You don’t make sense. I don’t make sense. Let’s be in that together. 👋
A top-down view of a blank spiral-bound notebook in the middle of a reddish-brown table, surrounded by notebooks and cups near the edges of the frame.
The other day Kim and I were planning a new workshop, and I caught myself (again) making no sense.
It was a heck-yeah-it’s-sunny-let’s-hang-out-on-a-patio meeting, so the conversation was loose and spacious. Kim was telling me about a writing group she’s in and I was telling her about a weekend, years ago, when I tried to write a novel in 3 days.
This is one of my favourite stories — all about the energy of an impossible deadline, the kindness of strangers, the vitality of creative commitment. Telling it, I could feel my mind unfurling like a spring leaf after a long rain, joyful, yearning.
Kim smiled and said — just as you might have said — “Well why don’t you do it again?”
And just like that, the feeling vanished.
“I don’t think it’s the right time.”
“My life is really different now.”
“I don’t know how.”
Whyyyyyy?
Truth is, it’s hard to make time for the good stuff, especially when it comes to writing.
We have a thousand excuses, only some of which are real.
We plan to get up early every morning to write and it lasts until Tuesday.
We have a whole Saturday afternoon to start something and we do laundry and errands instead.
We pick up that project, vow to get back to it, and then put it back down for six months.
If you relate to any of this — welcome to the human family of writers.
There’s a thing we do in character development classes.
We get everyone to find a spark of an idea, and then we give them sheets of questions. What smells remind this person of home? What are they hiding? Who do they miss? We say, “Answer these with your first instinct.” The pages flood with ideas.
Then after a while, we get them to pause, and we say, “Now look over your answers, and change one drastically. Bring in some contradiction. Mess this person up a bit.”
And just like that, we’re starting to make a real person.
Truth is, we don’t make sense.
We don’t do the things we say we’re going to do.
We don’t even do the things we want to do.
We don’t know why.
We walk around our lives trying to tell linear stories about our growth and forward motion, while circumventing yawning canyons of contradiction and chaos.
So what do we do about it?
I don’t know much, but I feel clear about these three things:
1. Humble experiments work better than confident plans. Not, “I’m going to write every day” but “I’m going to write every day this week and see how that goes.” Or better yet, “I’m going to ask a friend to write with me three times this week, and then we can talk about how it went and decide whether to continue.”
2. Support and community help more than anyone wants them to. We want to be able to hack this alone, and yes, writing can be solitary, but the process of writing comes alive with supportive people and structures. Find the people who make your writing feel like spring.
3. Past-us isn’t present-us. What worked yesterday might not work today. That’s fine! What failed yesterday might be exactly what we need today. Keep trying, and let the mystery be a mystery. There’s nothing to solve.
Mostly, I want us all to refuse to see this central strangeness as a character flaw.
If you struggle to write, you’re not rare, wrong or alone. You’re in the mess and glory of it, with everyone.
I’m willing to bet there is no linear, logical version of you or me waiting around the next corner. But I know we can keep turning back to the things we’re hungry for with new eyes. We can be in the messiness together, with humour and ceaseless self-forgiveness. We can take steps forward, celebrate our wins, and keep making really cool stuff.
If you want to not make sense together (and still get some good work done), we’d love to see you in our summer programs.
Kim has two workshops with space this summer.
The Fiction Workshop on Tuesday evenings for anyone with a fiction project on the go who wants accountability and structure to move it forward.
And, Romantasy on Wednesday evenings is for anyone who is drawn to the delicious experiment of blending romance and fantasy.
Britt also has two summer workshops with space.
Brief Bursts (The Fiction Edition) is for anyone who wants to write the shortest stories imaginable — and experiment with the power of brevity. Monday mornings.
And, Progress, on Thursday mornings, is for writers who want to tune out the world and get a whole bunch of writing done.
Mari has one summer workshop with space.
Mari created this program a couple years ago from her love of poetic forms. It’s called Flight Paths, and it celebrates the joy of a constraint.
Come to stretch your ideas into new shapes, and play with the creative tension between freedom and structure. Thursday evenings.
Sophia has one summer workshop with space.
On Monday evenings, Sophia will be heading off Focus and Flow, a workshop that uses the science of flow state to help writers sink into their writing with ease and momentum.
Asifa also has one summer workshop with space.
Join Asifa on Thursday evenings for a 5-week Begin Here workshop for writers who have no idea how to break into their creative inner worlds, or want to find the key again after a long pause.
Nina is running her first workshop this summer!
The last workshop to spark up this summer will be a 5-week version of Keep Your Pen Moving with our newest team member, Nina. Tuesday evenings.
This class is a great place to start, or deepen into, a creative practice, routine, journey or experiment.
A poem for your heart
This little gem, “Coconut” by Paul Hostovsky, is also about not making sense, and finding our way through.
Here’s another case for chaos — we’d have absolutely nothing to write without it.
The world doesn’t need more tidy, airbrushed stories that could have been written by AI. The world needs us. Us, with our cracks and contradictions and our weird shit. Us, with our craters of chaos and non-linear lives.
The more honest we can be about that, the more we can bring to the page, and the more we can be found and findable.
The trick is to find just enough patience and self-compassion to sit down with our pens and keyboards and write our way back in.
In it with you,
P.S. The workshop Kim and I were working on is a story-in-a-weekend intensive, and will drop this fall, run by Kim and our new coach Nina. I realized while writing this that I need to sign up and take it. :)