The Seasons of Being A Writer

  • The Seasons of Being A Writer

    Guest Blogger Megan Aronson writes about the seasons and cycles of life and being a writer.

    “I’ve been lost and reclusive of late as I deal with the most recent iteration of my grief-growth cycle,” my friend Candace Cahill, author of Goodbye Again, wrote in an online writing group I belong to. “Learning—the hard way, mostly—new things about myself and the challenges still ahead.”

    My eyes hovered over her words as her thoughts echoed my own. I wasn’t the only one who’d stopped at the words “grief-growth cycle.” Soon the comments were flooded with replies like, “Grief-growth cycle. I feel that. Never thought of it that way before.”

    In two sentences, Candace had fully encapsulated the collective experience of being a writer. Continually turning ourselves inside out on the page and off, we each instantly recognized the “grief-growth cycle” as the intersection of life affecting our writing, and writing affecting our lives. I know this cycle: it courses through periods of personal doubt and professional rejection, retreating underground, nurturing the seeds of ideas for another creative phase, and harvesting acceptances and accolades.

    “Where are we at in the cycle right now, each of us?” I wondered as I read my friend’s comments.

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about the seasons of being a writer and how we cycle through them personally and professionally. I know from experience (and science) that when difficult life circumstances trigger my brain into fight or flight mode, the limbic system switches on its red alert button and my creative center is more difficult to access. I know stress can impact my creativity, and a broken heart can either open the flow for writing, or completely dam it. I’ve also seen how a round of rejections on my writing can paralyze me in life, sending me into a phase of reclusiveness that I must slowly nurse myself out of again. It can wreck my confidence not just as a writer, but as a mom, wife, and friend.

    Productivity is often praised over personal growth and satisfaction in our society. We’re pressured to relentlessly produce, hustle, grind, and go. But the writer’s life demands time not just to harvest—we also need periods of renewal, recovery, and growth.

    Recently, I’ve found comfort in Julia Cameron’s insightful and lesser-known book “The Sound of Paper.” After a series of challenges triggered another grief-growth cycle, I needed time to tend my personal and professional wounds. Julia gave me permission to embrace my place in the cycle with her powerful words: “I am resting, I am gathering steam,” she wrote. “I am in a low cycle, a time of dormancy, a period in which I will come to know exactly how much and how deeply I love the art I am not at the moment able to practice.”

    Last week, I ran into a writing friend and instantly recognized on her face the look of panic I’d also been wearing during my months of “dormancy.”

    “I haven’t been able to write,” she said, her eyes ablaze. “I’m caretaking my mom full-time. I can’t get myself to put a thing on the page.”

    I told her how I’d just barely escaped this space myself, and how, paradoxically, the only thing that had sped it along was not speeding it along at all. My heart and mind needed time to heal, to wander in the woods, to walk the stacks at the library and grab anything that piqued my interest. As we spoke, I remembered the existential angst I’d felt in her shoes. I wished I could have granted myself the peace of accepting my season of recovery, rather than fighting against it the whole way.

    I want to live the kind of artist’s life that flows gracefully through its seasons and honors the needs of my creative nature. When I’m incubating ideas for a new book, I live in curiosity—not producing, but gathering notes, ideas, life experiences, and reflections. An ideas file may be scraps and shards of random, unhinged scribbles, but those scribbles will become the words of an essay or book one day. I need time to be unhinged. I need time to wander and weed the corners of my mind and life. The time to harvest and produce will come again soon.

    Moving forward now, I wonder: Can I be brave enough to continually honor where I am in the grief-growth cycle? Can we as writers grant ourselves a week, a day, or even a month (gasp!) to heal from life experiences before we write again? Can we go dormant for a winter and simply germinate our ideas, or celebrate a spring of creating just for ourselves, not for the world’s consumption?

    I hope we can. I hope my recent experiences have taught me to let life inform my writing gracefully, with time to heal between the living and the writing, embracing the seasons as they come.

    I’m coming out of my winter now, grateful for its lessons. The panic is subsiding as new ideas are beginning to burst forth again. Another spring is coming.

    Originally posted as “The Grief-Growth Cycle of Being a Writer,” August 30, 2023, Brevity Blog.

    Megan Aronson is a writer and public speaker who lives in the red rocks of Sedona, AZ.

    Excerpted from Megan’s website:

    I’m a writer, a speaker, an advocate, a mom of four, a #YOLOGirl (You Only Live Once) and a survivor of…just about everything.

    In 2011, I wrote a piece called Grim Reaper Girl that went viral, sharing how empathy saved my life after a string of 12 deaths had left me feeling like death followed me everywhere.

    Over the next few years, the slew of tragedy continued at a relentless pace. In total, we lost 30 people in 8 years. We moved 4 times. We lost a baby, our home, my daughter’s best friend…and then I discovered my husband’s deadly painkiller addiction had escalated, and we became a miracle in the WE’LL BE COUNTING STARS story. 

    But my story is not a pity-party-table-for-one-please story. It’s one of triumph in tragedy. Little triumphs that came slowly and carefully while I fought for my life, my joy, and my love.

    I’ve written myself through grief upon grief, and brought myself back to life again and again. I am still doing it now, and along the way, I’m sharing my journey, because I have become a self-certified Heal-Thyself Specialist (it’s a fancy title, I know, I earned it with 14 years at The School of Hard Knocks. Did you get a degree from there, too?!).

    I’m here to tell you, I see you, I get you, I’ve been through it, too, and here’s how we pick ourselves up and keep moving forward again and again, with our broken, open hearts. I’m here to remind you how to open when you’re closed, to soften when you feel yourself turn hard like callouses.

    I’m here to encourage you to dare greatly, even when vulnerability makes you quake in your boots. I’m here to urge you forward into unfolding again and again.

    I’m also here to remind myself, and YOU, not to take ourselves or this thing called life too seriously!

    Megan’s work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction’s Tiny Truths. She is currently seeking a publisher for her memoir, We’ll Be Counting Stars, which tells the powerful “love vs. addiction” story she lived with her husband, Kory, a survivor of the opioid crisis.

    Marlene C

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  • I write to understand . . .

    “So, while I still write for understanding, for truth, for clarification, to tell a story, to help people, to help myself and even for fun—I also write for communication, for discussion, for connection.

    In a world that can feel fragmented and lonely, I write to bring myself closer to others.” —Diane Forman, “Why I Write,” Brevity’s NonFiction Blog, October 31, 2022

    More on “Why Write?”

    Why Do You Write?

    Why I Write

    Just Write!

    Marlene C

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  • Don’t Rush It

    Morgan Baker

    “Don’t Rush It” by Morgan Baker

    I don’t like being late – to classes I teach or the airport to catch a plane. My anxiety meter goes haywire if I haven’t given myself the time to organize before school or when I’m packing to go away. Will I need my swimsuit? What about those shoes? I allow extra time wherever I go, which means I’m usually early.

    My stepfather once told my daughter as he drove her to a summer job, “You’re on time if you’re ten minutes early.”

    I’ve taken that to heart.

    When my daughter and I went to a wedding in Montana a few years ago, we were excited about the event, and to see the big sky landscape we had heard so much about. I didn’t want to feel rushed or anxious, so I allowed for plenty of extra time to get through security and find our gate.

    We watched planes taxiing to other gates from the rocking chairs we sat in. For three hours.

    But when it comes to my writing, I don’t follow my own advice. I often rush it. I think I’m done way before I really am. My husband, a former journalist and editor, reminds me frequently to slow down, think the piece through, whether it’s an essay or a profile I’m working on. Wait, he says, before sending it out. There are always opportunities to expand or transform my writing.

    I don’t always listen. Often, I already have a good sense of what’s working and where I need more, but instead of figuring out the fixes, I get jittery and eager and I send off the piece to trusted readers and editors, hoping they won’t notice the holes.

    Not only do they notice, they fall in them.

    I encourage the writers in my workshops to take their time. Sit on your work for a day or two, or more, I tell them. If it’s a timely essay, sit on it for a few hours. Wait and see how the work matures over time. Then revisit and revise. Don’t rush. Wait before taking a bite of the cookie that’s just come out of the oven. Don’t burn your mouth.

    I spoke with a writer recently who has a book of essays out, and she told me some of the essays took her years to write. Years.

    I don’t have years. I want to get my book of essays out now!

    I’m a problem solver. I like immediate results. I can usually fix someone else’s challenge, edit their work, or find their lost car key. Helping myself is more perplexing and time consuming.

    But when I linger on my pieces, like waiting to bite that hot cookie, it’s always worth it. I might remember another aspect of the topic I want to add in, or recognize a theme I didn’t see before.

    I’ve been working on a collection of essays for, yes, years, and I thought I knew their purpose. but recently, I realized I was going in the wrong direction. There was a theme in my work I hadn’t seen earlier, a theme that tied my shorter pieces together from two separate projects. I am now going to select, toss, and revise. Because I’d taken my time with the essays, the theme had time to marinate before it jumped out at me.

    Now I’m eager to get going. But I need to heed the yellow light ahead and slow down, take my time, let the pieces simmer, blow on them a little so they’re not so hot and I can hold them.

    If I rush to pack, I might forget the shoes I need, or my bathing suit in case there’s a pool. Sometimes I have to unpack and repack to make sure I have everything I need—editing my suitcase like I edit a book. I repack, rolling my clothes instead of folding them. They take up less room that way, and there is more room to add and substitute items. Just as I can revise once more, allowing for expansion and transformation.

    “Don’t Rush It” first appeared on Brevity’s Nonfiction blog on June 6, 2022.

    Morgan Baker has written for The Boston Globe Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Bark, The Bucket, Talking Writing, Cognoscenti, Motherwell, and several times for the Brevity Blog.

    Morgan’s debut memoir will be out in Spring 2023 (Ten16 Press).

    She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and two dogs where she teaches at Emerson College and facilitates writing workshops.

    Marlene C

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  • Becoming a Writer in the Third Chapter of Life

    Guest Post by Carole Duff

    All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. —Anatole France

    Western culture divides life into three stages: birth/student, work/family, and retirement/death. My husband and I, moving into our retirement years and building a new house, borrowed the Hindu concept of four stages, adding a time of spiritual growth and reconnection between retirement and death.

    The third stage of life, Vanaprastha, the name we chose for our mountain home, means retreat to the forest. Not retirement but time to learn, reflect, and grow. Time to take the internal journey and heal past wounds from loss, rejection, and inexplicable disruptions. Time to explore, discover, seek meaning, share wisdom, and serve others. Time to become our truer selves.

    As it turned out, I became a writer.

    While overseeing the construction of our mountain retreat, I read the books I’d promised myself I’d get to but never had time, walked the dog, and tried new recipes. I wrote about my husband’s daughter, lost to suicide at age twenty-four, a girl I’d never met and wanted to know about as part of my husband’s past. But while reading her journals, hearing her father’s stories, and writing, I found my story bleeding through the pages into hers, because of connections I never expected. Disruptions from when we were five: her parents’ divorce and a home-invader assaulting my mother; mental illness episodes starting at sixteen; troubles in college; rejection in love—stories begging to be written, hiding in our closets. After the house was built, I signed up for writing classes.

    Being a novice was humbling after a long and successful career, teaching, designing curriculum, and publishing technical articles. I was no longer a sage on the stage or guide on the side. My teachers were often the same age as my students—my recent students. More to the point, my wants and path-to-purpose had changed. After years of forward motion, raising children, earning money to pay the bills, pursuing success and honors, I looked back and moved toward asking, Who am I?

    Third-stage-of-life writers often employ creative nonfiction in memoir and personal essays. They are less interested in earning a living as a writer and more interested in the internal search on the page. This journey for self-knowledge is heroic in the Joseph Campbell sense, fraught with external and internal obstacles and resistance. We all have wounds in our past and tend to evade them at all cost. I was appalled to discover the extent of my evasions, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness, my need for approval, to be right and in control. The “clever” stories I’d told myself and others over the years were often self-serving and sometimes outright lies. My husband’s daughter took the same journey, until her mental illness exacted its toll. To become the master of my story, I had to portray myself as both protagonist and antagonist, to turn victims into actors, villains into humans, and the helpless into the able; to find a third way to manage fear, other than flight or fight. Only then could I find peace and offer what I’d learned to others.

    The nuts and bolts of writing can be daunting. Pitches, proposals, publishing, platform. The bottom line of becoming a writer in the third chapter is growth, both personal and professional. Write, write, write. Take classes to grow your craft, read craft books and recommended models, join writing groups, attend conferences, create communities. Open yourself to criticism; be honest and generous in return. Study, learn something new, sing, garden, volunteer. Do all those things and more—and have a grand time!

    “Becoming a Writer in the Third Chapter of Life” first appeared on Brevity blog on May 17, 2022

    Carole Duff is a veteran teacher, serious flutist, avid naturalist, and writer of creative nonfiction. She posts weekly to her long-standing blog Notes from Vanaprastha, and has written for Brevity blog, Mockingbird, Streetlight Magazine, The Perennial Gen, for which she is a regular contributor, and other publications.

    Carole lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband, writer K.A. Kenny, and two, large overly-friendly dogs.

    She will present a session on “Becoming a Writer in the Third Chapter of Life” at HippoCamp 2022 in August.

    Marlene C

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  • Brevity Blog seeks submissions

    Brevity Blog is the place to discuss issues related to the writing of creative nonfiction. “Though we don’t shy away from important issues in the writing community, the Brevity blog can also often be colloquial, personal, and at times irreverent or humorous, and our most popular posts tend to be those that are the least academic.”

    Appropriate topics for the Blog include the craft of writing nonfiction, issues in editing and publishing, writing conference and creative writing classroom experiences, interviews with writers or editors, prompts, close reading of essays or essayists, or specific issues that challenge us as we attempt to capture true experiences on the page. 

    Word Count: 500 to1,000 word range (sweet spot is 850).

    Brevity Online Journal also welcomes submissions.

    Marlene C

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