A round-up of your warm-ups
Thank you to everyone who commented or sent me notes on your writing warm-ups! No one does it exactly the same way, and the diversity of approaches was really delightful and inspiring. I’ll start with two that are almost the exact opposites, both equally aspirational to me.
Elizabeth used the analogy of musical scales to explain her outlining process:
I’m a committed outliner, which maybe has some parallels with scales. Instead of jumping into the real melody of the story, I have to warm up my brain with structure and organization. You could even say that the super broad outline I start with (“1. intro! 2. history! 3. new stuff!”) is like a slow, mindless, C-major scale, and as I add details and quotes it's like progressing to faster scales in harder keys. And eventually it doesn’t feel like such a leap to start making the damn music.
This is the most attractive outlining has ever looked to me, and I truly wish my brain worked like this. (More on my conflicted relationship to outlining in a future issue, probably.)
On the other side of the warm-up spectrum, we have Kate, who throws open a door to the subconscious and waits for something to walk through:
I start by either typing the alphabet and letting the stream of consciousness flow from there, or I type “cats cats cats cats cats” until something else happens. This is interesting mostly because I am really, really not a cat person. When my partner is stuck, he types the most morbid words he can think of. Today he got distracted partway through writing something on his to-do list and filled it in: “Working on…dying.” Aren’t we all.
As someone with this “I <3 Aging and Dying” sticker prominently displayed in my office, I can definitely relate. I also like how Kate’s approach engages the physical act of typing while simultaneously body slamming to the ground the existential terror of the blank page. A page full of cats is not a page to be feared.
While Kate focuses on the act of typing, we also have some warm-ups that depend on writing by hand. Jane does the famed handwritten “morning pages” practice from The Artist’s Way:
I started doing morning pages (usually just 2-3) with coffee before I start work and it does double duty: I clear my head of the random detritus floating around and also warm up those writing muscles. Like, if I write a nice sentence I am pleasantly surprised and feel more confident about the other writing I’ll have to do.
The journal is handwriting—I think that’s key! I’m a lot less precious about writing beautiful words when I know I don’t have the ability to go back and delete. (Marking something out is so much uglier than just moving on!) I journal either until I’ve gotten through the big things on my mind or until I’ve finished a cup of coffee, and it’s only after the journaling phase that I allow myself to move to the next phase of my morning: eating breakfast and checking my phone. I must complete Wordle and the pangram in Spelling Bee; I am allowed to check my texts and read the news, but not allowed to open my email. This whole routine takes probably an hour? And then I’m finally warmed up to work, which I only ever do on a computer.
As a fellow Spelling Bee-over-breakfast person and pangram junkie, I can relate! (Though I usually don’t get the pangram until my second try in the afternoon—very impressive Jane!)
Michael also relies on writing by hand to get started, coupled with a change of scenery:
When I’m in this mode I find that it’s easier for me to “warm up” to writing by: 1. Physically changing locations to somewhere that isn’t my normal workspace; 2. Taking out a physical notebook and paper; 3. Outlining on the physical notebook and paper. That normally loosens me up enough to get the juices flowing, then I can go straight back to the desk and write a first draft (often without even looking at the “outline” I had drafted).
Lately I’ve been trying to think of writing as an embodied practice, not just something my brain does while the rest of me is uncomfortably hunched over a keyboard. Where and how you do it matter, but they don’t have to be the same all the time. Handwriting also seems particularly good at loosening the judgmental death grip we can develop about the quality of our work. In a world where final drafts are typed, the handwritten draft is necessarily and automatically unfinished, which creates an emotional buffer against its inevitable imperfections.
Reducing anxiety is at the heart of China’s warm-up:
My equivalent of scales is trying to screen out any idea of the “whole” chapter and just write out a fragment. A concept a vignette, a paragraph…but basically the rule is not to be anxious about where or how it fits.
This is probably the closest to what I do, though I haven’t thought of it explicitly as a warm-up before. Start anywhere and write anything, without worrying about a larger whole. If I’m writing about a scientific study, this can be a couple sentences where I explain the main finding, or the design of the experiment. Something kind of mechanical that then flows backwards and forwards into other sections of the piece. I also like how China’s fragment idea opens the possibility of writing the thing you’re most excited about first, without any need to wait until you know if/how it will fit. Counting on excitement to come through for you every day isn’t really possible, but it’s important to leave yourself the space to grab it when it’s there.
When I’m really on a roll, I sometimes use this fragment approach to end the day, too. Just write a single sentence as a breadcrumb I can use to get back to the path the next day. Don does something similar:
I leave notes for myself the day before so they are the first thing I read when I start the next day. It is an invaluable exercise and gets the day going so much better than anything else I’ve tried. And the notes are not good writing so I look forward to writing them—like it’s a message for the “tomorrow me.”
Agustín points out this is similar to some advice from Ed Yong:
Park downhill at the end of the day, leaving a sentence or paragraph or piece unfinished so you don’t wake to an empty screen.
Deciding what you’re going to write is a huge amount of work in and of itself, so if you can wake up with that part already done, it’s much easier to ease back into the writing itself. To continue with the parking downhill image, all you have to do is get yourself to neutral and you’re already rolling. I feel like I remember and forget this constantly—and then when I remember, I beat myself up for wasting the time I spent forgetting. But to share a piece of writing wisdom from someone who doesn’t read this newsletter (as far as I know), wandering and returning isn’t a failure—it’s the point. Novelist and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki said in an interview with Ezra Klein, talking about the similarities between writing and meditation:
When we sit to meditate, our minds are very distractible and they get caught on thoughts and they start to drift away. And so at that point, the instruction usually is to return to the body, return to the breath.
And so this practice of return is something, I think, that’s very useful for writers to cultivate, because that’s exactly what we do on the page. We’re writing something and very often a self-critical thought will come in and suddenly we’re distracted. And then the instruction there is to sort of relax, relax the body, relax the mind, and just return.
The more we can accept that indeed the practice is just simply returning, as long as you continue to return, you’re doing the work. It sort of takes some of the pressure off. And it also gives you the resilience to continue to practice. I wish that I had been taught some of this when I was college age because I think I would have started writing a lot sooner.
Me too, Ruth. Me too.
Comments are on again! I’ve been trained to be terrified of comments sections, but if all of you keep making it so fun and chill I’ll turn them on more often.