Some Not-Writing Thoughts

I promised you all some not-writing thoughts, so here they are.

For the last, oh, six months or so, I’ve hardly been writing at all. I’d wake up every day, hoping to write, and then it wouldn’t happen. I’d try to push through with sheer willpower, which almost never worked and made me feel miserable besides.

I did get a few things done — because I’d promised patrons a story every month, I at least drafted a little story and sent it out every month (April – July). Deadlines help. But otherwise, stuck, and for a while, I was really beating myself up over it.

***

There’s a temptation to call this writer’s block, but I kind of hate that term. The problem is that there are so many different things that lead to not writing, and they all get tossed together under block, and that’s not helpful. For example:

a) lack of ideas — this is something newer writers are much more likely to be prone to, in my experience. By the time you’re at my stage, 30 years in, I think you often have far more ideas than you’ll be able to execute in your remaining lifetime.

b) trouble deciding what to work on — this is sort of a art vs. commerce problem? Usually, it’s not so hard for me to figure out what I’m most artistically interested in working at any given moment, but sometimes I get tangled up in stressing about the market, and what I *should* be writing, and then I can get stuck there.

I think I’ve mostly figured this one out for me — I’m just not a commercial writer, and if I try to write something I’m not excited about, I will get bored and stop, or I will write poorly. (This is just me, other writers can do excellent work AND write to market. A wonderful skillset that I do not possess, it turns out.) So I mostly know now that I should follow my passionate interest, and that is most likely to result in a writing project I’m happy with. Sometimes I forget, though, or I let the market voices get too much in my head.

c) fear. This is a big one, and I might write more about it at another point, but I don’t want to focus this post on it. It’s definitely something I’m struggling with, a sort of artistic fear when I sit down to write that it will come out badly, and so it’s safer not to write at all. I’m still working through this, so perhaps another post, down the road. Getting past the fear has something to do with lowering the stakes, also finding the joy and playfulness again. More on that another day…

***

There are a lot of other things that can lead to not-writing, but rather than list them all, I’m going to go right to the one that I think was most at fault here:

d) overwhelm.

This is where I take a sharp detour, and tell you that Jed and I have been in couples therapy for almost two years now, and I’ll talk about it more at some point, but not yet. Things were pretty rough for a while, but we’re doing better now.

Some of the issues were joint issues, but we also have our own individual issues that don’t help with being a good partner in a relationship. Which takes me back to overwhelm.

***

When I have too many tasks on my plate, I start to shut down. It has taken me literally YEARS to figure this out, and it’s only this past winter that it’s really started to crystallize, and I give big credit to our couples therapist, Catallina (rec. available on request, I love her, but note that she’s primarily CA-based and your insurance may not cover her).

What shutdown looks like for me — I get seriously aversive to anything that feels like it’s putting more demands on my time. In retrospect, the first big symptom of this started many years ago, when I started having trouble picking up the phone, even when the person on the line was a friend I liked and that I would normally enjoy talking to. I had too many tasks on my to-do list, too many blinking ATTENTION lights in my head, and a phone call became just one task too many. This was hard on some of my relationships.

I also stopped dealing with e-mail. I usually managed to deal with the most urgent ones — the immediate needs of students and the ones related to department tasks. And I set aside time for school board related e-mail every two weeks and forced myself to deal with it. But all the others — the general writerly e-mails, the possible projects, the library events, the introductions and requests for favors, each one that would require a real response and some time to deal with whatever it entailed? I’d read them and then close the e-mail, meaning to get back to it, but mostly not actually doing so.

***

This has actually happened to me before. Many years ago, I let my e-mail pile up until I had over 5000 messages waiting for responses, and it was truly hideous — I ended up taking an entire summer just to process them all, getting myself down to Inbox Zero, and I kept it reasonable for a while after that.

But sometime in the last few years, the overwhelm kicked in again (I blame the pandemic), and the pile in my Inbox started to get bigger (it doesn’t help that when you’re far enough behind, there’s guilt and shame attached to it too, and so many responses would now have to start with apologies for tardiness, and others would just be reminders of missed opportunities…). At the start of the summer, I was over 1000 again.

So I dug in, and I asked my assistant Stephanie to help, and we’ve now got it down to under 400, and I think we can get another 200 knocked out before the semester starts. It’s feeling more manageable, and it’s a small enough pile now and I’ve reviewed it enough that I no longer feel like there are snakes in there, waiting to jump out at me. (Thanks to Bujold for that metaphor: e-mail as a nest full of potentially hissing snakes…)

***

I was also overwhelmed domestically. Kevin is good about splitting domestic labor, but during the pandemic, I got depressed, and I mostly stopped doing my share, beyond the absolute minimum. And so lots of areas that are normally my responsibility fell apart. It’s been a long, slow process digging out from under that — I’ve been working on getting the house in shape for close to a year now, and the garden for at least six months.

And of course, it’s not as if life stops — I had a badly-sprained ankle and two big work trips in the spring, followed by Kevin’s father’s sudden serious illness and passing, so there were times when clearing the decks just stopped for a while. It happens, and I try not to beat myself up about how slow the process has been.

By the start of this summer, I think I was really starting to understand what was going on in my head, though I’m not sure I could put it into words then. I just knew that I HAD to prioritize clearing the decks — that if I wanted to feel sane again, I had to get the e-mail, house, and garden under control. So that’s what I’ve been doing, the last three months, working pretty steadily on that, organizing the family to help.

***

Side note on asking for help: Kevin and the kids are generally very willing to help — the kids don’t love chores, but I can get a fair bit of work out of them if I pace them appropriately. For example, for most of the summer, Anand has done about an hour of gardening work for me each day, but he has trouble (at age 13) doing more than 15 minutes at a time. So I have him come out at 9 and give him a brief task, then he gets a 45 minute break, then I call him out at 10 for another brief task (ideally something different), and I can repeat that one or two more times each day without him complaining.

Generally, they’re wiling, but need direction when asked to do things that would’ve normally been in my purview, and the problem is, when I’m overwhelmed, organizing other people is yet another task that is beyond me. Organizing in general is something that uses a lot of executive function skills, and I can only do it to a limited extent each day (usually during the morning, when my energy levels are high and my ADHD meds are working their best).

I’m also not good at asking for help. This is something therapy has made much clearer to me. (Cue soundtrack to Encanto, and Luisa singing “Under Pressure.”) This is probably another post too, unpacking why I feel this way and how it’s problematic and unproductive.

***

The funny thing is, I thought I asked for help a lot! I’m constantly asking people for advice online, or asking Kevin to do a household task, or asking Jed for tech support help, etc. and so on. But people — I try to do a LOT. Between my own life, family responsibilities, small business, non-profit, and school board service, it’s just a lot. And in retrospect, I should’ve been asking for a LOT more help than I was, help commensurate with the kinds of things I was trying to accomplish.

The problem is, when I’m overwhelmed, at the worst of it, I can’t even manage to articulate that I’m drowning. I’m in panic mode, my brain just screaming GO GO GO at me, and so I work sixteen-hour days like an exhausted robot, and I don’t even tell Kevin that I’m drowning, because talking to him about it is another task, and I have no time for another task — which is clearly ridiculous, I know. It makes no sense.

But when I’m really overwhelmed, my executive functioning capacity gets filled to the brim and overflows, and the first thing to go, unfortunately, is my ability to prioritize. It starts to feel like EVERYTHING is equally important.

***

To give an example, let’s say one of my tasks is to make milk toffee and let it cool and cut it into pieces and package it up (which is actually at least three or four tasks). That little to-do list is running in my head.

And what I should do is pause, look at that list, break it down into tasks, talk to Kevin and the kids and see if they have time to take on some of the sub-tasks, which they probably do, even though they’re busy too, because the sub-tasks are usually 15-30 minutes, and they can find that time, if they know I could use the help.

If I did that, I’d spent 30 minutes on my part of the task. Instead, I spend two hours on the entire task, feeling stressed and panicked (and maybe a little unreasonably resentful too) all the way along, and there ends up being much less time available for resting and recuperating, and maybe refilling that executive function well.

***

So one thing therapy has been very useful for is drawing my attention to that feeling of overwhelm, and helping me to interrupt that unproductive cycle. When I start feeling stressed and panicked because I can’t possibly do everything I need to get done, my instinct is to hurl myself into work, and just run run run, running myself into the ground.

Instead, I’m now trying to notice when I start feeling that way, and take it as a sign to pause. Stop, breathe, re-ground. Catallina has various exercises to help like that, such as doing a quick sensory check: what do I see, hear, feel, smell, taste? Come back to my body, breathe. There’s a lot of conscious breathing in my house these days.

And then, when I’m feeling calm, think for a second.

• Is this task actually urgent, or does it just feel that way? If it’s not actually urgent, maybe I can schedule some time next week for it instead.

• Is this task actually important, or does it just feel that way? If it’s not actually important, maybe I don’t have to do it at all. Or it can go on an ‘optional’ to-do list, to look at someday if I’ve ever run out of things to do (ha ha!).

(This is similar to the decluttering strategy where you can’t quite bear to take the clothes out of your closet straight to the charity shop, so you put them in a bin in your garage instead, and then a few weeks later, it’s much easier to take the bin to the shop. It’s weird that it works, but it totally does.)

• If the task really is important AND urgent, are there any parts of it (or even the whole task) that someone can help with? Can a family member or friend help? Does it make sense to assign my assistant (I can only afford limited hours of this, but every bit helps) to it?

• And sometimes, sadly, the task is important, and urgent, and it is also just not within my capacity. Sometimes I have to say to someone, “I’m so sorry; I thought I had time for this, but I just don’t. Is there someone else who can take this on?”

I hate writing that kind of note, but I’m hoping that if I can keep working on assessing my capacity more accurately, that I can do better at not taking on more than is possible for me to do (while maintaining my sanity).

***

So what does all this have to do with writing? Clearing the decks with e-mail, tasks, house, and garden, has opened up buffer space in my brain. It’s still hard to switch into generative writing mode from task mode. And that’s where writing retreats come in — they take me entirely outside the ‘to do’ list framework for a few days, and encourage me to dwell in creative space instead.

I got on a plane and came to Kaua’i on Thursday. My time since then:

THURSDAY EVENING AND FRIDAY: spent socializing with friends — Roshani Anandappa was here too, so I got to spend time with her family, with Alex Gurevich and Christa Grenawalt and some of Christa’s friends who were visiting. Beautiful, low-key time, winding down and relaxing, sitting on beaches, breathing.

(There’s a saying about writing residency programs — don’t be surprised if you spend the first day or two just sleeping. Most of us are not resting enough in our daily lives.)

***

SATURDAY: all the socializing people went away, and Alex and I settled down to writing retreat. We did a lot of talking on Saturday, rather than just trying to dive into writing. We spent hours talking about his projects, and hours talking about mine. That was incredibly helpful — for me, it helped me think through what I had started work on and left hanging, and what I felt excitement and energy about working on now.

I started a new project; I’m not sure if it’ll be a nonfiction memoir or a fiction book, but I’m excited about it. Also nervous, but in a good way. It’s going to stretch me, and that feels energizing (and scary). Alex read the new sections and gave me feedback; he also helped me pin down some of the details from my life (and our shared life) back in 1992-1993, which was very helpful. I ended up with 1800 words I’m happy with, and another 800 words of notes towards future writing; I have a clear sense of what the next scene will be, which should make it easy to pick up once I get home.

I also started reviewing my old poetry; I’ve been thinking about putting a chapbook or two together and submitting them. (Which I’ve never done before). This was a purely mechanical task, converting old files, and if I were home, I’d probably assign it to my assistant. But it was a fine thing to do in evening downtime, when I was out of creative energy. I got through all of 1992. I wrote a LOT of poetry in 1992. Most of it is terrible, but that’s okay. There are a few that may have some promise.

***

SUNDAY: I could’ve kept going with the memoir project, but I had a potential story under contract. I’d been having so much trouble with e-mail that I hadn’t actually signed the contract, but Sunday I was finally able to open the e-mail, write back to the editor and make sure they still wanted the story, that I hadn’t missed the deadline.

I was good, as it turned out, which was a huge relief, and so I went back to the story, which I’d written one scene of back in March (on the plane back from ICFA). I wrote the rest of the story yesterday, an additional 3000 words, giving scenes to Alex to read and critique as I went.

I finished a draft last night, and while there are undoubtedly some things to tweak, I’m pretty happy with the piece overall; it does interesting work, I think, and is an entertaining story too. It’s due in mid-September, so I’ll give it to my writing workshop in a few weeks, get their feedback, and should be able to have a final version on deadline.

(As a side note, this is one of the best paying stories I’ve written — it’ll be about $850 on acceptance. So assuming all goes well, that will cover the $700 plane ticket here, with a bit to spare. That didn’t need to happen — I had funds I’d previously earned in my writing account to cover this trip. But it’s sort of a nice little concrete bonus, and a sign that I’m on the right track.)

***

MONDAY: Well, Alex and I stayed up pretty late last night, our final night, talking about writing and life (this is therapy too, in a way). We’d been fairly disciplined up until then, going to bed at 10-ish, getting up early to walk down to the beach, swim, write, walk back up (there are a LOT of stairs, it’s a serious trek), lunch and rest for a few hours, then repeat in the late afternoon / evening.

Last night we were up until 2, so I didn’t really get started today until 10. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to work on, so I took the first hour to just review all the possible projects, looking at files, consolidating critique notes, seeing where I felt excitement and urgency, prioritizing.

I have a SF novel that needs a revision pass, Indenture, but I want Alex’s feedback on that, so I’m sending it to him to read in the next few weeks, and we’ll set up a time to talk after that, and then I’ll work on revisions. I have another novel, Liminal Space, that needs what I think will be a pretty quick revision pass, so I could work on that — but I’m feeling in a more generative mode, wanting to draft, rather than revise.

So I think once I finish this post, I’m going to have lunch, and then spend the rest of my time here working on Haven, a middle-grade fantasy novel that I actually started the last time I was here, and which then somehow got buried in my files and forgotten about. I have about 7000 words already, so am hoping to do another 2-3K today.

I leave for the airport around 8-ish tonight, and then it’s a red-eye back, with a change of planes in San Francisco, so I probably won’t be too productive on Tuesday. That’s okay. I’m expecting to feel some of the overwhelm returning when I get back to Chicago, but I’m going to try to keep moving steadily through the backlog of e-mail, house, and garden tasks, and hopefully, that should open up more and more mental space for writing.

I think I’ll be well set up to dive into writing on Wednesday, either on Priorities or Haven or Liminal Space, assuming I can put myself back in this generative space.

***

I’d eventually like to be writing for 3-4 hours / day on weekdays — the kids are old enough now that this is entirely feasible, if I can get into the mental headspace to do it. I’m expecting it’ll take a little while to get myself there — quite possibly through the end of the semester, maybe even through the end of the school year.

I have to keep telling myself that’s okay — this is a long game I’m playing here. I’m 52, and I hope to be writing for at least another 30 years. It doesn’t all have to happen at once.

This was long! I hope this solipsistic dive was at least interesting, and even better, hope it helps someone else.

It is obviously a vast privilege to be able to invest money in going to a writing retreat (and sheer luck that I’m able to do so in a place this beautiful). But you don’t have to necessarily spend this much money to create a writing retreat for yourself. If you have a friend with a spare couch (or better, a bedroom), that can be enough. Something to consider, perhaps?

*****

(Just in case you haven’t heard “Under Pressure,” here it is — check it out on YouTube!)