The Seasons of Writing
I think one of the biggest sources of frustration for writers is having expectations of ourselves based on a season we’re not currently in. It’s frustrating to be in shorts on a blustery winter day. It’s frustrating to be swaddled in a parka during 95 degree heat.
If you expect yourself to be writing every day, but you’re currently in a season of hibernation, you’re going to be frustrated with yourself. What if it’s okay to not write sometimes? What if your voice, and all your future creative projects, depend on this time of rest and word-silence?
What if your creative self wants you to pursue other creative outlets at this time—gardening, painting, learning a new technique in the kitchen; things that don’t involve writing words down—so that you may return to the page reinvigorated, broadened by a new medium or skill?
~~~
If you expect yourself to be writing everyday but you’re currently in a season of curation—organizing and building and editing—you’re going to be frustrated with yourself. Returning to old work after a period of fruitful distance and making sense of what it needs is an important creative act.
You work, time passes, and then you return to what you’ve made, able to look at it as something that exists outside of you. What if this act of revisiting and revising, of editing and putting together submissions and ordering the poems in your chapbook like a mixtape, is precisely the work that this season caters to best?
~~~
It’s just as important, in the season of fruitfulness when you are writing, to not get caught up in what you’re doing or why: to get out of your own way and “keep the channel open,” as Martha Graham wrote.
Don’t edit. Don’t curate. Don’t assess or define. When the words show up, give them your undivided present-moment attention; they need you to fully divest from all tendencies to determine quality or meaning, to categorize or name what you’re doing. If you must ask questions, point them at the world or the edges of your project, asking them in a way that makes the work bigger, stretchier. Ask questions that aren’t too invested in their own answers, because they’d rather prolong their curiosity.
~~~
You are a writer: You are an explorer. Questions are vital so long as they are leading you forward, making the space (the page) bigger, not stopping you dead in your tracks.
You are a writer: You are a gardener. You’re planting something, yes, and you may wish for a garden someday, but you know anything pretty starts with you putting your hands directly in the dirt, and you know that “pretty” isn’t the only way to grow something.
Writing is important. Curation and organization and editing are important. Hibernation is important, too. “Writer’s block” is just a tool of capitalism getting between you and rest, keeping your creativity thin and competitive.
What I want you to know today:
You are allowed to be an anti-capitalist writer who trades their economic framework for an environmental one; who syncs up not with competition, but climate and context. One who knows the value of dirt, regardless of what is or isn’t happening right above it.
