Friday prompts + a writing confession

Hello and happy Friday! I hope things are slowing down for you and that rest and connection are within sight. It’s a bustling moment, but there’s no reason you can’t take a few quiet minutes to write. If you need a jumpstart, try one of the prompts below. And if you’re in more of a reading vibe, scroll on for some thoughts on rest and writing.

Stay warm, friends, and keep writing!

This week’s newsletter is normally for paid subscribers only, but I hear it’s the holidays, a time to be generous and give gifts. If you like what you read, you might consider upgrading your subscription—paid subscribers get a bonus newsletter once a month, as well as prompts and readings—or simply sharing this newsletter with somebody you think might enjoy it. Thanks, as always, for reading.

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It’s time for me to confess to a few things.

First off, I’m not really writing. Sentences appear in my head occasionally but the whole sitting down and putting them on paper thing is not happening. I finished enough of Act II to feel satsified by it and shoved my notebooks to the side, where they’ve been collecting dust for almost two weeks.

Second confession: the morning time I usually spend making sentences has been replaced by what some might call a rather indulgent habit—in the morning, after I feed the cats and pour my tea, I get *back* into bed and read for an hour. What am I, a princess?

Not Doing is something that feels very strange to most of us, thanks in part to capitalism’s insistence that we always be doing and producing and advancing. Because of the power of this system and culture, when we try to Not Do, we often feel guilty. That’s when the voices show up, telling us we are not good enough, not worth anything if we’re not producing.

This mindset can infect our writing as well—if we aren’t putting words down, if we aren’t forcing our butts into the chair, well, we must not be real writers, right? If we are not creating or editing sentences, surely we cannot be advancing our cause.

Although these voices are loud, insistent, downright obnoxious, they are actually completely wrong. A crucial aspect of the writing process is rest.

Since I stopped writing, my mind has been roaming. Yesterday while doing dishes, I thought about an unfinished essay draft and how it might be threaded with another unfinished essay draft. Periodically, the characters in my novel appear, reminding me of slivers of their stories yet to be told. And of course I am dreaming of new stories, true and made up, building up potential energy that will be released when it feels right to go back to the desk.

This mental wandering is so important, as is the not acting on it. I don’t worry about what ideas I might have and lose before I write them down. I just let the flakes in the snow globe flutter and trust they will land where they need to.

There’s a Peleton ad a streaming service regularly subjects me to in which a very buff trainer says, “No challenge, no change!” while I quietly die inside. What about “evolution through rest” or “revelation in stillness”? Our culture primes us to rush, to run, to charge, to push, selling us the lie that change comes only through extreme effort. But actually we get a lot out of doing nothing. When we cease to exert intentionally, effortfully, we give our bodies time to recharge and our brains access to a whole world of insight that can only come from idleness.

I start these dark, short days in the gentlest, most comforting way, lingering over my morning caffeine and the sentences of another artist as I lay in a warm bed with my spouse and our cats. I do this not because I am a princess, but because I am a human, inherently worthy regardless of what I accomplish.

This season I want to remind you—myself—that there’s nothing you need to accomplish to earn rest, that engaging in creativity and play are joys you have every right to and can choose regardless of how many emails you’ve written. That when it’s time to go back to the desk, you will know, and until then, the best thing you can do for yourself, for your writing, is nothing at all.