Make Space for Your Writing
At every stage of the writing process, mental space is a must. Without this space, ideas die before they’re born—or, once born, they scatter before we can gather them into a comprehensible form.
As an editor, I find that the final process of sorting and smoothing the writing also needs mental space. For months, I’ve had a few manuscripts on my desk that I couldn’t crack open, because the mere thought of doing so put me in “I’d love to take a nap” mode. Never mind my own writing. That languished, too.
I don’t know about you, but I’m the problem-solving type, and, the way I see it, an editor who can’t edit is surely a problem. A writer who can’t write may or may not be a problem, depending on whether someone is counting on that writer to make good on a promise.
Assuming that you want to write, promise or not, I want to share with you the “space tricks” that finally made it possible for me to get at least one of those manuscripts ready to publish—and, as you see, has me writing to you today.
5 Simple Tricks to Create Space for Your Writing
1. Curb Communication
While some writers find communication of all kinds (email, phone, Voxer) to be the best last-ditch effort to bring their writing into the world, I find that it’s almost always a substitute and a siphon for actually getting the work done. Call these dynamics, respectively, the McDonald’s Effect and Running On Empty Syndrome.
The McDonald’s Effect is a retail phenomenon that allows you to escape the good thing you’d been after, simply by first intending to go that direction. It’s the salad on the menu that you consider, seriously, then ditch for the burger at the last moment. It’s the apples at the front of the grocery store that you consider, seriously, and maybe even buy; then, by virtue of that, you feel justified a half hour later to drop that pint of Ben & Jerry’s into your cart as you exit the final aisle. (Yes, that final aisle is, in the most strategic stores, always filled with sweets you wouldn’t have allowed yourself upon first entering the store. There goes your good food lifestyle!)
Running on Empty Syndrome means just this: your brain might feel like it works on magic, but it’s a physical entity, with a metabolism, just like the rest of you. Spend all your literal brain energy (in the form of oxygen and glucose) on talking about your writing (or writing status updates on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook), and you have no neural energy left over to ideate, compose, or revise.
Curbing communication may be one of the most difficult writing-space strategies, but it will keep you from using excessive chat to cheat you out of your writing.
2. Make Writing Its Own Room
One of the most prolific and vibrant writers I know goes to her writing as if it’s a room she escapes to each Friday. Accompanied by her favorite notebooks and pens, and dressed for the occasion (this week it was plaid tights, to accomplish one of the less delightful aspects of writing: finishing the Front Matter of a book), she turns out piece after piece—almost like, yes, magic.
This approach is similar to the “write every day” mantra you’ve heard chanted, but for the writer who doesn’t have everyday space (or who finds the everyday approach narrowing instead of expanding for their soul), it’s a fresh alternative: escape to your writing-as-room on a particular day for a few hours.
For me, this is less about ferrying off to my writing-as-room on a particular day and more about experiencing this “room” as literal space. For my recent goal to start editing again, and then to start writing again, I chose some places in my house where I don’t usually sit to do my work. Charm.
3. Stop Reading
Stop reading?! This is like asking me to stop breathing. But I did it. Radical needs occasionally call for radical measures.
Of all the strategies I tried out recently, to give my writing and editing the necessary mental space, this decision has been the most surprising and the most fruitful. Whole stacks of books I’d been just waiting to read went back to the library, unread. I cleaned out cabinets instead. Emptied the fridge, and the freezer. Broke down boxes, or packed them up. Filled bags with clothes and passed them along to new owners. It’s amazing how much mental space you acquire when you’re not worried, any longer, about spice jars throwing themselves onto your head every time you open the L-shaped cabinet in the corner.
And, while reading has often been the source of my best ideas, even revolutions, there comes a time when my brain is so full of other people’s ideas and issues that I can’t find an inch of space to open my own hand and write.
If you are an avid reader in need of mental space, try this. You’ll miss turning pages, but you may find that you start producing them, instead.
4. Start Walking
As I noted in “Curb Communication” above, the brain has a metabolism that involves the need for both glucose and oxygen, and it wasn’t until fairly recently that health care entities began to connect the dots for us: heart health = brain health. Get the heart going, and you get the brain going.
It’s about oxygen and glucose, but it’s also about other chemicals that help create a good mindset by improving alertness, attention and motivation.
Any wonder why the “Greats” of old were such prolific and intelligent writers? They walked, and walked, and walked.
So the next time your writing feels hemmed in, go out. Walk until you feel alive and ideas start to surface and combine, or revisions begin to present themselves.
5. Just Write Details
Sometimes it’s not so much that we have no mental space for our writing as it is that our writing has no mental pizazz in its space. The walls seem white, the floors seem grey, the curtains (if there even are any) hang dully straight.
A quick fix? Just write details, without trying to make something of them. This can be as simple as a stack, such as these details I’ll pull right now from my own living room…
the scent and scratch of pine on the red oak floor
silver-bearded nutcrackers on the mantle piece
little wood angels from Guatemala
white candles in hurricane glass
the amber, bent nasturtium, silken above glass-beaded elephants
black & white memories of Mexico leaning beneath the lamp
hardwood unburnt in the fireplace
From here, you can see how easily this could take shape into a poem or a vignette that, just moments ago, did not exist in my own mental space.
And You?
These 5 tricks are some of my best, though it was number 3 that finally tipped the scale for me after a long season of feeling spaceless.
How about you? How do you make space? Has anything tried and true suddenly failed you? Have you dreamed up something fresh you think will help other writers?
As for me, I’m off to do a few jumping jacks to jumpstart my brain, but I’ll be back to listen soon.
Related: 5 Ways to Get Off Your Productivity Plateau
Photo by Phil Richards, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by L.L. Barkat, author of Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing.
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Sandra Heska King says
1. I feel better about not reading as much as I had planned to / hoped I would.
2. We got a dog in part because I thought that would force me to walk more. Unfortunately, she’s an awful walker. She starts and stops and sniffs–kind of how I sometimes write. So I need to leave her at home sometimes and go by myself.
3. I’ve been cleaning out more clutter. I need to have my son visit more often. He is quite OCD, and I often wonder how he managed to survive growing up with us. Also, knowing he was coming for several days was the stimulus to declutter even more, which meant several trips to Habitat’s Restore. For Christmas I wrapped up some trophies of his I’d saved, stuff he’d left when he moved out like his graduation cap, all his past job information and applications. It was fun and funny to unwrap. Some he kept. He simply tossed a lot of it after reminiscing.
One of my favorite writing books is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. She has a chapter on “Reading as a Writer” but also a chapter titled “The Writer’s Recreation.” She says, “too much reading is very bad indeed.” And then she says…
“If we are left alone long enough and forbidden to read, we will very soon be talking to ourselves–“subvocally” as the behaviorists say. This is the easiest thing in the world to prove: starve yourself for a few hours in a wordless void . . . If you want to stimulate yourself into writing, amuse yourself in wordless ways . . . Most established authors have some way of silent recreation . . . books, the theater, and talking pictures should be very rarely indulged in when you have any piece of writing to finish.”
She talks about horseback riding, solitaire, needlework, walking…
” . . . it is the wordless occupation which sets their own minds busily at work.”
Showers work, too. There’s something about the rhythm of the water pounding.
Overall, that our-son-is-coming declutter party was a good jumpstart to what I hope is a good writing year. Now I’m going to go take a shower.
L.L. Barkat says
Really nicely put, by Brande. The handwork suggestion now has some brain research behind it, too. Using our hands activates large neural networks (even numeric ones)…
https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2016/06/02/poets-writers-toolkit-use-hands/
I think the other dynamic is that books (while I love them dearly) stand between us and the world, at the level of the senses. Also, dimensionality. We get one view—the writer’s, while when we are interacting in the world, we are seeing many (literal) angles. (We talk about a writer’s “vision”; well, this might be part of that dynamic. Getting out and about, we literally see more, from multiple angles.)
Decluttering has so many benefits. One could probably write a whole post just on that. 🙂 Love the gift trophies. What fun! 🙂
Sandra Heska King says
Next year, I’ve told both kids up front to be prepared to receive their kindergarten – 12th grade report cards and papers and 4 million photos each.
On top of writing three blogs plus his sermons, our senior pastor is a voracious reader of all genres. Last year he read 105 books. His wordless hobby is tinkering on old cars, and he walks every morning.
The other day he wrote in a list of what he’d learned last year, “Creative work first, reactive work second: The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second.”
I know this, but finding that balance is hard. I’m a morning person. Not that I particularly want you to talk to me when I first get up. Just saying. I also know whatever I start first will keep my attention for a long chunk of the day. So puttering… emptying the dishwasher, doing laundry, paying bills, and other wordless and reactive things lead to more things that often keep me from the creative. Though sometimes words do start spinning in my head then, and I have to stop in the middle of everything to capture them. So that’s a good thing, I guess.
Same with reading. If I start to read, it’s hard to stop. Or I fall asleep and take a nap. Now if I do the creative first, sometimes the reactive work piles up, and then I’m in a mess.
Did I say I’m still trying to find the balance? Maybe I need to set aside whole days for the reactive and creative.
Also, I’ve never understood how some writers can write while playing music (unless one is a songwriter) or in a coffeeshop, though maybe that’s a good place to observe and do a little stacking.
L.L. Barkat says
I prefer to do things by day. And, on that day, I’ll say to myself, “This is the one thing that has to happen today. All else is extra accomplishment if you happen to get to it.”
Today, for instance, I have to choose photos for Every Day Poems. That’s my one thing.
Also, while I like the idea of “creative first,” I often don’t have that luxury or that inclination. The best thing—find what works for you. Go back and consider what your best times have been. What was or wasn’t going on then?
This isn’t always easy to figure. I’m usually super inspired by books, but, in this season of my life, they became a siphon. I thought back to when I ran three blogs (and helped start Tweetspeak just as an archive site) and I remembered I was running every day at the time. That got me thinking… I should start walking, since I can’t run anymore.
Anyway, whenever you have a great writing time, maybe take note of what the dynamics were that surrounded that time. Make it your own. 🙂
Laura Brown says
Coffee and tea shops have become productive spaces for me, especially if I’m handwriting. It depends on the shop. It may have something to do with the part of me worked in a newsroom and could tune out distractions, even somehow hearing, and focus on the work at hand. It helps if the place is unoccupied enough that I can always use what I think of as *my* table (near an outlet, by a wall or window). I cannot get up from the table to go do dishes or laundry or other housework.
Maybe there’s a post in this. How, and why, to write in a tea shop.
L.L. Barkat says
Yes, I imagine there is. 🙂
Megan Willome says
I don’t have a tea shop, but there is a local java joint that sells Mighty Leaf tea. I always do my big final reads there.
Sandra Heska King says
I’ve never been to a tea shop. I wouldn’t know what to look for or how to act. But I did find this that I want to visit sometime. It’s not exactly wordless, but it could stimulate words. 😉
https://morikami.org/museum/tea-house/
Laura Brown says
Megan, some of my tea shops front as coffee shops.
Laura Brown says
Showers, yes! And then to quickly write down the seemingly brilliant ideas that arrived with the water.
Sandra Heska King says
Exactly. The people who invented AquaNotes were on to something. I’ve been known to take several showers a day. I’m very clean.
http://www.myaquanotes.com/
Laura Brown says
Yes to decreasing or eliminating distractions (which might mean disabling WiFi, dealing with visual clutter, leaving smartphone in another room, attending in the afternoon or evening to all the little life-administration things that might come to mind as urgent to-dos in the morning).
Yes, yes, yes to walking. I’ve gotten out of the habit, partly after a falling accident made me skittish.
My best trick: Get to desk quickly in the morning, with as few detours as possible. Bathroom, teakettle, desk. It helps to put fresh water in the kettle and set out a fresh mug the night before, and to get good sleep.
Yes, too, to your word “promise,” which has me thinking. It can mean making a promise to a promising or insistent idea, to give it the time and attention and mind-space and nurturing it needs. Leave it on a shelf too long and it’ll go bad; leave it unwatered and unfed for too long and it will wither. This promise can also be a promise to self, as well as a waiting someone.
I want to read more this year than I did last year. But it’s like a diet — important to consider what you ingest.
Megan Willome says
This is all so good! I follow a blend of most of your suggestions, adjusting as the calendar and deadlines require. But walking is every day, first thing, before tea/poetry/writing.
I don’t want to reveal my New Year’s resolution because then it won’t come true, but it has to do with that Dorothea Brande quote Sandy so wisely shared.
It is helpful to have one day with large chunks. So far, I am only good about that when I’m teaching a workshop, but I’d like it to continue year-round.
P.S. I’d like Callie to comment on attire choices for said Fridays.
Sandra Heska King says
Walking obviously works well for you, Megan. 🙂
I really need to make that a priority, but I’m up at 5:30 or 6 most mornings, and the dog and I don’t get any further than the front yard. I usually wait for the sun to come up when I do go, but by then I’ve also usually gotten involved in something else. I’m going to have to start going again sans Sophie until she gets her act together.
Megan Willome says
I love to walk in the dark. When I have to walk after sunrise, it bums me out.
And training a dog to be a good walker is hard and frequently frustrating. There’s a lot of not-fun before it’s fun.
Sandra Heska King says
Dark walking could have advantages. There are fewer distractions–important for one who simply must stop and record everything she sees. On the other hand, if something is going to eat me, I’d like to see it coming. And the dog–she’d be no protection. She’d just be an appetizer. Also, I wonder if she will ever get over her distrust of shadows. 😉
Bethany R. says
Helpful post. Your suggestion to “Just Write Details” pulls on me most right now. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
It’s such a great technique. I hope you try it. So simple. But it stirs.