how I kept going
the writing "menu" I used to finish my novel
This Spring I am co-facilitating with Breena Fain a 5-week long course called PORTAL STUDIES [bone course] designed for artists, makers, and writers to build up their personal power and establish an *unshakeable* quality to their creative practices. We share more Tuesday, March 11. Get on this waitlist if you’d like to get the details straight to your inbox.
The writing menu
Here’s the list I could think of—
almost 4 years of working on this novel written in prose blocks and footnotes, contemplating the “choose your own adventure” quality of my mind, or the urgent need to be accurate, correct, even in sharing memory to someone who is probably not listening—
the list of the ways I get back in, kept going, continued drafting one pearl after pearl on the string that would eventually become a full narrative, a finished thing.
However finished a thing can be.
Take scrapped poems, repurpose into passages from the narrator’s POV
Imagine scenes without context, write them into dialogue and action, hold them until their placement makes sense in the story
Write automatically from the POV of a character who is not the narrator. Prepare questions for this character beforehand so they know what to respond to. Don’t just make them talk. That’s rude!
Keep a commonplace book to hold things you encounter that you will want to reference while writing this project.
Create a scene-based mood board. Write ekphrastically in response to each image.
Collect books. Enact bibliomancy for scenes that match plot beats that do not have “flesh” yet.
Make a reading list of books, images, art, movies, places, things that will help you return to this project and its energetics.
Show up to writing calls and allow the energy between you and the others to guide you to the next scene that needs to be written.
Play songs from your project’s playlist on loop. Enter a kind of sensual trance. Allow for the loop of that song to inform the rhythm and texture of your language. Speak then from your narrator’s throat until something occurs.
Write a block of text from the gut for a whole page and pull out lines that feel relevant.
Create a curriculum to inform the direction of this project. What do you want to feel, make, learn, embody that this project will support you with?
Attend writing workshops. As often as your energy allows. Remember the magic that happened in Kristin Dombek’s Write a Slow Scene workshop. Remember how you wrote slowly, unfurling the scene about the brother that you had been avoiding for years.
Establish the birth chart of your narrator. Look at the transiting planets and their influences on her chart for the day the scene might take place. What planetary drama is afoot that could inspire what happens in the story?
Prompt the dream self with questions or scenes to “work out.” Wake up and see what occurs to you at dawn.
Practice morning pages. Then hand write until something occurs that is relevant.
Request an Akashic Records reading particularly about your project.
Prompt your subconscious mind before sleep to wake up in the consciousness of your narrator. Observe life through their patterns for a day. Feel uncomfortable. Adopt what you admire.
Outline what is missing. Outline each scene with a word or short phrase. Use Notion to toggle, adjust, and reorder each scene.
Identify the themes, motifs, and images while briskly moving through the draft. Write deeper into the themes, motifs, and images you identified. Consider the themes’ progression in the story.
Read everything published by figures mentioned in your writing. Remember what you learned when you read Linda McCartney’s photography books.
Experience what your narrator experiences. Make mistakes like them. Remember what you learned when you made cyanotypes.
Read.
Get away from the computer.
Interview someone who is like your narrator in any way.
This menu feels incomplete. Will you tell me what actions you take to keep going?
Personal updates
pitymilk press is now publishing a virtual journal called pitybath. Poems of mine as well as Chloé Allyn, Chelsea Tadeyeske, and
are featured here.I have placed my astrological practice “in the cave” in the effort to heed confident messages from my gut and sky that I am entering a phase of deep work alongside a couple fast-approaching Big Projects. If you’d like to know when I open up my astrology books every once in a long while, get on my direct newsletter list here. I’ll also be sending out resources for writing, divination, and art-making there.
I am visiting Cape Cod this week/end for work and joy. I’m open to any recs for what to check out while there!
Important: I winter hiked toward caves yesterday. My energy is restored fully now.
KP, this is so cool. My eyes opened wide at many of these suggestions. I am saving this for reference!!