What to do when you're not actually writing

Reflections from five years of Wild Words, how to cope with waiting and wondering, and a supportive fall workshop.

“Sometimes I think liminal space exists simply to remind us how little we can control, and how important it is to turn inward. I want to tell that young girl to be kinder to herself and to trust the long stretches of silence. Are you still a writer? Why yes, of course you are. You’re just in the eye of the storm that hasn’t calmed yet. Hold on.”

—Wild Words, pg. 121

Last month I was invited to join a writing group via Zoom at The Open Book in Warrenton, VA. They’re all reading WILD WORDS for their fall session and preparing to carve out time to work on a project.

This event happened to coincide with a special book birthday, so I’ve been a little sentimental thinking about WILD WORDS being out in the world for five whole years. It was published on October 15, 2019, and much like this newsletter and my podcast, provides an alternative path to being in relationship to our creativity. One that trades burnout for self-compassion and being on four social media platforms for doing whatever feels good to you.

To say I was delighted by this invitation would be an understatement. These are my people! Who I wrote WILD WORDS for! And one of the very thoughtful questions asked was about what to do when you’re not actually writing. When you’re living life, and life is just a lot.

The first thing that popped into my head? Wintering.

Katherine May

literally wrote the book on wintering, describing it as “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” Sounds about right, doesn’t it? She goes on to describe a period of transition as the sensation of having “temporarily fallen between two worlds.”

That accurately describes where I am at the moment. Collectively, we are very much between two worlds with a presidential election in the United States just weeks away. Creatively, I set aside a fiction project to dive back into my memoir this fall, and it’s slow going.

So I recently did what I encourage others to do: name where I am. I’m not writing much. I’m occasionally doing line edits or adding changes to my document. Sometimes I write a paragraph in my journal and mark it for later. I’m continuing to submit some essays and poems and collect rejections.

Deep down, it feels like winter again.

Maybe in an anniversary edition I can add The Season of Fatigue to the book, or something to sum up the particular challenges of trying to make things in the shadow of everything else. Politics. Wars. Whatever illness is spreading at school. Hurricanes. Mothering. Freelancing. Perimenopause. Waves and waves of covid.

Are you tired too? Because I sure am. And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one struggling to focus at the moment.

So back to the event and this very good question about not writing. To respond, I took my cue from nature. Earlier this year I recorded a podcast episode on this very topic with Sister Seasons founder Rebecca Magee who said:

“We believe that if anything is going to come into existence that’s worthy, you have to effort it into being. And the truth is, things can be incubating on your mental back burner and they will let you know when they need to be worked on … When I follow that and trust that, I’m not abandoning myself anymore.”

**Side note: Rebecca is hosting a lovely fall workshop later this month and gave me a discount code to share—head to the bottom of this email to snag it.

It’s the time of year when leaves are starting to turn. Some trees are half burgundy already. There’s a young tree in a neighbor’s yard that has already lost most of its leaves. It feels like everything is dying. The landscape turns barren. But really, the trees are just shedding what they don’t need anymore.

Let’s hold on to the idea that all that work roots do underneath the soil, warmed by the leaves that have fallen around them, makes it possible for sprouts to arrive come spring.

You might be thinking No! That’s so hard! I refuse to winter! You are not alone in the resistance. Waiting and wondering is challenging, and I suppose a small solace is knowing that no writer is immune.

Louise Glück—who has won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry!—sometimes wouldn’t write for years, and

Meghan O'Rourke

shares more in her recent Substack about a past interview with the poet.

“I recall her telling me how, after a long, painful silence, in which she could not write, she “heard” the opening lines of the title poem to her Putlizer-Prize winning book The Wild Iris.”

Like all of us, Gluck felt the suffering of not writing. It’s frustrating! But as O’Rourke writes it’s also “helpful to be reminded that probably suffering is common! A side effect, or flip side, of the drive to make. It might be the useful force we need at the tendril’d beginning of a project, when we have to let the material find its way to the page without imposing our will on it.”

Winter (whether it’s literally winter or a creative winter) is a way to let things settle, to allow material to ‘find its way,’ and to deeply trust the process.

This topic tends to circle back around every year, and I think it’s because we could all use the reminder.

The warmth and expansion of spring and summer is made possible because of the coolness and contraction of fall and winter.

Words materialize not despite our dark seasons, but because of them.

Until next time,
Nicole

P.S. Speaking of seasons, here’s just thing for fall. Join Sister Seasons for Carrying The Question, a 6-week self-inquiry circle for women + non-binary changemakers to help you root into your inner wisdom, find clarity on your biggest questions, and build the skills to thrive in increasingly complex times. I actually exhaled a little bit typing that! It starts on October 25, and you can use the code NG25 for $25 off registration.