#4: writing as a place
a small collection of flash fiction resources, and file cleanup as care for your writing
Hi there! 🍀 I’m Catherine. You’re reading Process Notes, where I share notes about the writing process—a combination of making, reading, and thinking. If that’s not your cup of tea right now, you can scroll down to the bottom and click “unsubscribe.”
Hi friends and readers,
I hope you’re enjoying your Saturday, wherever you are! I’m getting ready to watch the Olympics nonstop for the next two weeks and savor the limpid weeks of August — letting the rest of the summer stretch long and lazy before the frenzy of fall.
Since my last note:
I revised a flash fiction piece
I cleaned up my writing files, and reflected on how I want to engage with my novel
🎨 Making
I’ve been pushing myself to write more flash fiction and poetry this year, as a counterbalance to all the time I spend immersed in the world of my novel. It’s been a good learning experience. Flash marries extreme constraint (100, 500, 1000 words) with extreme freedom (in those 100 words, you can do pretty much whatever you like). In this changed context, I can’t rely on the usual writer’s “moves” that I’m leaning on in my novel. I have to create new ones, and it takes a lot of iterating! This week I completed a second draft of a flash piece that, for only being 400 words, has taken me weeks to get right.
A few flash resources I’ve been finding helpful:
“Smash Your Flash” newsletter course, by Jo Gatford for Chill Subs/Forever Workshop
“The Art of Flash Fiction” newsletter by Kathy Fish
The Art of Brevity by Grant Faulkner
Reading the archives of Smokelong Quarterly
💭 Thinking
I also spent some time last week cleaning up the Scrivener file that contains my novel draft. Scrivener is a word processor designed for writers. Rather than keeping your novel in one, linear document (like in Word), the Scrivener interface is a main “binder” that holds dozens of smaller sub-files, which have their own title, synopsis, metadata, and so on, and which can be rearranged easily. These files had gotten out of hand. “File cleanup” may sound like drudgery, but I enjoyed it, much in the same way that I can enjoy tidying up the house on a Sunday morning. I put good music on in the background. I dusted off old notes. I rearranged files that had slipped into clutter after weeks of writing. The act of making my space nice—a nice place for me to write and think—was itself a form of pleasure.
The writing world can be tyrannically focused on output. How much have you published? How many words did you write today? How many chapters do you have completed? The idea of my novel not as a thing whose progress to completion I measure, but as a place I go to explore and create, intrigued me.
How would I engage with my novel differently if I thought of it like a place that I steward and care for? I came up with a few notes:
I take time to clean up my messes, organize my files, label things with metadata, because it’s a form of showing attention and care towards this space.
I approach my writing gently, with care and intention, assembling my tools and ingredients, ready for the day ahead.
I treat the place gently. I respect my ideas. I tend to the novel like a garden or a baking project, understanding that the act of showing up to the novel and tending to the novel is what will be transformative (vs. the specific output/commodity that is produced).
I’m thoughtful about who I bring into this place (e.g., who I ask for feedback) because I understand it is also a fragile ecosystem (the ecosystem that allows me to keep staying here without getting scared off by my own doubts).
I’m still refining this and want to put it into a more solid form, but think it may be a helpful reframe for me—for the novel but also any kind of artistic practice.
Take care, and thanks for being here!
Catherine