The isolation is getting to me, but I’m still very much grieving and am not ready to resurface, and I’m certainly not ready to return to social media, so I came up with this idea to share a creative nonfiction (my heart genre) prompt and sometimes a pearl of writing advice once a week for, hopefully, the remainder of 2024.
The Prompt:
Step 1: Write a list of your favorite dishes, that you make yourself or were made for you: a soup your mom made you when you were sick as a kid, your aunt’s baked chicken, your grandma’s rice pudding, the beef neck bone soup you taught yourself how to make, that pizza you had at Pinocchio’s in Harvard Square way back when. List at least three.
Step 2: Now choose one. Write about the time(s) you’ve had this meal. Be as descriptive as possible: who was there, when was this, what do you smell, taste, etc. How do you feel as you’re remembering and writing? How does it feel in your body? Why do these memories provoke that reaction?
(Want to explore how writing about food can help you dig into memory and write about your life? Sign up for my four week Kitchen Chronicles class that starts March 5th)
The Pearl:
You need to write. So many of us dream of writing a book, an essay, a poem, but we don’t put it in the work to get that done—we don’t practice.
The world famous cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, who’s been playing the cello since he was four, said: "What all string players have in common is that if we don't play for a while, we actually start from ground zero."
While performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series, he shared:
Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity. Some days I practice for hours; other days it will be just a few minutes. Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others—it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
What the hell does this have to do with writing? Yo-Yo Ma’s advice is a nice reminder to all of us to take small steps forward when building a habit (like writing) or learning and improving a new skill (like imagery, sensory writing, etc).
Look at writing as a muscle: what happens to a muscle when it’s not used? It atrophies, it wastes away. What develops a muscle? Exercise. So what can you do? You can develop a writing practice.
Figure out when and how you work best. I’m more of a morning writer and have made a ritual around it which includes a cup of tea and burning a bit of medicine (copal, palo santo, whatever feels good in that moment). It’s not that I can’t write later in the day, it’s that I find that if I write early, I’m thinking about the writing all day—while I’m hiking or boxing, while I’m cooking, doing laundry, even while watching TV—so I’m chewing over the scene, story, plot, etc long after I had pen to paper/fingertips to keyboard, and that too is a part of my process.
It’s fine if that doesn’t work for you, just figure out what does AND DO IT. Like to listen to music as you write? I do but nothing with lyrics. Do you write best at home, in a coffee shop, the library, on the train? I used to love writing on the train when I lived in the city and commuted on the MTA. Can you only spend a short time a day writing? A few minutes can add up. A paragraph becomes a page, becomes a chapter, etc.
I don’t subscribe to the “you have to write every day” advice. It just isn’t sustainable for me. But you can write more often than you don’t. And when you fail one week, write less than four days or not at all, don’t beat yourself up. Just try again. It’s true what fantasy and YA writer Daniel José Older says: “Writing begins with forgiveness.”
Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I’d.’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not. -Daniel José Older, Writing Begins With Forgiveness
Keep trying. Poco a poco. Día a día.
I love you. Bendiciones.
~V
the pizza that i had in pinocchios... i had so much pizza there lol. perfect. lots of memories.
Love this. Love what Daniel José Older has to say about this too.