The winter of my creativity

Seasons of rest and mellow fruitlessness...

Dear Writer,

Writing, like the year, has certain recognizable and functionally distinct seasons.

There’s Discovery, when you play with the story and uncover elements, like an archeologist using a paintbrush to unearth a relic.

There’s Drafting, when you’re getting the words on paper however you can, trying not to think about quality or where you’re going or even if all of this work is ever going to coalesce into something understandable to any brain outside of your own.

Then, of course, we have Revision, when you take the material you created from Discovery and Drafting and try to form it into… something.

These seasons sort of swirl around you like a cyclone when you’re writing, and you can experience two or more at the same time, but their functions remain distinct.

I’ve spent most of my writing life noticing and experiencing these three distinct seasons of writing while a fourth would go often unnoticed, unsung, because it was a season of rest, and traditionally, I haven’t been a big fan of resting.

During this past year, as I’ve been walking others through their writing process, I finally officially recognized this resting season, when you put the book into a drawer for six weeks or so and try to think about it as little as possible. I have never thought of this as a phase of writing because of its association with rest, with the effortful absence of effort; the dead zone devoid of writing hours and word counts and the quantifiable ethic of work.

At first, I referred to this as the drawer phase, because back in the day when a writer’s work was on paper, you would put the work in a drawer, shut it away, somewhere out of sight, and focus on other things. Those things could be the daily bits of life that were neglected during drafting, or it could be the weaving in of a fresh Discovery season for the next work in progress.

I’m a one-work-at-a-time kind of girl, so for me, once I attend to all the things I let slide while writing, I end up just sort of sitting around, twiddling my thumbs.

Resting.

God, I hate resting. I’m terrible at it. If I’m not accomplishing something actively, I get this escalating nervous tension, like I’m not earning my space in the world or something. I feel lazy, no-good, useless. This is all toxic thinking, I know that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I think it. I feel it.

And I hate it.

Do you remember when the Great British Bake-Off was a thing? I think this was around 10 years ago, and everyone was watching it, so I hopped on that bandwagon and loved it.

It was also the first time I ever heard of the concept of proving. It sounded so posh, so positively British a way of expressing this idea of giving your dough the proper time and environment in which to rise. I quite like this definition I found on the Good Housekeeping website:

One of the most important stages of baking bread is proving your dough. Proving is the last rising of the dough before it is baked. During this time, it undergoes further fermentation and takes on its final size and shape.

Well.

Shit.

I realize now that this is the absolute perfect way to think about the drawer phase in writing; this is the time when you set the book aside and let it just do its thing. Sadly, the book doesn’t magically transform—or prove—in the drawer, be it physical or digital, but it does in your head. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been keeping my distance from the book, and for a while, things were quiet. It was good enough to be done. But lately, I’ve been finding myself waking up in the middle of the night with ideas, things to fix, things to cut, things to enhance. I grab my phone, go into my notes app, jot it down, and go back to sleep.

That’s the fermenting, the releasing of gases that are proving the dough of the book as I make the conscious and confounding effort to do nothing.

The neat thing is that the nothing isn’t nothing. It’s everything. It’s where the story gets the space to rise properly, to do the very thing I need it to do in order to have a piece of work that represents what I set out to make.

Everything that grows needs space and time in which to grow. That includes the work. If I attach my value as a person and a writer to a constant engagement with effort, the work doesn’t get what it needs, and I don’t get what I need.

The proving is a beautiful phase of active inaction, and while I have failed to recognize this season as the essential rest that it is, I’m grateful I finally see it, the winter of my creativity.

Everything,

L