Hi Friends.
After telling myself for years I’ll plan a solo writing retreat, I wormed my way into one quickly this month. It was spring break, and I sent my family to Florida, stayed home as the dog walker and writer and solo jigsaw-puzzle doer. It was, as expected, a productive week. Technically 6 days, but pretty much 5 actual working ones. Of course while I worked all I could think about was how slowly I was doing so but then, when I pulled back and looked at my trusty tracker, and I saw that no, I was working at literally 3-4x the pace I normally would. This is what entire days mean to someone who cannot claim her entire days.
There’s a necessary pulling away in order to enact this aggressiveness. I barely checked my email, responded to texts, saw anyone at all. I’d come off of a highly social few weeks, including hosting Passover, and seeing other family, and unexpected parties and meetups —and while I enjoyed these things, it is undeniable how much they drain me, both as someone who lives at both ends of the introvert/extrovert spectrum and as a person who is still adjusting to socializing in the waning hours (or at least the collective wishful thinking of them as such) of the pandemic.
I hunger for both of these things, to be away from it all, and to be deeply in the mix of it. In this case, being away from the lives of others—the schedules and needs of my family—is the only way I can really attack my work. I’ve come to accept the way these moments swing and work together. I do write, more or less, daily during the work week. But there is an acceleration of a writing retreat that is unparalleled, necessary. It won’t be smooth, going in or going out; there is anxiety on one end and usually depression on the other. I might be more productive but less rested (I kept staying up till after midnight, feeling like a kid who realizes they can do what they want, but also it was to do a puzzle, so it was pretty old lady) and that is just how it is. I’ve found myself looking, over the past year or so, for a word to replace balance, which is never how life is even at its best. In fact, to be its fullest, sometimes it feels wildly unbalanced. The highs are high, and the lows are low, and maybe it’s just in the movement of our own pendulums that we find what we need, day over day.
My brain, this week post the retreat, has been so tired. I keep thinking of an interview I heard with someone who wrote a book on Method Acting, and how they said all those actors experience their roles as if they are happening to them, and yet they’re not, but still, the body is, as we know, keeping the score1. Not to the same extent as an actor, but there is an emotional exhaustion to writing, especially when deep into a book-length draft where you must step over and over again into highly tense emotional landscapes. That I can do this, and like to do this, play all the roles: all the actors, plus the narrator, plus the set dresser, and the director—is what makes me well suited to writing, that great imagining. It is also exhausting, putting on a one-person show, and oddly physical, despite that most of this happens while sitting in a chair.
I tend to make rules—guardrails, I sometimes call them—when I know I want to focus deeply. Here are some of mine, which came out in the second person (the voice wants to be what the voice wants to be), and in no particular order, and many with 20/20 hindsight.
To retreat/attack one must:
Decompress. One evening, starting early, of binge watching old TV. It’s like a palate cleanser between your regular life and this temporary one. After that you are pretty much too tired to watch much of anything.
Put your phone in a drawer, on DND
Extend the normal hours of one’s DND, which was set to your kids’ schedules
Place one strategic grocery order. Things that could, technically be meals: prosciutto and potato chips, supermarket sushi. Things no one else eats: papaya, the salt-cured olives, the very expensive crackers. Things you don’t want to share: ice cream bars, one round of good cheese, kombucha (which, now, everyone in your family likes, what a bad idea introducing them to it)
Cook two meals, eating the leftovers over and over again
Forgo a weekly schedule, any schedule at all, really. Relatedly, attempt to turn off the clock on your desktop. You want to forget time exists. Realize you’re wasting time trying to do this, which you could use to write.
Forget your house exists. Don’t clean it, don’t notice it needs to be cleaned. Laugh, days later, about how you really thought, before the retreat started, you’d reorganize kitchen drawers. Housework is for suckers.
Make a friend out of a ball of blue tack. Literally, like make the blue tack a head with a face on it when you are in between thoughts, and place it on your desk in front of you. You don’t have time to talk to your real friends. Its expression is encouraging. Definitely feel as though you’re losing your mind.
Eat dinner at your desk, or on the couch, where you collapse after working till your eyes hurt and your stomach growls
Ignore your dog, who hates your new hours, and who believes you have lost the rest of your family, you big dum dum
Listen to playlists you’ve made for your book, and only these playlists till you realize the playlists are quite intense, like your book, so stop doing that
Keep going
Keep going
Keep going
Forget about relaxation, really. The one bath you take makes you think you could be writing.
Spend so much time with your characters you talk to them, as them, more than you talk to anyone else over 6 days
On breaks, jigsaw puzzle, and leave your friend (who maybe doesn’t care about puzzles) extensive voice notes about how there are only four acceptable puzzle brands2
Reading, Thinking, Feeling
It’s spring, and there are pink trees everywhere, mostly cherry trees and magnolias. I found the light, the growth, overwhelming. Now I like the way the streets are littered with pink petals, but it took me a few cloudy days to accept this new normal.
I’ve accepted that fiction is difficult for me lately, and so have been leaning hard into nonfiction, and have become an audio book girl for this, which is great. Two recent listens that I loved: Julie Philips The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, which is about mothering and art making, and is the ultimate both/and book and simply brilliant (and now I want to buy it and re-read it). While I puzzled, I listened to Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble, which I rather enjoyed as a whole but if you went to Oberlin there’s a chapter on it, set 20 years before I was there, that is hysterically spot on, and probably still applicable 20 years after I left it.
I’m re-reading Kayla Rae Whitaker’s THE ANIMATORS, which is one of my favorite novels ever, about friendship and art partnership and storytelling. Whitaker’s skill with gesture and plot is unparalleled. I’ve never recommended this book to someone who hasn’t loved it. Truly!
Loved this Deborah Levy profile. At nearly 45 myself, it’s always reassuring to remember that artists only deepen in our work as we age. Promptly pre-ordered her book. Eat up everything she writes.
Where to Find Me
Classes update! In light of Catapult closing, I’ve set up my own shop. Classes are listed here and also will be announced in this classes-specific newsletter if you’re interested in getting those first. It is a lot of work to set them up and market them and whatnot. Infrastructure, whew. I’ve also opened up to coaching and accountability groups, application here. I’m also open for one-on-one coaching and manuscript consults. Please spread the word; it’s been immeasurably harder to enroll anything given my mailing list is a solid 1/300th of Catapult’s.
Running my one-person show aka working on my novel till this draft is done (soon? soon, I think!), and likely snacking on salt-cured olives on breaks
Talk Soon,
Danielle
Kieran Culkin says as much in this interview post episode 3 and if you’re not caught up by now I cannot help you what are you even doing on the internet? There is also wild stuff about the shots in here.
Pomegranate (the only good art puzzles; any NY Puzzle puzzle has infuriating pieces, you’ve been warned), White Mountain (easy to work on, a bit heavy on the Americana and whiteness in that version of it), Ravensburger (pieces are almost *too* nice at times), Springbok (technicolor, sometimes glitter if you’re real lucky, and come with an extra poster of the image)