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finding your own routine

For twenty years, I put myself and my healing psyche in front of a notebook, nearly every day, opened the notebook to a fresh page and begun to write. My mornings often look like this: wake up to the electronic harp of my smartphone’s alarm, make some green tea, settle into my writing room with my notebook and light a candle—I like it to be early enough that it’s still dark, early enough that there’s nothing else I should be doing. So often I’ve felt like I’ve got to steal my writing time: from partners, from my job, from chores that need attending to. There were years when I rose at 4:30 or 5 a.m., well before my partner woke, so that I didn’t feel guilty for taking time alone to write. For me, this regular practice of morning writing is saying to writing, “My first and best breaths are still yours.”

Long before I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I was waking up early in the morning to write for an hour or so, as close to every day as possible. I called these morning writes my “core dump” times. In computing terms, a core dump is a file that’s created to collect everything that was in the computer’s memory when there’s a crash. When I apply the term to my writing life, I mean a write in which I dump onto the page anything and everything that’s in my head and heart at a given moment—no matter how random or seemingly disconnected. Poet and artist Brian Andreas describes the spaciousness with which I try to hold such inner disorder: “he tried for days to put / it all back in the proper / order, but finally he / gave up & left it there / in a pile & loved / everything equally.” These were the hours that I could get everything out in front of me, my worries and frustrations, trauma memory and work struggles, trouble or longing in my relationship. It was like a long talk with a good friend who listened intently and accepted me unconditionally.

Writing has been the place I trusted the most—the place where I learned to trust myself. And I have been fortunate to live with significant others who treated my writing with respect, who did not read journals, who treated my journals as if they were as private and inviolate as the inside of my own beating heart. I’ve rarely shared with anyone what I wrote in my notebooks—the notebook was a place for me to work things out, a steady and long-suffering companion who didn’t judge or criticize or interrupt or tell me what I ought to do. I needed this kind of sacred, protected, nonjudgmental space—that is, I needed to learn to treat my whole self as sacred, to release myself from judgment.

Even after all these years of daily practice, though, I can still struggle to give myself what best serves my words: those earliest morning hours devoted to the tender skin between dreamtime and waking life. Things get too busy, there are too many jobs or a love affair just beginning (or suddenly going down in flames) that needs all of my otherwise-creative energies, and suddenly there’s no time to write three pages in the morning. It’s so easy—even after twenty years of practice that proves otherwise—to convince myself I just don’t have the time. And then, slowly but surely, my well-being begins to unravel.

Fortunately, every day I get to begin again. I get to decide to show up for my creative and healing self all over again. Writing practice brings me back into my human realness: I don’t have all the answers, I am complicated and ridiculous and loving, I am not as shiny as I pretend to be, thank goodness.

•§•

At the 2010 Healing Art of Writing conference, an attendee asked how one develops a writing practice, how one gets in the habit of writing. The questioner was new to writing, and she wanted to do it right. She’d heard, maybe, that the way you become a writer is you write every day, no matter what. Underneath her question, I heard: What do you do to become a real writer?

Responding to the question, poet Jane Hirshfield spoke of her own writing practice: she doesn’t especially have one—well, not one that looks regular and regimented, anyway. She told us that she writes when she’s drawn to write, and when she is not drawn to write, she doesn’t force herself: when she tries to force writing that’s not ready to come, the writing’s not good, doesn’t work for her at all. Amid all the voices telling new writers that they must make space for writing every day, I’m grateful for Hirshfield’s example, her reminder that, as creative folks living creative lives, we get to learn and honor our own rhythms, trust how the words want to flow in/through us, and make our lives work in that direction.

I encourage you to give your writing what it needs, whenever you can. One friend writes in the morning, sitting on the sidewalk outside her apartment building, where with the sun on her face, she writes the day awake. Another friend can only write at night, after her child has gone to bed and all of her tasks (both for her job and her family) are completed. Some folks I know only really write in workshops or writing groups—their writing craves the company of others. These folks pay attention to what the writer inside them is asking for, and try to make those conditions available for their writing as often as possible.

We who survive trauma are endlessly creative and find our healing all over the skin of possibility: we paint and draw, we sing, we have open-hearted conversation with good friends or with anonymous folks online, we fight, we write, we run, we dance, we read the same book over and over again, we watch terrible TV, we drink, we use, we cut, we have sex that doesn’t serve us, we have sex that brings us into our bodies bit by bit, we use anything and everything to get us to where we are willing to see the awfulness through just one more day until we reach into a day that isn’t all about awful anymore. Sometimes therapy is an answer. Often and for many it is a very good answer. In the years I couldn’t afford the therapy I needed, I wrote, and I believe I had to write myself into a place where therapy (meaning the deep work of figuring out how to do true human connection through sharing, risk, transference and countertransference and all that) could even be a possibility.

•§•

Maybe you’ve heard the recommendations. Write every day. Nulla dies sine linea: no day without lines. Julia Cameron says three unbroken pages every morning. Novelist Madeline L’Engle is to have said, “Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s only for half an hour—write, write, write.” Anne Lamott says to try and sit down at about the same time every day, in order to train your creative unconscious to kick in for you.

For me, being at the notebook in the morning, each time, is a returning to that place of presence and safety, a returning to that place of non-judgement and discipline, that place of structure and freedom. There are plenty of productive writers who do not write every day; Toni Morrison once told the Paris Review, “I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in-between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.” We do it when we can; if it works to write daily, then do that. If you can only really get writing when you’re around other people, then get thee to a writing group! If you write when your muse grabs you by the hair, then make sure you know where your notebook is when she starts hollering at you. Above all, try not to beat yourself up for not doing it the way “the experts” say you’re supposed to—because even the experts can’t agree.

There’s a book I love that I discovered while I was at a Hedgebrook residency in 2012—World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, by Christian McEwen. In this thoughtful, thorough book, McEwen describes how necessary it is for writers and other artists to slow down, feel our rhythms, be all the way in our lives. Through personal anecdotes and examples from writers and other creative folks, McEwen makes the case for a slower—rather than fast and multitasky—creative life: she describes the artist’s need to wander (literally and figuratively), to have space for silence and dreams, to do one thing at a time, to have space for deep connection with others and room in our lives for alone time. Not everyone will resonate with her arguments. I myself bought a copy of her book as soon as I returned from Hedgebrook and dip into its pages whenever I need to counter the voices in my head (not to mention all those business-coach types out there on the interwebs) clamoring at me to do more and go faster and do it all now now now now now.

Whatever your rhythm, keep listening to and honoring it. Write every day if that’s right for your work. Find what works for you for awhile, and do that. And then what works for your writing will change. And you will change, too. That’s just as it should be.

It’s not necessary to write every day in order to call yourself a writer. “A writer is someone who writes,” my teacher (and the founder of the Amherst Writers & Artists workshop method) Pat Schneider always says, quoting William Stafford. While many extoll the virtues of morning writing, you might work better in the slow energy of the afternoon, or the quickening of first dark. You might prefer just to write on weekend mornings, if you don’t do other work on the weekends, in order to have hours free and stretched out and open for your words. You might prefer not to have any set schedule at all, instead just following the pull of your creative urges, waiting for some writing to shove hard against the insides of your fingers, needing you to set it free into the world.

Write into your rhythm

Take ten minutes and write about dancing—any sort of dancing, whether you yourself like to dance or not.

Then take ten more minutes, and write into these questions: What would an ideal or dream writing life look like for you? Where would you write? What time of day? What would you write, if you suddenly found yourself living that ideal writing life? Try and get into the details, the specifics. Let yourself really see it, feel it, move into and through the possibilities.