Writing swells and lulls
From 2022. (The New Thing became Another Thing which became 'The Second Chance Book Club'.)
Everything is a little bit inbetween.
I’m in a lull. I’ve returned the final corrections of FOUND IN A BOOKSHOP to my publisher, and I’ve sent off a proposal and first 10,00 words of my (maybe) new book to my agent, to see if it’s got legs.
Things are going to start happening, soon: cover designs, press requests, getting events in the diary. And feedback from my agent, which will mean either more writing on the New Thing, or thinking about Another Thing.
It’s not quite accurate to say that I’m waiting. There are my much-loved writing-adjacent activities going on. Preparing the upcoming retreat; mentoring; manuscript assessments; and reading and researching the New Thing (because though I’m waiting for confirmation, my instinct is that there’s something in it).
So, not precisely waiting. What I'm doing is closer to lulling.
(As opposed to lolling, which Harris is an expert in.)
It’s taken me a long time to realise that this is okay. For years I thought I needed to write every day.* If I had a week of low energy when I mostly read and walked and wondered, I also lay awake at night fretting about whether I was ever going to write another word. If I felt a bit lousy I Pressed On, because apparently I thought the creativity gods enjoyed watching someone with a headache and a temperature dredge up 500 feverish words that they would delete the next day.
Now I am much more relaxed about the way that there are - and will always be - lulls and swells in my creative life. Some of them are external: the rhythms of publishing, the simple fact of the time it takes to think and draft and write and polish a novel into existence. And some of them are internal. Motivation; imagination; energy; concentration; headspace.. all of these things vary.
I’ve learned not to get anxious about lulls and swells, though it has taken a while for me to get to get here. Whichever one I’m in, I know it won’t last. Everything gets there in the end. So whatever you're doing, whether you are lulling or swelling, take a breath, do what you can do today, and trust that you'll get where you're going.
*For a while, I probably did need to write every day: I had to cure myself of the idea that there needed to be a specific time and headspace in which writing was possible.