Category: Inlet Inspiration

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.

 

There’s something delicious about the solitude of drafting a piece of writing. Sitting alone at five a.m. before the sun comes up and the four-year-old gets out of bed, fueled by the steam of coffee and the mist of morning. Or drawing notebook from backpack and crawling onto a mossy boulder to describe a blue butterfly’s silence.

Hunkering down to carefully craft what you want to say—whether plotting a climatic sequence or artfully developing a metaphor—can feel quite intimate. Sometimes it seems all we want is to dwell there, in that quiet, creative place, and work and rework. While at other times all we want is to share what we find there with readers. To be read. Be heard. To “only connect,” as E.M. Forester writes.

That yearning has been with writers for millennium—to take private thoughts and through sheer artistry and grit, transform them into words crafted so well they link us inextricably with readers, like the stars connected by our ancestors into constellations that shine on forever with significance. Nodes of connection from one person’s solitude to another’s.

But the line drawn from writer to reader, that brings words from private drafts to public pages, isn’t as easy as connect-the-dots, and is much harder for us to control than what our pens produce on quiet coffee-fueled mornings. We can’t make that link by staying in the heady realm of solitude. We need to reach out to the public network—whether we work to entice editors or agents, or build our own platforms to entice readers, or a bit of both.

Convincing others that our work deserves a readership can be one of the most difficult things about the writer’s life. And the delicious ease of solitude may morph into the frustration of bitter alienation as our writing struggles to find its way in the world. We can feel shut out, unheard—apart, rather than connected.

That’s one reason Kimberly Behre Kenna, who talked with Writers’ Inlet this month, said if she had to give one piece of advice to our group of writers, it would be this: reach out to other writers. Become part of a community. (And as Jessica Vitalis talked about in October, you’ll likely find more than one community along the way.)

Kimberly Behre Kenna’s debut novel Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade, “the story of a twelve-year-old girl who conjures up help from deceased ecologists to save a Long Island Sound salt marsh from certain death,” is coming out in 2023. —Watch my interview with her below:

Community comes in all shapes and sizes—a weekend online class, a large online pitch forum, a thousand-plus-person conference, or a poetry reading you attend on a whim in a room with five other attendees.

A critique group may act as “first responders” and help revise everything from your first draft to final. A writerly book club may be there at a chosen touchstone on the path, to share war stories about separate journeys, reveling in the victories and commiserating in the defeats.

It’s not only a comfort to find company with other writers on the writer’s journey—it’s a marketing strategy. That act of reaching out again and again can be a catalyst for your author platform. In other words, hearing from others, and sharing your writing process with others, gives you ideas and opportunities for building an audience for your work—and those writers (and their readers) are also potential readers for your work.

That six-attendee poetry reading may lead you to a lit journal’s craft class, which may lead you to a peer recommendation of a writing coach, who may lead you through a finished memoir draft that may at some point lead you to a close-knit group of other writers launching books at your manuscript’s publishing house, like the new community Kimberly Behre Kenna found herself part of when her book got picked up by Regal House/Fitzroy Books.

Like Kimberly and so many other writers, as you keep connecting, you’ll find yourself amidst a flowing network of inlets and outlets supporting your writing life. And to enter the inlet into that network, all you need to do is simply start showing up to groups and reaching out—which in turn helps you show up more to the page. A day of satisfying connections may be as simple as writing in a room of your own for one hour, and the next hour, logging onto Zoom and raising a glass of chardonnay to a peer’s publication—or your own.

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I’m here at Writers’ Inlet to help you write your way to destinations intended or discovered as you go—and support you as you carry your craft forward from one body of work to the next. In fact, that’s what we’ll be talking about at the Inlet next trimester: Carrying Your Craft: How to Sustain Your Writing Practice for the Long Haul. All writers of any genre can join my upcoming “Carrying Your Craft” Monthly Craft Intensive this coming winter/spring, and apply to my new nine week “Carrying Your Craft” class. Applications are currently open to newsletter subscribers or Inlet course writers. Contact me for details: angelarydell@gmail.com.  

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Have you ever tried so hard to make your writing right you snuffed the creative spark that got you going in the first place? Maybe reworking a dull dialogue exchange twenty times made you want to clean your closet, then bookshelf, then attic, rather than return to your novel. Or that comment you got about character arc in a critique session last month made you feel like an impostor and wouldn’t it be better to bake another batch of cookies for your nieces because they always say thank you even if the bottoms are a tad overdone?

There are a lot of writers and aspiring authors with whom Samuel Becket’s quote resonates: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Why? Because when we let failures get us down, sometimes we stay down, and don’t get back up again—and that means our writing gets pushed away for months, years, maybe even decades.

Writers who get stuck in a mistake-shy mentality often believe setting their writing aside is the best answer, because why take another risk when they fear they know what’s about to happen next? (More failure.)

Why try again? Because you don’t know what’s about to happen next. Because each time you fall, you learn how to get up. Because each restart means you get to see what you did before in a new light. Or try a new approach. Because the next mistake you make—or facing the mistake you just made—may be the next step you need in a series of steps you must take to solve a creative problem. Because avoiding mistakes can stifle your creativity and keep you from taking necessary risks. Because failure is normal—and without it, you’d get too big of a head anyway.

Writer Jessica Vitalis, whose debut novel, The Wolf’s Curse, came out this past September, wrote five unpublished novels over thirteen years before her sixth book landed her a publishing contract with Harper Collins. I asked her if she felt that starting new work again and again over all those years—rather than sticking with one novel and working to perfect it—was a mistake.

“I don’t regret anything about that. I’m so glad that my first five novels didn’t get published… If something’s not working, do your best with it. Learn what you can from it, and move on… There’s no quota on words. It’s okay. Write more. Because there will be more stories. There will be more words… So don’t be afraid of just writing more.”

(This fall at the Inlet, we’ve been talking revision in the Monthly Craft Intensive. An edited version of that conversation can be found on the website [link coming soon]. You can still join the Inlet Craft Intensive and watch the unedited conversation, with a Power Point craft talk—and participate in upcoming interviews, too. Contact me for details: angelarydell@gmail.com.)

So ask yourself, have you ever written anything that came out exactly as you wanted it to on the first try, from title to final word? Ever revised something so it was exactly as you wanted—and still felt that way after publication? Most writers will answer no to all those questions.

To succeed at writing, you need to give up on the dream of attaining perfection.

And that’s actually a good thing.

This summer, I woke to loon song on the shores of a freshwater lake, tried grilling a panini over an open fire (almost successfully), reconnected with old college friends, got stung by a bee, met a man who shot a giant fish between the eyes, and survived a hiking encounter with a skinny black bear barely fifty feet from our group. “Does skinny mean hungry?” someone asked when my brother and I returned. Fortunately the bear was only hungry for corn in the field near our hiking trail, the bee sting itched but didn’t swell, and I learned a life hack: if you want to eat a panini grilled in a grilling basket be sure to secure the basket tightly.

I also sharpened my storytelling skills. As I retold the stories of my summer, they got taller. I didn’t just wake to loon song, I swam alongside loons. The big fish shot by the man I met wasn’t just big but a shark. And my brother says the bear was normal-bear-sized, but I remember it towered over us, especially when it paused in its slow amble away along the westward ridge and rose up on its hind legs, taller, skinnier and hungrier.

It’s a well-known truism that the secret to good storytelling is embellishment. But would you believe that when we returned from our bear encounter, shaken, and my brother brought out a bottle of whisky he’d meant to give our dad as a gift, the bottle read, “When facing a great bear, don’t play dead, or try to outrun it. Rather, make light of the situation, keep eye contact, and pour a drink for two.” Believe me, I couldn’t make that part up.

Let’s face it, sometimes true stories are too unlikely to sound true, and sometimes a story’s fantastical hyperbole makes it feel more true—whether true to life or not.

The truth itself can sound stretched or too on-the-nose, manufactured or too coincidental, while fictionalized embellishments—overstatement or understatement, metaphor, allegory, exaggerations of facts—may make the story resonate more fully, even if it’s not more factual. The best “embellishments” don’t obscure but enhance. The more I tell the tale, the more colorful that bear story gets, and the more real the bear encounter becomes—for the audience, I hope, but even me. Though I’m calibrating as I retell it, testing to see if another detail, and yet another, makes the bear story too tall, so tall it topples over. That happens when ornamentation or wordplay or excess details or unnecessary digressions—factual or not—detract from the truth at the core of the story. (FYI, seriously, that whiskey bottle detail is true, I swear.)

As writers, what matters the most is the ring of truth that comes from the whole, that makes our writing true to life. Whether turning fact into fiction.  creative nonfiction, or poetry, when you write bearing detail to help uphold the truth, you’ve got to be selective, even at times leave out some facts to serve the greater truth—or incorporate the narrator’s incredulity so the interpretation of what’s hard to believe is true true gets massaged into the tale-teller’s greater themes.

So, how do you strike the right balance? You get to be choosy. Use good details as a guide, a kind of beacon that focuses what matters. As Michael Ondaatje said, “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumors and tall tales were a kind of charting.” Choose facts and details that work like marks on a map and that bring you closer and closer to your true destination—a true story well told.

Summer’s in full bloom here in Madison, Wisconsin, and there’s no better time to relish productivity than in the midst of much flourishing. Yes, relish it. Appreciate the plenty. Have you indulged?

The cliché is “stop to smell the flowers.” But have the flowers ever stopped you in your tracks—their fragrance so strong you can’t help but notice? I entreat you to treat yourself while you’re deep in constructive creative work, too.

You’ve probably relished a sentence or line until it’s just the right intoxicating mix of melody and meaning. Or appreciated the tension in a scene you’ve revised so the pages are packed to bursting like the skin of ripened fruit.

Keep relishing.

Galway Kinnell describes the deliciousness of creative burgeoning in his poem Blackberry Eating:

lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well

Ah, yes. The splurging. Word to word, sentence to sentence. Plot point to plot point. Are you splurging well?

When we splurge well, we’re appreciating not only the fruits of our labors, but the process behind those labors.

I’m not talking about heady jolts of brainstorming’s lightning, quick thrills of first draft revelations, or boons of insight that come from a benevolent muse’s fickle offerings. I’m talking about your slow nurturing, from seed to stalk, from bud to blossom to fruit, over time. Because you, dear writer, have nourished that work into form.

Don’t shirk the chance to appreciate that burgeoning. Reflect on its harvest, the way you might reflect on the sun that ripened grapes into wine—the presses that pressed, the barrel that held, the people that processed and the seasons and minutes that ticked down until the wine now poured into your glass touches your tongue.

And as you appreciate, don’t be surprised if you chuckle to yourself, recalling a faux pas or series of failures before your work reached its peak ripeness. You probably spent a week slogging through abstract phrasing that fell flat until you gave it dimension through sensory imagery. Or when a reader winced at wooden dialogue during critique, you worked harder until you unearthed the true subtext of the scene. Maybe a secondary character fell into a plot hole, and rescuing her opened up a new direction for your plot. Or perhaps you left her behind, a sacrifice that sealed up a structural gap.

It may have felt cruel. But we know the entreaty to kill our darlings rings true. After all, plants flourish in compost, and so can our creations. To grow and ripen our writing takes not only time and nurturing, but innovation and humility. Our successes only reach their peak because we plow through bad choices—often embarrassingly bad. Which is actually a good thing.

Some days we know this. Others days we’re so enamored with the popular myth of the perfect draft that reworking feels like a slap in the face of creative prowess. But the reality is that good writing— what’s good, plump, and packed to bursting—requires good work. And a little savoring of that good work.

May you splurge well, in this season of ripening.