Category: Inlet Inspiration

As summer winds down, it’s hard not to notice the change in the air—and I’m not just talking about content cat days butting in between sweltering dog days.

I’m talking about the elephants and the donkeys in the room, carrying us someplace new.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve felt moved by the sea change in the zeitgeist? And had a hankering to bottle it. Turn it into ink. Pick up your quill, dip into the well, and write out the shift on the page?

Ah, but how to make sense of it all? Turn being moved by the moment into a piece of writing. Or slip it into an essay, novel, poem, memoir already in the works? Or will it marinate within and find its way over time regardless?

As a writer and creative writing instructor asking herself the same questions, my best answer comes down to this: tune your ear to metaphor, and see where it takes you.

Okay, yes, metaphor is my favorite craft element. So I admit I’m partial. But stay with me and you may become a convert too.

Take “sea change.” Peel back the layers held within and you find a clunky hunk of waterlogged trunk transformed into buoyant driftwood. Changes, once made, that cannot be undone.

Metaphors often resist explanation of whatever we’re trying to get our minds around, such as the big picture “political zeitgeist.” Instead they point to something seemingly unrelated, often concrete and better known, like “changes in the sea.”

They encourage us to compare the two things through detail and relationship—to ponder the transformation of wood into driftwood and how it relates to the change in the political climate.

They work as guides to help us see one thing in terms of another, to illuminate new understanding.

Contrary to popular belief, metaphors are not the province of poets. They’re the kingdom we all live in.

Better yet, you could say metaphors work like the democracy we all have a stake in. Sure, even if we don’t pay much attention to them, they can keep working for us for quite some time.

But if we get lazy, if we don’t shape their usage, don’t recognize how they shape the very world we live in, let alone write about, all we have worked for is at risk of losing its integrity.

This spring is change-crazy. I swear a cartoonish “boing-oing” emanates from my desktop thermometer with each leap from one temperature extreme to the next.

Many of the young plants in my garden are like wild animals peeking from darkness rather than eager green sprigs unfurling. But not all.

Early in April, when temperatures spiked past eighty degrees for a couple record-breaking days in a row, crocuses went off like tiny fireworks all over my yard. One even grabbed enough fast and furious energy to spark up under a dwarf hemlock.

As my yard transformed from blanketed-in-white to crackling-with-crocuses, just a couple miles away, the magnolias in Madison’s Longenecker Horticultural Gardens burst into a riotous full bloom—lush, expansive flowers flushed pearl-pink and hush-yellow in the sudden heat. Then the opposite extreme hit: rain and sleet, followed by snow and ice, coated the flowers in a glistening crystalline freeze.

But the blooms didn’t break off. In a few days the freeze eased and, as Madison’s arboretum newsletter described it, “cool cloudy days… like a refrigerator, helped preserve the open flowers and slow the opening of new buds (https://arboretum.wisc.edu/news/arboretum-news/how-magnolia-flowers-weather-an-unpredictable-spring/) .” The trees leveraged something called the “latent heat of fusion,” harnessing energy released during the phase change of water to ice and ice to water, preserving their own blooms.
Photo Credit: Bernard Spragg

The magnolias had what may be the most glorious bloom cycle the city has ever witnessed—brighter blossoms lasting longer than ever.

But every time I found myself admiring a thick blossomed tree, awash with the tranquil joy I often feel when tickled by noodling tendrils of spring, a cloud of anger hovered over the joy and darkened it.

I kept thinking, if only spring could be the way it used to be. If only climate change could change back to just… climate. I even resented the blooming, which made me even madder. I wanted to bow to those boughs, not fume at blooms of beauty unequaled in the arboretum’s history.

And what’s worse, I felt culpable. As if my use of plasticware while on picnics caused the magnolias to super-bloom and muted the budding of my bleeding hearts. As if extra sweaters in my closet caused die-off on my Japanese maples. Which made me feel all the more stupid with anger.

There I was, furious in the face of this sparkling pastel evanescence, feeling helpless, delightfully dazzled, and pissed off—all at the same time.

How much of this was about me, if any of it? All this change is so much bigger than me feeling stuck in the rootedness of the imperfect society I’m part of.

I personally am not the one cause, nor am I the one solution. But maybe I’m like one of those magnolia blossoms tremulous among thousands in Madison, millions in Wisconsin, and trillions across the planet. A part of the whole impacted by external conditions I can’t control any more than a blossom can control the tree it blooms upon.

Or is that metaphor a palliative—seeing myself helpless as a tree to the conditions around it. But maybe a tree isn’t as helpless as it seems. Like the magnolias impacted by conditions out of their direct control, could I, too, reach back into the adaptive wisdom within my nature, resist withering in the weird weather, and instead, use the “latent heat of fusion” as I clash with conflicting conditions, and let it charge me? Give me an extended bloom?

In an interview about her newest book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Sarah Bakewell quotes Robert Ingersoll’s happiness creed: “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

And here I am, in the springing time, about to launch forward, suffused with a coiled urge towards change. To spring upwards out of one phase, into another. As James Wright once wrote, “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

What will that change be for me? Stay tuned.

How about you? Have you faced something that angered or moved you in strange and unexpected ways, until you were pushed to a point you were about to break into blossom? Maybe something akin to this feeling sparked you to write your novel. Write a poem, a story, a personal essay. Even align a group of poems or stories or essays into a collection.

Perhaps a latent heat of fusion has helped or will help you keep writing, even extend or help you better understand what you know and see and understand or wonder at of the world around you, or better preserve something you love as fully and wildly as Madison’s magnolias bloomed this May.

Back in the late 90s, Kurt Vonnegut gave some weird advice to a packed crowd of readers and writers at the Wisconsin Union here in Madison. I’d just started taking my writing seriously and was grabbing tips whenever I could find them from local workshops, audited classes, even a neighbor I’d cat-sat for who had published a few poems. Now here I was at the feet of a master, Distinguished Lecture Series program in one hand, pen poised in the other. But the advice that stayed with me I never wrote down. I might have even dropped my pen when Vonnegut gave it.

He told everyone to write a story, poem, essay—something we could complete. Give ourselves to it wholly. Finish the piece. Then like Buddhists constructing and deconstructing sand mandalas, destroy it.

Yes, destroy it. That’s what he said. I blinked a few times. A sense of unease grew in my itchy fingertips. Destroy my writing?I’d diligently saved every halfway-decent scrap I’d written to date. All my potential-laden lines seemed precious, let alone the final drafts I’d cobbled together. Maybe I could let a scrap or two go. But a completed piece? No way.

I still remember sitting in that chilly lecture hall, huddled in my winter coat, trying to imagine myself crumpling a satisfyingly final draft into a ball and throwing it in the trash—only to rush back, dig it up, and smooth it back out again.

I desperately wanted to write something good. Wanted to be read. To have someone sitting in a dusty office in the corner of a university town say, “Yes, this is something I’d like to publish.”

And Vonnegut was saying don’t worry about it. Publishing isn’t all that important. The writing itself matters more.

Maybe he, the great Kurt Vonnegut, had enough ideas so he could burn a few. But not me.
Heck, what if by destroying my completed work, I destroyed the best thing I’d ever written to date? And no one would ever know? Not even me.

I honestly don’t remember anything else he said. Just, destroy your art. And I remember the feeling that came over me as he continued talking—a mix of demoralization, hubris, horror, exhaustion, and somehow in there, swirling around with everything else, the lightest breeze of liberation.

But I did not take his advice. To this day, I still have a box of poems and stories squirreled away from that early period of my writing, most never published.

Over the years, though, I did unintentionally—not intentionally—lose a few final drafts. The misery of computer glitches and misplaced hard copies forced me to confront the splintering, broken-glass panic of irrevocably lost work. I had to let go of that writing because there was nothing to hold onto anymore. So I’d start again, bemoaning the best of my work while creating something new and discovering, in recreation, that where old best words were sacrificed, new best words could be found.

And each time I started over, I learned I could do good work when all seemed lost. Or literally was lost.

You may be reading this thinking, um, Angela, losing work because of a computer malfunction and reworking those original ideas back into something decent isn’t really what Vonnegut was getting at.

I hear you. There’s a bigger concept at work here than “rewriting is an essential part of the writing process.” Yet a lot of new writers question whether rewriting is worthwhile. I can’t tell you how many beginning writers have asked me something akin to, “Doesn’t taking something apart to put it back together again drain a piece of its originality, the spark of spontaneity? Isn’t that a bad thing?”

Here’s my two cents: The “bad thing”, if there is one, isn’t losing a first spark but putting all your trust in a single spark at the onset. True and abiding originality comes not through the admittedly alluring first blush of a good idea, but through testing and executing and developing your ideas, making room for new ones to grow, even an idea that wasn’t there when you started.

I’m typing this not only for my students, but for myself, back in that audience, holding tight to my pen. Because the more interesting questions for me now are, “How can I become better at letting go?”

Even, yes, letting go of what feels like the perfect idea, the just-right image, the stellar sentence so I can better resee what I just did in a new light, then backwards, then upside down, until I find value not only in construction but deconstruction, shift my attention in new ways so the old becomes new again. So what I’m making now matters as much as any other thing made.

At times, I swear it feels like my writing could even be made, remade, or let go of just as easily as a lump of clay can be shaped and reshaped. Sometimes it seems I’ve been using and reusing the same lump all my life—shaping and reshaping words from a collective mound to be massaged, eased, brought back to form and collapse until I somehow believe I hold in my hands creation repurposing creation. Until the kneading and molding and remolding matters as much—maybe more, yes—than the made thing. Making for the sake of making.

So, over the years, I’ve warmed to Vonnegut’s instruction of destruction. I’ve begun to see it as an invitation to appreciate how nourishing a commitment to the creative process can be. Come to value creating over chancing unpredictable gambles with publishing, and to value and embrace the making over the made, as a revitalizing source of stability and strength.

The Instruction of Destruction

TAKE THE VONNEGUT CHALLENGE

Write something for the sake of writing something—nothing more, nothing less. Write knowing that you will complete it, let it go, and won’t move on to publish or share it with others. But don’t just write any old thing. It may be an essay, short story, poem, chapter of a novel, or more. Craft it. Build it the way you’d build a solid fire. Let the spark grow. Turn it into something meaningful. That means more than one draft. You may spend a few hours or a few days on the piece, even weeks, all the while knowing you will not keep it, knowing you’re writing purely for the sake of making something. Consciously reflect on the process as you’re engaged in it. How is your writing process different than it would be otherwise? What’s the same? Is the writing itself different than other writing you’ve engaged in? In what ways? How about you—are you relating to your writing differently? Is the process more pleasurable, or less so? Both? And if so, how can both things be true at once? What is the writing or process missing? What does the experience help you gain? If a piece of writing isn’t read, is it truly complete? Reflect as you go, share your insights with other writers you know. And I’m happy to hear about your process, too. Simply reply to this email.

BUILD A FIRE JOURNAL

While camping this past summer, I carved out some retreat time and started something I called “fire journaling”, inspired in part by Vonnegut’s challenge. Basically, whatever I wrote each night I’d toss into the campfire. Yup, I went for it! Goodbye, creation! Want to hear more about this process? Click the button below to get on my DIY Retreat Kit Waitlist. My Inlet DIY Retreat Kits include downloadable instructions for assembling your own DIY Retreat (how to make retreat space either away from home or at home), plus a couple spotlights, like how you might use a Fire Journal on retreat.

Do you remember a surprisingly kind + insightful + genuine thing someone said about your writing not too long ago? Maybe a mentor, writing buddy, or a reader of your work in a journal reached out to say, I liked that image, detail, character, last line. It has stayed with me. It gave me hope.

As we move forward in 2023, and word clouds made from our inboxes turn “resolution,” “goal,” or “intention” into giants of the month, I encourage you to consider refocusing those intentions for a moment, and turning them towards helping another writer achieve their goals.

Cheer that writer on. Say something you genuinely loved or appreciated about their work. It may stay with them—give them hope. Plus, you may be surprised at how much it inspires you in your own writing, too.

Queen bumblebees spend over two thirds of their lives hibernating in small cold holes. After the community they once knew has buzzed into the beyond, each bee burrows, alone, to wait out winter.

Their wings held now by dirt rather than air, do they remember the golden dusts of summer? Do they curl towards phantom petals, hear the companionable hum of ghosts, or long for a honeyed firmament?

I can’t help wonder if bumblebees spend month after month of their short lives quietly pressed up against mud, ice, root and rock, telling themselves stories.

And how about you? Like me, do you find yourself settling in this winter, telling yourself stories you’re hoping will some day wing their way to others?

At about three in the afternoon, on a too-hot mid-June day here in Madison, it turned dark as dusk. The wind picked up hard, rain lashed our roof, and the tall shagbark hickories surrounding our house began tipping this way and that, shedding branches and leaves like giddy dogs shed water. My computer screen flickered—I was in the middle of a writing project, fingers hovering over my keyboard—and the electricity went out.

“Are you okay?” I called to my husband working upstairs. “Flashlight?” he answered. “Tornado?” I replied.

But by the time we found a couple flashlights, the brief spat of rain and high winds had stopped. The daylight returned to normal levels—our electricity did not.

The power company’s calm, disaffected voice-recording told us to “plan for an extended period without power.”

“How ‘extensive’?” I asked my husband, using air quotes for emphasis.

We’d recently finished watching the post-apocalyptic TV series Station Eleven. Within a few days of that story’s disaster, the dead were everywhere. So my pandemic-affected, climate-change sensitized brain quickly shift into apocalypse mode.

I looked at our refrigerator. How long did we have before food would spoil?

My husband and I picked up our phones. Who should we call first?

Our moms. Then we’d order pizza.

Turns out “extensive” wasn’t all of Madison—just 19,000 households. Still, a lot of people. But not apocalypse level. The teen I talked with at Glass Nickel Pizza, a little over a mile from us, was oblivious. It hadn’t even rained over there. The pizza ovens were just fine.

We ate half our pizza for dinner, gave the other half to my sister’s family a few blocks away. We chatted with neighbors. And went for a walk like we do every day, this time more mindful of the light than usual.

The sun had come out again and we were keenly aware it was lowering. We’d been on walks like this often in the late afternoon, though rarely gave the sun’s position in the sky a second thought. Yet people had lived by the sun, without electricity, for hundreds of thousands of years. Most of recorded history.

I reached for my husband’s hand as we turned a corner towards our darkening house, feeling the urgency and predictably of natural light moving through us. Had we done enough so far that day? Was there enough time for it all? There was so little left of the light. Yet we felt less worried about hurrying to finish, too. We had turned our phones off. Our electric clocks weren’t working and we didn’t mind. When we returned home we found matches, sat in comfortable chairs in front of our powerless TV, then settled in to read by candlelight.

And when the power kicked in late in the evening, we didn’t turn the lights back on.

Have you ever congratulated yourself for doing something seemingly clever—oh, say, trying to get ahead of a storm, timing it just right on the road—only to realize later that you were just darn lucky?

A couple weeks ago, driving up through Wisconsin’s North Woods, keeping an eye on weather radar, I dodged a storm, nudging further west, then north, then west and north and west again, skirting a large black low-bellied cloud mass I kept thinking I could drive around–until the mass became miles wide and there was no more west to go.

I’d successfully maneuvered my way around the storm with only fifteen miles between me and my destination. But now I had no choice. I had to navigate north, out of the dwindling cloud-fringed sunlight, and toward the inky scribble of storm ahead.

I took a deep breath and punched through into a light rain that soon turned into a hard downpour. I kept thinking with the next deep breath that I just had a few more minutes to go. A few more minutes turned into a half hour of on-and-off waterworks that kept filling the ditches to the left and right of me. All the while I drove, watching the water levels rise, thinking how beautiful the storm. How strange and strong and bold, the way water can whip and wend and thrill and pour down and thunder forth.

I later learned that around the same time I reached my family’s old farmland safely, the rain deluged into a flash flood that washed out miles of roads in my wake.

I later learned that around the same time I reached my family’s old farmland safely, the rain deluged into a flash flood that washed out miles of roads in my wake.

And did this.

That’s a video from WBAY news. Shortly after I got off the road and shook the rain off my hoodie, a small highway I had been on, featured in the video, broke in two just as a sheriff’s deputy drove over a swollen culvert. His SUV plunged into the rushing water along with giant chunks of blacktop. Somehow the deputy and his two K9s got out before the vehicle filled with water, and they found safety on higher ground.

As I watched the story on the news later that night, and saw footage of that drowned car, I swallowed hard. They were fine. Just a few miles from where I was driving, just a few minutes from when I was driving. They were almost toast.

We may think we’re in control. May think we’ve got it figured out. We may even be prepared. Have all the tools. In a storm that means equipment. Radar. Maps. GPS. Even knowledge of the lay of the land, the nature of nature.

In writing that means craft tools like metaphor and plot, scene building and sentence construction, character development and theme. Plus an understanding of the lay of that land that is your own work—your style and voice and approach. Where you’ve been, where you want to go. Along with the nature of the piece you’re writing. You can intuit it, know its contours, what its capable of. Or at least think you know.

Knowledge is power. But nature can overpower our knowledge. And surprises can come at us—from underneath.

When I was skirting that storm, watching the radar, staying on track, thinking I had it all under control—did I? Yes and no. I kept adjusting my timing based on radar. Adjusting my path. Feeling solid and confident about my choices—for the most part. I had some skills, some knowledge. And I used all the tools I had to avoid the storm successfully. Until I couldn’t.

The conditions around me were changing too fast. Maybe I’d timed it well at first, staying on top of things, missing the worst of it by less than an hour. But luck had a lot to do with it.

Another fifteen minutes here, or fifteen miles there, and an overwhelmed ditch may have swept me off the road and into a makeshift river.

As a writer, when I get over-confident, and think, oh yeah, I’ve figured out just where I am, what I’m doing, what it means—sometimes things do fit together and I’m right. But often, the nature of what I’m working with is fluid. I may not know all the piece is capable of. The work itself may be greater than my understanding of it. And soon something may shift from beneath—and I can lose all momentum.

Fortunately, if something gives way in a piece of writing, it’s not life or death. And doesn’t necessarily mean the whole piece collapses. It may mean the opposite. That breaking point may be just what I need to find the next new discovery in order to make the piece work. I can even honor that wild capability—and give it room to open up something new in my writing.

Ironically, the best way to stay open to that level of drastic surprise and new discovery is to be prepared.

Whether you’re driving or writing, I encourage you to plan ahead, have a map and reliable GPS system handy, keep your eye on the road—and buckle up. Because you may be surprised by where you’re headed.

Have you ever been to a caterpillar race?

In Banner Elk, North Carolina, the woolly bear that reaches the finish line first is said to predict the winter ahead. The blacker the worm, the colder and snowier the winter. The browner the milder.

Yet in the spring, those caterpillars don’t care whether they satisfied an old wives’ tale. They don’t recall (or even know) whether they had more or less brown or black fuzz all over.

But they do need that fuzz—regardless of color. They won’t awaken until the charged sensors in those bristly hairs tell them the time is right to thaw.

***

Have you ever felt hairs standing on end before you transformed an idea into a story or poem or essay on the page?

Or perhaps your writing was in stasis until you sensed a thaw on its way?

Or you knew, finally, it was time to move into a new phase—corral poems into a collection.

Take your plot through an outline. Warm up to a new draft.

Start a new chapter, or inch closer to finally penning “the end.”

Maybe, like me, you’ve paused as you started new work, or as you returned to revise–paused with pen in hand, as if putting feelers out to sense whether the conditions are right.

A pause that provided focus–until it lingered into hesitation, lengthened into doubt. And you froze.

When that happens to me, it helps to know I’m not alone. That there are other writers all around, doing the same thing. Testing, pausing, freezing—thawing. Emerging from a stasis—or from one phase to the next in the creative process.

In fact, it’s possible to work through that writing process along with others, in the solitude of one’s own writing space.

Sounds like a contradiction—shared solitude. But as Walt Whitman says, what’s wrong with a little contradiction when you contain multitudes?

I’m talking about something called “livewriting.” A conceptually shared writing space with room for shared multitudes—creative emergence at multiple desks all at once, yet apart from one another virtually.

My writing mentor, Katey Shultz, is offering a month of free livewriting—EMERGE—starting Monday. (Yes, a whole month! Starting April 4th.)

But just what is livewriting, exactly? Here’s Katey:

Livewriting is a mostly silent, real-time writing experience celebrating the creative process. It seems counterintuitive to come together, in silence, to write → but this gentle, collective accountability WORKS because we all experience the value of shared vulnerability. When that happens, writers start worrying less about harsh goals and, instead, focus on the validation they experience by being uplifted in their community and associating positive energy with the habit of writing.

Livewriting isn’t a competition, or a race. It’s simply that shared act of being with others in the midst of coaxing writing as it emerges. Being with others in the imperfect perfection of the creative process—sometimes it’s raw, sometimes cooked. It’s always a transformative act of discovering and letting go and emerging into next new thing.

So I’m taking the leap into Livewriting with Katey in April, and I hope you’ll join us. It’s even better than racing caterpillars.

As I ponder ways to spark your writing this March, I keep looking back over a dark February—Russia’s attack on Ukraine, my beloved sixteen-year-old cat’s passing, a few vague health issues on the periphery of my fiftieth year. So nothing on my mostly upbeat topic list feels quite right.

Instead, comedian Bill Hader’s creative process advice keeps running through my head: “It’s so much easier to come up with a fun goofball thing” than what’s underlying it—which may be darker, harder to face, and less fun. Kind of like this moment we find ourselves living in.

But when Hader comes up with that easy goofball idea, he doesn’t shelve it because it’s too facile. Or because it’s not deep enough. He pitches it to his writer’s room like it’s the greatest thing ever, all the while knowing it’s (probably) not.

That may sound like a joke. After all, he is a comedian who wrote and performed for SNL for eight years. But he also mentored at Pixar, and now stars in his own Emmy winning TV series on HBO (Barry), for which he’s creator and writer. So maybe it’s not so crazy after all? He’s found a way to make it work. And so has Pixar.

Think of it this way: when you’re coming up with an idea, it can be hard to know what might be great, or even good. And sometimes we just need to run with what comes to us. Rather than dither, Hader’s willing to “be wrong fast.”

When you’re wrong fast, it’s okay to stay in what might be wrong for a bit. Not weeks and months. But perhaps a few minutes. Maybe a few hours, even days. You can study that wrong-footedness, so you can get the feel for not just what’s wrong, but how what’s wrong can lead to what’s right.

And by being wrong fast—and wrong loudly, in front of others to boot, soliciting quick pushback from peers—you’re creating an opening.

By owning being wrong—or the possibility of it, even the joy of it—there’s no worry about being criticized for your snafu. You’re already okay with it being bad. Or good. Either is good, actually. Maybe even great.

He’s effectively opening up a judgement-free space in which to ask better questions, like, what am I avoiding? What’s underlying that kneejerk goofiness, or that cliché trope, or dull description of the cornfield in fall, or that one-note trait in my sidekick or antagonist.

What’s the good the bad covers over?

And the more you interrogate something that does feel goofy or cliché or bad, he says, the more you realize you’re avoiding certain things in the story or the character’s life the way you might avoid them in your personal life.

You know that feeling—that swerve we make to avoid something painful or uncomfortable. The swerve to the liquor cabinet, to Netflix, to our phones or the next vacation or escape hatch, as a way to avoid negative feelings.

Or even the swerve in the midst of an uncomfortable situation—that embarrassing moment at the grocery store when you realized you were pushing someone else’s cart, and rather than look up to see who’s missing theirs, you drop your hands fast and mosey on whistling (or maybe that’s just me…).

What if you’re doing that “swerve” with something that’s not quite right in your poem or story? You’re avoiding it. Maybe even willfully not seeing what’s really there.

And what if owning whatever bad thing you’ve written—and pitching it out loud, as if it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever written—will help you dig in even more?

What’s that, you don’t have a writer’s room nestled in the Hollywood hills, peopled with peers, to bounce ideas off of? Neither do I. 😉 But I do have a writing buddy, and a group I meet with on Zoom. Maybe you have one or both, too.

You may be part of this trimester’s Writers’ Inlet Long Haul Cohort, where you’re meeting to talk creative process and practice. (Or you may want to join for the next run in the fall–send me a note to let me know and I’ll put you on the contact list.)

But if you don’t have a group or writing peer you may be able to pull aside a friend. Or simply talk out your pitch into an audio recorder. Then see what happens. How does it feel to own something “bad” and not be afraid of what comes next?

Though we’d rather write work that’s spot on all the time, the creative process includes writing into what’s not so great. A lot. So keep turning towards the goofy or difficult passage that isn’t quite right, even if it’s uncomfortable at first. Even if you’d rather swerve.

Instead, when you stay, you’re more likely to discover insights buried under the bad. And if you’re patient, and look carefully, you may find you give voice to something deep within that’s been waiting for the right moment to finally see the light.

It’s been a few weeks since hundreds of thousands of writing resolutions were launched into the universe. Now it’s the end of January (already!) and if you, like me, made a New Year’s resolution to give your writing a boost, time is testing our resolve.

My resolution is on a yellow Post-it Note atop my computer screen, and I’m happy to report it hasn’t fallen yet. 😉

I took a cue from Maggie Smith, who shared her goal with us at the Inlet last month: “My goal is always that I want to write better this year than I did last year… I would like to be Maggie Smith writing better in 2022 than she did in 2021.”

(Maggie Smith’s debut novel, Truth and Other Lies, is coming out soon—March of 2022. You can pre-order now for a spring break page-turner. Find out what others are saying about her book on Goodreads)

Thanks to Maggie, “Be Angela Rydell writing better in 2022 than in 2021” has been a helpful guide so far.  I’m building new support systems (like connecting with a writing buddy weekly, and giving myself targeted writing challenges, including flash structure exercises that make my brain twist a bit). And when what I try leads me astray, my resolution’s there, twinkling over my desk, reminding me to stay true to the direction I hope to go. My little north star.

Even if your resolution’s already out the window, you’re not in a bad place. An “out the window” failure can motivate you to reach out that window and for the moon.

The writing goal that fails but doesn’t stop you from striving is among the most productive of all.

If you haven’t been able to hit your goal as you’d hoped, here’s a suggestion. Think like a tennis player. When a player flubs a serve, she doesn’t think, I’ve gotta find a better brand of ball. She rethinks her stance.

In other words, worry less about fixing the resolution, and focus on the approach you need to take in order to get your writing going in the right direction.

In this trimester’s Inlet Craft Intensive: Carrying Your Craft—How to Sustain Your Writing Practice for the Long Haul, I recommend working to balance three elements of writing practice—elements you can control in order to make following through with goals more manageable, possible, and even pleasurable:

• How you think about your writing practice: Mindset. Navigating doubt, hope, expectations, accountability, habit building and the creative process.
• How you care for your craft: Maintenance. From empowered self-editing to “reading like to writer,” talking with writer friends, or simply listening carefully to moments of stuckness as you write, and asking why they’re there in the first place.
• How you approach getting your work into the hands of readers: Macro marketing. This includes envisioning your ideal reader as you revise, and creative angles in to reader connection and author platform.

We meet one Thursday night a month, Feb 17, March 17, and April 14. All genres are welcome. I hope you’ll join us to help make your writing practice deeper, smarter, and more rewarding. To find out more, go to the Inlet Craft Intensive page.

So whatever goal you hope to hit (write eight pages a week, pen a poem a month, be a better writer this year than last, publish in a lit mag) first check your positioning—mindset, craft maintenance, marketing—then train your eye on the bright ball of stardust and hope and determination you hold before you, and try once more to launch it towards the heavens.