how short bursts of writing build to something more

or, writing for people who can’t go write in an isolated castle

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In the past year, I filled four notebooks with short bursts of writing.

Some days, the muse is yelling in my face but I’m simply not able to write anything other than emails or an SOS text to a friend.  Is this true for you, too? 

If you’re not a writer, substitute whatever the thing is that you love instead of writing—the thing you need in order to feel like yourself—that you would love to do every day, even just a little: dancing, lounging, cooking, running, reading, guitar, etc.  

If you’re like me, you might fantasize about going off to write in an isolated castle (note: there is an actual writing residency in a castle in Scotland that one day, I will go to). But the reality of your life, like mine, is probably far from that castle.

I’ve been teaching writing for 16 years, and in that time, I’ve always struggled to write during the hustle of the academic year. I’m continually learning and teaching about principles of strong writing, but I’m often not doing the thing itself. It feels painful emotionally, intellectually, and even sometimes, physically. I’m like Tantalus doomed to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree—what I long for ever-present but always eluding my grasp. 

When I meet other writer-teachers, I always ask them: Do you write during the school year? How do you do it? Nancy Reddy’s Write More newsletter has been a necessary voice for me over the last few years, reminding me that others share this struggle from many different angles. I’ve gleaned countless creative ways to move forward from whatever seemingly doomed position I find myself in. But I still couldn’t find a way to write consistently.

Then I realized that perhaps the way forward was to write in short bursts. We often want long periods to do the things we love, but there is still a lot of good in doing something you love for even a short time.

I realized that if I wrote every prompt I gave to my students, I could write most days. I factored in time in class with my high school students and my adult poets through the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops to attempt every prompt. I always wrote by hand, which was critical in order to avoid the many-headed hydra of email and to dos waiting in my laptop. I used a timer and would sometimes extend the time if one of my students, or me, was really in a groove with something. But usually, these prompts ranged between 5-10 minutes. Often, I would write a few lines or a phrase I liked in a bunch of free association language. Sometimes, just a list of frustrations or a mind dump. Sometimes, I wrote a full rough draft of a poem or start of an essay. Then, the class or workshop would move on and the draft would live in my notebook, waiting until the day when I could open the notebook and start the process of discovering what I’d actually written. 

super rough first draft of a poem I’m still working on called “Laugh Catalog” inspired by Ross Gay’s Book of Delights

When I got into a groove with this, what I loved about it most was that it connected me again to the sense that writing is a process first, rather than a product. For years, I’d embodied the Dorothy Parker quotation, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Writing in short bursts forced me to silence my stultifying, perfectionist inner critic and just frigging write some words on a page. And, in turn, it made me fall in love with writing again—that breathing, messy, process that you do because you love the feeling of using words, rather than working only to have the draft to show off and say, I did that (although that feels really good, too, in its own way).

And so last school year shaped itself into a pattern of writing in short bursts every day: morning-pages style at the kitchen table before my kids woke up (a habit I started during the pandemic out of fervent necessity for even 20 minutes to myself in amorphous working-parenting days), and, during classes and workshops, writing “real” prompts that I had created. By June, I had filled four notebooks.

For the last few years, my poetry and nonfiction manuscripts languished and started to feel like calcified relics on a shelf in my office. To be honest, I’m still finding my way back slowly into my larger projects, but now they feel like living things again since they’ve been re-vivified by actual new lines and drafts.

What worked was accepting the limitations of my current life and deciding that I was going to start anyway. To just start from where I was and write something. Even if I didn’t feel like I had anything smart to say. Even if it didn’t become a real draft. And, eventually it did build up to something. If I can keep with it, who knows what it will become? 

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Short-Burst Writing Process in a nutshell 

1. Think about your days right now (maybe just look at this week at first) and identify a structured moment that already occurs in your life in which you can build in a short burst of writing time (or whatever that other thing is that you really need). If writing, this could work with a bus or train ride, while drinking your coffee, in the pickup line for your kids, in stolen moments in the bathroom, or even drafting audio style while driving or walking. (Note: I resist the optimization of our every waking moment to be used for productivity. But I’ve found that this process of finding a short burst of time for what brings you joy can be transformative, especially as it accrues over time).

2. Write down your goal somewhere for yourself AND tell someone about it, so that you have an accountability partner. For me, this was my husband, Nico (also a writer), to whom I would say, “I wrote today” and he’d say “awesome” as we were shuffling our beloved, yelling children out the door to soccer practice. 

3. Just do it. As you go, celebrate the doing of it rather than the product. Leave little breadcrumb trails of sticky notes with notes about ideas or questions or potential for particular pieces. Trust that you will come back to it later and dig into the rest of the process. Reward yourself somehow for your progress. I had a habit of tracking my writing in a list in the back of my notebook because it gave me a little dopamine hit of “hey, I wrote for 10 minutes in an otherwise intense day.” You might not be as compulsive as me, but what would be a compelling pat on the back to keep you going? Try it. 

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If you’d like to read more about the process I followed after this, once I started to make sense of my pile of drafts, you can read more this coming week (on Wednesday, I believe) at Write More, where I wrote about it for Nancy’s newest series, “tending.” Until then, check out the other “tending” pieces, interviews and essays on craft and process, which are thought-provoking and offer strategies I’ve tried and loved.