The dry seasons of creativity: planning for and recovering from
News
At the end of June and the beginning of July, I traveled to Houston, Texas, to visit my grandmother who has received a terminal diagnosis. As a result, I missed sending out my June newsletter, and everything has been a bit crazy! Your prayers are greatly appreciated for my grandmother Jeri's happy and peaceful death.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, such as it is...
Catholic Writers Retreat
I'm excited to be working with the Guild to help pull off the Catholic Writers Retreat in October. Due to the pandemic and a few other factors, it's been a while since we had one — but I'm looking forward to several days of peace, quiet, prayer, and writing. You should come join us! (More here)
Meet Father Stephen
My second children's book, Meet Father Stephen, is officially contracted! Like going back to college sophomore year, it's not a brand-new experience any more, but it's still exciting. (And mildly intimidating.) Many thanks to Kate Camden, our new OSV Kids editor, for shepherding my proposal.
Recent articles
Our Sunday Visitor: I put a whole lot of work over the past year into developing a new resource for the 40 Hours devotion, and also wrote an article about how to bring this ancient and beautiful practice to your parish. Read more
CatholicMom: Following up on May's gardening-themed newsletter, I wrote an article that includes a selfie with a chainsaw. What more do you need? Read more
Catholic Writers Guild: Continuing my series "Your Author Toolkit," I worked up a brief explanation of endorsements (a.k.a. blurbs) that should capture most FAQ on the topic. Read more
Food for Thought
We all deal with dry seasons — those times when creativity is lost to us, like a misplaced screwdriver or a distant friend. As writers, especially writers with deadlines and commitments, dry seasons can be downright scary. Without a method of dealing with them, we can begin to fear that we're irrevocably cut off from our art.
As soon as I got the news about Grandma, I knew I'd be entering a dry season. I've learned that the way my brain and body work is that if I'm exhausted or busy, anything creative has to be deprioritized so that I can focus on the basic essentials. It's not just a time thing; it's also the fact that my storytelling relies on a certain amount of emotional bandwidth. If my all-too-finite emotional bandwidth is needed for other purposes, creative writing has to go on the back burner.
Thankfully, this time I had fair warning, so I executed a certain process I've developed that allows me to not panic when I suddenly can't write.
Step One: Remind myself that this is only a season of delay. I'm a do-it-all-at-once person, and speed-bumps often cause my projects to fade away into the void. So my first to-do is always to remember that yes, this project is important to me, and I absolutely will get back to it when I can. A dry season isn't the end.
Step Two: Think about the project. Yes, this sounds silly. But sometimes we feel like we might as well not think about a thing unless we actually have time to work on it. I'm trying to reframe this for myself, and allow my mind to just wander through my stories while I'm on an airplane, taking a shower, or falling asleep. I find this helps me stay connected with my ideas, even if all I'm doing is returning to what I've already written.
Step Three: Write scraps of things here and there, even if they aren't at all connected to my main projects. I wrote a few paragraphs the other week reflecting on being at my grandmother's bedside. I also wrote a brief introduction to the Rosary for my cousin, which was a joy. These pieces don't advance any writing goals, but they allow me to be a little creative even in the midst of a dry season. Again, it's breaking out of that mental block of "I have to be sitting down with my novel in front of me and several hours to write otherwise it Isn't Enough."
Step Four: Recover before pushing forward. I've been trying to listen to my body and get as much rest as I can, and at the same time get a handle on the essentials of life and my day job. It was better to push off trying to write until I knew I had the bandwidth.
And, thankfully, I'm back to novel-writing, after a kick in the pants from my fellow Chrism editors. I've got about 15,000 words to write in the next few weeks, so it's time for hard work!
Good Books
I rarely pre-order a book, but I couldn't pass up the bonus material from pre-ordering Jessica Brody's Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel. Brody has taken the "save the cat" method from screenwriting and applied it to novel-writing with great success. I'm learning a lot, both from the book and the pre-order freebies!
All opinions are my own, and are not endorsed by Our Sunday Visitor, Chrism Press, the Order of Preachers, the Catholic Writers Guild, or NaNoWriMo.