Writers pour so much energy into their craft that sometimes we forget that creative pursuits other than writing can fill us up in other important ways. Here, we’ll look at what writers do when they aren’t writing, and how those pursuits affect the return to the page. This month, writer Jodi Paloni ruminates on gathering information and inspiration before returning to the page.
I’m walking along a dirt road one day in winter, swapping woes with a friend—a writer—who struggles to sit down at her desk, face the blank page. Once she gets going, she can work for hours. “How ‘bout you?” she asks.
It isn’t difficult for me to arrive to my writing. The difficulty I face is staying put. It’s a trait my elementary school teachers noticed about me, too, a long time ago; I am easily distracted. My many interests compete—gardening, cooking soups, creating mixed media images, playing with my grandkids, watching movies in the middle of the day. Time away from the desk nourishes me. And then, by and by, I feel the urge to return.
One of my favorite distractions is taking trips to the food co-op, when I can multitask. While driving and shopping, I listen to audiobooks, favorites I’ve read already—Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; Braiding Sweetgrass narrated by the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer; anything by Elizabeth Strout, Jeannette Winterson, or Jane Austen. I love these recordings for tracking the arc of the story in randomly selected places, and also for the sentences, the character details, the images rendered with color, shape, texture, and light. I know the stories well enough that I can browse the produce section, cull for the best beans, knock on a cantaloupe, ask the high schooler stocking shelves where to find capers without worrying I’ll lose my place in the story. Because for me, in these moments, it’s not about the story as much as it’s about the sensate experience of imagining it. Listening to the music of well-executed prose while scooping dry kidney beans into a brown paper bag is like attending a craft talk wherein you aren’t asked to sit still.
At home, putting away groceries and chopping for a soup, I turn on The New Yorker: Fiction podcast, a series in which a well-known writer chooses a short story they admire by another well-known writer to read aloud in its entirety and then discuss with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Because I cook similarly to how I write, I don’t follow recipes when making soup. While I dice garlic and onions and a rainbow of veggies, fling them together with herbs and spices to sizzle and simmer in a pot, I listen to two masters discuss the work of a third. I listen while I stir and taste and adjust. It’s as if I’m discussing fiction with friends in the kitchen. My body is moving, my senses alert. My brain is firing. I am joyful. I believe the soup tastes better and nourishes more fully because of the fiction and that my fiction can become richer because of the soup.
The same way I stalk wooded backroads while talking with friends about our writing practices, immersing myself in craft while shopping and cooking is a way I merge two passions. But this habit goes beyond mere multitasking. It’s a form of pre-writing. I am collecting, embodying experiences to bring forward, later, when I feel that urge to return to my desk.
I think about a book I loved reading to my kids when they were little, a picture book called Frederick by Italian writer and collage artist Leo Lionni. The book tells the story of a mouse among many mice living together in a stone wall. They are gathering food for winter, all except Frederick, who, instead of helping, is daydreaming. He’s collecting sunrays and colors, “for winter is gray.” Frederick, we come to learn, is pre-writing. In the middle of winter when the stores are barren, the details he’s collected, his poems of summer warm and feed the others, body and soul, as only a story can.
The day my writing pal stopped on the road by the pond, she turned away from me to watch a pair of beavers, their heads skimming across the flat surface in the sun. A dreamy expression softened her previous expression of consternation. She said something wise, something short and sweet, something I think about often. She said, “Maybe it’s all writing. Isn’t it? The other things that we do. Because we’re writers, everything we do is writing.”
I never know for sure how standing side-by-side with another writer, to watch on a sparkling spring day, or listening to fiction while arranging vegetables by complimentary color on the cutting board will directly impact my work, but I’ve come to trust the process. And I plug the process into whatever I love doing outside of writing—harvesting chard and parsley in a late autumn garden, enjoying the swish of tissue paper while building a collage, sliding down a bumpy snowbank with the grandkids under a bleak sky. If I attend to the details, these sensate experiences somehow, some day, seam into my narratives.
What my friend says to me is true.
When you’re a writer, it’s all writing.
Jodi Paloni
Jodi Paloni is the author of the linked story collection, They Could Live with Themselves, runner-up for the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, finalist for the Maine Book Award, and an Indie Publishers Award Silver Medalist. She won the Short Story America Prize, placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and is a three-time finalist for the Maine Writers Literary Awards in the Short Form category. Her stories appear in Carve, Contrary Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Whitefish Review, in the anthologies North by NortheastI and II, and Short Story America IV, and many other places. Jodi has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She offers generative writing salons, workshops, and retreats virtually and in-person on the coast of Maine. To learn more: https://www.jodipaloni.com/
Curated by Jen Dupree