which he wore gloves and a mask. We had a discussion about whether or not he was applying enough bleach on the surfaces of the public showers he has to use at truck stops—showers used by people from all over the country crossing multiple state lines—and how he had to cancel a load going to Brooklyn because he’d have to quarantine for two weeks after and he can’t afford to do that. Should he get that small business loan the government is offering? What would he do if he got sick? Where would he even live, since his truck is his home?

Every time I’ve posted something about my book since the pandemic hit the world in earnest, I’ve felt conflicted: Is it okay to take up a few moments of people’s time right now to share about a book I love, an offering I made for the world, something I think will help them during this crisis, but would require them to do nothing but read words on a page for a while?

Is it okay to feel sad about what having this book come out now means for me and my career when the entire world is suffering through a shared crisis? Is it okay to celebrate the long, hard road I’ve walked to write a book that, to me, distills everything I know to be true?

Since most of the people reading this are writers, I will tell you what I tell the writers I work with, and tell myself. I will tell you how I answered the questions above:

Right now, the people on the front lines of this crisis are our health care workers, scientists, and policy experts. Our job as writers is to bear witness to what’s happening, and to be foot soldiers in the fight for morale. Hold space for others through our words, whether they provide escape or solace or clarity.

But when the dust of COVID19 settles, it’s the artists who will be on the front lines of the crisis.

The artists who will be keeping the world afloat through the waves of grief and loss and uncertainty that will threaten to drown us all. When the people of the world open their doors and step back out into the world en masse, a world that will no doubt be significantly different, it is the writers and painters and musicians and makers of things who will be taking their place to do battle with humanity’s greatest enemy: The fact that we and everyone we love is going to die, and to be okay in the face of that. To thrive in the inhospitable environment of mortality.

And that’s where Little Universes comes in.

I think my book and the universe conspired together to have Little Universes come out during a global pandemic.

Just look at the epigraph, a piece of Tracy K. Smith’s devastatingly brilliant poem, The Universe As Primal Scream:

I’m ready
To meet what refuses to let us keep anything
For long.

I always say that our books are our teachers, and Little Universes has been my toughest and most rewarding one thus far.

Like all good teachers, it never stops instructing me. Little Universes is about impermanence, about how nothing is for keeps; but the deeper lesson, the one in its tender beating heart, is how to be okay with loss and uncertainty. Really okay. No matter how much of it you experience. No matter how many times the rug is pulled out from under your feet.

In the book, Hannah and Mae lose their parents to a tsunami—the experience is as horrible as it sounds. But they learn something vital as they rage and grieve and curse and question—a truth I believe only the hardest lessons can teach us:

The same wave that threatens to drown you also has the power to carry you safely to the shore.

I won’t lie: Publishing has been a painful experience for me from my first book to this, my seventh. Many of you read a piece I wrote last year that went viral, about how bewildering the ups and downs have been. Perhaps, with a different sort of book, helmed by the Heather of olden days who did not meditate, having a novel come out in the midst of COVID19 would have been the wave that killed me dead.

But this Heather is on the other side of Little Universes, a book which taught her that her only job on this planet—her only job—is to do right by the miracle.

We are made of the stuff of stars and, if that’s not WOW enough for you, then consider how many atoms and choices and people and loss and gain and luck and tragedy and mystery had to conspire for you—your individual self—to be here on this planet, at this time. Whether you bow to the Buddha, pray to Jesus, or tip your cap to Carl Sagan, the fact of the matter is that in order to do right by all that brought you into being, you’ve got to show up. Right here, right now.

How will you, writer, do right by the miracle?

Little Universes is one humble attempt I’ve made to do right by the miracle. An offering. I like to imagine placing it before my readers as though they are an altar or doorway in Bali, the novel resting on a banana leaf covered with flowers. To me, it has already done its work because I’ve done my work, the hard inner work of not placing my value or the value of the art I made on how well it sells, or how good the reviews are, or whether it stays in print. I made the thing to help us all navigate this thing, life, a little easier. Mission accomplished.

I sort of feel like God on the seventh day: It is good.

You’re hurting right now. I know that not just because that’s the First Noble Truth—suffering is a part of life—but because you’re a human on Earth during the COVID19 pandemic. I wrote this book during a hurting, and a healing. And so I hope it can give you some of the warm assurance it gave me—tough, but tender love.

Tough: This book and, by extension, the books your yourself might one day write, might totally sink. Drown in the waves of “content” in the world. This book might be a tinier blip than I or anyone close to it hoped for.

Tender: That’s okay. Because we did our job—we did right by the miracle by offering our words to the world, to help make it a little less confusing and a little more bearable for those in it.

As Jo, one of the characters in the book says:

“This one life: It’s all we get. It’s not about the likes and the degrees and the bank account. It’s about the love, man. It’s only about the love.”

I finished the first draft of the book during a major depression, unaware that a new medication I was on for migraine had a side effect of suicidal thoughts. It was a great wave and as I clawed for the surface, I, like Hannah, realized something very important:

“Under the wave, I found out what I was made of. Realized nobody is going to save me but me, that there is sometimes a choice—to stay or go—and that you might not know what you’ll choose until the breath has left your lungs and…you suddenly come face-to-face with the voice in your head, the hidden you, that spark of light that has been singing you out of the darkness for as long as you can remember. And she is wise and beautiful—maiden and mother and crone—and she says, she says, You are enough. And now you have a choice: to float or drown, and if you are enough, then drowning isn’t an option.”

You are enough, writer. Drowning isn’t an option.

Little Universes was borne out of a lifetime of spiritual questing, my own relentless search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe. From walking with monks in a Korean rice field to poking about the oldest magick shops in London, from temples in Calcutta to Midnight Mass in Rome, I have searched and searched only to have my book teach me the most important lesson of all in my darkest hour of need:

Everything you are and need is within you. It has been all along.

So what is it like to publish a book during COVID19? It…is. It’s what happening right here and right now. It is a wave and I am riding it to wherever it will take me.

When I began working on this book, I was ready to meet what refuses to let us keep anything for long.

Today? I have met that great What. I greet her / him / they / it with one of Hannah’s poems from the book:

Last Words

1. Say thank you
2. Say I love you
3. Say these words until you die

So reader, and fellow writer: Thank you. I love you.

Tonight there is a super moon. A time for release. For moving on. I think I’ll go sit outside with Hannah and Mae. Together, we’ll look up, as Whitman says, in perfect silence at the stars, many of which shine though long dead.

Gone, but we can still see their light.

Begin The Journey

Below is the playlist I listened to on repeat as I wrote this book. It is, as Hannah says, sound medicine. From my heart to yours.

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Writer, You've Been Training For This

I hope you're healthy. I hope your heart isn't hurting. And, either way, I hope you know that you're not alone (but I will guard your solitude, if you desperately wish you were).

First: Permission not to write right now.

Second: Permission TO write right now.

Either one is A-Okay. The world needs people who are doing what lights them up - all the time, every day, and especially now. If writing lights you up, do it. If it doesn't, then why torture yourself? (Or us). Do what feels like a YES, like YUM, like MORE PLEASE.

This social upheaval is a season. Either it will be okay, or it will pass. (My new favorite Norwegian proverb. Actually, the only Norwegian proverb I know). Also: All. Things. Pass. Do you know anything that doesn't?


Regardless of where you're at with your writing right now, I come bearing good news:

As a writer, you have been training for the world to fall apart your whole writing life. Because uncertainty is what we writers swim in.

From not knowing the outcome of a story to whether or not that story will sell to being uncertain as to what will happen inside you or on the page each and every time you sit down to write. Will the story come together or fall apart? Will the Inner Critic win today? Will you be deep in flow? Will you give up? Will you be interrupted? Will you remember why you do this in the first place?

The uncertainty we experience as writers has often been painful. But it turns out, it's our superpower. Being a writer is one of the least certain jobs or passions you could ever have. So in times of global uncertainty (and, camerado, ALL of life is uncertain), you are positioning yourself to more elegantly navigate that feeling of groundlessness. And guess what? From a physics standpoint, we--the entire universe--is in a perpetual state of free fall. Moments like this, when we share and have each other's backs so we can write in community are how we catch each other along the way.

If there's anything I've learned as a writer, it's that the more I relax into uncertainty instead of fight it, the more I feel like a steady ship's captain in a storm.

I've had so much practice with the rug being pulled out from under me. I've become so accustomed to having to pivot when I reach story tangles and career roadblocks and rejection and just the sheer not knowing if my gambles will pay off.

Case in point:

I have a book coming out on April 7th. When all the bookstores are closed. And you know what? I'm bummed sure, but I'm okay. I really am. (But, also, I hope you snag a copy. This one hits all the sweet spots we need right now about what to do when things fall apart) I'm holding fast to my love of the book itself and I can let everything else go. I can't control what happens. I can only show up, do right by the work, and then let go. (It's a paradox, isn't it? You must let go to hold fast.)

What's kept me steering through the storms of uncertainty is my love of words.

Writing them and reading them. Even if I just have a few minutes in a day to get some words down, even if that's all I have, I've reconnected to what keeps me from being thrown overboard. I've held fast. To myself. To my dreams. To how I best show up in this world and serve it.

Gifts From Me To You Right Now:

Build the writing life you long for.

This sneak peek offers loads of resources to help you find and stay in flow. If you decide later to subscribe to my newsletter, you get the whole free 30-Day program. Click below to download the sneak peek immediately.

give me flow

All of the things below are for newsletter subscribers. Jump on and get all the goodies.

In this month's Rough Draft, I’ve got the perfect writing process/exercise for when you're feeling overwhelmed, mindfulness hacks for creatives, and loads of exploratory questions to find what feels most delicious to you right now.

And if you want to jump on this Sunday's free Dandywood Circle call with me to talk all things writing during social distancing, you’ll get the link right when you sign up for the newsletter.



Sunday at 2:00 PM EST. A recording of the call will be available on the homebound resources page later that day, in case you miss it.

Send me an email with any questions you want answered, or ask on the call.

A little heads up: I've been building a community for us all on Mighty Networks for some time now. It's not ready yet, but I can't WAIT to share it with you when it is. Just know it's coming SOON. Email me if you have any wish lists for the ultimate writing sisterhood.

Hold fast, friends.

Writer In Quarantine: How To Access Your Creative Well

Below is a recap of our discussions and meditations for the first live “Dandywood Circles” Zoom calls for writers in the first few weeks of massive social distancing. For four Sundays, I’m inviting writers to my home, affectionately called Dandywood, where we’re gathering together to share thoughts, advice, and support during quarantine. The goal is to work on staying connected to our writing practice during this time of massive social upheaval.

Both sessions are recorded and you can download the audio below, or just check out the highlights in this post.

To get in on the next calls, be sure to sign up for my newsletter to get the links.

Dandywood Circle #1: March 22, 2020

Dandywood Circle Call #1

Questions Begin at 9:54 // Meditation at 40:50

Download

Q: Is it time that I stop making myself into the writer I’m supposed to be and make room for the real type of writer I am, who knows words are her playmates?

My resounding answer to this excellent question from one of the writers on the call was YES! 

One of the things that comes up in quarantine is a re-assesment of who you are as a writer and where you’re at. The “shoulds” also come out to play a lot. Instead, just play. Explore. Allow this to be a time of getting in touch with what got you writing in the first place (hint: it might have been processing stress or escaping it!).

Right now we’re in transition, and transitions are delicious opportunities for growth. It’s a liminal space where a lot of clarity can come through.

We talked on the call about how to move toward YES and JOY and whatever feels jazzy and yummy and expansive. That may or may not be writing. We gave each other permission to not write if writing felt like a drag.

I spoke about how curiosity is key. Now is a great time to fill the well and go down rabbit holes. All of my best books have come from being curious about something.

The funny thing about curiosity is that it’s a bit like falling in love: you can’t look for your next story idea. Rather, you show up and it finds you. The way you show up is through curiosity. My lifelong curiosity of spies led me to a visit to the International Spy Museum, which led me to discovering Virginia Hall, which led me to writing my biography about her, CODE NAME BADASS, which comes out in Fall 2021.

So while you’re in quarantine, following what sparks your curiosity may very well gift you with a new story, solutions to a current one, or simply fill your well so you have more flow.

Q: “How do we know when something that seems like a block is really a blessing in disguise - something that’s saying No, this isn’t for you…?

This question from someone on the call was a great one because it generated a discussion about how to be in touch with our bodies, which know a lot more about what’s really going on than our minds.

In my experience, the best way to get in touch with out bodies is to meditate. Ever since I got serious about meditation, I was able to listen to my gut more…and trust it. This allowed for enormous creative dividends.

To work with Jennifer’s question, I led our group in a meditation I created for this session to explore what our inner creative wells actually feel like. You can check it out in the recording below, but here here is the gist:

Creative Well Meditation: Part One / Submersion

To get some inner quiet and access your inner Knowing. Your gut. The part of you that will let you know when to ditch a writing project, and when to stay (among many other things):

• Close your eyes and envision a wide, endless sea. You’re bobbing in it, gazing out at the water. See the sunlight flickering across the surface. The waves. The horizon.

• Now, pull yourself beneath the surface. Feel the heaviness of the water. The immediate, comforting weight.

• Observe how quiet it is here below the surface.

• The water is clear and warm. You are absolutely safe. You’re breathing gently through your nose only - inhale and exhale.

• As thoughts come, or outer distractions, notice that those are just waves on the surface of the ocean. You are below those waves. In the deep. In the quiet. In the inner sanctuary.

• Notice the shafts of light cutting into the water.

• Allow yourself a few minutes to just be there beneath the surface. Your object of meditation is your breath or whatever visuals are coming through here under the surface.

• This is where creative flow lives. In the quiet. In the deep.

• You can stay here, enjoying this, or move onto the next portion:

Accessing Your Creative Well

• You’re still here, under the surface of the water.

• Think back to a time when you felt really in flow. It could be when you were writing, but it could also be other times, when the ideas are coming to you, a moment of deep inspiration that sparked something for you.

• Go deep into that memory. How did it feel in your BODY? Don’t put words to this but, rather, feel into the actual sensation. For me, I feel an expansive loosening in my chest. My fingers tingle. My temperature rises.

• Feel that feeling. Amplify it. Home in on exactly where it is in your body. Notice all the shifts that happen inside you.

• Where you feel flow in your body is where your creative well lives.

• Sit there for a bit and enjoy the feeling. When you’re ready, push up, up, up to the surface of that ocean, take three nice deep breaths, and slowly open your eyes.

The takeaway: After the first time you do this, I recommend journaling a bit to get some concrete ideas of where the well is and what this experience in the meditation was like. Then, I recommend doing this meditation every day for the next week, or as long and often as you wish, to keep reconnecting to the feeling of flow.

Work like this is how writers train in flow. It’s the equivalent of a ballet dancer going to class, doing work at the barre.

Q: Is there a hack for writing essays? Right now, I don’t have the bandwidth for creative work.

My big piece of advice here was to consider what you’re adding to the conversation when you write essays or blogs.

There’s a lot of content out there, a lot of half-assed stuff. A lot of lists or rants. So when you do put something out there, consider who your audience is and how they’ll benefit from what you have to say.

There’s also just a lot of value in processing for yourself right now. Writing essays or journaling as a way to cope. As writer self-care. Check out the Inspiration Portal for some good journaling prompts.

In addition to these big questions, we also talked about ways to bring more mindfulness and intentionality into our writing practices. What works for one writer might not work for you. I talked baout the helpful tools in the Flow Lab Sneak Peak, which you can download here (the full 30-Day Flow Lab will land in my newsletter subscriber’s boxes in April). The sneak peek includes a Do Not Disturb doorknob sign, a writing cave sign-in sheet, and some helpful mindful hacks to get your work done.

We dug into how to set healthy boundaries around your creativity, especially with people at home or constantly calling and texting, and how to guard your solitude.

It was wonderful to see each other’s faces, to connect with writers around the country, and to remember that as isolating as writing can be—and social distancing—it really does take a village to sustain a flourishing writing practice. This is how we have each other’s backs.

Keep calm and carry on, camerados.

How To Guard Your Solitude

“...the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other...”

— Rilke

I wanted to pop in with a few helpful hints I've been sharing more than ever with the writers I work with, many of whom are struggling to maintain focus and boundaries around their creativity during this time of social distancing. Writing is hard in the best of times. During a global pandemic rife with fear and uncertainty, it can feel downright impossible.

Don’t worry if right now you feel like you can’t stand guard over your own solitude. That’s why I’m here. It’s my raison d’être as a writing coach and mindfulness mentor. Through my practices, tools, and gentle prodding, my hope is that, together, we can help you build a sustainable and flourishing writing practice that works for you NO MATTER WHAT. In sickness and in health.

Permission Slip

First, I want to say this, in case you need to hear it: It’s okay to take a break from writing if that’s what feels most nourishing to you right now. I don’t know about you, but I want my writing to be the harbor, not the storm. If writing feels like a drag right now, if it doesn’t help you feel safer and more grounded and more centered during this time…then why would you do that? Why would you do anything that adds to your psychic or emotional pain right now?

Writing As Harbor, As Lighthouse, As Sanctuary

If writing is the thing that keeps you sane, if it’s the lens through which you view the world (and thus make sense of these unprecedented times), if it’s what makes you you, and if it lights and fills you up (even when it drives you nuts), then you must write. For your health. For the health of those near you. For the health of our planet’s future.

And yet, writing might feel harder than ever before, what with the world being so topsy turvy.

Even if you don't suddenly have a full house to contend with (or, as one writer mentioned on Twitter, neighbors who are DJs that have decided to turn their apartments into a club) or other major upheavals, simply trying to maintain focus when everything has suddenly become so uncertain can be an enormous barrier to getting your work done. You might even be wondering what the point of writing is anyway.

There can also be sudden and strange expectations you place on yourself, perhaps to make the most of the extra time home. Some writers are beating themselves up, creating unrealistic expectations, convinced that if they don't finish their novels by the end of the quarantine period they would have "wasted" this time. Others are being challenged by a lack of focus and motivations, or placing themselves at their loved ones' beck and call, lacking any healthy boundaries. Others are struggling with mental health: increased anxiety and bouts of depression. There's a lot to juggle internally and externally--not to even mention maintaining health, security, and your standard of living.

Here are a few ways to work with your relationship to your writing during this time: 

Guard Your Solitude--And Enlist Your Loved Ones To Do The Same

I love this quote by Rilke:

“...the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other...”

If you have a partner or roommate at home, sit them down and let them know what you need. Perhaps you're an introvert who feels drained with too much socialization. And, of course, you need writing time. Schedule your solitude. Create signals that everyone knows that show you shouldn't be bothered unless someone's bleeding or the house is on fire. I have a doorknob sign I bought at Graceland with Elvis's logo: "TCB" - taking care of business.  I put that there when I'm meditating and when I'm in the zone with writing. I created a Do Not Disturb doorknob sign for you in my free Flow Lab Sneak Peak download.

Set Boundaries Around Your Creativity (And Schedule It In)

Here’s a whole article I wrote with ways you can set boundaries around your creativity (with others and yourself!). It goes into all the ways to sustain a healthy writing practice. 

My husband and I enjoy walks together, but now that he's home, I still take a solo walk when I feel like it. The loss of this solitude would be harmful to my creativity and mental health. I need time alone. Lots of it. My husband is a massive extrovert. We're lucky that we've had a lot of practice with this dance, having just come off a year of international housesitting together. Because he’s a writer, too, and a meditator, we’re basically the Swiss Guard over each other's solitude. It's one of the things I value and appreciate most in my life.

Digital Boundaries

I've also worked hard over the years to set boundaries with tech.

I keep my phone on airplane mode while I'm writing - and not even in my writing space, as a lot of research has shown that even the presence of a phone is distracting.

To that end, I don't have news  or social media notifications on my phone.

I set an alarm for the one or two times a day I intend to post on social (more now, though, which I have to be very intentional about - it's easy to fall down the rabbit hole).

Inever answer my phone when it rings - I let it go to voicemail and call back when I'm not writing. I make sure that I budget the time, too--I know who the chatty Cathies in my circle are. These are just a few of the ways I've set my own boundaries - and it certainly works. Though these methods are arguably easier for someone without children than for someone without, all too often I see writers with kids make the mistake of using that excuse as a blanket reason for why you "can't write." There are far too many prolific writers with kiddos to offer up as evidence to the contrary. (Obviously we hold space when you don't have a partner's support, health issues, massive financial strain, elderly parents, etc. But if you add up all the time you spend on your phone or unnecessarily checking email or bingeing Netflix, we can likely agree there are pockets of time to write). 

Not everyone has had the chance to test run the quarantine life or have years of setting boundaries, though. There may be a lot of tension at home right now. Think about what you need. What the fair expectations are. Then communicate that. And take good care of yourself while you're at it. 

Mindful Social Media

Recognize that when you go down the social media rabbit hole, that's really valuable time away from writing. Be intentional and only check at certain times of the day. Turn of notifications. Keep the TV off. Have a healthy relationship to texting and calling. Of course you want to be in touch with your loved ones and you want to be safe, healthy, and aware. Recognize when you're using social media as a way to procrastinate or have fallen into a kind of habit energy. Keep a sense of whether or not you're sliding into an unhealthy, addictive relationship with your tech and the Web. 

Straight Spine, Open Heart

In meditation we talk about posture as a straight spine with an open front. In your relationship to yourself and others, consider ways you can have a straight spine (healthy boundaries and personal discipline, mindfulness, and intentionality) and an open heart (recognizing how tough it is for everyone - and you - right now, and finding ways to be loving and kind and compassionate....while also holding your personal line).

For those of you who are in caregiving roles, it can be all too easy to be zapped of every second of personal time and space. Be aware of feelings of guilt or of allowing other people's drama to become yours. Be there for your loved ones and recognize that of course more is expected of all of us now. But you can love them and still say no. You don't have to answer the phone every time it rings. You don't have to text back immediately. 

My advice is to have a conversation with those you are closest to, the ones who will expect your time and energy. Set your boundaries, give them some love, then hold the line. 

PSA: You will have needy friends and family members who are not writers and so have much more time to call and text you. They'll want to worry out loud. They'll want to share the latest thing they saw about the virus on Twitter. Community and connection are vital more than ever before and so OF COURSE you want to keep connecting. But. Be mindful of the time suck involved. Be mindful of when someone is just bored and dialing you up compared to when they actually need help and are in crisis. Get intentional about family/friend check-ins: Are there specific times you can jump on the phone? Could you do Zoom lunch dates? Only check and respond to texts at certain times of the day?

My Homebound Resources

I created a page on my website for writers on my website. 

Here you’ll find:

The link for the free weekly Zoom calls (as well as recording of past calls) that I’m doing for the first four weeks of social distancing.

The Flow Lab sneak peek download, which includes a writing sign-in sheet for your writing cave and a Do Not Disturb doorknob sign, as well as my best practices for setting boundaries around your creativity so you can have a sustainable and flourishing writing practice.

Helpful blog posts for mindful ways to be in relationship to your creativity, especially now.

Q & A dialogue with tips for writing during social distancing.

A few helpful meditations that you can download and begin working with right now.


I’ve been digging this Norwegian proverb, which is wonderfully mindful and some serious real talk:

“Either it will be okay, or it will pass.”

Hold fast, camerados.

Write In The Slow Lane

Above is a picture of me in Lyon, France, taking it slow, enjoying the moment. See that look of utter contentment on my lady face? It's not just from the delicious meal or the wine or France, or even the company (my beloved). That is my face when I give myself permission to just BE. To relax. To take a freaking knee. And until pretty recently, that wasn't happening on the regular. If you read nothing else in this post read this:

You need to be taking a sabbath once a week.

One of my new big commitments to myself is to take Saturdays off. Every week. No email. No errands. No chores. No phone. No appointments. Nothing scheduled at all, even if it's fun. No clocks. No fucks given.


NO WRITING. (Even if I'm on deadline. Seriously. NO WRITING. And the world still turns...)


On Saturdays I bask. I read books I want to, not ones I "should." I wander around my house and look at things that strike my curiosity - a photo book on Patti Smith that is always just decoration, the way the light slants through the trees in the back yard. I read poems and take walks and I don't cook unless it sounds fun, which it only is if I'm making soup.


What this has done in just a few weeks has been nothing short of astonishing. New book ideas come to me. I have a deeper connection to my creativity. I laugh more - not just on Saturdays but ALL THE DAYS. I am more mindful, catching myself during the week when I'm revving (multi-tasking, getting in that near-manic place of crossing things off lists and non-stop doing).


The best thing is that I have this delicious treat to look forward to every week, which is a balm on the hard days. I know it's there, waiting for me like a promise. I've been talking to my clients about this more and more: How can we unearth some delight? How can we give ourselves permission to really fill the well by doing absolutely nothing? How can we stop feeling guilty for just allowing ourselves to be alive and to wonder and muse and lollygag?

Mark me, friends: Your creativity needs this. And it will suffer without it.

I'm getting huge creative dividends from this combination of mindfulness, creativity exercises, and the deep inner work required of anyone who wants to write anything worth reading - I hope you are all benefitting from the Rough Draft and the meditations, too.


When you're ready to get back out there after your sabbath, you can check out my piece on how to set boundaries around your creativity.

One of the things these sabbaths have clarified for me is who I want to work with in my coaching. While I love writers of all stripes, the ones I'm drawn to working with the most are the ones who feel a deep yearning to flourish in their creativity, but just can't seem to figure it out.

If you're curious about this work, you can head over to my brand new coaching FAQ to learn more.

In the March 2020 Rough Draft, we're getting into ways you can write in the slow lane. Where are you pushing yourself too hard? How can you slow down? What would be a delicious way to bask and loll and delight in your creative self? We've got a writing exercise that Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus) uses too. This one’s all about filling the well and being good to your writer self. Finding inner quiet. Yum, right?

You can access all archived Rough Drafts now on the Inspiration Portal, so even if you’re catching this post well beyond March 2020, I’ve got you covered. (Newsletter subscribers have the password to portal. Not a newsletter subscriber? We can fix that.)

Cheryl Strayed recently gave this piece of advice to writers, via an interview on the Beautiful Writers podcast: "Write in the slow lane." Spring is a great time to explore slowing down after all the intention setting and holiday recovery that happens in the early part of the year. It's a time to feel the bliss of rain on your face, to reach for the sun, to stretch deep into the earth and bloom.

Who's with me?

3 Ways To Set Boundaries Around Your Creativity

If you’re someone who does creative work, unless it’s bringing in a reasonable paycheck, you probably treat it like a hobby. Is it really a big deal if you didn’t write today? Your family needed clean laundry. So what if you didn’t paint this afternoon? Your sister called to vent about another crisis at her corporate job. Sure, you wish you could have gone outside and shot some photographs while the light was fantastic, but your kids were fighting and you needed to intervene.

We hear a lot about setting boundaries — in families, in friendships, and in the workplace. So what makes us think we can neglect them when it comes to our creative time? We often devalue any work that doesn’t earn an income, and what’s more, we assume talent is all that creative work demands. “The one thing creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills,” writes choreographer Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit. “Art is a vast democracy of habit.”

If you set and hold healthy boundaries around your creativity, you’ll be growing the conditions for your best art to bloom. Here are three ways to establish perimeters that work for you.

Schedule your creativity and make it nonnegotiable

You wouldn’t cancel an important doctor’s appointment because you just weren’t feeling it and your best friend invited you to coffee, right? Make your creative time nonnegotiable, meaning not up for discussion. You schedule time, you turn down invites, you reserve the room (read: the kids don’t get the den to play in for the time you need to be in there to work), you hire the sitter. And then you hold the line. You do not cancel this date with the muse for any reason unless you are on your deathbed, the house is on fire, or your city has been attacked by extraterrestrial terrorists.

You may be surprised to find that the person who breaches your boundaries the most is… you. When you make your creative time nonnegotiable, you stop bargaining with the part of your brain that would much rather binge watch Peaky Blinders or get a quick dopamine hit from knocking a few items off the to-do list. In a recent Tim Ferris interview, writer Neil Gaiman says that when he’s writing, he’s allowed to do two things: write or stare out the window. No matter how difficult the writing is, eventually, he says, staring out the window gets to be boring. So he writes.

Your action item: Look at your schedule and find all the possible pockets of time for your creativity. If you have a partner, roommate, kids, or anyone who might push up against this boundary, let them know this is your creative time and that it’s nonnegotiable. Find someone to hold you accountable. A fellow creative or your bossy friend will ensure you keep your promises to yourself.

Reframe the word “no”

As a writing coach, I often work with people who are struggling to prioritize their creative work over doing dishes, running errands, or returning emails. If I had a nickel for every time I heard one of my clients say they’d frittered away writing time because they “feel guilty,” I’d own an island. The reasons for the guilt vary, but it always comes down to this: They’ve put others’ needs above their own. In these cases, we reframe the situation. What if saying “no” to someone (or something) isn’t a negative? What if this “no” is actually a “yes” — to your vibrant, flourishing, life-giving creative force?

To stand your best chance of forming a lifelong creative habit, Tharp suggests building a metaphorical bubble around yourself — and then staying in it. “Being in the bubble does not have to mean exiling yourself from people and the world,” she writes. “It is more a state of mind, a willingness to subtract anything that disconnects you from your work.”

The more you respect your bubble, the more others will, too. If you’re quick to give in every time someone knocks on your home office door, or say “yes” every time you’re invited to a spontaneous dinner, you’re telegraphing that you’re not, in fact, very serious about your creativity — so why should they be?

Your action item: Write down what your creative bubble might look like. Then list all the unhelpful habits keeping you from living in it. (Pro tip: See how much screen time you’re logging on your phone). In getting rid of those habits, don’t think of it as depriving yourself, but rather saying “yes” to possibility.

Get resourceful about overcoming obstacles

It’s all too easy to give up when the conditions for creativity aren’t ideal. But unless you’re constantly on an idyllic retreat in the woods, they never will be. Here are some creative ways to overcome the obstacles of life:

• One writer I work with is a mom who does her writing at all the grocery stores and local gyms that offer free childcare while customers shop or work out. Genius, right?

• Another client swaps creative time with her partner, watching the kids while he works on his music so that he’ll watch them when she works on her novel.

• Many of my clients bring their laptops to their cars and work while waiting for school pickups and other obligations.

• When I needed to get out of living in chaotic, loud, expensive NYC, but didn’t know where I’d go, I embarked on a nearly year-long housesitting adventure, writing my novels in beautiful locations all over the world — and only paying for the airfare to get to those places.

Your action item: Consider: What resources are available to you that you’re not utilizing? Who can become a co-conspirator? Are you wasting your commute? (Subways are great places to write!) Is there a little-used conference room at work you can sneak into to fine-tune your sketches after hours? It’s time to get imagining so that you can get creating.

*This post was originally published in Medium’s Forge publication.

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