Don’t Worry or Kill Your Darlings
September 28, 2022
Every morning I greet my works in progress and choose which one is speaking to me, it’s tricky because I have to be in the right mood and frame of mind for each one. For The Magazine, I have to be furious, and that one usually speaks to me loudest about nine days before my period. The Party mostly speaks to me in the trippy days of endless Amsterdam summer, I need sunshine for that one. The Lady Witch Detectives, fittingly, has a will of its own. It comes to me everywhere all the time, and is the one that writes itself, all around me, every day. The Netherlands is a witchy place.
I’m a sucker for writing advice and any time I get a glimpse into a writer’s process I’m riveted, but at a certain point I realize reading about writing is just another form of procrastination and the bottom line is you have to do the work yourself, and the work is writing. Still, one piece of advice I saw hit me like a thunderbolt. It’s from a guy named Michael Jamin on Tiktok (also fabulous for procrastinating) and he said to approach writing by choosing a specific story that happened to you and write it from an outsider’s perspective like it’s gossip — catty, a little bit unfair but interesting, which is what gossip is and why people are universally attracted to it. Begin your story that way, but about half way through change the point of view to your own and tell it like you know the characters, you understand their motivations and have empathy for them, this way you are tapping into a place where you are making the story real, vulnerable and honest. I love this approach and you bet your ass I’m going to try it.
The weather has changed in Amsterdam, summer is long gone and while it’s a relief to be out of the scary, awful drought we had this summer, the nonstop rain affects me. I’m back to coffee and writing morning pages in front of my SAD lamp. I’m grateful for the rain, the vines and ivy are thriving again and everything feels alive, even as we head into the dead season, but today we had a break in the rain and it’s amazing how my spirits instantly lift when the sky is blue again.
In other news, I leave for my fully immersive Dutch language program on Friday. It’s a residency program in Drenthe where I’m going to eat, breathe and sleep Dutch in the hopes it starts to take hold in my brain. I’ve been doing the pre-residency homework assignments, many of which are the same exercises I’ve been doing off and on for the past four years, but this time, finally, there are glimmers of progress. I was a literature major in school, but grammar was my worst subject. I hate it like I hate math, so learning a language the traditional way — breaking down the parts of speech and learning the rules of grammar makes my brain switch off. In order to learn a language I need to hear it spoken organically, the same phrases over and over and over again. I’m going away to swim in Dutch. Tot Ziens!
xoxo