Letter from a reader: Process
Welcome to a Thursday edition of Mommy’s El Camino.
After a recent post where I wrote about my ongoing writing process, I received a reply from a reader. After you read it, maybe you’ll also have some thoughts you can articulate in brief process notes—it can be epistolary, an outline, handwritten notes, however you wish to briefly interpret describing your writing/art-making process. For those published, payment is $25.00.
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Grace Montgomery is an interdisciplinary writer currently living in Cambridge, MA. She has a degree from Hampshire College in creative writing and early childhood education and was a fellowship recipient at SLS Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia. Originally from Wisconsin, she is querying a novel about midwestern nostalgia that was a semifinalist for the Key West Literary Seminars novel-in-progress award.
Hi Wendy!
Hope this note finds you well. I love this letter on your long, slow process, and the idea of having One Big Thing in your mind every month — whether or not it is directly related to the writing, of course it is all about the writing. Whether art reflects life or life reflects art, it’s all different parts of the same thing and I think it’s absurd to pretend otherwise.
For the first time in maybe a year, I’ve been in a productive, creative groove that feels good. Sometimes that means I'm sitting down with the writing and actively crafting sentences (I prefer to draft by hand like it’s the 1700s, so I’m often sitting with my notebooks and pens/pencils/markers splayed around me in bed or on the floor). Other times, it means I’m playing meditative video games (Dorf Romantik and Stardew Valley) while my brain crunches on narrative problems and solutions. At my day job as a toddler nanny, I practice being present in the moment — where even though I’m not consciously thinking about my writing, I usually feel clearer-headed when I come back to it the following day or week. I’m also a person with chronic pain and chronic illness, and I think the time I spend lying around, resting as hard as I can also reflects and refracts my work in meaningful ways. Especially because I’m a writer who finds the story as I draft (as opposed to writers who plot out the whole story before they begin, who I greatly envy), all of the things I do in between writing sessions greatly influence the writing itself. It’s about as spiritual as I get, thinking about how everything in my life comes back to the writing, the work. Always, always.
The biggest disruption to my creative process was attempting to get published. I finished my debut novel in late 2022 and spent the following year focused on my query letter: writing and rewriting it, researching publishers and agents, sending it out. Querying is exactly as long and miserable a process as everyone told me it would be I learned a lot from your newsletter over the last year about your own experience with publication and agents, and through your mini-interviews with other writers on their books. I especially appreciated your candor on the feedback you received on your first book (which is deeply important to me) — how everyone loved your prose but still didn’t want to publish it. This is similar to feedback I’ve received, which is both encouraging and incredibly frustrating.
But trying to sell my work, trying to convince other people they could make money off of it, felt so contrary to the actual writing, the actual thing that means the most to me. It felt impossible to begin drafting new work for most of 2023. All of my creative energy was going into the querying process, trying to sell this huge project I put three years worth of my heart and soul into. It was so hard to get messy with something new when I still had one foot in the publishing/querying/polishing world of my old project. I would love to hear any insight you and other writers might have on his dichotomy: how is your writing process affected by the publishing process? How on earth do writers begin new projects while still revising and perfecting and selling their old project? And why isn’t this something writers talk more about?
I’ve stepped away from trying to sell my book for the time being. This is heartbreaking for a whole bunch of reasons, but ultimately, I needed to be able to start new work and I just couldn’t figure out how to do both at the same time. I’m grateful that a version of my process has clicked back into place after so much time away from it, and I have to believe that there are better things ahead than any we leave behind, both in writing and in life.
Best,
Grace
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Thanks, Grace!
When this was a Substack newsletter I was offering Founding Members a 45 minute Zoom conversation with me about anything related to writing. I’ve been modifying the offer—originally priced at $250, which includes a forever subscription to Mommy’s El Camino—to be able to better meet you where you are financially. Reach out by replying to this email if interested.
As always, thank you for reading. See you Sunday.