Way back when the pandemic began, I joined a writing group. Every week by email the host would send a prompt to an assortment of writers, of whom I knew just one. A few days later, we’d share our work like offerings, then follow up with private notes of encouragement: I like this line or good job.
The responses were simple, easy and kind. I needed this nudge to write, and more than I’d like to admit, I needed the accolade. It felt good.
It felt needy to need but, if I’m out loud and honest, it mostly felt good.
* * *
Most of my friends have a writing group they lean on for encouragement and support. But I’ve always been a loner, not a joiner. I often lead and this was the first group I had no obligation to run or guide. Less pressure, more play.
Thanks to this somewhat anonymous and pressure-less routine, last year I wrote more than I have in years. The more I wrote the more I had to write. It was a faucet I didn’t want to turn off.
But as the summer wore on the world turned more and more grim, and we shared less and less. We were worn down with life. Weary, we took the break we all needed.
* * *
But like a run you skip just one day, and then another, I wrote less and less. I got rusty. I resented my blank pages, my dull mind, this idling blog. I grew mad at myself: what’s wrong with you? can’t you do anything? you’re so lazy!
This is normal. Writers go fallow. We need rest and restoration. But each time I hit a dry spell, my creative life feels terminal: I will never write again, I say, falling to the couch in a dramatic heap.
Of course, I always rally, I write. Life takes on a brighter hue.
* * *
Today, our writing group resumed. And I’m happy to have a structure that urges me to the page again.
But more importantly, I’m remembering — for the zillionth time, it seems — that writing is practice, not precious. My best work, and my most creative and happy self, is found through trying and messing and feeling through, without expectation or plan.
I gotta stay in the play, not in the product.
* * *
Writer-artist Austin Kleon, who modernized the erasure form with his black out poetry, blogs daily, not because he has so much to say but because “blogging is about discovering what I have to say.”
“I had no idea,” he writes, “how badly my writing muscles had atrophied. After a couple of weeks, I could feel the sentences coming easier. . . . Something small every day leads to something big.”
* * *
I’ve had seasons of daily pages, and seasons of not writing at all.
But I am reminded now of my favorite season, when I write with fever and share with abandon, when everything feels alive and abundant. I want to go back — or, rather, forward — with a loose grip.
Write more, write better, write now.
I want to bumble and flub, to kick off the rust and oil the gears. I want to write the odd phrase, the awkward break, share the almost-there line, the not-quite poem. Not to preen and gleam but to build muscle, to let go of the precious line and sacred space so that I can return again to the power and flow of making.
Years ago my first and favorite teacher, Judyth Hill, told me: Writing needs air!
Yes, yes! It needs to crackle and spit, to fire and flash. Let us not hold our poems too close, our words too dear, but instead share wildly and with great cheer.
Are you with me? Let’s go!