Developing a Sustainable Writing Practice
I’ve been trying for a few days to write a Substack on developing a sustainable writing practice, and I keep giving up because, well, everyone knows what I’m going to say. I’m going to talk about writing regularly, and approaching writing as work, and how if you do that you will get better and. . .but see, I’m already bored, and you probably are too, because you know all of that.
We all know we need to write regularly. We all know we need to read, and read widely. But the reasons one might not write in this world are as wide and varied as the books we need to read, and sometimes we might need a little reminder that there are outside influences that can keep us from our computer.
It’s hard to write when you’re sick, whether Covid or chronic pain. After I had the cancer cut out of me there were still days I thought I was dying, not because of pain or pressure, but because, when someone tells you something is eating your body from the inside, you begin to believe it might eat you all up. (Notice the shift to second-person there, the need to distance myself from myself.)
It’s hard to write when you hate your job. I don’t, for once in my life, but some people do. Some people hate their job and some people give everything to their job and some people are eaten up by their job like their job is cancer. I bet cops are like that. Cancer-doctors, too, one would think. My mother worked for 30 years with intellectually-disabled adults. Some days she came home crying from how one of her students had touched her heart. Imagine trying to write about that. Imagine getting to write about that, if you can stay out of your own hurt long enough to do it.
It’s hard writing when you have young children. Or any children. The time. The energy. The worry. I have a grandson now, and I just want to hold him against the awfulness I know he will see in this world. I want to raise him to fix it. To become the kind of man this world needs, and that means being nothing like most of the men who have come before him. I want him to embrace masculinity without misogyny. To revel in his hairy self without hurting others doing it.
It’s hard to write knowing I may have already hurt him. That his mother might carry with her some parenting mistake she picked up from me without even knowing it. That both my daughters might carry my mistakes with them like codes in their DNA that get passed down, and down, and the world can never fix itself until all that code is erased.
If we must talk about writing regularly in a world becoming more and more irregular, then let’s talk about how hard it is to write when there’s so much awfulness out there. When there is such war as to make us sick inside. When the world is warming so much we might all burn up. When the corporations don’t care and the politicians are paid not to. When my parents are aging right out of my life and I don’t know where I’ll be anchored once they’re gone. When the way of life I knew as a child has disappeared, and more and more I’m becoming a confused old man who only has these small words to explain how lost and lonely he feels sometimes.
If we need motivation to write, then here’s a reminder that it is the writer’s job to hold beauty up against all that. To recreate the small moments that make us and break us at the same time: how your partner’s gross breath in the morning still smells like love; how when my grandson looks at me with my daughter’s eyes I feel this faint distant connection to the starry cosmos, as if we are allowed to go on after this, our essence embedded in those we leave behind; how an October afternoon or a rainy Saturday night can send us to some faint, fleeting memory of what life used to be like when the world was younger and we weren’t so afraid of everything.
We need to talk about how words are all we have to hold us up against the darkness.
Then get to work writing them.
Note: I wrote this piece way back in 2023 for Melt With Me, my other page, before I decided to start Establish the Habit for writing-related essays. I didn’t have many subscribers then, so I don’t think many of you have seen it.
As always, thanks for being here, friends.
This is what I needed to read this morning. The world, my job becoming sad and stressful after years of feeling satisfaction and happiness, my pain after knee replacement surgery, all have given me reasons not to do the writing work. The reading is easy for me so I keep doing that. I know I will get back to the habit and soon. The gnawing is there reminding me that these early mornings and rainy nights and wind storms and dogs are all part of the mystery of my life that I can write down a few nice sentences about. A little or a lot just do it.
We are currently in Florida visiting my husband's elderly Aunt Jane. We are elderly too, so says our doctor. We spent yesterday walking in beauty and watching the TPC golf tournament and the day before at the beach having dinner with a cousin. I have been a golf fan all of my life but I will write about that later. More family showed up last night and we have smiled and laughed. In the meantime my sweet neighbor and cat sitter has lost her job and is devastated, there was a shooting near the golf course that delayed the gates opening and the war is raging on. We go home soon and this trip was planned probably a year ago. I keep thinking to myself beauty and horror are hard to reconcile.