458: How to Take a Break

#AmWriting

Jess, Sarina, Jennie and Jess are all here to talk about taking a break from various angles: the mechanics angle, the guilt angle, the fear angle, the identity angle and inspiration angle.
Mechanics.

1. Leave yourself notes about the project when you leave off, for example, “The next thing that needs to happen is this…” so when you come back, you know how to get back into the project. This is Sarina’s daily practice, but it really helps when she has to leave a project behind. This can be especially helpful when you have to go away for an unexpected emergency.
   
2. Jennie adds that the only way you can do this is if you have a place to keep and find those notes to yourself. In one of your 47 notebooks or in the document itself? Or, as Jess adds, on the side of the cardboard box you use for trash in your basement workshop that you almost recycle by accident.
   
3. Jennie also notes that you have to have intentionality, to know what you are writing so you can know what comes next, whether that’s in your outline, inside outline, or whatever.
   
4. Jennie has a little notebook she brings on vacation with her and she downloads those ideas into that just before going to sleep at night when she’s away.
   
5. These vacation inspiration moments are much like shower thoughts, part of the magic of our brain unhooking, getting into deep default mode network, and becoming its most creative.
   
6. Sarina mentioned an article about how walking makes you more creative, also a study in why tapping into the default mode network is so effective as a practice.
   

Fear

1. The only way to get over this is to sit down and do it. Open the document. Just start.
   
2. Jennie points out that getting back into a manuscript when it’s disappeared feels horrifying but it’s much easier than it sounds and has happened to one of our frequent guests, Sarah Stewart Taylor, when her then-toddler created a password for the document that was not recoverable. She had to give in to the fact that her book was gone, and recreate it out of her memory.
   

Guilt and Identity

1. It only took Jess until her fiftieth year to figure out that her process - of walking, gardening, beekeeping, musing - is a part of writing, and that’s cool.
   
2. Can you be a writer if you are not actively writing? Yes, if research, planning, thinking and otherwise cogitating is a part of your writing process. Get over it. The words have to land on the page eventually, of course, but if you are doing both, have grace for the not-actively-writing part of the writing process.
   

#AmReading

Tess Gerritsen’s series set in Maine (The Spy Coast and The Summer Guests) and, once she finished those two books, Jess went back to The Surgeon, where it all started for Tess Gerritsen. Stay tuned for our interview with her!
Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (Don’t watch the movie trailer if you plan to read the book!)
Sarah Harman’s All the Other Mothers Hate Me

Amy Tintera’s Listen for the Lie

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer The Unfolding

Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (coming to Netflix in August!)
Janelle Brown’s What Kind of Paradise

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Writers and readers, KJ here, if you love #AmWriting and I know you do, and I know you do, and especially if you love the regular segment at the end of most episodes where we talk about what we've been reading, you will also love my weekly #AmReading email. Is it about what I've been reading and loving? It is. And if you like what I write, you'll like what I read. But it is also about everything else. I've been #AmDoing: sleeping, buying clothes and returning them, launching a spelling bee habit, reading other people's weekly emails. Let's just say it's kind of the email about not getting the work done, which I mean that's important too, right? We can't work all the time. It's also free, and I think you'll really like it. So you can find it at kjdellantonia.com or kjda.substack.com or by clicking on my name on Substack, if you do that kind of thing.
Come hang out with me. You won't be sorry.