How to Sit Down to Write
Sometimes Writing Is the Easy Part
By Agnès Madrigal
Sometimes writing is not the difficult part, but rather finding the space, the time, and the habit to make it happen is what can stall an author from just getting started. I have been writing and procrastinating from writing for years. Here are a few of the tricks I use to get myself to sit down and put words on a page.
Form a Habit
For many years, I utilized a Pavlovian technique of creating a particular situation in which I could write. Working fulltime, I could not write whenever I wanted, so I had to write within the confines of early mornings, evenings, weekends, and holidays. I am what some might call a night owl, so evenings were a good time for me — I know others prefer mornings, before the day has worn them out. It does not matter so much when one does it, as much as it does how one does it. Commit to writing at a particular time — this gives a signal to your body that you write at this specific hour. Reinforce it with other stimuli. When I was writing my first novella, I turned off all the lights in the apartment, lit an assortment of candles on my dining-room table, and played the same albums of the Russian composer Rachmaninoff. I also kept my journal and ink pen on the table at all times, so it was always easy to begin the work, whether the work called to me — as it sometimes does in the middle of the night or at other inconvenient times — or whether I had to call out to it within my schedule. These cues, romantic as some of them sound to me now, enabled me to adhere to a habit of writing. After completing the work I did during this period, I actually changed to a new journal and a new music, which gave another mental signal, one that I was embarking on a different type of story.
Write with Abandon
I am deeply terrified of a new notebook filled with pristine pages. The first thing to do with a new tablet is to start sullying the paper as much as possible. If I cannot do it with writing, I do it with something else: sketches, lists, markings of any sort — anything to remove the utter perfection of the untouched journal. Now I can start to write. Along these same lines, I start to write as the writing comes to me, unfiltered, in a free form. Later I can go back and shape the words into a form and apply the editorial glosses. That is an entirely other process — editing. For the writer struggling to write, the editor’s impulse must be muted. The writer can write with a rawness at the start. I have found that often this is where some of the best — and often unexpected — ideas are revealed. Sometimes I dig back through a lot of lackluster passages to find a glistening sentence or a concept for a story. When I have been looking for a new story, just writing — writing anything — has fostered its revelation. Also, when I have struggled with a particular part of a story, writing recklessly through it has helped to find solutions previously unimagined.
Create a Container
Sometimes a complete novel is overwhelming to consider, especially if I’ve not composed a general plot or a narrative arc. It is helpful to remember that a novel is composed of chapters, which are composed of paragraphs, which are composed of sentences, which are composed of words. The greater genre can be broken down into its parts. Maybe there is a particular part of a story that is speaking through you — write that. Perhaps it’s a chapter, or maybe just a paragraph or a few paragraphs. Don’t worry about where it fits in the novel or even if it grows into a novel. Sometimes, writing what I think is a part of a new novel, I discover that the form is actually something else, such as a lengthy short story instead. I have also liked the idea of working from other kinds of containers, such as filling one page or three pages in a sitting, or writing an article that I know jigsaws into a series of other articles. Having a container, whether it is the final container or not, gives a less intimidating space within which to work.
After years of writing, and even after months of following my own best practices, I still find that writing can elude me, sometimes when I want it to happen the most. Stay present with your writing, listen to it, be ready for it. In spite of our best intentions, the act of writing, as with all art, remains, at center, enigmatic and even, at times, fleeting. As much as I advise about setting the little traps noted above, I also recommend working outside of them, too — to retain the surprises, delights, effervescence, and impromptu revelations that inform all art.
Agnès Madrigal is part of the writers’ collective Madrigalit. Read more of her stories on Madrigalia.
This article is from the Madrigalit series Madrigalite.
