How to Keep an Open Heart
When the results vary.
Hi friends.
I originally posted this as a note, but it seemed to have struck a nerve (in a good way) so I thought I’d send it out wide:
I saw this in celebrated novelist Lisa Ko’s instagram stories and got her permission to repost it.
(If you’ve not read Lisa’s work, she is a National Book Award finalist for the mesmerizing novel The Leavers, and last year she published the highly acclaimed Memory Piece.)
I absolutely love the confidence and energy that goes into knowing what you need to be doing for yourself and your work and what it means to have a deep relationship with your process. Lisa also has a clear understanding of what the long haul of the life of a writer looks like, which is always helpful for me personally to see! This washed over me beautifully at the end of a busy and complicated year.
I’ve been thinking further about this, about the importance of knowing your process, and also the value of trusting yourself to keep going even when the results aren’t always obvious.
The world we live in is pretty results-based. If we work out every day we want to lose inches. If we pass the exam we want to move onto the next grade. If we put in the overtime we want to reach the next career plateau. If we kill all the monsters on level six we expect the screen to immediately reveal level seven.
And if we write every day for x amount of months/y we expect to…what? Finish a novel? I think that’s a fair expectation and yet our creative life doesn’t always match up with the time invested, or at least not always on a specific schedule. I say this not as a discouragement but just so you understand your results may vary.
And if that’s the case (and it is, trust me, for all of us, in one way or another), then you need to approach your work in a big-hearted fashion. A big heart for yourself. With forgiveness, love, hope—but also with commitment. Supporting yourself means cutting yourself some slack, but also always returning to the work. It’ll be waiting for you.
Hope you’re all having a good week.
Jami
You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.
From the day my Dad told me he had been given a terminal diagnosis to the day he died I didn’t work in my novels. I just focused on him, and learning to sew. I’m back writing now and doing an MA in it. It was part of my journey
This is very encouraging. A thing I have come to, as a way of showing my effort since results are somewhat out of my control, is writing things on a paper calendar. I started this the last 6 weeks or so. I use a specific colored marker for each thing, like morning pages, meditation, walking, novel work (even if I’m just staring at it), and other things that matter to me. The color-coding seems to help me because I can tell at a glance what I’ve done throughout the month. It’s not necessarily a don’t-break-the-chain kind of thing. I don’t know. A brain log? It seems to ease my anxiety and makes me feel better to see my effort.