Writers’ words of wisdom to carry with us into the new year:
Honor creativity for its own sake, don’t take yourself too seriously, and keep showing up.
Over the years in this space, at times I have felt grounded or wise or hubristic enough to offer writing advice. This year I needed to be on the receiving end.
I collected weekly inbox exhortations, inspiration, craft tips, and prompts. In a world where we define success by publishing contracts, followers, and dollars, other writers reminded me that the best writing — or any art — springs from the need to express deep beauty (or pain), to study something up close to know it better, to share what astonishes us, moves us, expands us.
Here are some of the resources I turn to again and again.
Brenda Ueland’s classic, If You Want to Write, in which she shares how she counseled herself against the “why bother” of writing, and helped her students get past that. She builds her case in an unlikely starting point: why did the average Renaissance nobleman write sonnets — not to be published in some magazine, but because “his chest was full of an uncomfortable pent-up feeling that he had to express.” And because, “One of the intrinsic rewards for writing the sonnet was that then the nobleman knew and understood his own feelings better, and he knew more about what love was….”
Yes, and yes.
Next, she gives us Vincent van Gogh, whose letters revealed that his creative impulse “was just this: he loved something — the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.”
The poet Maya Stein offers inspiration in the form of online classes in short-form writing (one of which I did this year, and another I plan to do in January), as well as her 10-line Tuesday poem practice, something she has kept going since 2005. This week, her poem to close out 2023 ended with lines that moved me to write back to her (a practice I resolve to do more often because writers like to know when something they wrote touched another person):
…But take care, even if it’s just three lines, because someone will read it
like a found letter, and be reminded of birds and wonder.
They will say to themselves, Oh honey, and discover their own way of writing
the last stanza, gathering a flock of pens in their tender hands.
Jami Attenberg, novelist, co-founder of the #1000WordsofSummer writing boot camp community, and author/editor of the forthcoming #1000Words book, encourages and bolsters me to keep going when good writing feels elusive, in her Craft Talk substack. This week she wrote,
We write because it is the thing we do. Because we love it. Because we want to make our art, communicate our vision, shift our lives. Scratch that itch. You know that itch. When you are struggling to put words down on the page, I want you to focus on that itch and what it means to you. I hope it will carry you across your own finish line.
I am fortunate to have bespoke inspiration in my writing group. One of these beloveds, Chris Whitaker (a beautiful writer and editor and creative herself) who has counseled us through many agitated mornings of rudderlessness, recently offered methis suggestion: “When you sit down to write, ask yourself, ‘What is it today?’”
Not, what am I working on today, but what is it today? Not what product am I aiming to complete, but what does my heart know that my mind does not? This question invites you to a blank page without judgment.
Asking myself that question the first time, what bubbled up was a memory of my father coming home from work when I was nine years old or so, finding me in the living room stretched out on the sofa in my pink ballet tights and black leotard, reading Nancy Drew; setting his scuffed leather briefcase on the floor (the one a client had engraved for him in prison) and sitting down next to me; and the sense of safety I felt. I wrote about one childhood dinner conversation, my father talking about needing to be a problem-solver, like “When the judge says it’s your turn to call witnesses, and your witness isn’t there yet, you can’t freak out, you have to think on your feet.” My mom sat at the other end of the dinner table, not making any speeches, yet there wasn’t a doubt that she was the one I would seek when for help with problems that did not involve a courtroom.
What is it today?
Today it is veering toward recipes, and allowing that to be a creative outlet. It is vacation permission, with my freshman home from college, and me wanting to linger close, even though he still sleeps, just in case there is some overlapping contact time with him.
What is it today?
Today it is looking through shutters on the shady side of our house at the woody vines that cover the fence between my house and my neighbors’. It leans heavily toward me with the accumulation of years. Today it is knowing that I am about to get up to put on the tea kettle, because the skies are gray and this house runs cold, even in southern California.
Today it is leaning on what Vincent van Gogh counseled himself, as Brenda Ueland tells us: “I need not hurry myself; there is no good in that — but I must work on in full calmness and serenity, as regularly and concentratedly as possible, as briefly and concisely as possible.”
To all who need the strength of others’ wisdom to keep creating: May you remember the pursuit of authenticity and beauty. May you feel the grace, wonder, and permission of the open-ended question, what is it today?
Laura Nicole Diamond is the award-winning author of Shelter Us: a novel, and Dance with Me: a love letter; editor of the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood; and is writing a memoir about becoming a foster mom to a teenage asylum-seeker from Guatemala. For more, go to LauraNicoleDiamond.com. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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