She's Writing: Getting to the End and Embracing the Crazy
Treat Yourself with Brittany Ackerman #4
In our age of self-awareness and personal care, we have been collectively encouraged to treat ourselves—to our daily overpriced coffee and little pastries, to taking hot girl walks, to learning a new craft, buying houseplants, redecorating our space, spending time with our furry friends, etc. Treating ourselves means doing something enjoyable that isn’t “necessary.” We treat ourselves to froyo not because we need to, but because we want to! We deserve it!
Treat Yourself is a monthly column on process where Brittany Ackerman explores this notion of self-care. How do we treat ourselves when we write? How can we take care of our physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being as writers? Is it possible to find peace in our daily lives by balancing what we give to ourselves versus what we give to our work?
Brittany wants to find out! In these dispatches from her writing desk, she encourages writers to join in on the conversation by commenting, engaging, and sharing personal experiences– the struggles, the wins, the what the checks!? Writing can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be, so let’s treat ourselves to the support and encouragement of our literary community– right here, right now! Or, like, only if you feel up to it? If not, no worries, hehe.
She's Writing
A student in my personal essay class shares that she’s feeling inspired. We have one more week of the semester, one more week until their final drafts are due. This writer tells us how she’s finding her groove in the material and is excited about being with the work. She looks forward to finishing her day job and sitting down to write in the late afternoons. She prepares special beverages and puts on comfy clothes. She makes a playlist on Spotify called She’s writing.
It’s the end of the year, and there’s a big pressure to use my voice to say something important, something meaningful and universal and relatable. But in my classroom, we often talk about authenticity over originality.
And what I want to use my voice to discuss here now is what happens when I near the end of a manuscript, how I basically dissociate into the pages of my work for five to seven business days.
*
On Thanksgiving Eve, I finished a manuscript I’ve been working on since June of 2023. The days leading up to completing a draft are pure chaos. I yell at Siri while I drive, dictating notes and questions and answers to those same questions. I write through my daughter’s naptime and work right when she goes down to sleep at night. I stay up late, which I hate, but I can’t stop writing.
Back in October, I’d wanted to write at least 1,000 words every day. I was going strong for the first ten days, moving along at a solid pace. But on Friday, October 11th, I got a migraine. The next day, I had the dreaded migraine hangover, and the day after that, I just didn’t feel like writing. My aim to get shit done fizzled out and I gave up.
When November came around, I wanted to recommit myself to the project. I’d gotten the idea for the story during a Making Time in Fiction workshop I took online in February of 2023. I was very pregnant and was feeling inspired for the first time during my pregnancy. Then the baby came and then the story was shelved as I entered Newbornland.
In the summer, I felt ready to begin again. I started writing and while I still had no sense of a regular writing practice at the time, I was finally moving along with it. It was a slow year of progress, and I felt like I needed a push of accountability to keep me going. At the mall one day, on the phone with a friend who had also recently moved across the country, I proposed the idea of sharing our manuscripts with each other and checking in as we wrote our drafts. I was so committed to myself and to my dear friend, that I even kept our plans for our first scheduled meeting after I had to have emergency surgery and had been in the ER the night prior. I Zoomed her from bed and my husband brought me Chick-fil-a and all the pills I was supposed to take. I understand that this is the kind of obligation one must have to a project. You must be willing to be uncomfortable.
It has been a glorious few months of working with this writer, my friend, someone whose work and brain and heart I admire deeply. I think it’s safe to say we are both proud of the major strides we’ve made, and to do this as a duo brings an extra layer of joy and appreciation to the whole practice.
But when I hit that October roadblock, I knew I needed another push, another pal, another person in this with me. I met a writer friend for coffee and we talked about this desire for culpability at this stage in our process. We agreed to text each other every day for the month of November and cheer each other on as we wrote to the bone. I thought that receiving a text that my friend had already written for the day before I’d even gotten out of my pajamas might make me feel horrible, but her messages only motivated me to get my ass in gear and get with the program. I felt responsible for both of our efforts, to be that positive voice for her as she is for me when things get hard. And things are these days, mostly hard. We both have kids and husbands and jobs, and we both have big dreams and impressive goals for ourselves. To say I admire her fortitude and determination is an understatement. She amazes me with her open heart and her wisdom.
Cut to the week of Thanksgiving, what should be a Fall Break, but it isn’t in California for some reason. I had solidly written 1,000+ words a day, every day so far, and I was nearing the end of my draft. I could feel it. Things were ramping up. My days were fixed around this manuscript. Every waking moment was focused on how I would get the work done and how much more I could do per day so I could be done before the holiday, so I could, God forbid, take a break and enjoy myself.
*
Those five to seven business days, the week I feel myself gearing up to the end of the draft—I am manic. I’ve never tracked my daily word count before, but it is satisfying to chart my progress each day in my planner. Some days I break 1,000 in less than twenty minutes. Others, I am sitting there for hours grinding out the stuff.
In November, I write 42,150 words toward my manuscript, which currently clocks out around 120k. I don’t say this to brag or to be annoying. I say it because it’s shocking. It’s a shock to write this many words, words that came from the ether and into my head and onto a page, words that I committed myself to writing and only got written because I made it happen.
I think the crazy at the end of a draft comes from the desire to create my own urgency in my work. The last few years have felt like trudging through mud in the literary world. I have felt so behind, so less than, and whether or not that’s true, whether I am believing a false narrative about myself or whether there is some verity to it, doesn’t matter at all. The only thing that matters is that I keep writing and that I keep making my art.
Even though I’ve had encouragement and support along the way, this part, I have to go alone. At the end of the day, I am the only one who can make my writing happen. No one is going to do it for me, and no one is going to believe in it more than I do.
This month wasn’t easy. I wrote through getting an MRI and two rounds of blood work; I wrote through more news of illness in our family; I wrote through getting chemical bonding agent in my eye during a cavity filling; I wrote with three jobs and a toddler and a husband; I wrote through unexplained shoulder pain (or maybe I'm just getting old) and burning my forearm on the edge of a pan and jamming my finger. I wrote in the morning and in the afternoon and in the night. I wrote with a cup of tea or with an overpriced latte or with nothing at all. I wrote at work and at coffee shops and the local library but mostly I wrote in my house at my dining room table with my daughter asleep upstairs and the monitor open on an app in my phone. I wrote as I watched her get comfortable and change sleeping positions. I watched as she reached for her stuffed elephant and brought it to her chest to cuddle.
How many times I looked at the bed or the couch and said I just want to lie down.
How many times I took a deep breath and kept writing anyway.
*
I cried twice on Thanksgiving. Once because when the turkey timer went off, the bottom of the turkey was still undercooked, and again because when the meal was finally served, I was so exhausted I didn’t even want to eat. But I did eventually wash my face and sit down at the table I’d set and eat the food I’d cooked and enjoyed time with my family.
As I neared the final sentence of the draft, my husband walked into the kitchen for a snack. “I might cry,” I told him as he poked around in the fridge. “Are you okay?” he asked and turned to me.
“I'm about to finish my draft,” I told him, and he smiled. He left the roo,m and I typed my final words. I cried at the ending, which doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does. I cry because I am relieved, because I love the story, because I love what writing is and what it does and what it allows me to do. I cry because I did it and it’s finished. And then I shut my laptop because another day of work is done.
This is so beautiful written and inspiring, made me question: do I do enough for my writing? The answer is no. I don’t do anything, but complaining how hard it is, which is fair - life’s hard and difficult and even if I wish for an easy way out, there isn’t and shouldn’t be one. So reading this reminded me that if I want something I need to make it happen myself. Thank you, for sharing this with us.
After I read your essay, I wondered whether I am a "real" writer, because I don't seem to suffer as much as many writers do. I just sit down and write. I won a poetry award with a poem that I just started at the top and finished at the end without a single change. Of course, I'm not famous. I don't have an agent. My three novels have been printed by a POD publisher instead of a respected traditional publisher. (I did that mostly because I was 81 at the time I began the novels and was afraid they wouldn't get published...that I wouldn't live that long. ) And lo! at age 82 I did get breast cancer, but it's all fine now....and I'm still writing, this time looking for an agent and a traditional publisher. Does that make me a real writer? You seem so intense....and I admire that.
Good luck to all of us.