Hi you,

(Let’s take a moment to appreciate the word bushwhack. Man, that’s a good word, and it’s just fun to say. BUSH-whack!)

Who starts an email with a parenthetical aside? Apparently, I do! The writing police will never catch me!

I’m in Venice.

Venice is my second favorite city in the world, right after Wellington. And I was just sitting at a cafe, drinking a cappuccino, writing about paths and maps.

I first came to Venice in 1994. That was two years before Mapquest came out and a good ten years before I was the very last of my friends to get a cell phone.

My sister and I had only a ragged Rick Steves book and the map from the train station. I have no idea how we found our pensione that night, but I do remember it was difficult to do. (I must have booked it by using the phone? Horrors.)

I’ve always delighted in maps, in looking down at them, turning them around, holding them up to the light as if that will help (it doesn’t), and then finally, cheerfully giving up and asking someone for directions. I think it was the first thing I ever learned in Italian: Dove siamo? “Where are we?” I’d hand over my map, and the Venetian local would take it, looking down and up and hold the map up to the light. Then they would shrug (what use did they have for maps? They lived there!), and then they’d point forward. “Dritto, sempre dritto.” Straight on, keep going straight. (Which is hilarious in crooked little Venice, but it always works.)

Now, of course, no one has a paper map—everyone’s heads are down, staring at their phones, trying to get to St. Mark’s in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

That’s no fun at all. Venice isn’t quick or efficient. The whole point of Venice is being lost, and found, and lost again. Sure, there is a direct way to get to St. Mark’s, and it’s completely miserable, chock full of people marching shoulder to shoulder past windows full of 3D-printed purple gondolas and shitty T-shirts covered in AI art.

A direct path is available if you want it. But it won’t be fun, and it won’t bring joy.

That made me think about writing books, of course.

Can you buy a map that will tell you how to write a book? Of course you can. Your local bookstore has tons of ‘em.

The hard part is the writing. And the most necessary part is creating your own path, in finding your own way.

In Venice, I have dozens of secret ways to wind through the labyrinthine streets. They’re mine, laced with my memories. Last night, as I wandered, I kept catching glimpses of my younger self just disappearing around the next corner, creating that path. Keep going, I whispered to her. You’re doing great. Sempre dritto, keep writing.

Back then, I was still searching for the right method of writing, totally convinced that my own way would be flawed and inefficient.

What I learned was that all methods of writing are flawed and inefficient (ha!) but the only methods that would ever help me would have to be mine, ones that I developed for myself. I had to learn what tools I needed to forge the path, then I had to forge the tools themselves to fit my hand.

Only then could I start on the great bushwhack.

On hard days, I like to remind myself that every good book ever written was first an unnavigable wilderness. It had no path. The plants grew high and the boulders loomed above, blocking the light and the way.

Every book’s path needs to be made by hand, and only the writer can figure out how to do it. No already bushwhacked path helps a writer who’s starting a new book. A map of Orbital won’t help me find my way through my new book. A map of Mrs. Dalloway won’t tell me how to make the path clear and beautiful for my reader.

And every path I've ever forged through a book, I've forged with other writers beside me. Though I’m going it alone on the page, the community keeps me company at night in the firelight as we spin our tall tales. (And as we whine. We all need writing friends to whine with.)

If you want company for your audacious bushwhack, I’ve just opened my next session of 90 Days to Done and 90 Day Revision.

It’s what I do best: helping you become a real, working writer.

All the details are here:

90 Days to Done (for drafting)
and
90 Day Revision (for revising).

If this isn’t the time for you to join us, do please find your own community of bushwhackers. The wilderness won’t care if you get lost, but your people always will.

Sempre dritto!

love,

Rachael

Website | Ink Village | Instagram | Podcast | Patreon

PS - Bush-whack!!

PPS - Writing in the wild this morning:

PPPS - 100% human made, with the inevitable typos to prove it!