As my parents’ youngest child — my sister and brother were twelve and ten years older, respectively — I grew up mostly in the company of adults or books or both simultaneously. My summer vacations took place on marathon road trips with my mother as we drove the hundreds of miles back and forth across the Midwest’s dull expanses to visit old people.
None of my grandparents were still living, but many of my great aunts and uncles, first and second cousins once removed and sometimes even long-ago neighbors were alive, and we visited all of them.
The trips were annual, mandatory and excruciatingly dull. Plus, the houses all smelled funny, everything was breakable and the hard candy in the dishes were for decorative purposes only.
But, I did have a library card for every town where we stayed more than a couple of days, a privilege I wonder at now. I’d stuff my tote bag full of books and read as many as possible before my mother and I moved on to another tiny town in the cornfields. Sometimes, when I only got partway through a book, I’d note the page where I left off and check the same book out at the next small-town library so I could pick up the story.
On one of these visits to my grandfather’s sister, the baby of the family in her mid-80s, I glanced up from my book at the chalkboard calendar on the wall of her dim kitchen to see the word “prayer” written on each day. How funny, I remember thinking. As if she’d forget to do it if it weren’t written down.
A half-century later, I think of that chalkboard a lot. Because now I, too, will forget to do anything that isn’t written down on my to-do list, even the daily tasks, like “laundry” or “floss.”
And, yes, this includes writing.
Gone forever are the days when I almost literally couldn’t wait for the coffee to brew so I could get to my word processor and start, at a fever pitch, to work on whichever of the myriad in-process projects most attracted me that morning. After my best friend and then my husband died, grief moved in permanently, replacing my steel-trap mind with a leaky sieve. Then the pandemic, my parents’ steep decline and now (gesturing around) all this … creativity is the last thing I remember to make time for.
Based on my completely unscientific survey of the creative people in my life — writers to actors to painters to musicians and lots of other creative types in between — you might feel the same.
Many of us are living with anxiety, grief, illness, pervasive existential dread. What’s the point, you might wonder. Who even cares anyway? And if you work in nonfiction, as I do, you might also wonder: Does anyone really need more reality right now? We’re all so darned tired.
And yet.
Writing is often suggested to any number of folks as a helpful activity of self-therapy, a practice I 100% applaud. But, as a creative writer, even one whose primary subject for close to a decade has been grief and loss, writing has less to do with therapy and far more to do with an essential component of myself. Like eating breakfast or getting a reasonable amount of exercise, if I skip the writing, I’m in a very real and measurable way not myself.
I admire writers who have the stamina to spend daily disciplined hours on their writing. That’s not me. Yes, writing often involves taking quiet walks alone or staring out the window at the traffic whizzing by, but if I’m not intentional, these necessary alone-in-my-head meditative practices rapidly devolve into non-writing activity. It’s easy to come up with excuses for not simply putting my butt in the chair. After all, those baseboards aren’t going to wash themselves.
In a way, choosing to prioritize a daily writing practice is about doubling down on purpose. One’s personal mission statement, the kind that answers, Who am I? For my case, if I’m a writer, then I need to write. Even when I don’t feel like it. Especially when I don’t feel like it.
Similar to my great aunt’s long ago daily prayer reminder on the chalkboard, “write” flutters near my ear to whisper, taps me gently on the shoulder, won’t go away until I do the thing.
Like a pianist playing scales or a painter creating monochromes, I’ve learned that I can only stay nimble as a writer if I’m writing. And, like drinking water, that means every day, regardless of whether or not I feel like it.
Focused freewriting works well for me. I set a timer, open my laptop and write for 20 minutes nonstop about whatever presents itself to my mind in the moment. No edits, no spell check. Sometimes, no punctuation. If I come to the end of a thought, I start typing “I can’t think of anything, this is stupid, did I feed the dog” and so on until my mind seizes on a new idea. When the timer goes off, I close the document. I never go back to read anything I’ve written for at least a couple of weeks. Most of it is chaff to be sure, but viable kernels appear all the time, seeds for projects or solutions to a structural quandary or a lifeless scene.
Twenty minutes equals a mere 1% of an entire day. My creative practice, my self, deserves that much. That’s why it’s the first item on each day’s to-do list. The daily discipline, the “just do it,” means that only rarely do I not immediately keep the writing momentum going by turning my attention to a specific project in process. By letting my subconscious take over and get it all out at the start, I’m so much more aware, focused, in flow afterwards.
Especially when the world seems to be on fire and I feel helpless or hopeless or just plain sad, what I choose to do with my time is the only real agency I have. I can scrub those baseboards, again. I can doomscroll. Or, I can choose to write.
What difference does it make? Perhaps not much to the world, if we’re being honest. But, to me? To my well-being or, let’s say it, my soul? Well, that’s everything.
Helene Kiser’s poetry and nonfiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. A recovering poet, she’s the author of “Topography” and currently at work on her second book, a memoir. Find her online at www.helenekiser.com.
