making myself into the person who is capable

I first drafted these words last night, at the end of a frustrating work day—yet another day on which I had no idea where the hours went. Minute by minute the days get away from me, because I am interrupted and then interrupted again—someone buzzes the apartment, the phone rings, a child wants help with his math, it is time for another meal to be made. I like having the children here, but I have not been able to create any sort of steady rhythm for our days together, and though I dread that in September I will have to teach myself all over again how to get the children fed and out the door on time for school, I expect that I will benefit from the need for such structure—as well as from having some working hours to myself during the day again.

I likely would not have written these words at the end of a frustrating work day if I were not participating in #1000wordsofsummer, an online writing challenge organized by novelist Jami Attenberg, and if I had not had about 500 words to go to meet the daily goal. I’ve been using a Twitter thread to keep myself accountable to the goal, and I’ve already missed the target on four days (Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, and Monday and Tuesday of this week). Ordinarily just one missed day or two in a row would have led me to abandon the challenge altogether, but in the spirit of fall down seven times, eight times get up, I have stuck with it. My purpose was not to produce 14,000 words so much as to discover what a regular writing practice could look like for me, given all my other challenges and obligations, and in this second week I am beginning to see the shape of what that practice could be: in the morning, a draft or two of a poem (as I used to do a few years ago); in the evening, a couple hundred words of an essay and a page or two in my journal. I have questions, too. I generally write in longhand; when is the best time to type up my drafts? Can I shift even more of the writing to the morning? Can I find a regular time to read? What will I do next week, and the week after, and the week after, when I don’t have a community working alongside me, all of us cheering each other on? How can I learn to trust myself?

This week I bought and began to read Our Endless and Proper Work: Starting (and Sticking to) Your Writing Practice by Ron Hogan, who also writes on the subject of maintaining a writing practice for his fantastically titled newsletter Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives. (I suppose that by creating this writing practice I am destroying some (illusions of) safety, but I can’t say that my life is all that happy if I am not writing regularly.) Hogan believes that “the writing life is about recognizing what it is that you need to share with the world, then making yourself into the person who is capable of that act of sharing.” I keep misremembering what Hogan means about “making yourself into the person who is capable”: he is referring not just to becoming someone with the craft to express themselves, but also to “becoming someone who has the inner clarity to recongize their story and the confidence to open themselves up to others in the sharing of it.” When I think about making myself into the person who is capable, though, I have neither craft nor inner clarity in mind. The person I am working to make myself into right now is simply the person who has the faith and determination to write regularly—even at the very end of a long and frustrating work day.

I’ve read

Jami Attenberg’s newsletter, Craft Talk, is great; right now she is posting daily encouragement for #1000wordsofsummer, and she posts reflections and advice about the writing process regularly year round.

Kiese Laymon says, “We’re not good enough not to practice.”