Hey there A+ member!
This roundtable was inspired both by you, our members, writing in asking for about writing from our team (and I don’t think this will be the last roundtable about writing at all!), and by my personal, continuous and enduring failure to maintain any semblance of a regular writing routine. I just hop from one “routine” to another, but actually, don’t you have to maintain a certain order of events over a certain number of days for it to be considered a “routine”? Otherwise, is it just a…happening?
So, in an effort to inspire all of us (because sitting down and actually writing words is half the battle), I thought why not start with what surrounds us when we write, when we do it, and what we feel we need with us to begin the process? What snacks do we have? What do we listen to?
If you have tips for establishing a writing routine (or want to talk about how we don’t actually need them!!), or want to share your own routine, we’d all love to hear from you in the comments! Thank you for sustaining this space dedicated to writing by queer and trans people. You all are the best!
xoxo,
Nico
i love everything about this, thank you.
i have found things that work well for me – i write right away in the morning (but i don’t have to write every day – i just find it extraordinarily difficult to write after i’ve left the stillness of the early morning); no noise of any sort; caffeine is a must – but i’ve also learned that, when i have a writing ROUTINE, i often find the writing serving the routine rather than the routine serving the writing, so i try to avoid establishing any rules for myself. i think it’s amazing if routines and rituals work for others, though, and i love seeing the varieties of experience here!
How cool to get a peek at your processes!
Heathers is my favorite. “ oh, the tweets my son socks has tweeted!“
Love to see the variety in everyone’s techniques! And how some people have different methods for writing for work vs. writing for personal/creative reasons. I’m an academic and view manuscript writing as part of my job, so I don’t have a special routine for that, but I also write poetry and have had the same poem-writing routine for several years. It’s kind of similar to Dani’s. I wake up early, make a cup of masala chai with oat milk, sit down with my poetry notebook and pen (a Pilot G2 0.38mm) either on my floor couch or outside on my back porch, and write a poem. Sometimes it’s a new poem, more often it’s a draft of an existing poem. Sometimes I change one word or add one line and that’s my writing for the day. I think it works because it’s low pressure – as long as I look at a poem and stare off into the distance about it, I feel like writing happened. My poetry notebook is a three-ring binder, each draft goes on its own three-hole-punched page of printer paper, and drafts belong to the same poem are paperclipped together. It’s a weird little system but it works for me!