Showing Up for Your Writing

Showing Up for Yourself

For those of you keeping track: I’ve received one rejection for June so far and am now up to 50 rejections for 2025!

#ILoveRejections #CelebrateRejections

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The Easiest Thing to Do?

Sometimes my writing feels stale. Like old-bread stale. Sometimes even moldy.

Sometimes revision is tedious, frustrating.

Sometimes I simply don’t feel like writing.

And yet.

Even when I don’t feel like writing, I want to be writing. There’s an innate drive to do it.

Every once in a while, though, I lose my momentum and don’t write as much as I want to, don’t revise as much as I want to, don’t submit as much as I want to.

Something I know from years and years of experience is that one of the easiest things to do as a writer is to stop writing.

You might tell yourself that it’s just for a moment, a few days, or a few weeks.

But you’re probably lying to yourself.

Because something else I know from years and years of experience is that it’s actually not easy to stop writing.

For me, getting out of my writing routine can cause me to feel a kind of unevenness or what I might call “floating.” There can be distress, turmoil. What am I doing with my life??

I didn’t do as much writing, revising, or submitting in May as I would have liked. But this happens periodically, and it’s nothing to be alarmed about. If I’ve learned anything over the last few years, it’s how to give myself grace—to let what is be what it is. There’s nothing wrong with taking a break when needed.

But as we entered June, something dawned on me:

No matter how "unproductive” you may feel, you can still show up for yourself—and your writing—in small ways.

Showing up for your writing—and thus yourself—can literally just take a few minutes a day.

Process vs. Product(ivity)

By chance, do you remember what you were doing five years ago?

Ah, yes, 2020. COVID. The pandemic. It almost seems like something from a distant past, another lifetime. Maybe it was.

I just revisited a blog post I wrote in April 2020, not even a month into the pandemic. There was an initial boom (seemingly) of productivity in the early stages of the pandemic—for other people, at least. Not for me. I recall a lot of talk about people learning new hobbies, reading more, trying things they wouldn’t ordinarily have time for. But that certainly wasn’t everyone’s experience. So, in the aforementioned blog post, “Writing Productivity During a Pandemic,” I explored what productivity meant to me at that time.

But there doesn’t need to be a pandemic to feel the weight of what you think you should be doing, what you should be writing.

For the month of June, to help get myself back into a more consistent writing routine, I’ve committed to showing up for my writing by doing the following:

Focusing on my own writing in some way for at least ten minutes a day.

In some ways, this is similar to my November challenge of writing 30 no-stakes drafts in 30 days. The main difference is that I’m not focusing solely on generating new work this time; instead, I may use my ten minutes for revising and/or submitting.

The idea is not to generate new work or “finish” old work—although both are bonuses. It’s simply about me showing up for my writing and reestablishing a routine and creative mindset.

My still life drawing with acrylics on canvas panel—art lesson, June 4, 2025. This is not a finished product, nor will it ever be one. It’s merely a step in the process. It’s practice, another way of showing up for myself creatively.

As I discussed the other day with a writer friend, process and progress are intertwined. My take:

As long as you are engaged in the process, you are making progress, even if it’s not visible progress. Even if you don’t necessarily have a product to publish.

This immersion into process takes the focus off of a “product” (i.e., the end result). It’s not a coincidence that product is part of the word productivity. Our society lusts after that productivity, after that final product. And this is sometimes where writers get stuck. They can’t see the end result, so they might feel like they’re not making progress.

But writing is really about process. Because process is where the magic happens. Process is where progress occurs.

And it only takes a few minutes each day to make progress. To engage with the creative process.

To show up for yourself and your writing.

Seriously. It’s easier than you might think.

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Writing News

In January, I received the delightful news that my story “The Day I Went Missing” (originally published in Gooseberry Pie) was selected for Best Microfiction 2025. And, more recently, I learned that the anthology will be released on July 7! This yearly anthology is a great way to learn more about the microfiction form; in fact, I’d consider it essential reading for any short-form writer.

Best Microfiction 2025 is now available for preorder.

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