Let Slip the Dogs
Emma Barry
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Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is often shoved into the hands of would-be writers, and thus it was with me. I’ve been gifted three copies, and one passage from it has lingered in my mind. Lamott writes, “Let’s not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeping those crazy ravenous dogs contained” (26). It’s a striking image: the feral dogs, the writer’s agency, the power of routine. Indeed, countless other writing advice books echo this insistence that you must write every day or else Bad Things™ will happen.
And on the days—the all too common days—when I don’t manage to get any words on the page, I hear those dogs breathing down my neck. Because you see I’m utter crap at writing consistently. Partially this is due to time management, and partially its due to my tidal style. Sometimes it’s in and I’m fecund with creativity. But when it sweeps out…well, god help me.
To wit, in the last three years, my ability to work ebbed so far, I considered quitting. It was a long, dark season when I was just done with the entire quixotic thing of trying to be a writer. Done with stories altogether.
But it didn’t stay dark and I wasn’t done. Read on for the tale of how I managed to staunch my wound and get writing again.
Some context: I typed my first words of fiction eight years ago when I was avoiding my dissertation—and all my problems since are likely contained in that sentence. In the intervening period, I’ve written or co-written and published seven full-length novels and eight novelettes and novellas. I’ve also penned half a dozen or so unpublished manuscripts and countless false starts and random chapters and sketches. In the same period, I finished grad school, started teaching college English full-time, and kept alive two small kids, a dog, a cat, and three chickens.
While the details vary, none of this is unusual. We all have too little time and too many obligations. I’m caught between feeling a little bit guilty and a little bit unfulfilled. Either I try to do everything and let everyone down in the process, or I pare down my to-do list and disappoint myself.
The dance between guilt and ambition, doubt and stress is constant for me. If my time management style were a color, it would be the purplish green of a bruise; definitely the result of trauma, and never quite healing. And last fall, I decided something had to give.
A few days after a major (positive) review dropped for a book I wrote with Genevieve Turner, I sent my co-writer a tearful email explaining that I wasn’t certain I would be able to keep writing. I’d open my works in progress and stare at the blinking cursor while dread soaked me. I had to stop.
For months and months, I didn’t write at all. And it was horrible.
I had thought I could give up this commitment and be lighter, happier, freer. But instead, not writing was a loss of relationships and identity. Those months were every bit as awful as trying to write and finding no words in me.
For me, less was not more. It was just less. Infinitely less. I had to find ways to be realistic about what I could achieve, while making some progress toward my goals and being infinitely kind to myself. In the past few months, I’ve slowly, slowly reestablished my writing habit and, with it, far better mental health and balance.
This is how I’ve (tried) to do it.
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1) Setting micro-goals: I love these “don’t break the chain” calendars (link: http://karenkavett.com/blog/5154/dont-break-the-chain-calendar-2019.php). You establish a goal and mark off every day you hit it, trying to put together long chains. I started a calendar to track the goal of writing 200 words a day. I eventually revised down; now, my desired word count is only 50 daily words.
What I like about small goals is that if it’s 8 p.m., and I’m exhausted, I can still rally and write a paragraph or two. I still don’t hit even that tiny goal every day. But I ping more days than I don’t, and it’s been enough to drive off the miasma of failure.
2) A rolling to-do list: sitting next to my computer as I type is a small yellow legal pad for my to-do list. Each entry has a hyphen beside it. When I complete an item, I turn the hyphen into a star. Any incomplete item gets an O. Every few days, I rewrite the list, rolling forward any incomplete item(s).
Whenever possible, I give the items a due date, and I break larger tasks down. So I don’t put “edit” or “write”; instead, it might be “edit chapters 4 and 5” or “write 50 words.” I never permit the list to be longer than one page so I can see the entire thing at a glance, and I only think a few days forward at a time. This isn’t for long-term planning, but for structuring the few blocks of “free” time that I have every day.
The key is giving myself small, manageable, concrete things to do and not beating myself if I don’t get to everything. What do I need to do on a given day? What would I like to do? All while remembering that there is always tomorrow.
3) Accountability buddies: one of the things I missed most when I stopped writing was the hour every day that I had set aside for writing. Genevieve and I text each other at the start of the hour, then we sprint, trying to write as much as possible without stopping. When the hour is done, we check in to see how many words we both wrote.
For years, that hour was sacrosanct. But the instant I removed the barrier, that hour evaporated. It’s bizarre, but when I stopped shielding that time, it made my day feel shorter.
I’m happy to say that the hour is back in protected status. I’m not obsessive about it; sometimes I have grading or errands and those take precedence. Other times I find that I can’t focus and I struggle to meet even my micro-goal. But having a set time to write and having to be honest with someone about how much I got done (or not), makes me more productive and removes the illusion of loneliness from my work.
4) Building non-work time into my day: when I read Anne Helen Peterson’s recent essay on Millennials and burnout (link: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work), it was a classic scales fall from my eyes moment. What I experienced last fall was, at least in my opinion, burnout.
If I’m going to avoid it in the future, I need to protect my headspace and break the stress cycle. I’ve stopped using Twitter on my computer and I’ve quit Facebook. I’m reading less news and more books. I’m making sure to go jogging three or four times a week. I play the piano for a few minutes every day. And I’m trying not to write after dinner unless I feel desperately compelled to (or I have to hit a micro-goal, but even then, I limit how much time I spend staring at my computer).
Your prescription might look different than mine (in fact it almost certainly does), but for me, the most important component seemed to be giving myself permission to have non-productive time. Without that, everything in my life felt laborious, and I had nothing to write about.
This is a funny line because writing is my hobby. While I make a small amount of money from my books (a vanishingly small amount) and while I’m professional about my work, writing is not my day job. And quite simply, I don’t think I want it to be.
Look, it would be amazing to have my stories in wide circulation. I daydream about seeing a stranger in public reading one of my books. I’d love to be a super mega ultra-bestseller. But I’m content writing a small number of books for a small number of readers, if the work says something about how I see the world and what I love in it.
Amateur: someone who does something out of love and not money. It’s right there in the name. So while I hope my books aren’t amateur in terms of craft, I am an amateur. And thus there’s nothing wrong with preserving my mind and drawing some lines around how much of my life I give to writing. It can’t get everything—but that has meant that I want to write more.
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So that’s the story of how I almost quit writing but nursed myself back to health. These days, I’m friends with my snarling dogs, and I can report they’re merely misunderstood.
Bio:
Emma Barry is a novelist, full-time mama, recovering academic, and former political staffer. When she’s not reading or writing, she loves her twins’ hugs, her husband’s cooking, her cat’s whiskers, her dog’s tail, and Earl Grey tea.
Links:
Web: https://authoremmabarry.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/authoremmabarry Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/author.emma.barry/ Mailing List: https://tinyletter.com/authoremmabarry