We are not ever just writers—we are also sons and daughters of good parents and disappointing parents and we are partners who need to grab a quart of milk on the way home and parents who crawl into bed with the little ones late at night to admire them when they are still, even though we know we don’t have any tiredness to spare. We are students and teachers. We are readers, taking in the universes created by other minds. Our stories and poems and essays are written in and among and because of these moments. A scene is not only a moment on the page that takes place in space and time—the writing of that scene takes place in space and time too. I remember working on an especially dark section of my first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, in which the character based on my great-grandmother escapes pogroms by fleeing with her children into the Russian wilderness where she survives on tree bark, and it so happened that this writing day took place beside a swimming pool at a Southern California hotel where my father-in-law was staying while he visited us. I spent the morning in the shade surrounded by Disneyland-bound families and I wrote about starvation. You can’t see that in the pages, but the energy of that good, easy day provided an opposite to the story from the past and its fictional counterpart. That strange pairing was part of how I powered the writing.

We do not write outside of our lives or in spite of them, but because of them. Writers make a choice to carve out significant time—some squeeze writing in while a baby sleeps on their chest or during the lunch hour. Some dictate a story while driving to work. The walls of stuck-ness are easily built. Time is always short; fear is a capable bricklayer; self-doubt and envy can construct a windowless room in seconds. While I love encouragement and good cheer (can you see me waving my pom-poms? I am!), those are not enough to free us. What I believe in, what has worked for me over and over, is a repertoire of small, playful, and unintimidating experiments. Lots of them. A small choice is huge. So often you need a little light, some air, and a handle turns in your hand, you peek through to the next thing, and you’re back, you’re in, you’re running.

My new book, Unstuck, contains all the skeleton keys to all the secret doors I know—I’m sharing a few of them with you here.

Doorway: Begin Anywhere 

There Is No Better Time, No Right Answer

You have this idea for a novel. A young woman disappears in the woods, or a new planet is colonized, or two people fall in love. Ahead of you there are no fewer than one jillion decisions: Are we in 1876? Is the couple driven apart by their hateful fathers? Does the book take place over the course of twenty-four hours or a year? Is it told in first person? And that’s only the big stuff. Every page is a string of words picked by you. Every scene is populated, full of characters and places (real or imagined) where every tree, every vase full of dead flowers, every old, tired cat is placed there by you.

You cannot, no matter how much you wish, know at the start how this will unfold. Like all the best parts of being alive, it requires you to enter without a map or a promise of success.

I was in such a place when my eldest child was in the fifth grade and it was time to go on tours of middle schools. I had spent the morning staring at a Word document on which I intended to begin a new novel. The document was a white, ominous nothingness. My job was much too big. Defeated, I closed the computer and picked up my kid at his sweet little elementary school, a place that had seen him through the pandemic, that had brought him from a tiny person to a big kid. We drove to a middle school and parked. Nervous eleven-year-olds and their more nervous parents hummed in small groups. Inside, the building felt huge. The echo of sneakers in the concrete stairwells, and halls leading to other halls. How were we here? How was my small person going to be okay in this wilderness? We came around the corner and there was a lit theater marquee at the end of the hall with these words: “BEGIN ANYWHERE.—John Cage.” I stood there for a long minute. My child tugged at me. He did not know how to be a middle schooler yet, as he would not know how to be a high schooler a few years later or all the steps to come after. I did not know what this new novel would contain, as I had not known how the three before it would work until I had written through the years and the many drafts. “I’m ready,” I said, and we began there, at the anywhere where we stood.

Key

You are here. You are anywhere. Start with a single scene, a single memory, a single question. Set a timer and keep writing for twenty minutes. Whatever you have done at the end of that time, your page is no longer blank, and you have, beautifully, gloriously, begun.

Doorway: Primordial Slush 

The Matter from Which All Life Is Created

What I have come to understand is that you can’t start where you intend to end up (i.e., a book that feels like a book) because you have to start three billion years before that. I’m writing fast, following curiosity and questions, writing scenes even if I have no idea where they’re going, writing backstory for characters so I can figure out who everyone is, writing place and space. Eventually you want a book-shaped thing, but before that it takes the shape of a freshly bloomed tulip, the back half of a rhinoceros, a mountain stream, a bird’s nest. And before that it’s a beam of light or a ball of clay. I remember a friend asking how my second novel was going and I said, “It’s a swamp monster that oozes around on the floor waiting for me to feed it dead fishes? Is that an answer?”

This was not the creature I wanted. I wanted a unicorn or at least a sturdy, faithful dog. But here is what I now understand: You don’t get a dog right away, you have to evolve there. You have to start with a vat of primordial slush, the making of all life, and that slush is not pretty or decipherable. Then something crawls out and maybe it’s a tiny little swamp monster. You need that guy. Yes, that draft is super drooly and it’s awkward and lumpy and leaves mud all over the place. The swamp monster will grow arms and legs. When you come back to the second draft, he’ll be sitting up at a table and you can tie a little checked napkin around his neck and feed him crème brûlée. And when you loop back for a third draft, he’ll have grown a lovely coat of fur and now he’s looking more like a recognizable animal. A yak, maybe, or one of those Scottish Highland cows with the long red bangs. In draft four you have an apple tree that’s about to bloom and in draft six you have a crescent moon and in draft eight you have a wolf and in draft ten you can start to tuck all these eras carefully together between covers and hand it to someone and when they read it, by magic (and months or years of work), the story that you saw in your mind pops open in the mind of that reader and that’s when you get to start calling it a book, but by then I hope you trust that it’s also still a yak and still a moon, and that your old sloshy swamp guy is in there covered in primordial soup—the energy and possibility of the entire universe dripping from his slimy, squiggly body.

What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s going to be so much messier than you can possibly believe. Our job is to trust the mess. To trust the dust storms and the mud bogs and not rush on toward premature order. Order only matters if it contains something real. Sure, you can write a novel that follows a set of very clear rules and expectations, but you will have written a container, not contents. You will have a harness but no dog. Don’t skip the mess, because that’s where the magic lives.

Do you hear that this is not a quality assessment? Yes, a first draft can be shitty, but it’s hard to get very excited about sitting down to write a shitty first draft when quality control is already in the room.

There’s a dude in a white coat with a hairnet and a magnifying glass and he’s waiting for me to hurry up and take my failures and turn them into candy apples he can sell. If I’m trying to make candy apples, then a beehive is a failure. If I’m trying to write a novel, then a mud bog is a failure. And even if we are welcoming of failure, as we should be, as it is critical to be, I’m sorry but I’m kicking that white coat guy out the fire escape. There is no quality assessment in the primordial slush draft. The universe did not feel inadequate when all it had was an explosion in space from which all life would emerge.

Key

This is not a key you turn once. As you move through your first draft, you must keep going through this door-way over and over. Write the following on a sticky note and put it on your wall: It’s not supposed to make sense yet.

You might live in the slush for weeks or months or even years. When life begins to crawl out onto land it could happen quickly, a sudden understanding of your project and what it wants to become. Or it might happen slowly, one little toe out in the sunshine, then back underwater.

This is about the intentional, heartfelt creation of energetic, weird, unformed life. Every writer you’ve ever admired lives here too.

It’s not supposed to make sense yet. It’s not supposed to be a book yet. I am discovering something still unknown on this earth. Create energy. Repeat.

Doorway: Writer Physics 

Follow the Energy

A story or a poem or an essay has logic, but it’s also a living thing. Imagine that a cat walks softly across the black landscape of a burned neighborhood. One valid approach might be to follow the logic: How did this fire start? Who or what was lost? What will happen to the people who used to live here? Those are good questions and you may answer them, but sometimes logic can sideline us on a kind of frontage road next to the story that never seems to merge into the real stuff of it.

Writer physics, which happily does not require a familiarity with the theory of relativity, is the practice of noticing and following the energy in your pages. That cat moves over the ground, and the ground is radiating with everything that was burned. The ash is full of the energetic force of the house, which was full of the energetic force of the ten years (let’s say) a family lived inside that space. The baby who was born on the kitchen floor after a labor too quick to get to the hospital; the photo album of great-grandparents in Hungary; a hundred dinners eaten on a simple plate, a shard of which is under one of the cat’s paws.

What happens when the family pulls up in a car in front of this changed place? Follow the energy between the people and the plate shards, the memories, the cat. Maybe the cat, afraid and traumatized, jumps at one of the children and scratches her, and the cut gets infected by something in the ash. Maybe the father becomes obsessed with rebuilding a certain room in the house exactly as it was. Maybe the mother returns in secret alone at night and digs through the rubble herself, looking for remains of her old life. Maybe there’s a coyote, also scavenging. All of these ideas grow from pressing together two sources of energy: a character and an object, a feeling and another feeling, a character and a tiny moment, a tiny moment and an object. Energy makes energy. Pretty soon that mother is running after the coyote, which has the cat in its jaws. Pretty soon, she’s got a jagged piece of wood, once part of her living room wall. Where does the energy go next?

Key

Take a survey of the energetic forces moving through a scene, image, or moment. Close your eyes and try to feel them swirling around. Pick two and press them together, see what happens when the energy of one thing mixes with the energy of another. What changes? What new force is born?

Now you have the keys to some of these doors, but where you go will be a place entirely undiscovered, all your own. Send me a postcard when you get there.

Excerpted from Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page by Ramona Ausubel. Copyright © 2026 by Ramona Ausubel. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC. 

The post Quick, Playful Writing Exercises for When You’re Feeling Stuck appeared first on Electric Literature.

At the time of the shutdown, I was housesitting for my parents in my hometown in upstate New York while they were marooned in Florida, unable to travel home safely, so my housing situation, like my financial situation, was comparatively secure by the time the pandemic was in full swing. Even the stay-at-home order had left me relatively unaffected. I am by nature predisposed to a solitary life, and my life very much reflected that predisposition in those years. I had no partner, no children. I was, for all intents and purposes, unencumbered. Responsible only for myself and my tiny dog.

The biggest disruption to my daily routine was that I could no longer attend twelve-step recovery meetings in person. Thankfully, the recovery community rallied in the immediate wake of the shutdown. Within days, twelve-step meetings across the country, all over the world, had moved online with impressive speed. Suddenly, I could attend meetings any time of day, any day of the week. I often say that recovery never felt as democratic as it did in those early pandemic days.

This is all to say that my life during the COVID shutdown looked remarkably similar to the life I had grown accustomed to before it.

So why was I so exhausted? I wondered.

The answer came to me one afternoon during my daily walk, a habit I had established in January of that year to help mitigate the sedentary posture of writing at the computer all day, and one I had carried over into the pandemic. It was so helpful just to get out of the house, to move my body, to be out in the world and among nature. Later, my friend JoAnn would tell me that due to the near-complete cessation of road and air traffic during the shutdown, birds no longer had to pitch their songs in a higher and more rigorous register as they strained to be heard by their mates. I don’t know if that’s true, but I believe it. During my walks, the birdsong sounded lower and fuller. More relaxed, more melodious. I stopped to observe the Northern flickers that had returned with the spring weather. I watched the cowbirds roost in other birds’ nests. And during the rich slowness of one of those afternoon walks, the cause of my exhaustion became apparent. Unlike the birds, I had not relaxed. Even in the quiet solitude of the shutdown, I had continued to overfunction.

And, I realized, I had been overfunctioning for years.

I was first introduced to the concepts of overfunctioning and underfunctioning through the work of clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner and her book The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships. Like family systems therapist Murray Bowen, from whom Lerner adopted the terms, Lerner uses overfunctioning and underfunctioning to describe the division of emotional labor and relationship responsibilities within families of origin and intimate partnerships. That said, it’s been helpful for me to remember that overfunctioning and underfunctioning are at their core stress responses. That is, they are attempts to regulate the uncomfortable physiological reaction that arises in the body during anxiety-producing situations.

Simply put, in moments of high stress, overfunctioners compensate: They do more, work harder, and take on additional responsibilities. Underfunctioners decompensate: They do less, disengage, and yield responsibilities to others. Socially, both overfunctioning and underfunctioning have their advantages and disadvantages. Overfunctioners receive a good deal of praise for being ambitious, hardworking, and born leaders, while at the same time they are criticized as controlling, domineering, and micromanaging. Underfunctioners are praised as flexible, easygoing, and laid-back, while they are simultaneously criticized for being lazy, procrastinating, indecisive, and avoidant.

Hello. My name is Benjamin, and I am an overfunctioner.

And, if I’m being completely honest, there is a part of me—the egoic part—that has enjoyed the benefits of overfunctioning. I am a fairly achievement-oriented person, and in that regard overfunctioning has served me well, socially and professionally. But regardless of their respective advantages and disadvantages, the important thing to remember is that both of these stress responses are maladaptive. They are maladaptive because they are unsustainable. Both overfunctioning and underfunctioning keep us stuck in a state of perpetual nervous-system arousal, which leads us to the precipice of exhaustion and eventually to complete nervous-system collapse. Overfunctioners burn out from taking on more responsibilities than they can reasonably handle themselves, while underfunctioners experience a kind of emotional and behavioral paralysis as they continue to fail to attend to responsibilities successfully, which in turn only increases their anxiety.

The unexpected byproduct of the COVID shutdown was that, at least within my own sphere of influence and personal experience, the world had slowed down. The world had slowed down, but I had not. The contrast between the two had thrown the latter into stark relief. Once I saw what I was doing, I could not unsee it, and I knew that if I did not address the root cause of my exhaustion, the root cause of my exhaustion was going to address me.

I was going to have to stop overfunctioning.

I was going to have to practice intentional rest.

When I work with students, coaching clients, and sponsees around their tendencies to overfunction or underfunction, I ask them to write down a list of everything they think they can reasonably accomplish in one day. (I emphasize the word reasonably.) Then I tell them, “If you identify as an overfunctioner, take the number of items on your list and cut it in half. And if you identify as an underfunctioner, take the number of items on your list and cut it in half.” I deliver these instructions as if they were a joke: the punchline is that the instructions are exactly the same. I do this to demonstrate specifically to underfunctioners how thoroughly they have been conditioned to believe they should be able to do more than they actually can as the result of a lot of cultural expectations. When underfunctioners realize I’m not going to suggest they increase the number of items on their list, they typically respond with visible relief.

With these instructions in mind, I decided to follow my own advice. 

I returned home from my afternoon walk that day, opened my computer, and pulled up the daily to-do list I write every Sunday for the upcoming week. I started using this to-do list twelve years ago when I was applying to graduate school because it helped me stay organized throughout the process, and it has helped me stay organized ever since. But in all likelihood, it has also contributed to my inclination to overfunction. There is never a shortage of things to do, and I can accomplish a lot in a day. But when I looked at my to-do list in May of 2020, I was horrified by what I saw. Even during the shutdown, when I was barely leaving the house, I had still written down eight to ten things to do each day—and I was actually doing them. This is what overfunctioning looks like.

No wonder I was exhausted.

So I moved the cursor over my list and began cutting that list in half.

I am sure it will surprise no one when I say I am not a person for whom rest comes naturally. As an overfunctioner, rest has never been high on my list of priorities, which is why I qualify my pursuit of rest as both intentional and a practice. For me, developing an intentional resting practice began with implementing the tool I called “The Four Things.” The premise was simple: For the next thirty days, I would limit myself to four daily tasks and once I had met my quota of four things that day, the remainder of the day I would commit to rest. Why four things? Because that is the number I arrived at when I cut my to-do list in half. For an underfunctioner, this number may be lower. For another overfunctioner, it may be higher. But if someone’s number is higher than five things, I usually recommend they reevaluate their understanding of the word reasonably.

When I made my list of “Four Things,” I did not include in that number my morning practice, the hour I devote every morning to passive and active reflection: fifteen minutes of seated meditation and forty-five minutes of journaling. Morning practice is foundational to my spiritual health and therefore is a nonnegotiable. I will prioritize it over everything else. If I have a 6:30 AM flight, I will wake up at 4:00 AM just to do it. On the rare occasion that I am unable to attend to morning practice, I feel it. I am a less patient and compassionate person out in the world. I become that asshole in the grocery aisle.

So my “Four Things” did not include morning practice—but it included everything else. It included writing; it included attending a twelve-step meeting; it included any labor-for-money; and it included exercise (my daily walk or yoga or a workout). On any given day, I did three of these four things, which meant I could really only do one additional thing each day. One thing. Not the five or six additional things I had grown accustomed to doing. This felt extreme, but so did my exhaustion. It became clear that if I was going to make space in my life to rest by limiting myself to “The Four Things,” I was going to need to become unsparing in my commitment to my values.

I have come to believe that value-aligned living is at the heart of all recovery work. This process has required me to identify the values that are most important to me and to learn to live my life in agreement with them. This is how I define integrity. And the great thing about value-aligned living is that my values cannot be determined by anyone or anything outside of myself. My values are specific to me, and only I can define them. And while I did the majority of my own values work in the early years of my sobriety through the twelve steps and a modality of secular mindfulness practice known as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the values exercise I most frequently recommend to others comes from qualitative researcher Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversation. Whole Hearts.

In Dare to Lead, Brown provides a list of a hundred or so values and asks readers to narrow the list down to the two values that are most important to them. Brown suggests this approach for two reasons: “First, I see it the same way that I see Jim Collins’s mandate ‘If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.’ At some point, if everything on the list is important, then nothing is truly a driver for you. It’s just a gauzy list of feel-good words. Second, I’ve taken more than ten thousand people through this work, and when people are willing to stay with the process long enough to whittle their big list down to two, they always come to the same conclusion that I did with my values process: My two core values are where all of the ‘second tiered’ circled values are tested.”

Identifying our values is a key part of value-aligned living because, as Brown points out, “We can’t live into values that we can’t name.” But if narrowing down the list to two core values proves too difficult or overwhelming for people, the other values exercise I regularly suggest is a weekly inventory. Every day for one week, I ask people to write a bullet-point list of everything they’ve done each day, from the time they wake up until they go to bed. Then, at the end of the week, I ask them to review the inventory and ask themselves what their daily activities have in common.

Like Brown’s approach, the benefits of a weekly inventory are twofold. First, a weekly inventory reveals where we are currently allotting what I have referred to as our two most valuable resources: our time and attention. In other words, a weekly inventory demonstrates the values we are already (and often unconsciously) prioritizing. Second, at the very least, a weekly inventory has the potential to expose what I call “integrity breaches”—places in our lives where our actions, behaviors, and priorities are not in alignment with our values—especially if we discover that the things we devote the majority of our time and attention to are, in fact, not the things that are most important to us. Upon reviewing the inventory, we might say to ourselves, “I still don’t know what my core values are, but whatever they are, they are not this.” In my experience, identifying our values is as much a process of elimination as anything else

My own core values are spirituality and creativity. When I look at my life, I can see that the majority of my time and attention goes to my spiritual development and my creative work. Prioritizing these values is how I have cultivated a sense of purpose and meaning, and because I make a habit of prioritizing them, I am able to show up fully and presently in every other area of my life, including my relationships with other people. So as I pared my to-do list down to “The Four Things,” I prioritized the items that were in service of those values, and wherever possible, I deprioritized everything else.

Every time I describe “The Four Things,” people invariably ask me the same two questions. Most recently, it was my friend, the writer Cat Powell, who asked me: “How do you know if something counts as a thing?” I wish I had a better answer to this question, some universal standard, but the truth is I don’t. Instead, I offer people the criteria I use, which is the criteria I’ve found most helpful: “If it goes on my to-do list, it counts as a thing.”

Which is to say: If it’s scheduled.

For example, if I decide to swing by the bank to deposit money at the ATM on my way to do something else, that doesn’t count as a thing because it’s something I could do anytime that is convenient. But if I have to go into the bank—or worse, call customer service—to speak with someone about my account, that counts as a thing. Similarly, habitual daily tasks like brushing my teeth, showering, and eating meals don’t count, but if I’ve scheduled time to meal prep for the week, that does. Cleaning the house counts as a thing. Laundry counts as a thing. Going out to dinner or a movie with friends, as pleasurable as it may be, counts as a thing. So does a scheduled phone date. Doctor and therapy appointments count. So does an appointment to get a haircut or a massage. The task itself is not what matters. Nor does it matter how much time and attention the task will require. If I write something down on my to-do list, I have committed to completing that task on that day, and it counts as one of my four things.

The other question I’m most frequently asked, usually by parents and primary caregivers and people with high-demanding careers, is whether their familial and work responsibilities count toward “The Four Things.” As someone without children or a traditional work situation, I always want to honor this question with the respect and consideration it deserves—and yet my answer remains firm: Yes. For many people, their commitments to their families and their careers will be in service to their core values, but regardless of whether or not that is the case, these commitments will most certainly limit the amount of time and attention they have available to allocate elsewhere. 

For this reason, it is imperative to keep in mind that “The Four Things” is not a tool to help us attend to everything we deem worthy of our time and attention. And it certainly isn’t a tool to help us attend to everything we want or think we need to get done, or what other people want or think we need to get done, or what society tells us we should want or need to get done. “The Four Things” is a tool to help us make space in our lives to rest. If we are going to do this, we will have to get honest about the limitations of our capacity. Pretending those limitations do not exist is how many of us exhausted ourselves in the first place. Following through on this admission—which requires us to acknowledge and honor our limitations—is what makes intentional rest such a difficult and, I would argue, countercultural practice.

When I first embarked on this intentional resting practice, I thought (perhaps foolishly) that after a week or two, I would emerge from my exhaustion feeling, if not fully rested, at least significantly more so. And certainly after thirty days of resting, I expected my exhaustion would be cured. Spoiler alert: This was not my experience at all. In fact, shortly after I commenced resting in earnest, I found I felt more exhausted than I previously had. What I know now is that this phenomenon was not specific to me and was actually a fairly predictable physiological response as my parasympathetic nervous system began to regulate my biochemistry.

In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Amelia and Emily Nagoski explain the effects of exhaustion on the body and the biochemical changes that occur when we first begin to experience adequate rest. They write, “When we’re sleep deprived, our bodies try to compensate by activating the stress response—doses of adrenaline and cortisol to help us survive the temporary stressor of too little sleep—which masks the fatigue and impairment . . . The counterintuitive result is that when we eventually sleep, the stress response reduces, so when we’re actually better rested, we may feel less rested. Adrenaline is no longer masking our fatigue.”

Though the research the Nagoski sisters cite specifically addresses sleep deprivation and the importance of adequate sleep, the same physiological changes occur when we practice active rest, and it didn’t take long for me to determine that my plan to rest for thirty days would not be enough. Ultimately, I engaged in this intentional resting practice for a total of nine months, and it took about three months just for me to begin to feel well-rested, and another six months for my nervous system to fully regulate. During that time I could almost feel my nervous system slowly unwinding incrementally each day. I liken the experience to trying to open a fist you’ve been clenching for too long. The muscles in the hand don’t immediately relax. Instead, they loosen by a measure of degrees until at last the hand opens freely.

Once I had recovered from the initial wave of intensified exhaustion, I was surprised to discover exactly how resistant I was to rest. Because, as it turns out, resting is uncomfortable. By 2020, I had done enough embodiment work that I had learned how to sit with the uncomfortable physiological experience that accompanies difficult emotions, but as an overfunctioner and someone with a history of trauma, my nervous system had grown accustomed to operating at a certain level of hypervigilance. This meant that, neurobiologically, resting felt almost unsafe. Most days, I met my quota of four things sometime in the late afternoon, and I began preparing dinner around 4:30 PM simply because I didn’t know what else to do. Then, having eaten by five, I regarded the evening hours with something like terror. Suddenly I had all this time, and I didn’t know how to fill it without doing more. In fact, my nervous system was practically shouting: You must do more. Surely, I could draft a response to that email I hadn’t gotten to earlier in the day. Surely, I could submit a short story to that literary journal or update my resume for that teaching application. But no, I had committed to “The Four Things.” I had committed to intentional rest. It was at this juncture that I had to admit to myself I really didn’t know how to rest at all. What I knew was distraction. What I knew was “shadow rest.”

I define shadow rest as any form of “rest” that is not actually restful. In my experience, the most common forms of shadow rest are media, social media, and online devices. Sitting down at the end of the day to watch an episode of television, or better yet, a movie—something with a clearly defined beginning and end—may function as a form of rest as long as I am present and engaged with whatever I’m watching. But staying up until 2:00 AM binging an entire Netflix series is not rest. Neither is losing three hours passively scrolling on my phone.

My thinking about smartphones and social media as forms of shadow rest has largely been informed by Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, specifically Price’s research demonstrating the similarities between the algorithms that run social media and smartphones and those that are used for slot machines. Like slot machines, social media and smartphones have been designed to trigger the release of dopamine in the brain through the use of intermittent reinforcements in the form of notifications, likes, and comments. But in addition to dopamine, social media and smartphones also trigger the release of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which encourages a state of nervous-system agitation and hypervigilance in human beings. These neurobiological responses are what have changed our relationship with these platforms and devices from a form of social interaction to one of compulsive engagement.

I had mostly cleaned up my social-media and phone hygiene by the end of 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, after having read Price’s book. By then I had learned enough about the human nervous system to know that our brains were not designed to accommodate the near-constant exposure to a twenty-four-hour news cycle and the endless scroll of social media where daily we were bombarded with some new political scandal, ethics violation, or humanitarian crisis—which is to say nothing of the stress that comes from living under an administration perpetrating these things. But during the shutdown, when my face-to-face human interactions had been greatly curtailed, I found myself slipping into my old habits of shadow rest. I told myself I just needed to check out for an hour. I told myself I just needed to connect. Then two or four or six hours later, I’d find myself more amped up than when I had logged on.

So as part of my commitment to intentional rest, I began reimplementing Catherine Price’s suggestions. I turned off pop-up notifications and removed all social media apps from my phone, including email and dating apps. If I wanted to log on to Twitter or check my email, I could access them through my phone’s web browser or my computer, but when I finished, I made myself log out of my accounts. I also turned off my phone when I wasn’t actively using it, and at night I charged it in my office. My phone was not allowed near my bedroom any time after 11:00 PM.

These measures did not prevent me from engaging with social media and my phone altogether, but they did present obstacles to accessing them easily and provided a momentary pause in which I had to consciously choose to use them, rather than engage with them compulsively. I would be lying on the sofa, reading a novel, and three pages in, I would watch as my hand reached for my phone, seemingly without my permission. Then, when I picked up my phone, I was met with a dark screen because I had turned my phone off. Thanks to that interruption in what had become a compulsive habit, I could ask myself, “Do I really need to look up which Fleetwood Mac album Stevie Nicks’s song ‘Gypsy’ appeared on or how many people died from COVID today right this minute?”

The answer was always, No, I did not.

My brain had simply been rewired for distraction.

And distraction is not rest.

If limiting my daily activities to “The Four Things” and disengaging with my favored forms of shadow rest helped me define what didn’t constitute as rest, I still had not defined what did. Ironically, the definition I found most useful in determining the parameters of rest was actually not a definition of rest at all. Instead, it came from Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, and his definition of play. Brown defines play as “time spent without purpose,” and the benefit of repurposing Brown’s definition of play for rest was the implication that rest was both active (time spent) and a means to its own end (without purpose). For an overfunctioner, this concept was something of a paradox. What was the purpose of doing anything if not to accomplish something else? The purpose was rest. That said, learning what Brown’s definition looked like in practice required some experimentation.

Reading, I discovered, could be restful, but only if I was reading for pleasure. If I was reading for novel research, that wasn’t rest. That was work. And if I was persisting through a book I didn’t care for but felt compelled to finish simply because I had started it, that wasn’t rest either. Reading for rest had to be enjoyable and a means to its own end. Likewise, a second, long, leisurely walk in the evening could count as rest, but only if I had included an earlier walk or another form of exercise in my four things for the day, because though rest is absolutely an act of self-care, not all acts of self-care are restful.

And so I began painting. I had not painted since the early years of my sobriety, and I was pleasantly surprised by how restful it felt. I am by no means a visual artist, and because I know this about myself, I had no expectations of producing anything of value. I simply delighted in the process, which made painting a restful experience. I also listened to music. I recovered my record player from the basement and began listening to albums on vinyl, which prevented me from repeating a song or skipping ahead. Many evenings during the pandemic, I sat on my sofa and looked out the window as I listened to Mother Earth’s album Bring Me Home all the way through: first one side, then the other. And finally, I danced. After dinner, I would put in my AirPods and dance around my kitchen to the Wild Strawberries or Sarah McLachlan. You might think a person cannot dance to Sarah McLachlan, but as a gay man who grew up in the nineties, let me tell you: A person absolutely can.

Painting, music, and dance. These became my rituals of rest.

Three months into my commitment to rest, I finally felt like I was getting the hang of it. My exhaustion was still present, but it had improved. This improvement, however, coincided with the loosening of COVID restrictions in my home state, and with the looser restrictions came renewed pressures to reengage socially that summer. Committing to rest in isolation was one thing, but now I had to carry this practice into my relationships, which required me to address my tendency to overcommit myself to others, as well as my tendency to people-please, both of which are common pitfalls for overfunctioners and underfunctioners alike.

I sometimes joke that as a society we would be much less eager to cop to the behaviors we call “people-pleasing” if we called “people-pleasing” what it actually is: manipulation. The truth is, my inclination to people-please has very little to do with my desire to please other people and much more to do with my desire to control their perception of me. This is one of the tradeoffs of value-aligned living. Getting clear on my values and maintaining firm but healthy boundaries around them is not always comfortable or easy. It means telling the truth when a lie would be more convenient. It means saying no and allowing other people to experience their disappointment, because I’ve learned that saying yes and secretly hating people for it is not generosity. The tradeoff is that I can sleep at night, both figuratively and literally. So as my family members and friends and colleagues began to reengage that summer, I said no, and I said it frequently.

I said no to invitations to socially-distanced barbecues and bonfires and coffee dates at outdoor cafes. I said no to more lucrative work opportunities. I said no when someone called to ask for a favor, or advice, or just to chat. I changed the outgoing voicemail message on my phone to inform people that I would be resting for the remainder of August and would be slow to respond, but if they left me a message, I would get back to them after the first of September. If it was an emergency, or something that required my immediate attention, I told people they could text or email me and I would do my best to get back to them within twenty-four hours. For the next six months, I re-recorded this message on the first of every month and changed the dates for another month out. It amazed me how few people left me voicemails when they knew I would not be immediately available to them, and how few situations (and by few, I mean none) people considered urgent.

I was grateful to the people in my life who respected my decision to prioritize rest, who trusted that my no was not personal to them. And I understood when some people expressed frustration with my decision, but I did not feel compelled to explain or justify my boundaries to them. I simply knew I wouldn’t be of use to anyone—to other people or myself—if I tried to power through my exhaustion in order to satisfy them or control their perception of me. What’s more, I discovered that as I said no to other people, not once did I have to say no to my values, and I was able to live with that because my values were enough.

By the end of my nine-month commitment to intentional rest, what I learned about rest could probably be boiled down to one thing: Rest is really fucking hard. But for me, the hardest part of this practice was that it forced me to confront my motivations for resting in the first place. This confrontation is something Tricia Hersey, a rest activist whose work centers on Black liberation, womanism, and anticapitalism, discusses at length in Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Throughout Rest Is Resistance, Hersey frequently reminds her readers, “Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of ‘productivity’ leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.”

We are not resting to be productive.

But the truth is, I was.

Looking back, I could see that my primary motivation for resting was the exact reason Hersey warns against: I was resting now so that I could be more productive later. Which is to say, I was resting because I thought rest would help me resume overfunctioning. And the reason I was overfunctioning to begin with was simple: I was overfunctioning out of fear. I was afraid if I stopped overfunctioning, I would fail to achieve the success I hoped to achieve as a writer. I was afraid I wouldn’t get what I wanted, or that I would lose what I had. I was afraid if I didn’t do it all, no one else would do it, and it wouldn’t get done. And I was afraid of disappointing other people because I was afraid of what other people thought about me.

This was an unpalatable truth, and one that was particularly difficult for me to swallow because at that point in my recovery I had learned that fear is the number one motivator of integrity breaches. Fear is the number one motivator of integrity breaches because my fear and my values are nearly always at cross-purposes.

While I was writing this essay, I stumbled across a photograph from my time at an artist residency in Amherst, Virginia, in the spring of 2018. The photograph depicted my writing desk below a sun-filled window. Attached to the window ledge above my computer I had posted a series of pink sticky notes on which I’d written a number of mantras I’ve found useful to keep in mind while writing: mostly reminders to stay in the process and out of the result. But the last sticky note I read brought me up short. On it, I had written: Be afraid of NOT getting your writing done.

Seven years later, five years after I had learned to practice intentional rest, I experienced a kind of cognitive vertigo from encountering this younger version of myself—this younger writer—who would have written such a thing. I wanted to tell him, “Oh, sweetheart, you do not need your fear to write.” But at that juncture of my life I had already adopted the false belief that I needed my fear to guide my life toward more labor. What I didn’t realize at the time was that doing so would eventually require me to trade off on my values.

This is the part of the story I glossed over. When I said I woke up one morning in May of 2020 and realized I was completely, utterly, undeniably exhausted, my exhaustion was undeniable because it had begun to impede my ability to show up for my values. I was so tired I couldn’t listen during meetings. I was so tired I slept through phone calls with sponsees. And when I opened the Word doc to work on my novel, I was so tired I couldn’t concentrate on the words on the screen. My exhaustion, fueled by my fear, had become a barrier to the things that were most important to me, regardless of how much exhausting myself had helped me achieve. Had that not been the case, I don’t know that I would have ever addressed my exhaustion or my proclivity for overfunctioning.

The appeals of fear are seductive. This is true for most people, I think, but certainly for creatives operating in a world in which our personal, social, artistic, and professional lives increasingly overlap. Steeped in a culture of industry devoted to the hustle and the grind, a culture that would prefer that people function more like machines than human beings, it is easy to mistake our self-worth for our level of productivity. We begin to think we are only as good as what (and how much) we do, as what (and how much) we manufacture for ourselves, as what (and how much) recognition we receive. Within that paradigm it is natural to deem our fear “useful”: the powerful and profound engine that keeps the machine running.

But there is a cost to that kind of living.

It is a cost I am no longer willing to expend.

In the end, I had to learn to practice intentional rest because rest is necessary to my physical, emotional, and psychological well-being, and because, as Hersey suggests, I am worthy of rest because I am a human being. But I also had to learn to practice intentional rest because rest supports my ability to invest in the life I want to live: a life that is aligned with my values.

What I might call a life of integrity.

The post Let’s Talk About What It Means to Rest for the Sake of Rest appeared first on Electric Literature.

We were told, or told ourselves, a lot of things. For instance, we should strive to be timeless. No very specific historical markers, nothing that could be seen as only now. In this way our work wouldn’t become outdated. As though we could keep that from happening! I had classmates who said that fiction shouldn’t be political, who intoned at every opportunity, Show, don’t tell, or Write what you know, or Kill your darlings. 

People said, Show, don’t tell, so often it had the valence of a mob threat, something everyone knew you should do because the made guys said so. Snitches get stitches. I still don’t know what it means exactly. 

Write what you know. Subtext: Maybe you don’t know anything. Subtext: If your life hasn’t been interesting, you can’t be a writer. 

Kill your darlings. If you love something, kill it. If it comes back to you, kill it again. 

It’s true that such pieces of advice prove the power of language, because they sound plausible even though they’re devoid of meaning. I can still picture the faces of the people who said these things to me (as some of my classmates can surely picture my face, saying something ignorant) because it was so long ago. My grudges are fossilized, preserved in excellent, unmalleable detail. 

I loved graduate school: I made dear friends at Iowa who are still dear to me, whether or not we’re still in touch. We took one another seriously. Nothing is better. That might be my number one piece of advice for young writers: Find the hardest-working writers you know; take one another seriously. 

You should dismiss grudges when you can. If they stick around despite everything, they probably mean something. Use them.

When I speak at writing programs and say with certainty that not every writer needs to write every day, that I myself don’t, without fail afterward one of the resident faculty will take me aside to say, “It’s so interesting that you don’t write every day! But I really think writers have to.” 

Their eyes are bright and panicked. They have issued this proclamation to their students. Real writers write every day. Why won’t I just say so? I don’t believe it. I’ve never managed it. I haven’t been great at making anything a job in my life, including my actual jobs. I always do too much or too little; I overvolunteer or I goldbrick. I’ve never been a person of moderation, though I have tried. Sometimes I write every day for months, but never with a sense of proportion. Is it a matter of psychology or neurology? Laziness, I used to think, and vowed continually to start my new life of discipline. Tomorrow, I told myself. Monday, then. Okay, April. I did try. When I was young and struggled to write interesting fiction every day, each morning was anxious, another day I might fail to buckle down. 

And yet I persist in believing that I’m a real writer. I’ve never doubted that I am. My work, yes, I have doubted. My work ethic, and my reputation. Not my identity. I write; I am a writer. My qualifications are that I say so. 

I understand that this can seem simultaneously glib and daunting. You might think it’s a philosophical question. Am I a writer? A real writer, as the director of my graduate program specified long ago, scaring the bejesus out of all of us? 

Am I a writer? is the sort of question (there are a lot of them) that seems deep but only wastes time. It’s a binary question and—To be or not to be aside—no binary question is all that interesting, at least until it’s answered. 

If you call yourself a writer, whether you’ve written that day or month or year, you go into the world as a writer. Anything you see becomes more interesting because of your acquisitive writer’s soul. A middle school production of The Three Musketeers in which the cast wears expensive rented capes and cheap store-bought plumed hats and their own dress pants and leggings, their own black sneakers and ballerina flats. The young lifeguard whose dark manicure has grown out, like waxing moons. A man in the grocery store who says into his phone, in a voice of love, “You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You’re certifiably insane.” A colleague, now buttoned-up and dull, who reminisces about her time as a teenage huffer of paint. You don’t need to write any of this down. You could. You could have a little notebook; if you remember to carry it around, you’re better than me. To consider yourself a writer as you move about the world is—I am a true believer—a beautiful way to live, a form of openmindedness, even in terrible times. Here life is, going on all around. It is a form of writing itself; if you do it, you are a writer. It’s likely to lead to putting words down on a page, at least a few, but even if it doesn’t it can make you feel alive. Lucky. Luck you can make yourself.

So much of fiction is a trick of the mind. (Much of life, too, but my only expertise is in fiction.) 

Lots of people speak scornfully of pen-and-paper questions after literary readings, meaning generic mechanical questions: Can you tell me about your process? Do you write by hand or on a computer? What time of day? These are concrete questions about work instead of art: answerable, opposable. We writers believe that everyone else is doing it right while we bumble along in the gutter; we also believe that it’s the rest of the world who bumbles and only we know the True Way. 

Ask yourself those pen-and-paper questions, as though you are both audience member and visiting writer. 

Or think of yourself as a science experiment. Try out everything to see if it works: early rising, late night, nice pens, crappy pens, the notes app on your phone, voice memos. Listen to white noise or music. Some of these experiments will only show what doesn’t work. Make your space as amenable to work as possible. One year—one whole year of my life!—I wrote almost nothing because I lived alone in an apartment with plenty of room, a place I never had a single visitor, and I had crammed my desk in the corner of my bedroom next to a cast-iron radiator in such a way I had to clamber into the chair. This difficulty meant I almost never sat down at my desk to write. I certainly never sat down idly in my desk chair to read a book, an essential step in my process. When I moved house, away from the radiator, I immediately began writing. You might get away with moving the furniture. 

Make process (and only process) a contest with your writing friends (and only your friends): how long you work, how hard. What weird complex note-taking system you have in place, the beauty and obsessiveness of your notebooks. Whiteboards, murder boards, charcuterie boards: whatever fuels the work. Trash-talk. Self-aggrandize. Challenge. I once told a friend that one day I worked so hard I scared myself, and I saw an answering fear in his eyes—I scared him, too—and this is one of my favorite writing memories. 

Every-day writers have a clear answer to the question, How will you get work done? Me, I harness the power of my own self-loathing. 

Self-loathing is a common commodity among writers. An uplifting craft book would tell you that you must forgive yourself before writing, that writing is hard, but I believe self-loathing has its uses, if you know how to angle it. Don’t think of days, but weeks or months, a period of time in which you want to get work done. Say it’s four months. You know that you have enough time in those four months to amass some pages, even if week to week you don’t know where you will find those hours or minutes. Decide what you’d like to accomplish. Make it wildly ambitious, more than you think is reasonable. 

Think: How mad will I be if I don’t get this done? How much will I hate myself? Travel forward in time in your mind; make yourself really feel it. Put yourself into your body and take it on: the misery, the self-recrimination, the shame. 

Travel back in time to the current moment. Realize that you can avoid these terrible feelings: All you have to do is work. Not every day. For you—for some people—the manageable units of time involved in daily writing aren’t useful. Remember what you want to avoid: the nauseating feeling of having wasted a block of time.

A whole stretch of the calendar allows you to be more grandiose. If your aim is unreasonable, and you fall short, you won’t feel too bad; if your aim is modest and you don’t meet it, you will be crushed. 

This method is the only way I get work done. 

In the past few years people have become fond of the phrase imposter syndrome. “I suffer from imposter syndrome,” a young writer might say, meaning they don’t deserve what they’ve achieved, or, in its worst form, are afraid to dare to try. As though this isn’t the human condition. Imposter syndrome sounds fantastic. It probably comes with a cape and a false nose and the ability to perform surgery without a medical license. What it means is: fear of failing. Calling it a syndrome instead of a feeling suggests that it can’t be tampered with. It’s not a problem to be solved, but something you will have forever. 

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. No, clearly I am: I have just said that I have never doubted that I am a real writer, which is true. I have only doubted and loathed my writing and excoriated myself for not working harder. 

Don’t make a journey out of something that can be a decision. This is a corollary of no binary question is interesting. If you have received something—a place in a writing program, a compliment, an acceptance—do not wonder whether you deserve it. That is a question aimed at the past. You have it; the answer is yes. Turn your eyes to the future and put all your worry into your writing. 

Am I good enough? is, on the other hand, an interesting question to write about. You could do worse than to take all your personal, worrisome flaws and put them into your characters. To feel ashamed about writing isn’t interesting, but writing about shame is fascinating. A jealous writer may get no work done; a jealous character can scheme and murder and say astonishing things. You might even discover that once you have removed your flaws to use them in fiction—like a splinter, a bee’s stinger—they no longer bother you. 

From the book A LONG GAME by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth McCracken. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

The post You Don’t Have to Write Every Day to Be a Real Writer appeared first on Electric Literature.

The first battle is figuring out what to write. Clearly everything has been done before, no? I see familiar concepts and tired storylines every day. But if there’s nothing new under the sun, how can writers stand out to agents and editors while also giving readers what they want and maybe taking advantage of trends?

There’s so much to say on this topic that I basically wrote a whole book about it. Writing Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life helped me better understand how writers can navigate the weird, opaque, and confusing publishing landscape. There are no shortcuts or sure things, but my bird’s eye view of the industry has given me some insight, starting with what to write. 

Way back in 2017, I wrote about the novels literary agents see all the time. No more zombies, I said back then. Now, times have changed! You can write a zombie novel if you want! It’s time for an update. I’m back to tell you about 10 novels that fill agent’s inboxes these days, but also how you can make yours stand out from the crowd. You can write anything you want. The key is to think about the reader, too.

1. Thinly Veiled Political Satire
   Listen, I can’t believe what is going on in the world either. Writing fiction about it might make you feel better and that’s great. Publishing it probably won’t change the world the way you hope, unfortunately, and everyone recognizes that character named Pylon Dusk. If you want to change the world, you can fundraise for mutual aid or canvas for candidates, and then write something else. Readers are not flocking to books that recreate our news feeds, just with funny names. 
2. Sigh Cli-fi
   This science fiction subgenre focuses on climate change in a noble attempt to sound the alarm. But often they’re preaching to the choir. Most readers who like these books already know we have to act yesterday. If you want your cli-fi to reach the unconverted, what can you bring to your story that is not just HURRY UP THE PLANET IS DYING? The reader that should read your book will be the very last to do so, because then it would feel like homework.
3. The Witches of Everywhere
   We’ve seen so many different witches in books: historical, contemporary, good, evil, goofy, scary, teen, crone, highbrow, lowbrow. It feels like the post Twilight days when vampires flooded the market. If you’re plotting a witch book right now, you can put it on the backburner until it comes back around again (which it will) or make sure your witches offer something new. You have to go deeper than my witches have white cats or other surface-level attributes. It will take some serious inventiveness and character development to turn a reader’s head with a witch book these days.
4. Hello Fellow Cool Kids
   I often see YA novels where the main character’s primary motivation is to be popular. And honestly, (and thankfully) I don’t think kids today feel this as strongly as the adults writing those YA novels did back then. Plus, it makes me ask why those characters want to be popular. What will it get them? What will it protect them from? I think kids these days want to be safe and seen, not crowned prom queen, and a book about wanting to be popular needs to explore that desire more deeply in order for readers to connect with it. 
5. AI Run Amok
   I see science fiction about AI more than any other trope, and like with cli-fi, the authors are preaching to the choir. The robot overlords have been a bad idea since Hal closed the pod bay doors. If you’re writing about AI, ask yourself what you want the reader to come away with, and then ask yourself if you think they already feel that way. How can you make the reader question their own beliefs? How can you surprise them?
6. I’m Coming Out
   We need more queer and trans stories in the world, not fewer, especially now. And while coming out is a formative, important, sometimes traumatic, sometimes joyous moment, it’s only one aspect of a queer person’s life. Queer stories are so much more. What else can you share? What about joy? What about love? What about everything else?
7. Picture Books with a Lesson
   My advice to all picture book writers is to read 100 of them published in the last five years and then start writing. You’ll find the ones that attempt to teach kids a lesson, whether it’s don’t pull the cat’s tail or share blocks at school have been done a thousand times or are not that enjoyable to read. Kids know when they’re being talked down to or lightly scolded. Instead of a lesson, can you tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end? Can you show a character that learns, grows, and changes? It’s tough to do in so few words. This is one of the hardest genres to be published in for good reason. 
8. A 12 Book Series
   The New York Times bestsellers list is full of novels that are part of a series. As a writer, I too would like to park myself in a world and write about it for years. But not all successful series were planned that way (as you can often tell by book four or five). If your new project is something that will only make sense to the reader after the third or fourth book, you aren’t going to get very far in today’s publishing climate. I mean, how many second TV episodes have you failed to watch, no less second books? Focus on making that first book a uniquely satisfying read, and with some success, you might find yourself in a series down the line.
9. It Happened One Night
   Many main characters suddenly find themselves in the middle of things—a mystery, a romance, an intergalactic war—and it makes me ask, does this character do anything, or do things just happen to them? If your main character is the recipient of the plot instead of actively engaged in it, the reader will start asking their own questions. Why don’t they just leave? Why do they have to solve this mystery now? Why is this battle theirs to fight? Make sure your main character wants something and goes out to get it. If it’s compelling enough, the reader will want to see what happens next. 
10. It Happened to Me
    Writing is hugely therapeutic. That writing, though, doesn’t always fit in the publishing world. While you’re not trying to publish your diaries, sometimes when we’re too close to our subject matter—in both fiction and non-fiction—we can’t see how the reader will interpret things. Just because it happened doesn’t mean there needs to be a book about it. Just because you wrote about it doesn’t mean it needs to be published. It has value whether someone else can buy it in a store or not. 

It took me years to get my first book deal as a writer. I wrote picture books and a middle grade novel and an adult novel with no luck. It wasn’t until I wrote a non-fiction book based on my newsletter that I found success. What made the difference for me? I thought about what the reader would want, not just what I wanted to say. This alone can help troubleshoot your ideas. Assume your reader is smart and has little time and money to spend on books—because it’s true. You want the reader to say ohhh, I’ve never seen that before. Because at the end of the day, the reader is always going to ask, what’s in it for me?

The post 10 Novels Agents Have Seen a Billion Times, and How to Make Yours Stand Out appeared first on Electric Literature.

“This seems unrealistic.”

“Have you tried yoga?” 

These were some of the comments I received in writing workshops regarding my work about disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. Often, I was the only student writing about living with disability, rather than using it as a cliché metaphor about being mad, blind, lame, or deaf, where disability was only present when it represented something else. Sometimes my classmates wrote about disabled characters, relying on crude stereotypes, or about disabled family members, focusing on the burden of caregiving or of loving difficult people. In these cases, disability was not at the forefront. Instead, it was being used as a plot device to convey either empathy for characters dealing with someone else’s illness or frustration at disability thwarting abled people’s attempts to live happy lives. 

I was not represented in these works. None of my disabilities were visible. I was young. I was relatively successful. I loved and was loved in return. I was happy, except when I was not, but often this had little to do with being disabled and more to do with trying to survive in an ableist world. I did not want my existence to inspire pity in those who were not disabled, by which I mean I did not want to make others feel grateful they did not live a life like mine. 

What I wanted was to write stories about the experience of living with chronic pain and the sensory onslaught of neurodivergence. I wanted to write stories about bodies and brains like mine without having to justify that yes, this really did happen and, yes, I really did feel this way, and no, I was not exaggerating to garner attention or sympathy. I wanted to be called what I was—disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent—instead of sitting in workshops that insisted on using demeaning terminology such as “differently-abled,” “handicapable” and “special needs,” which imply we’re both helpless to our disabilities and yet somehow capable of overcoming them. I wanted to write about my crip community—our collective rage and exquisite joy and sharp humor—without abled classmates insisting I was generalizing. I was tired, I was in pain, and I did not want to spend my limited energy fighting for my place in workshops that didn’t understand me or my work.

Like many disabled people, I was skilled at masking. The abled world often does not want to accommodate us, and if we vocalize our pain, let alone demand access, we are punished. So we mask to fit in and hopefully succeed, though this comes at great mental and physical costs. I masked in workshop and on the page, dutifully following the writing advice I received in the workshop, even when much of it invalidated my lived experience. 

But after a while, I grew tired of writing the abled story of my disabled life. I no longer wanted to translate my experience for abled audiences who often failed to understand—or even believe—my stories. In order to write, I needed to unlearn much of the advice I had encountered. I wrote my craft book, Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, about my experiences as a multiply disabled writer in order to help others who might need what I needed after so many workshops where abled writers insisted they knew best: strategies and methods to form a disabled writing practice. Along the way, I learned how to dismantle some of the most commonly received pieces of “feedback” in ableist workshops. Below is some advice on how to spot these comments, so you can dismantle and unlearn them too: 

1) Disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers will often be encouraged to create work about these identities and little else. 

When disabled writers include a small detail about disability in their work without it being the primary focus, workshop colleagues may call attention to that detail and insist it’s what the work is “really about.” This type of comment assumes the writer did not know their own intentions. Despite this common suggestion, it is possible for disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence to inform a work without being the focus, just as it is possible for disabled writers to create work that does not include any discussions of this identity at all. 

2) Assumptions about a writer’s identity or information from their previous pieces may be brought up in order to imply that this information needs to be included. 

When disabled writers do choose to disclose information about their identities in their creative work, workshops may focus their discussion on unanswered questions about the author’s diagnosis, asking invasive questions and speculating while the author is forced to sit silent. Workshops colleagues may ask us to include extensive information about our lived experiences and various disabilities, shifting the focus of our work to a medical report about our brains and bodies. We are expected to put our suffering on the page, to “show, don’t tell” what it is like to experience medical trauma. At the same time, we may be told to spare readers the details about our lived experiences that make them uncomfortable. But disabled writers do not need to shield readers from our suffering, just as we do not need to perform our trauma. We do not have to justify or explain every detail about our disabilities, treatments, and lived experiences for them to be accepted as true or valid or worthy of art, nor do we need to answer invasive questions on the page or in the classroom. Sharing our stories requires our consent, and we do not need to consent to violations of our privacy and dignity.  

3) If writers choose to write about disability, they will frequently be told to do so with an optimistic tone. 

We’re often told this suggestion is being made because the story is hard to navigate, difficult and upsetting to read. We may be asked, as I was time and again, to “describe how you find the courage to go on living,” as though our lives would be better off ended. The subtext here is that disabled people make abled people uncomfortable, and we must anesthetize our stories if we want to engage an abled audience. But why should we shoulder the burden of translating our stories for the ease and comfort of others? If even the mere facts of our brains and bodies are so upsetting to abled audiences, then perhaps these are not the readers we hope to engage with our work and certainly not the people we should be turning to for writing advice.  

Similarly, disabled writers must resist pressures to demonstrate stoicism and grace above all else. This is not to say we cannot strive for these qualities in our lives and on the page, but rather that we must not allow abled others to reduce us to these qualities, must not accept that our stories are only of value if they imply that our lived experiences, full of frequent injustices, are easy to bear or devoid of unpleasant emotions. We do not need to revise our lived experience in order to make ourselves or our characters courageous and cheerful for the reader’s comfort. 

4) Disabled writers may receive medical advice masquerading as craft advice.

Many times, the ableist need for optimism means requiring that disabled characters undergo treatment and prove their hard work, or at the very least, demonstrate hope. Because of this, we tend to receive all sorts of unasked for advice: recommendations to try meditation or essential oils, stories about a friend or family member or stranger from the news who benefited from some obscure treatment that the disabled writer ought to try. This “advice” implicitly asks us to prove we’ve tried everything in our power to be well. We’re expected to reveal this failure cheerfully and without criticism, certainly not mentioning that ableism is an inherent part of both the medical industry and of being offered unsolicited medical advice while we’re just trying to live our lives. Rather than succumb to calls for our work to provide inspiration—as though our lives are not challenging enough without the added pressure of needing to serve as a saccharine greeting card about looking on the bright side—we must remember that crafting our stories accurately is the ultimate act of agency. Resisting pressures to perform illness for others is a reclamation of our power.

5) Ableist audiences often want a triumphant recovery arc, or the promise of one to come. 

As a result of points 3 and 4, workshops may encourage disabled writers to spend lengthy time discussing the possibility of recovery, as though each piece about disability should conclude with a magic cure or medical breakthrough. Alternatively, audiences will accept disabled stories that inevitably end in death, so long as the disabled character goes calmly and compliantly into the good night. Mostly, however, readers love a success story, meaning a story where disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent people rehabilitate and assimilate. In other words, where we become (or at least pretend to be) abled. But doing so requires the erasure of the reality for many disabled people, one where treatment and recovery are not always possible or even preferable, our unique identities intertwined with our disabilities and inherent to our sense of self. Implying our stories are only of value if we assimilate requires the eradication of our very existence. In a world where so many disabled people are denied access to public spaces, education, politics, and even healthcare, we cannot allow ableist workshops to erase us on the page, in the stories of our very own lives. 

“Why not conclude by reflecting on how far you’ve come?”

“Can you show how hard you’ve worked to overcome this?” 

“Can you spend more time explaining how this doesn’t define you?”

Years after my time in writing workshops, I still remember these frequent comments and still receive them from book and magazine editors. But if I were to revise based on this feedback, I could only conclude that I’ve come very far in ignoring advice like this—the kind that suggests my writing is only of value if I demonstrate how far away from my disability I have managed to escape. If I were to revise based on this feedback, I could only say that I have worked very hard—all my life—to navigate disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence, all of which are difficult to live with, but even more so because they are rejected by an ableist world that refuses to accept or accommodate them.

I will no longer explain that disability does not define me, because it is a preposterous thing to ask of any writer about their identity. My disabilities do define me, and to pretend otherwise is to actively erase me—from society, from the writing workshop, and from my own work. Treating everyone the same is an ableist society’s convenient way to overlook that disabled people have different access needs, and thus rid themselves of the responsibility to educate themselves and provide accommodations. When workshops treat each writer and work the same, they mirror this injustice. Unlearning the expectations of the ableist workshop is an ongoing process, one that continues to help me write the story of my disabled life. I hope others in our community do the same, finding new ways to resist and reclaim.

The post To Tell My Disabled Stories, I Needed to Unlearn Ableist Workshop Critiques appeared first on Electric Literature.

The first time I uttered that sentence was in 2016. I was sitting underneath the blue awning of Wheatfields Restaurant & Bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, with the writer Claire Messud. I had just graduated with my MFA in fiction and was attending a summer writing conference at Skidmore College. It was my second time in workshop with Claire, and my birthday happened to fall during the first week of the conference. Claire had kindly suggested we celebrate over lunch.

At some point during our conversation, I said, “I’m not worried,” referring to my prospects as a writer. “But I’m worried that I’m not worried,” I told her.

Claire asked me to explain what I meant.

In response, I detailed my history of rejections.

The first time I applied to graduate school was in 2012. I applied to fourteen MFA programs that year and was rejected by all of them. The following year, I applied to sixteen programs and was accepted at three. Ultimately, I decided to attend the program at the University of Arizona, but I arrived in Tucson with a chip on my shoulder: one) because I had initially been waitlisted by the program, which in some ways felt rejection-adjacent, and two) because I had really wanted to go to Syracuse University to study with George Saunders or to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study with Marilynne Robinson.

In the end, I could not have asked for a better graduate school experience. I adored my cohort; I was enchanted with the desert. I felt supported and encouraged by my professors. I read and wrote more than I ever had. And I got better. I became a stronger writer because of my time in the program. But I also could not help but note that I had been passed over for every department award, and that while many of my peers had published regularly and well during our MFA years, I could not publish a story to save my life. I was also rejected from every post-graduate fellowship I applied to the year I graduated. From a strictly intellectual perspective, I understood the evidence in support of my future success as a writer was not at all in my favor. And yet, I wasn’t worried.

“But I’m worried that I’m not worried,” I said again.

Claire regarded me from across the table. “Listen,” she said. “You’re brilliant. And you’re a great writer. So there’s no doubt it will come.”

It will come, Claire said.

What she meant was: Keep writing.

A few years ago, the writer Matt Bell posted a series of tweets about a phenomenon he had observed among emerging writers, which he referred to as the “despair of almost there.” “I often see people quit right on the precipice of some goal,” Bell wrote, “after being a finalist for a few dream jobs, or getting full requests from agents but no yes, or being waitlisted for residencies/MFAs, etc. Those are signs you’re on the path, not that you should step off. And yet.” By then I had been around the literary scene long enough to have witnessed this trend myself. I had watched writers in the early stages of their careers, writers with far more talent and promise than me, flame out and quit prematurely. I began to wonder why this happened. Why did some writers quit writing before their careers had even begun? At what juncture did writers yield to the despair of almost there? Over time I concluded that, more often than not, the answer is a relatively simple one: We quit when we lose our tolerance for rejection. How we arrive at that precipice, however, I believe is a bit more complicated.

Four days after my conversation with Claire, I received an acceptance from a reputable online literary magazine for a short story I had submitted to their slush pile. It was my first Big Yes, and it felt like a gift. It will come, Claire had said. And it came! I thought. I understood that the story’s publication had the potential to accelerate the trajectory of my career, and in anticipation of that, I returned with renewed focus to the manuscript the story was a part of. I spent the next nine months polishing that manuscript to a fine luster, and I applied to post-grad fellowships a second time. I worked those applications to the bone.

Eventually the story was published in the spring of the following year, and was featured by another popular online literary venue. Almost immediately, I began receiving emails from agents asking if I had a full-length manuscript they could read. By then, I was prepared. Yes, I told them, I had completed a short story collection. I made a list of other agents I thought might be interested in my work, and I queried those agents at the same time I sent the collection to the agents who had solicited me. Altogether, I received thirteen full manuscript requests. Over the course of that summer, their responses trickled in.

No one was interested in representing it.

By and large, I could sort the rejections I received from agents into two categories. Half of them had enjoyed some of the stories but felt the collection as a whole was uneven. This feedback would have been helpful, except for the fact that no two agents agreed on which were the stronger stories and which were the weaker. The lack of consensus was, quite frankly, maddening, but not as maddening as the second category of responses I received. Those agents had enjoyed the collection overall but said short story collections were a difficult sell. Every one of them asked me the same question: “Do you have a novel?”

No, I told them, I did not have a novel.

By the fall of 2017, I had received the last of the agent rejections, and the momentum I’d felt in the wake of the story’s publication had largely dissipated. I found myself in a curiously familiar situation, repeating the same sentence I had spoken more than a year before.

“I’m not worried,” I said, “but I’m worried that I’m not worried.”

This time, I was back in Tucson visiting friends. I had arranged to meet up with my graduate mentor, Aurelie Sheehan. We sat at a table at Time Market, a kind of hipster deli and café I had frequented during my MFA days. Like Claire, Aurelie asked me to explain what I meant. Again, I listed off my resume of rejections: the rejected graduate school applications, the failure to win any department awards, all the rejected short stories I had submitted, the rejections from post-graduate fellowships I had now received for the second year in a row, and the thirteen rejections from agents who were not interested in representing my work—at least not until I’d written a novel.

Aurelie listened, and when I had finished, she offered me a piece of advice that would forever change my understanding about the relationship between writing and rejection. She said, “When it comes to the career of a writer, there is the creative mindset and the business mindset, and it is nearly impossible to inhabit both mindsets at the same time. So my advice is to spend as much time as possible in the creative mindset and as little time as possible in the business mindset.”

For some people, this might have been an obvious observation. 

For me, it was a revelation.

Or it was and it was not.

Spend as much time as possible in the creative mindset, Aurelie said.

What she meant was: Keep writing.

In my experience, rejection is a well-trod topic among writers. We don’t need much encouragement to talk about it. And for the record, I believe this is a good thing. Rejection can be an isolating experience in the professional career of a writer—or, I should say, of life in general. To not talk about rejection is to risk internalizing narratives about ourselves and the value of our work that are steeped in shame, self-deficiency, and doubt. That insidious refrain that tells us we are not enough. But I hear it all too often, people say, Rejection defines the life of a writer. Or they say, If you want to write, get used to rejection. Or perhaps, For a writer, rejection is inevitable, and a lot of other bullshit like that. It is not the usefulness of talking about rejection that I question, but rather this particular framing of the subject. To suggest that rejection defines the writing life—and not, say, writing—is to yield to a lack of precision in our use of language or else a lack of discernment in our thinking. And though I cannot say for certain when or by whom I was first sold the idea that to write was to ensure rejection, at some point I had bought into that belief and had internalized it so thoroughly as to never question its accuracy. Not until Aurelie said what she said. Only then could I see that rejection had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with the business of writing.

A week after my conversation with Aurelie, I returned home to upstate New York and was sitting in a twelve-step meeting when I heard someone say, “You can never get enough of something you do not need.” At that point I had been sober for eight years, and yet the statement still struck me in a visceral way. I recalled one night in particular from the years when I was still drinking. I was standing at the kitchen counter of my home, pouring whiskey from a bottle into a sixteen-ounce water tumbler. I filled the glass to the brim. (Because if it fits in one glass, it only counts as one drink.) As I watched the whiskey rise over the ice, I thought to myself, “There will never be enough. There is not enough booze in the world to do what I need it to do.”

Then I put down the bottle and picked up the drink.

It would be another two years before I finally quit drinking, but eight years later that insight was returned to me. You can never get enough of something you do not need. I had long ago concluded that during the years of my active alcoholism, I had used alcohol to take me out of what was, at the time, an intensely painful experience of life. And for a while it worked. But the relief drinking provided was always temporary. The next morning I would wake up and the pain would still be there, waiting for me. So I drank more. Always I needed more relief. Then I reached the point where I could no longer control my drinking, and that lack of control brought with it its own pain and its own consequences. What I actually needed was to get sober and work a program of recovery and seek professional treatment for the trauma I had endured in my early twenties. And eventually I did. I sobered up and received the help I needed, and that help proved to be enough. It afforded me a form of sustained relief that has allowed me to live sanely and serenely in reality.

But on the heels of my trip to Tucson, I understood the implications of what the person was saying beyond the scope of my alcoholism. This is why even now, more than seven years later, I still attend recovery meetings regularly: I go to meetings to hear the things I don’t know I need to hear. Because when that person said, “You can never get enough of something you do not need,” Aurelie’s advice was still fresh in my head. I could see then that this principle applied not only to my past relationship with alcohol but to a number of other things I had pursued in sobriety, mostly in the material and romantic areas of my life. I had pursued the acquisition of material comforts as if I needed them; I had pursued the attention and approval of other people as if my well-being depended on it. And not once was it enough. There was always more stuff to acquire; there was always another person to please. And then I had gone and done the same thing in my pursuit of success in the business of writing.

I want to be clear: I don’t believe there is anything wrong with pursuing commercial success or critical recognition as a writer. Just like I don’t believe there is anything wrong with enjoying a playful flirtation or buying a new car or a new leather jacket. I’m not an ascetic. I’ve simply learned that I am in trouble when I pursue something I do not need as if I need it. When that happens, my experience has shown me that I’m usually asking whatever I am pursuing to do one of two things: to make me feel good (which I might call gratification) or to make me feel good about me (which I might call validation). The problem with pursuing external gratification and validation as if they were needs is that, as a human having a human experience, my appetite for gratification and validation knows no boundaries. This is what distinguishes something I need from something I do not: a need has a discernible limit. A need can be satisfied, sated. A need recognizes enough.

Not once in my life have I ever been confused about whether or not I’m receiving enough oxygen. I need to breathe, so I take a breath, and my body tells me if the need is met. As long as I am operating at a state of emotional regulation and relative mental and physical health, most of my needs function this way, including my needs for hydration, nourishment, and rest, as well as my needs for physical and psychological safety, emotional fulfillment, and financial security. I am able to determine the parameters of these needs and whether or not they are being fulfilled. I am able to discern when enough is enough.

But my relationship to success as a writer has never functioned this way. I might place a story with a dream publication, or win a scholarship to a prestigious writing conference, and I’d experience the familiar rush of external gratification and validation. But eventually that rush always faded, and when it did, I’d update my resume and turn my attention, full-throttle, to the next opportunity on the horizon. The more I pursued success in this fashion, the less I was able to integrate any real sense of accomplishment. The time between achieving some milestone and the point at which I moved on from it became shorter and shorter. There was always more success to achieve.

And therein lies the rub when it comes to rejection. Because yes, rejection is inevitable in the business of writing, but only because the pursuit of success is inexhaustible, which makes pursuing success as a need—as a constant source of gratification and validation—an exercise in unsustainability.

I am aware that there are writers who have professionalized their writing who will argue that I’m splitting hairs with this distinction between writing and the business of writing and my insistence that rejection is squarely the territory of the latter. Rejection defines the writing life, they might say, because writing is their job. They need their writing to succeed because writing is how they make money. I am more than happy to leave these people to this belief if the belief is working for them. All I can say is that my experience has taught me there are far more efficient and less emotionally taxing ways to make money than making art, and every time I have placed the burden of financing my life on my writing, my relationship to writing has suffered—and, eventually, so has the writing itself.

Because here is the thing I did not tell Aurelie that day as we sat in Time Market eating greasy pizza: In the eighteen months since I had graduated from the program at Arizona—during all my fastidious tinkering with the short story collection and submitting fellowship applications and querying agents—I had not written anything new. I had allowed the business of advancing my career as a writer to distract me from the real work of writing. Which perhaps explains why I found myself repeating the same sentence I had said to Claire eighteen months later to Aurelie. The words were exactly the same, but the locus of my anxiety had changed.

When I told Claire I wasn’t worried about my future as a writer but was worried that I wasn’t worried, my loyalty still remained with writing. I wanted to write, so I was going to write. All I wanted from Claire was some confirmation that I shouldn’t be more concerned about my lack of concern regarding the lackluster reception of my work. But in the eighteen months between that conversation and the one I had with Aurelie, I had begun to internalize the belief that all the rejections I had received indicated something about the value of my writing. I had begun to seriously wonder: Should I be worried? I didn’t know it at the time I said it, but I was no longer looking for confirmation. I was looking for reassurance.

And in hindsight, the answer was yes. I should have been worried. But not because the rejections I had received said anything about the value of my writing. I should have been worried because my allegiance had shifted. I had conflated the two mindsets, and as a result, my investment in the success of my writing had begun to supersede my investment in writing.

This, I’ve come to believe, is how we lose our tolerance for rejection.

I cannot say for certain how close I was to the precipice of quitting, or whether or not I would have yielded to the despair of almost there had I reached that impasse. But looking back, I believe I was losing my tolerance for rejection and that operating in that state would have been tenable for only so long. What I can say for certain is that by the time I left that meeting where I heard someone say, “You can never get enough of something you don’t need,” I had made a decision: I would divest as much as I could from the business of writing. I would stop pursuing success as if I needed it. That decision, of course, presented its own quandary: How does a writer divest from the business of writing while simultaneously pursuing a writer’s career? For me, it involved developing certain strategies to ensure that my investment remained first and foremost with the writing, which required me to take stock of my most valuable resources and begin to deploy them more mindfully.

After I graduated from the University of Arizona, I stumbled my way into a job teaching mindfulness practice. I did that work for three years, and if there is one lesson I learned during that time that has served me most in my writing career, it is that the two most valuable resources I have at my disposal are my time and my attention, and that these resources are both finite and nonrenewable. Which perhaps is another reason Aurelie’s advice resonated with me so profoundly. Yes, she was encouraging me to keep writing, but when Aurelie pointed out the difficulty of inhabiting the creative mindset and the business mindset at the same time, she was prompting me to consider where and to what degree I was allocating my most valuable resources. With this in mind, I began utilizing a tool that’s so rudimentary it’s easy to underestimate its potency.

I began using templates.

That winter I set aside a weekend and drafted templates of every component I could conceivably need to apply to professional opportunities: a cover letter for short story and essay submissions; a cover letter that included project descriptions for fellowship, grant, and residency applications; an artist statement; a teaching statement; a statement about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion; a letter to query agents; a letter requesting letters of reference; writing samples of varying lengths; and a streamlined writing resume. Then I made myself a promise: I would spend one weekend a year updating these templates. Otherwise, I would submit the materials as they had been written.

A lot of advice out there lauds the benefits of tailoring applications and submissions to specific opportunities and institutions, and while I don’t disagree that this practice has its advantages, I am not at all convinced it is worth its expenditures in terms of resource management. I never realized how much time I used to spend on the business of writing until I started using templates: time drafting and revising and reviewing documents, time researching programs and publications, time tracking deadlines and making spreadsheets, time arranging and confirming letters of reference. It’s true that it might only take me an hour or two to personalize an application or submission, but multiply that number by ten—or twenty, or thirty—and those hours add up. I also underestimated the degree to which the business mindset had siphoned my attention. Even when I wasn’t actively attempting to secure success, I was often actively thinking about it. I would sit down to write and my mind would be slightly elsewhere, occupied with to-dos and entertaining what-ifs. Which is to say nothing about the emotional investment. The more time and attention I invested in applications and submissions, the more attached I became to the outcomes and the harder I took the rejections.

Using templates helped me circumnavigate these tendencies.

I discovered that when I limited the amount of time I spent on the business of writing, I limited the degree to which the business mindset subsumed my attention. I had more time to write, and I was more present while writing. I wrote with clearer focus and purer intention because I wasn’t preoccupied with what would come of it. My emotional investment shifted to doing the work, and I began to fully inhabit the creative mindset. As I did, my tolerance for rejection increased. Now if I failed to procure some professional achievement, the resources I invested in trying to make it happen were so minimal I found I was less inclined to take rejections personally. That doesn’t mean I don’t still experience disappointment when I receive a rejection—I do—and I’ve had to learn to honor those disappointments. But using tools like templates has helped right-size my relationship to rejection by prioritizing the thing that really matters to me: writing.

I have been pursuing the career of a writer for more than a decade now, and though I am far from the most successful writer I know, I have managed a modest and consistent degree of success as an emerging writer. That said, it has only been in the last five or so years that I’ve experienced the majority of that success. During that time, I’ve published fiction and nonfiction with several well-regarded literary outlets; I’ve been awarded scholarships to two writing conferences and fellowships to four residency programs; and I received a major grant from a literary arts organization. I applied to every one of these opportunities using templates.

I’ve also sustained hundreds of rejections. 

I survived those, too, using templates.

In addition to getting clear about the difference between writing and the business of writing, and learning to use tools like templates to allocate my time and attention according to my priorities, it has been necessary to reframe my understanding regarding the nature of rejection in order to maintain a tolerance for it. Like Brevity editor Allison K Williams, I’ve come to believe that rejection is not a valuable source of feedback. In fact, as Williams points out, rejection is not feedback at all. Rejection may be accompanied by feedback—which may or may not be useful (another important distinction)—but in and of itself, rejection is more akin to the absence of feedback. Understanding the difference between the two has helped me discern when a rejection is, as Matt Bell suggested, a sign that I am on the path, rather than a sign I should step off it. To that end, I often return to a piece of advice my undergraduate advisor, Susan Fox Rogers, imparted to me years ago during my first attempts to professionalize my writing.

When I received the three offers from MFA programs back in 2014, after having been rejected from every program I applied to the year before, I emailed Susan to ask for her advice. Susan herself had completed her MFA at the University of Arizona, and of the three offers I had received, the offer from Arizona was the only one I was seriously considering. But, I told Susan, I was also considering declining all three offers in favor of applying to programs a third time. I still wanted so badly to attend the programs at Syracuse or Iowa.

In her reply, Susan wrote, “One thing my advisor said to me in my MFA program was: Go where it’s warm. It was a funny thing to hear, because we were in Arizona, but I got it.” Then she added, “If you don’t go, I’ll disown you.”

I read her response and laughed because I also got it.

Go where it’s warm, Susan said.

What she meant was, Go where they want you.

And I did. I went where it was warm, and that decision served me well. In the years since then, Susan’s advice has proved a helpful strategy for maintaining a tolerance for rejection in a business in which rejection is the rule rather than the exception.

The application and submission economies are by nature unpredictable. Editors and readers come and go; mastheads change. Juries and selection committees rotate. But every editor who has ever published my work sent me an encouraging rejection for a previous submission first. “Not this one,” they said, “but please send us something else.” So I did. One submission at a time, I sent them everything I had. At some point I learned it was appropriate to ask if I could submit directly to these editors instead of submitting to the slush pile. I also learned to submit new work to editors with whom I had previously published because their past support was an indication of warmth. These strategies eventually led to a history of acceptances. Similarly, one residency program sent me a form rejection the first time I applied. The second time, I was waitlisted. That waitlist indicated warmth, so I applied a third time and received a fellowship to the program.I still regularly submit to places that have only sent me form rejections—because if I’m using templates, why the hell not? But now when I receive an encouraging rejection from an editor or program, I make a conscious decision to believe them. I separate the encouragement from the rejection because I understand the encouragement is feedback and the rejection is not. When I do, the way forward becomes clear. I stay on the path, like Matt Bell suggests. I continue to go where it’s warm.

The post All of My Accepted Stories Started with Rejections appeared first on Electric Literature.

My friend, who worked at an academic press at the time, was my only connection to publishing. I learned how to write a book proposal because she sent me a few from her imprint that had already sold or were already published for me to reference while I wrote my own. When she asked me if I wanted to be her plus one to this networking mixer, I said yes. I wanted to connect with folks in the industry. Most of all, I wanted to make new friends. 

Something I know how to do quite well is stand out, so I put my twist on business casual, which was: a bright yellow blazer with no shirt underneath, black, skin-tight skinny jeans, and a pair of red, patent leather pointed-toe boots with a leopard-print bandana tied around one ankle. Something I learned from my days as an active participant in New York City nightlife is how to conjure curiosity. My friends from the world below Fourteenth Street sauntered the streets with the conviction of a superstar until, eventually, many of them would go on to achieve global stardom in some capacity—from Broadway to performing for 50,000 people at a stadium in London and everything in between and beyond. I was determined to enter that mixer and make everyone in the room—and every room thereafter—want to know who I was until I was someone to know.

Well, I did stand out at that mixer, but the only people who wanted to know who I was were two marketing assistants in their early twenties who wanted to know where the “weird, but fun” places to party in the Lower East Side were, and the server handing out cheeseburger sliders who slipped me his number on a cocktail napkin as I left. There were some modest attempts at making meaningful connections, but besides a few well-intentioned compliments—“I like your shoes”; “I love the color of your blazer”; “Wow, is that your real hair?”—I didn’t leave with plans to grab coffee with anyone. The server never even texted me back! These are things I laugh about now, but the memory that still haunts me to this day is meeting A Very Well-Known Writer who looked at me like I was a nuisance, like they needed a spray bottle to get me away from them.

“What is someone like you doing here?” they asked, giving me a glance up and down after I went up and introduced myself. “Uh, isn’t it obvious? There’s cheese,” I replied, joking.

They let out a suggestion of a chortle; I thought I was killing it.

“I’m here with my friend who works in publishing, but I’m a writer, too. I’m writing a book right now!” I told them. “I really loved your first one. I keep it close by when I work on my own.” 

After a mildly awkward pause, they looked at me and smiled. “That’s so nice,” they said. “Well, it was nice meeting you!” And with that, they stopped, dropped and rolled away. 

I left that night feeling disheartened. I did not feel welcomed like I did when I walked into my first dive bar on Rivington Street when I was 18. I wanted to meet people who loved books and could maybe offer me a little guidance, but all I got was acid reflux from the nine burger sliders I ate. That night, I made a promise to myself: If I ever published a book and attained any modicum of success, I would always hold space for other writers—established or not. I vowed to make sure anyone who crossed my path felt like they belonged, even if—and especially if—they were just starting on their path to publication. There’s room for everyone, even if you’re made to feel like there isn’t. 

I have since gone on to publish my first book, which has sold thousands of copies, which is thousands of copies more than I ever thought it would sell; I’ve been published in my dream publications; I’ve met (and befriended) so many of my heroes; I run my own reading series; I teach; I organize; and I’m working on, like, three books right now. All of the dreams I had when I was 23 came true and then some, and that is something I forget all too often after more than a decade of working my ass off and putting work before everything else and constantly trying to outdo myself. But this endless grind, this self-imposed urgency, is not what keeps me going anymore. 

The success of my memoir—and the success I’ve achieved since—has less to do with my promotional efforts, and more to do with the writers who lifted me up along the way. These are the folks who have been there, and understand that it’s hard to break out in this industry without name recognition or a massive platform. The folks who pledge to support newcomers as they navigate the literary landscape—which, in the beginning, can feel like being the new kid at school—because they wish they’d had someone to turn to for guidance when they debuted. These are the authors who blurbed my book, said yes or offered to be my conversation partner at events, or even just posted a photo of my book along with some kind words about it. Now, they are friends who I call when I get frustrated or feel like I want to give up, but remind me the feeling will pass; it always does. 

My literary ambitions remain grand, if not bigger than when I decided to pursue writing as a career. And I still contend with fear, doubt, and anxiety; I still struggle with insecurity. There’s also being mired by life in general: heartbreak, health issues, familial discord, job insecurity—you name it. The only difference is I’m not alone. I am constantly uplifted, both in times of achievement and duress, by those who also believe in the promise of the page. This has been especially true for the past year, when my agent started pitching my second book to editors. After getting my hopes up twice, my proposal died on submission months later. Feeling unmotivated and discouraged—and trying to swat away thoughts of failure and the fear that I would never publish another book again—I struggled to devote time and attention to my projects. Every time I felt pulled to the page, I felt like I kept striking matches that wouldn’t light. Instead of giving in to the urge to fling my computer into the sea and start over as a maple tree farm laborer, I let myself lean on my writer friends. Before long, I felt a renewed sense of purpose, which feeds my art and vice versa. 

When I flew to Los Angeles last summer, in 2023, to host a reading, I thought it would be a one-off event. I pitched a concept called “Spring Cleaning” to my friend, fellow author, and co-host, Jen Winston, earlier that year when we were in Seattle for the AWP conference. The idea was for writers to read work that was cut, killed, unpublished, or otherwise rotting in the bowels of their hard drives. “Spring Cleaning” turned into “Empty Trash,” and a few months later, we booked 12 LA literary luminaries to read at a local theater. Afterwards, milling about outside under the marquee, writer after writer came up to me. “Thank you for doing this. We don’t have a lot of readings like this out here,” one told me. “It’s one of the things I miss about living in New York.” “We’ve been waiting for something like this,” another said. I had already been flirting with the idea of moving to LA, but after hearing comments like this, I pretty much decided to move then and there. The opportunity to build community stood out to me.

Writing is a solitary job, and the industry in which we work is almost invariably brutal. Not only is it an endless buffet of rejection, but, now more than ever, it is a business trying to tread water amidst constantly shifting tides. There are mergers, acquisitions, a starkly evident mismanagement of resources (don’t get me started, girl), and an overall disconnect between those whom I like to call the check-signers and the often overworked, underpaid folks who are employed by these corporate overlords, a lot of whom work just as hard as their authors to advocate for the voices and stories that have historically been, at best, relegated to the sidelines, and at worst, entirely invisible. 

Not only does this pose an obstacle for emerging writers to get their foot in the door—especially writers from marginalized backgrounds—but creates distinct challenges for established writers, too. Those who have already broken in can also find themselves bereft. I have two friends who’ve both recently been orphaned by their respective editors. This is the second time this has happened for one of them. Another friend recently had their contract for their third book killed. Writers at any stage of their career—sometimes even blockbuster names—still struggle to make a living writing full-time. Many of us have other jobs, sometimes more than one, and still live paycheck-to-paycheck. I don’t know where your Aunt Joyce got the impression that we get rich from publishing a book, but please tell her that I overdrafted at Walgreens just the other day.

We’re all just trying to successfully string our words together and stay afloat so we can pay our damn bills, but, oftentimes, it feels like an uphill battle. It’s easy to feel discouraged when all you want to do is share your work with readers, but the route to doing so is an obstacle course. Why navigate this treacherous terrain alone when you can do it together? (Preferably over a strong cocktail.)

I used to sometimes feel dejected after seeing a handful of screenshots from Publisher’s Marketplace announcing book deals scattered across my various social media feeds, feeling like a flop because my second book seems to have stalled in submission purgatory. Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled when I see my friends and peers sell their books, and celebrate every win that comes their way. But there used to be a part of me—the part that’s hypercritical and mean to me for no reason—that reframed everyone’s success as my personal failure to keep up. That part of me still exists, but its volume is drowned by the voices of those with whom I am in community. Even if it’s a ping from my group chat—which is comprised of authors in all different stages of our careers—I know I am not alone, which is critical when you’re confronted with the same difficulties in a business that treats us like literary factories. 

More deals, more acquisitions, more options. Most of this industry focuses solely on the writing and trying to manipulate the sentences into a direction that will yield profit. I want to work in a world where the people underneath the writing are honored and treated well. We are not machines that can produce an endless supply of content without detriment to our health and wellbeing; we are real people with real experiences and real problems and real challenges and real emotions whose job is to metabolize all of these things and create something that we hope will impact at least one person out there. We are already tasked with the writing, but most of us are also tasked with publicizing that writing, and, more times than not, that includes dipping into our personal finances to fund things, like travel to conferences, festivals, and other events. Or the labor is emotional, like being asked to plunge into our wounds for the sake of generating buzz. There’s a scene in the second season of Special on Netflix where Ryan O’Connell’s character, also named Ryan, tells his editor during a meeting that he’s dealing with writer’s block, and she glibly responds with, “Why don’t you just write about your disability again?” Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

Who knows what the future of publishing looks like (or doesn’t), but one thing is for certain: We can count on each other. Whether starting a massive online movement like #PublishingPaidMe to expose the stark disparities in equity and promote transparency going forward or complaining about a publicist dropping a ball over coffee, we will find each other, again and again and again. Across cities, states, and countries. What a blessing it is to find one’s people, one’s cherished community beyond family and close friends. What a felicity it is to spend so much of your efforts in a solitary way, and then find your people and emerge and grow alongside them. 

My dream has always been to walk into a bookstore and see my book on a shelf. Now imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing your friends’ books alongside your own. It never gets old for me. It’s a constant reminder that magic exists—you just have to know where to look. And what a gift it is to look no further.

The post Why It’s Community Above All Else for Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

The agent letter was a surprise, and I was buoyed by it for days. The letter went something like this, “I enjoyed your short story. I’d be interested in seeing more of your work. Do you have a novel?” It felt great  to be approached. It was flattering. But the answer was no: I didn’t have a novel.

A few years later, I received another agent letter after another story publication. A few years after that, an email. The notes all said some version of “I liked your short story. But do you have a novel?”

I’d heard from my graduate school creative writing teachers, who taught us only to read and write short stories, that a fiction writer’s final form was novelist, or at least, they said, that was the publishing industry’s core belief. The books that sold well, the books editors at big publishing houses wanted to acquire, were novels. Collections could be published, sure, but they were afterthoughts or add-ons.

Whenever it came up, the “do you have a novel” question made me a little indignant. I thought it was like telling someone to use their eyes for eating. Novels use words and sentences, obviously, just like short stories, but they require a different skillset, as well as a lot of attributes, like patience and a good memory and discipline, that I—first as a 20-something who just wanted to write poem fragments on my forearms and listen to Pavement, and later as a parent, shellacked with two smallish kids and a full-time job—did not have. If I could write even a third of a short story over a few weeks, it felt like a win. 

When my kids were more self-sufficient and I found myself with actual pockets of time to write and submit, I started getting wildly, embarrassingly jealous of every Publisher’s Marketplace announcement I saw. More egalitarian and generous writers would Tweet about how “there’s enough success for everyone, there’s plenty to go around,” but I, then in my 40s, felt like maybe there wasn’t. Maybe short story writers, all of us vying to win the same few small-press collection contests that ran each year, were doomed to not have book deals. I decided to try to feel content about publishing individual stories in literary magazines and pushed aside the idea of a book. 

The next time an agent emailed me was 2020, and it was the same line as ever. “Do you have a novel?” No. “I really cannot sell a collection on its own.” Okay, I understand. “Do you plan to write a novel?” I guess. Maybe? 

I signed with the agent, which was a leap of faith more for her than for me. I started trying to expand a short story I’d published, to build it somehow into a novel. In most ways, it was like trying to make a bathmat work as a rug in a room the size of a ballroom. Still, I wrote early in the morning, on weekend days, while waiting for doctor’s appointments, on all-hands meetings. I remember even feeling a little bit hopeful, like, “Maybe I’m doing it, maybe I’m really writing a novel, finally,” like this magic land, unenterable for twenty plus years, was opening to me. 

In the end, my draft was more of a loose assemblage of stories. The plottier parts that lurched each chapter forward, the parts that made it a possible novel, weren’t working. When I expressed self-doubt to my agent, she asked me, more than once, if this was “the book [I wanted] to send into the world,” which felt pretty jagged. I remember thinking, Well, the book I want to send into the world is my short story collection. Maybe I even said it out loud. 

We went “on sub,” which is the silly sport-game-sounding name for flinging your book out to a selected group of editors, followed by the brutal process of checking email all the time, being mad at anyone who emails you who isn’t your agent, and (in my case) almost always getting bad news. We sent the book out to 18 editors, and over the course of a few months, we got many nice rejections, paragraph-length notes my agent told me were encouraging and that I should feel good about, and even one call with an editor who liked the book that ultimately resulted in months of ghosting and no book deal. 

The process was flattening. People wanted “propulsion,” and I was focused on sentences and moments. I liked the quiet pockets I was able to build into short stories but that felt harder to make work in a novel.  

In a stupid fit of “now what?” I frantically, in a few months, wrote a whole other novel. The agent hated it, which stung, but it was likely hate-worthy. 

How did I spend the pandemic? I speed-wrote two novels, only to realize I am not a novelist, or at least not yet, and market trends, traditional publishing’s seeming demands for books that rapid-cycled you from beginning to end in one sitting, weren’t going to make me one. 

In summer 2022, I parted ways amicably with my agent and returned to story writing. She told me if I started working on another novel project, she’d take a look. I didn’t fault her. Agents have been told collections don’t sell. So many of them have to deal with the industry realities of looking for plot-heavy books. This isn’t to say there aren’t brilliant and successful poetic, experimental, quiet novels – there obviously are. But if you’ve queried an agent lately, you know: propulsion and plot are king. 

I disassembled the second novel draft and built some short stories from the parts, then wrote some new stories, too. I understood stories and loved how within one I could focus intensely, think about every word, and I could experiment without worrying about staying on a path of forward momentum. I revamped my short story collection, sandwiched in some new stories, moved things around, took out the flash fiction. 

This, I thought, feels like the book I want to send out into the world. 

I submitted it to the same few indie presses and university contests where I’d sent earlier versions of a collection and had been rejected more than once. At this point, only a few of the stories were the same. What the hell, I thought. I was 54 and had gotten my first “but do you have a novel?” agent letter thirty years earlier. 

And then I waited. Items in my Submittable queue changed from Received to In Progress. 

In August, I moved my daughter into her first dorm room in a tall building, and I thought, simplistically probably, about how the dorm, each floor, with each room another person, style, story, was a collection, and how so many things in the world were more an assemblage of disparate parts than a mellifluous whole. My daughter, who is also a writer, said it didn’t make sense for people to be so weird about short stories. Why was publishing so opposed to short fiction, when the world seemed to want and love short-form everything else?

In September, a few weeks after leaving my daughter in New York, in my haze of sadness that was like an anvil hitting me repeatedly and saying you fucking fool why did you help make a person who is designed to leave you, I got an email from one of the small presses. I saw the re: ____ subject line, and I braced myself for the rejection those emails usually are. Instead, it was a nice editor I’d corresponded with a few years before, telling me they wanted to publish my collection.

I was so numbed by life that month, by all the accumulative sadnesses of being 50-something in a whirlpool of life change, that I wasn’t sure how to feel. But when I stood up from my computer to walk around the neighborhood and look at all the familiar things, so many of which had years of memories attached to them, each their own little story, I let myself feel happy. This wasn’t the novel. It wasn’t the Big 5. But it felt truer to the writer I wanted to be.

Small presses, less beholden to concerns over big sales, are able to publish collections and the kinds of books Big Publishing tells writers we shouldn’t bother making. For that, I’m grateful. 

As is true of so many writers I know, some of my favorite texts are short stories. Each time I come upon a new collection in the library or in a bookstore, I get excited about the hive of situations and characters I’m about to dive into and the room for experimentation. It feels like so much possibility. 

I remember hearing last year that a lot of traditionally published debut novels sell only in the hundreds of copies. The managing editor of the small press that accepted my collection told me something like, “During the life of the book, a good outcome would be selling 1000 copies.” A thousand sounded good. Better than the hundred of some novels. Big Fiction’s insistence on the novel as default is maybe a failure of marketing or the imagination about what a book can be and do. 

I’m trying again to write something that approaches a novel, but this time I’m letting myself lean into my tendencies and reminding myself that a novel does not require a traditional narrative arc, nor a set number of scenes and beats. So I’m trying a “novel in stories,” and I’m not writing it with some big splashy publication in mind. I’m writing it when and how I want to write it. 

After an excerpt of the novel-in-stories project won an Honorable Mention in a contest, an agent I adore, a “dream agent,” messaged me and asked me if I had the full novel ready.  I don’t, at least not yet. But when I do, I hope I’m able to pull together a whole made of small slices of the world pulsing together, a collection in its own way, that champions the short form while also feeling like a whole. To the industry, maybe it will even be considered a novel. 

Is this just an essay about someone who wanted to and couldn’t sell a novel so now wants to champion the short story? Maybe a little. But, more, it’s about a circuitous path away from and back to the thing I actually enjoy writing, that the industry told me I shouldn’t do if I wanted to succeed. 

The post I Love Short Stories. Do I Have to Write a Novel? appeared first on Electric Literature.

Then the universe shook my Etch-a-sketch. 

The pandemic, plus bonus tragedies that can strike at any time, because life doesn’t give you a reprieve just because your day-to-day sears subheads into the history books. The backsliding of my career barely registered as a blip. 

Last year, just as I was almost upright again, legs trembling beneath me as I tried to take steps toward something that felt like life, I relented and googled this ChatGPT thing I’d been hearing so much about. 

The pity party lasted three days. 

Luckily, around that time, I’d cobbled together a self-funded reporting trip that gave me something to look forward to. In my attempt to chase the travel writer dream, I’d arranged to hitch rides with teams of drivers on the Baja XL, a 10-day off-roading rally down Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. I would hop from Jeep to 4Runner to motorcycle, riding hundreds of miles a day, much of it through desert and rocks, totaling 2,800 miles, approximately the distance from Seattle to Orlando. 

I returned not only proud about what I’d overcome on the dusty adventure, but more confident about making it as a writer. I’d learned a particular attitude on this tire-patched and duct-taped trip. Overlanders, as they’re called, know how to create a path, even when it feels like you can barely trust the land beneath your wheels. 

In the weeks before the trip, I was haunted by the thought that throwing myself into the backroads of a foreign country with strangers with just a backpack was a terrible idea. If I were on the show Naked and Afraid, my Primitive Survival Rating would be about a 1.5. Two days before I left, I checked the online group one more time. A driver who’d arrived had posted about how damn cold it was. Last minute, I bought a sleeping bag rated for 20 degrees. In my tent that first night, my toes holding just below numb, I thanked my previous self for taking good care of me.

You can’t afford to mess up in the desert. Overlanders prepare as best they can, including first checking the weather. If we’re preparing for our writing lives, how do we do this? It’s keeping up with your community, learning from people who have been where you plan to go. 

If we’re planning to make a living as writers, I’d say it’s also looking for what futurists call signals of change — evidence that something will be different, and how it will be different. It’s the first emoji you see in The New Yorker, the first time you see a job post for an AI prompt writer, the first time you recognize something as written by an algorithm. These indicators are to futurists what plot points are to writers: the building blocks of a story.

The weather determines the gear you’ll need, and, as writers, our gear lives mostly in our minds. That’s why, on top of reading and writing, I try to learn something about the business, the tools, whatever gets me traction, at least a little bit every day. I’m upgrading my gear, turning myself into a more powerful vehicle to climb my wilder, more ambitious artistic mountains and keep myself fed and housed and insured along the way. 

How you prepare depends on your resources. One Baja XL driver brought a fancy rig with a $9,000 suspension, and another vroomed in driving a police-car-auction Crown Vic with zip ties holding the bumper together. Some had day-job budgets; others had mechanical knowledge gained over decades tinkering under hoods. Once you’ve prepared as best you can, make do with what you have. 

So often, I’m pouty or paralyzed because I couldn’t afford the fancy MFA or couldn’t pay my bills if I wrote as many hours a day as I’d like. Cheryl Strayed’s words slapped me hard when I read, “You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.”

You have an obligation. 

If your tools include a steady income, take writing classes. If you’re rich in community, arrange a workshop with writer friends. Every moment spent envying the writing life we could have had, if only — and I say this as someone who mentally swats at those moments like mosquitos — wastes the opportunity to get creative with what’s in front of us. 

The word scrappy can mean determined or it can mean made from scraps. My writing life is both. 

On the second day of the rally, a team pulled up next to a fellow off-roader and leaned out to greet him. 

“Hey, you’ve got a flat tire,” someone from inside the vehicle pointed out.

“Oh,” he said, “you do, too.”

No one was surprised. They expected the rocky desert to do what it does, and they brought spares. They planned to spend time with a knee in the dirt, wrenching off lug nuts. They brought gloves. 

Writers are not on life’s main highway. We have veered off where the view is spectacular but the ride is rough. The flat tires of rejections are part of the deal, along with writer’s block, crumpled-up starts, existential flails. 

In the software I made to organize my writing life, a graph tracks my publication attempts. The line for submissions rises high, hugged closely underneath by the one that tracks rejections. Acceptances form tiny bumps.

This is the fun we’ve chosen. It’s not fun like drinking beer and playing video games might be fun; we have to work to get that sense of satisfaction, trusting that the trail of flat tires behind us will make the summit all the sweeter. 

And we can’t be shy about how hard it really is, or how much harder it might get. 

Even the founder of the Baja XL, Andrew Szabo, who named his company The Institute for Unsafe Living Ltd., brings along a medic, prepared for the worst case scenario. One of the most well-respected drivers, Dave, has been known to bring a spare drive shaft, among other parts. It covers one of the worst-case scenarios.

I want to tell writers to be optimistic, but that would be as irresponsible as crossing your fingers and hoping no one rolls a Jeep off a cliffside. So I embrace the Stockdale Paradox. 

Admiral James Stockdale was the highest ranking officer in a POW camp for eight years. When asked afterward how he made it through, he said, “I had unwavering faith that I was going to make it in the end.”

When asked who didn’t, he said, “The optimists.”

The optimists were sure they were going to get out by Christmas, and then Christmas would come and go. Same for Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, for years. But how was Stockdale different? 

“I also never shied away from the brutal facts of our reality.”

And so the Stockdale Paradox instructs us to maintain unwavering faith that we will prevail — finish this novel, publish that chapbook, live the artist’s life — regardless of the difficulties; and, at the same time, it tells us to have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of our current reality.

The reality is, I don’t know what AI is going to do to my creative or freelance writing career. I don’t know what the future of books looks like. 

But I have a plan for the worst case. AI can’t coach writers, lead retreats, or build community like I love to. I can actually play the corporate game quite well, if it comes to that. I can cook. 

Looking the worst of it in the eye gives me a sense of control and calm. 

I didn’t land the pitches for the Baja XL piece I’d envisioned. I wrote it anyway, on Medium. I’ll be a traveler, and I’ll be a writer, but it looks like I’ll have to do it my own way. 

Riding with a crew that had teamed up in a string of half a dozen trucks, we came upon a few motorcyclists stuck with busted wheels. Everyone pulled over. We stood in a circle, offering advice, patches, a hand to brace the tire against the rim while the bond dried. We hung around for more than an hour, just helping and hanging out. No one got left behind.

Before I started my online writing group, A Very Important Meeting, and became a part of that community, I used to think that I, as an artist, had to be the singular flower in the vase. (And of course, it would be a humiliation to be anything less than the most award-winning flower.) But seeing everyone write together and afterward commiserate or celebrate helped me see myself as just one in a swath of wildflowers, all blooming on our own time. I was able to enjoy other people’s success and feel more supported in my own struggles. We can at least make each other laugh about it all, and offer to listen, towing each other out of the sand of self-doubt.

Ocean Vuong reportedly encouraged students to think of competitiveness among artists as a racetrack, something synthetic. Remove the man-made elements, the enclosure and the numbers, and all you have are horses running in a field. 

The camaraderie of the road is not only the joy, it’s the comfort, the ability to give when someone needs help, to ask for it when you do, trusting that someone will stop with you, make sure you don’t get left behind. 

I was riding with Andrew, the creator of the rally, to the hot springs one day. The road there, however, was not, indeed there. In the desert, the land moves. 

This was the refrain of the trip: 

“Is this a road?” 

“Are we on a road?” 

“Where’s the road?”

“Where’s the road?” is the essence of what writers are going through right now. We’ve thrown it into park, and we’re standing in front of our idling cars, hands shielding our eyes from the sun, staring at a pile of rocks, saying, “There used to be a road here.” 

I’m writing in the morning, doing client work, coaching writers, designing software, reading in snippets, reporting a bit, running retreats, teaching classes, sharing a one-bedroom in New York — is this a road?

One of my favorite quotes from Game of Thrones is: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Some are given the chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm.”

I can be guilty of clinging to the realm. I want my ’90s publishing budgets. There used to be a road there. 

We are tasked, then, with making new roads. Perhaps it’s taking a corporate job so you don’t have to think about money, waking up at 5 a.m. to write. Perhaps living cheaply in a tiny place or somewhere rural. Hell, it could be starting a side hustle as a wood soup ASMR influencer.

You might be flinging up sand and dirt, branches thwacking your windshield, saying to yourself, “I don’t think anyone’s come this way before. Is this a road?” 

Overlanders know: If you can make it a road, it’s a road. You make it one by driving it. 

At camp each night, Dave unhooked the yellow jerrycan — a color that’s supposed to signify that it contains diesel — from which instead he poured everyone margaritas. 

Along the road, we passed an SUV with a gigantic inflatable rubber ducky strapped to the top, smiled every time. 

When we saw an especially gorgeous view, we stopped to just breathe it in. 

Not everyone made it to the finish. Axles broke and teams disbanded. Sometimes all people had were the first few days. 

Not all of us will make it in writing, either. Amid my career in short form, there’s this novel I’ve spent about a decade trying to get right. I don’t know if I ever will, but I’m comforted by the times I’ve made myself cackle at my desk. I’m simply enjoying the view.

I know we writers are a very serious bunch, but as it turns out, having fun in your work has been shown to help you get more done and do it more creatively. Fun provides solace when you consider that our performance might only pay off in the moment it’s lived. 

This year the Baja XL was missing a driver. Dave’s friend and former teammate, Phil, had died of Covid. Dave and a few other drivers carried a memento mori coin, which some had made into a keychain. The front had a skull and an hourglass. The back said, “You could leave life right now.”

We have no idea how long our roads are. So whenever I’m stressing, which is only multiple times a day with a nightcap around 3 a.m., I try to remind myself to come back. Don’t worry so much about the destination. Celebrate the little wins along the way. Enjoy the company. Eat a taco. Make it a road trip. 

The most entertaining driver I rode with, Wilson, told me about how he had planned a trip to Baja outside of the rally with just one other friend. Five days before they were set to head down, the friend told him, “This is just so far out of my comfort zone that I’m just, I’m freaking out.”

His friend backed out and Wilson went alone, which he could do because he’d already been, had already pushed himself past the freak out, expanded what he knew he could handle. 

I was also freaked out about going to Baja, and now all I want to do is go again. I was scared to pursue a writing life, but having figured it out up until now gives me the confidence to continue making my path.

You may have heard the E.L. Doctorow quote, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Off-roading told me: You can only see the road or the rocks in your headlights now. You can only make a path with the tools and the friends you’ve brought along. But you’re going to make it that way, trusting yourself to do the best you can with what you’ve got, taking care of yourself and fellow writers on the path, and rerouting when you need to, to create your most important story — that of the writer’s life you’ll live. 

The post How 10 Days Off-Roading in Mexico Helped Me Navigate A Shifting Publishing Landscape appeared first on Electric Literature.

Eventually my own acceptance letter came, and though I had a relatively idyllic MFA experience, I found myself in the same situation two years later when I applied for post-graduate fellowships. This time I was rejected across the board and experienced a kind of professional déjà vu when one morning I opened an email announcing the winners of one fellowship I had applied to. There, written plainly, was the writer’s name. The following year, I applied to the same handful of fellowships, and the same thing occurred: a series of rejections and one morning an email announcing the writer had been awarded another fellowship. In subsequent years, the trend continued. I continued to write and apply for fellowships and residencies and scholarship programs to summer writers’ conferences, and very often when I received my rejection, I would scroll down and find the writer’s name among the list of awardees.

It wasn’t long before the writer announced he had signed with an agent and sold his first book. When the book was released, it was shortlisted for a national award. By then the idea that I was in competition with the writer seemed a bit preposterous—the trajectory of his career had catapulted so far beyond my own. And yet every time I read his name on some announcement or other, a variation of the same thought occurred to me.

I thought, “That was meant to be mine.”

I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve read in craft books, or heard writers proclaim in lectures or interviews or on social media, that writing is not a competition. It is a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with but one that can be difficult to integrate when, at times, this writing thing feels very much like a competition. When there are only so many slots in MFA or fellowship or residency programs, only so much available page space in publications.

I’ve written elsewhere about my experiences with professional jealousy and my belief that it is almost always a cover for disappointment. But there’s an important distinction, I think, between professional jealousy and competition. Julia Cameron elucidates this distinction in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity more clearly than anything else I’ve read on the subject of competition. She writes, “You pick up a magazine—or even your alumni news—and somebody, somebody you know, has gone further, faster, toward your dream. Instead of saying, ‘That proves it can be done,’ your fear will say, ‘He or she will succeed instead of me.’”

The driving narrative of professional jealousy is that if I had what another writer has, I wouldn’t feel the way I feel (i.e., disappointed). But professional jealousy doesn’t require me to believe that another writer’s success precludes my own. Professional jealousy doesn’t—but competition does. The distinction between the two is a belief in scarcity.

Scarcity mentality tells me there are only so many pieces of the proverbial pie and only the worthy get fed. It is a mentality that fuels the construct of competition, and when it comes to the profession of writing, it is likely the unfortunate byproduct of trying to create art in a capitalist society in which value is determined by limited opportunities for success. But knowing this doesn’t make the construct feel any less real—or any less difficult to navigate.

Eventually I was able to deconstruct the belief that I was in competition with the writer, but it took years, and looking back I can see that its deconstruction was largely precipitated by two things.

The first was that I began teaching mindfulness practice for an Internet startup.

The term mindfulness practice has become a kind of catchall phrase for a variety of concepts and modalities. The definition of mindfulness practice I personally subscribe to is simply the practice of cultivating awareness, and I believe this practice can be broken down into two key components: nonjudgmental observation and inquiry.

Nonjudgmental observation, or noticing, as my friend Molly—a licensed therapist, life coach, and mindfulness teacher—likes to call it, is the act of paying attention to my physical, emotional, and mental states in the present moment from a position of neutrality. It involves noticing my physical surroundings through the vehicle of my five senses; noticing any internal sensations present in my body, including how my emotions are registering physiologically; and noticing whatever thoughts are occupying my mind at the time. In other words, nonjudgmental observation is the act of observing what is actually happening.

For me—and for most human beings I know—there is what’s happening, and then there is the story I tell myself about what’s happening. It is the difference between “I did not get the fellowship and that writer did” and “I did not get the fellowship because that writer did.” The distinction here may seem subtle, but those are two profoundly different perspectives, and if nonjudgmental observation asks me to notice what’s happening in the present moment, the second component of mindfulness practice—inquiry—asks me to identify and interrogate the story I’m telling myself about what is happening.

In inquiry, I identify the story and ask myself questions like, “Is the story I’m telling myself about this situation true? Can I be certain that it’s true? What other stories might I tell about this same situation that might also be true?” The benefit of practicing inquiry in tandem with nonjudgmental observation is that together they help me bridge the gap between what is happening and the story I’m telling myself so that I can take whatever actions are most in alignment with my values, rather than acting out from a place of scarcity or fear.

I had been practicing this approach to mindfulness for nearly a decade, but it wasn’t until I started teaching it to other people that I began to understand that the mechanism driving the story of that writer and I as competitors was the mechanism that drives most of the stories we tell ourselves: the ego.

Like mindfulness practice, much has been written about the ego—by far more skilled and articulate mindfulness practitioners than myself—but in short, the ego is the part of the mind that engages in a continuous commentary on the world around us and the events of our lives. Unlike the part of the mind that is capable of neutrally observing, the egoic mind constantly judges and assesses and busies itself by replaying and recasting events of the past or projecting and rehearsing events of the future. Which is exactly what the ego was designed to do.

Neurobiologically, the egoic mind evolved to perform two functions: avoid pain and seek pleasure. However, the ego is relatively uninventive, because it only has one tactic by which it performs these two functions: it identifies a problem and then finds the solution. That’s it. That’s the only trick the ego has up its sleeve. But it performs this trick remarkably well, and it keeps us engaged in a kind of perpetual easter-egg hunt, rooting out problems (or creating problems where there are none) for the sole purpose of finding that problem’s solution—i.e., to avoid pain and increase pleasure. This was really helpful when we were all living in caves, but is perhaps less helpful when applying to creative writing fellowships or submitting short stories to contests.

But here’s the life-changing bit about the ego, and it is hands down the most radical and helpful piece of information I’ve ever conveyed as a mindfulness teacher: The ego has no investment in peace. The ego is not interested in freedom. It is not interested in serenity or sustained relief. What the egoic mind wants more than anything is to stay in control. Which is why, once it has found the perceived solution to the problem it has sought out, the ego quickly goes to work searching for a new problem to solve. It is a cycle that never ends.

Sometime during my third year as a mindfulness teacher, I read Eva Hagberg’s How to Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship, which contains a fantastic illustration of the relationship between the ego’s disinterest in relief and the construct of competition. In How to Be Loved, Hagberg tells a story about her arrival at UC Berkeley, where she was one of several graduate candidates vying for a limited number of slots in the school’s PhD program in architecture. When someone asks Hagberg if she’s finding her peers in the program helpful, the question surprises her. “I didn’t feel like I’d come to grad school to make friends,” she writes. “My cohorts were my competition.”

Hagberg goes on to explain: “Stepping into the architectural history graduate student workroom, I met my cohort, and looked to place myself on the ladder—smarter than the social historian over here; not as smart as the nineteenth-century-focused theorist over there. Right from the start, I was imbalanced, unequal, already separate, looking for people to tell me how great I was…I starved for the idea that I might know where I fit on the ladder, that I could be better. There had always been safety in being better, never safety in being equal.”

Ah, yes, I thought. There is never safety in being equal.

For the egoic mind there is never safety in being equal because equality presents no problem to solve, which is what makes competition an ideal construct for it. Competition keeps us in a constant state of assessing and comparing our worth in relation to others based on our attainment of what we perceive to be a finite resource: opportunity. Specifically, opportunities that are valuable (and therefore validating) precisely because they are finite.

We are either losing, or we are winning.

The former is the problem, the latter the solution.

The validation of our worth once again rests on scarcity.

This is why the ego thrives on competition.

The second thing that helped me deconstruct the story that the writer and I were competitors truly surprised me—mostly, I think, because the story’s deconstruction was facilitated via an unlikely source. Remember that book the writer wrote? The one that was shortlisted for a national award? I read it. And it was a beautiful book—a book I believed was doing important and necessary work.

It was also a book I had absolutely no desire to write.

And with that revelation, any delusion I had about being in competition with the writer lifted—and my god, was I relieved. Here was a book I was so grateful existed in the world, a book I believed was worthy of all the praise and attention it received, and yet given the chance, I would not have written that book. In fact, I don’t believe I could have written that book, if only because I had no interest in writing it. The writer’s style and aesthetic and thematic concerns were so wildly different from mine. How could we possibly be in competition? The notion suddenly struck me as absurd.

The myth of competition is the myth of meritocracy—the belief that recognition validates the best work as the best work—and the profession of writing is not immune to that myth. We’ve all heard the axiom that comparing works of art is like comparing apples to oranges, but it’s really like comparing apples to poodles to waterslides. All three are delightful in their own right but best suited to different purposes. It is tempting to believe that when I submit a short story to a literary contest or an application to a prestigious fellowship, whether or not my work is selected will be determined by its value compared to the rest of the applicant pool. That is, by whose work is the best. But that’s just a story. What an award or fellowship really affirms is how well my work aligns with the tastes and interests of the selection committee. It is not a determination of value, but of values.

The funny thing is, I already knew this—from my work as an editor.

For eight years, I edited fiction and nonfiction for a fairly niche but well-respected literary journal. Every year during our general submissions cycle, I read anywhere between seven hundred and twelve hundred submissions, and of those submissions I selected approximately a dozen for inclusion in our annual print issue. Over the years I rejected a lot of fantastic work, including work I very much wanted to publish. But not once during my tenure as an editor was I ever forced to choose the better of two pieces for publication. Every time I rejected a story or essay, I did so because it didn’t fit within the constellation of a given issue. The decision to accept or reject was never about worth; it was always about fit. And in that way, no two writers were ever truly in competition with each other for the same creative real estate.

When I read the writer’s book, I realized the same was true for him and me.

We were not competitors. We had never been.

Today when I find myself tempted to buy into the construct of writerly competition, there are two reminders I’ve found useful in recalibrating my mindset. Used together, these reminders invite me to return to the two components of mindfulness practice. The first reminder is a mantra my friend Molly offered me some years ago when I was struggling in a romantic partnership. She said, “Whatever comes, let it come. Whatever goes, let it go. What is meant for you is always meant for you.”

What I love about this particular mantra is its practicality. First, it subverts my competitive thinking by asking me to step outside the framework of the scarcity mentality in which artistic achievement is a zero-sum game. But beyond that, by working backward from this mantra, I can use it as a tool for engaging nonjudgmental observation. That process looks something like this: If I am not awarded a creative opportunity, whatever that creative opportunity may be, it isn’t because someone else has won what I’ve lost. It’s because the opportunity was not meant for me.

How do I know it wasn’t meant for me?

Because I didn’t get it.

The belief that what is meant for me is always meant for me is not asking me to surrender to some cosmic higher power that’s busy doling out and withholding treats, but rather to surrender to the higher power I believe we all must ultimately surrender to: reality. It asks me to notice what is actually happening.

The second reminder comes from one of my favorite modalities of secular mindfulness practice, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living, ACT practitioner Russ Harris advocates for a nuanced approach to inquiry. Instead of asking ourselves if the story we’re telling ourselves is true, Harris suggests we ask ourselves a different question: Is this story helpful? He writes, “You can waste a lot of time trying to decide whether your thoughts are actually true…again and again your mind will try to suck you into that debate. But although at times this is important, most of the time it is irrelevant and wastes a lot of energy. The more useful approach is to ask, ‘Is this thought helpful? Does it help me take action to create the life I want?’”

When I tell myself the story that I am competing with another writer, and I believe that story, I begin to doubt the value of my own work. And it is a short distance from doubting the value of my work to doubting the value of myself. Like Eva Hagberg, I begin jockeying for my place on the ladder of importance. My ego vacillates between asserting my worth (“I’m just as good as he is!”) and questioning it (“I’m just as good as he is, right?”). But ultimately that debate doesn’t serve me or my work, and it certainly doesn’t serve other writers or the literary community at large. Simply put, the construct of competition isn’t a particularly helpful one.

Now, it is important to acknowledge that the application of these tools to deconstruct stories of competition does not take place within a social or cultural vacuum. The writing and publishing industry, like any industry, has always privileged certain stories and certain storytellers to the diminishment of others. There are times when creative opportunities are not “meant for us” because systems of oppression and exclusion like racism, misogyny, heterosexism, queer- and transphobia, and ableism have predetermined that they are not meant for us. That’s not a story—that’s reality.

For me the entire point of incorporating mindfulness practice into my writing life and reframing constructs like competition is that the process encourages me to live in reality so that I can align myself with my values and take constructive action in their direction in order to stay within my integrity. A necessary part of that process—especially for individuals who belong to majority cultures—is acknowledging that systems of inequity are very much at play in the literary community. As writers, editors, publishers, and consumers of literature, we must ask ourselves if we truly value diversity and inclusive engagement. If we do—and I hope we do—it is imperative to consider how we are or are not putting those values into practice, and if we aren’t, we must ask ourselves why not and take action toward a more just version of literary stewardship.

In his essay “The Autobiography of My Novel,” Alexander Chee argues that “writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about.” The same could be said about the writing life. When I deconstruct the construct of competition and return my attention to what I truly care about, which is the work, rather than the success and validation of that work, or how that success measures up to the success of my peers, I experience a shift. It is a shift away from the problem-finding-and-solving machinations of the ego and toward the present moment—the only place from which the work can be done.

“What is Meant for You is Always Meant for You: A Mindful Approach to Writerly Competition” was first published by Poets & Writers Magazine (October/September 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Poets and Writers, Inc., 90 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004. www.pw.org.

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