15/07/2025
In May I came to the sumptuous, supportive cabin retreat of and worked away at the opening chapters of my next book. Now that I’m here on vacation with my family, I’ve brought printouts of what I have so far. I’ve crossed out quite a bit and scribbled ideas for replacements or reworking in the margins.
One of those writing days in May, I felt so swept up in the process that I struggled to fall asleep that night. Every creative knows how hard it can be to press the gas, and how equally distasteful it feels to pump the brakes once you finally find momentum. I realize that when I get into that energy, I risk inhabiting and energy that writes as if this is not the 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 draft but the 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 draft - which is both absurd and naive.
The writer and mentor Anne Lamott says:
“You don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it.”
The creative act is often described as birthing, but it’s so unlike it. To birth - to bring forth - evokes something arriving fully complete, unique, and perfect. But writing is iterative. Unlike sculpting from stone, you can subtract, add, and rearrange to finesse. If you scrap what you wrote, that’s not a failure of the material. Its purpose was served: revealing what needed to be there so your vision becomes clearer.
Accepting this with more grace feels like the biggest difference I’m noticing between my first book and this one. How lovely to experience personal evolution by daring to be creative.
