Ink and Vein

I finished Jami Attenberg’s 1000 words of summer challenge June 13th. My total word count was 14426 words, and I wrote almost every one of the 14 days. I actually started this blog post the next day, and never finished it. That seems to be a theme with me, lately, when I try to write for myself.

Some of what I wrote wasn’t any good, or was just ramblings, but the point wasn’t to produce text that was polished. For me, the point was generating text and getting back into my book, since I hadn’t been able to establish a good writing rhythm for a while.

I was writing, but inconsistently, and frequently feeling stuck when I did carve out the time to write.

I found myself feeling sleepy as soon as I sat down – a pattern I recognized while I was in my memoir writing group – and I would have to get up and move multiple times throughout a writing session, in order to keep alert and keep focused on the page.

Katherine Standefer, the writer leading the writing group, helped me work through some solutions to the problem. It seemed most likely that it was a trauma response: my body was making me tired to protect my mind from revisiting my past.

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with my life on several levels: work at the bookstore, editing, starting a small press, trying to earn enough to pay my bills and to pay off some debt, trying to find time and energy to expand my business, figuring out how to navigate complications in relationships, and then difficult aspects of the book that keep coming back up as I try to progress.

Falling asleep when I sit down to try to work makes sense as a trauma response, and also just as a response to physical and emotional weariness in response to my life, and to the wider national and global situation, too.

But I wrote over 14,000 words in 14 days, missing only one day of writing in that time, and it feels good. It feels good to accomplish something like this, to generate text and to work through my thinking on some of the content in the book. It feels good to know that, when I make my book a priority, I can get the work done.

It was especially helpful having a challenge to take part in, and having other people to check in with. Writing is often a solitary activity, but there’s much that we can do to support each other, too.

After writing 14000 words, I felt eager to get back to the book, to revising, to reorganizing, to shaping this into the finished project it will be. The most important element is to keep coming back to the page, again and again.

Since that challenge, I haven’t made much progress on the writing, haven’t managed to make the book a priority. I keep coming back to this issue, again and again, and keep finding myself either too busy with work or spending too much time scrolling on the internet (the political state of the world, especially the United States is terrifying, discouraging, there’s no getting around that), or just making my schedule too full for writing.

I’ve been participating in a virtual writing accountability group for a couple weeks, but haven’t managed much headway with that. It comes down to needing to center the book, center myself, and I keep not doing that. I am, as usual, my own biggest problem.

I’ve joked with a couple friends that I just need to pretend I have nothing in my life except for work and the book, that I need to just go to work and come home and write, and ignore everything else, cut off everything and everyone else.

And maybe I do. The idea of isolation doesn’t feel good, but my current life doesn’t feel good, either, so maybe a reset is what I need. Not permanent isolation, but just a temporary withdrawal from events and an immersion in solitary activities like long walks, hikes, reading, and writing. Writing most of all.