[00:00:01.080] – Rachel Thompson
Hi, luminous writers, and welcome to Write, Publish, and Shine, a podcast for creative writers who want to write with more depth, publish with more courage, and stay connected to the work that keeps calling them back. I’m Rachel Thompson, writer, editor, and host of this show. This is episode 122, and it is also the final episode for the summer. I’m going to take a little time away from publishing new episodes so I can rest, think, make some new things, and work on the next run of the podcast. I expect new episodes will be back in September.

[00:00:33.100]
As I anticipate that return future me will make to the podcast, I want to talk about returning in writing. This feels like the right subject to pause on since, when I come back in September, I know I will not be returning as exactly the same person. A draft can change when you look again too, or maybe more accurately, the draft has not changed at all. You have. You’ve lived another month, read another book, lost something, learned something, rested. Last month, my family and I took a few days away by the sea, speaking of rest, and across the water, hazy mountains rose from the coastline.

[00:01:09.820]
And from one angle, the mountains looked blue, and a few minutes later, they were lavender. A shadow I had not noticed became the whole landscape. At dusk, my son said, “The sky and sea are the same colour, Mom.” And I reminded him that there was land there too. So it was the sky, land, and sea that were all kind of blurring together. The longer we looked, the less certain we felt we were looking at the same coastline.

[00:01:33.270]
I’m sharing this because this is the metaphor I’m going to apply to your drafts today. A piece of writing can look like a disaster one day and then reveal another facet when you return. What felt like one thought may contain several smaller thoughts nested inside it. What looked like a single emotional truth may have other colours running through it, those lavenders and blues.

[00:01:55.070]
One day you’re noticing sounds, so your draft focuses on your ear, and another day the eye, another day your compassion, another day your impatience, your tenderness, your embarrassment, your anger. That’s me a lot in the summer heat right now. Other times, your love. The same material met by a different part of you, the writer. And maybe to take this even further into my own life, my own writing life, sixteen years ago, I published my first book, Galaxy. If you’re newer to the podcast, you may not even know I published a book before I became known primarily as an editor and instructor.

[00:02:32.380]
At the time, I thought I was living what I referred to as my annus mirabilis. The year my book published, I fell in love, I moved across the world. It felt like everything was happening at once. We had a big expectation happening at the time too in our life. And it was like a whole life arriving in a single year for me.

[00:02:57.180]
And for a while, I believed that was the shape my life would take from then on. One book becoming another, one draft opening into the next, a future made at least in part by staying close to the page and big changes in family and my love life. But the same year also had a really profound loss. That expectation turned into tragedy. And I want to be honest that the publishing experience itself, the actual experience of putting Galaxy into the world, wasn’t always easy for me, or didn’t happen in a way that I had hoped as well.

[00:03:30.430]
It was a different time, a different industry really too, and a different me. And so there I was holding all of it at once, the book, the falling in love, the move, the loss, and underneath it, a publishing experience that hadn’t been what I expected it to be. And I also think, how could it have been? Because I was changing so much at the same time. There were a lot of things wrapped around that, if you can imagine.

[00:03:53.610]
But at the time, in the devastation of that, I found myself thinking of that line from Anaïs Nin about not wanting to taste life twice. Or actually, her line is, “We write to taste life twice.” And I kept thinking, “I didn’t really want to taste this twice.” Writing, for her, was a way of living a moment once in the experience of it and once again on the page. And I do think that is what writing can be too, but when life can be really challenging, many people write through it. For me, after a long stretch after that year, I didn’t want to taste it twice. I didn’t want to go back through it on the page.

[00:04:28.230]
And writing became harder than it had ever been before, not because I lost my ability, but because returning to the material meant living it again and I wasn’t ready to. But enter more about editing for me too, more of a focus on editing. I was already an editor then. Editing did not replace writing exactly, but it became the creative work I could still do. I doubled down on it because I could still meet someone else’s draft with attention, even when my own relationship to the page felt altered.

[00:04:57.650]
The first issue of Room magazine that I edited was called Mythologies of Loss. And looking back, that feels really uncanny to me and special, that I was given that opportunity and that I took it, or made it for myself in many ways. So I was spending days reading essays, poems, and stories about grief, memory, transformation, and survival. And I really needed that then too. I was learning something about attention to that part of me, even if I didn’t have language for it. So editing taught me so much.

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And when I think about it in terms of writing too, a draft often knows something before the writer does. So as we’re creating things, I believe that’s true. And sometimes one line carries the truth before the rest of the piece catches up. So when we’re returning to ideas in our writing, it’s not always repeating because we’re often bringing a different quality of attention. And I think your work here is not to force meaning onto the draft, but to listen to what the draft already knows.

[00:06:02.120]
I think I spent the last sixteen years of my own writing learning how to return, returning to the page, returning to curiosity. Returning after life changes you. That is probably why I believe so deeply that the draft changes when you look again, because sometimes the draft has changed, sometimes you’re noticing something that was always there, and sometimes you have changed, so you’re really seeing things in a new way. A writer, Colleen, who I’m coaching right now, put this better than I could. She let me know I could share this insight she had with her work this week.

[00:06:35.290]
“The fragments were hard to sit with,” she said, speaking about writing in fragmented ways, “but they’ve uncovered some hidden stories, some truths about my process, that the quote-unquote bad writing isn’t bad at all. I know this logically, but I had to sit with the discomfort and feel it before I could feel my way out of it.” What struck me wasn’t only what she discovered about the draft, but also how it shows what I’ve been saying about returning. We step away and come back before we understand. In the meantime, we’ve settled a little, we’ve changed a little, and because we’ve changed, the draft begins to show us something new. Another thing about returning is that I find many writers worry when the same material keeps returning in their work, and I know I’ve had those worries myself before.

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There’s a bit of a private shame in it, especially when it comes to memoir writing. So, haven’t I written this already, or shouldn’t I be over this? Why am I still circling the same scene, the same question, the same image, the same ache? Returning can become avoidance when it keeps the draft safe, repeating the same explanation, the same conclusion, the same polished little defence. One of my early mentors, Betsy Warland, in her book Breathing the Page, refers to this as the coma story too, the one that you just can keep telling again and again as if you’re locked into the shape of this narrative without rethinking it or revisiting it or revising it in any way.

[00:08:01.950]
I’ll link Breathing the Page in the show notes if you want to sit with that idea further. But I think a lot of us can return to ideas again and again and let it become craft when the angle changes, when we let ourselves change and come to the page in a new way. I think the questions writers can ask about a piece that returns to them, an idea that keeps circling, can include, what can I see now that I could not see before? It’s certainly something I’ve asked in my own writing as I’ve gone through profound changes in my life. What has the draft not said yet that is there under the surface?

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Because I think often those little bits are already there, and maybe it just takes the writer time to notice it. And what happens if I follow the image instead of the explanation? This is probably the feedback that I give. I’m currently teaching my flash memoir course, and I think almost every time I’m providing feedback, I’m always circling the parts where maybe there’s some explaining here, and is there a way to give us this through images, through a different angle of the moment? So my practice note for you in this idea of returning and changing is to choose a draft, a scene, an image, or question that keeps calling you back.

[00:09:21.930]
And pick material that you feel a little voltage from, it just has a spark when you think about it, and then return to it three times with a different kind of attention. So I’m just thinking again of looking at that land, that sea, and that sky, and how you can see it in different ways from different angles. So the first return, you might pick a sense like the ear, for example. Read the draft out loud or read one passage aloud. Listen for something that has charge to it.

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Listen for rhythm, repetition, or a word that seems to know more than the sentence around it. Like, why that particular word? Why does that resonate so much? And a prompt after reading it aloud might be, “The line I can still hear is…” Fill in the blank after that. Another return could be through the body.

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So come back to the same material and just notice where it lives physically in you, the breath, the throat, the hands, the stomach, tingling of the skin, maybe the way that you hold your body, the posture. The body is not going to give you a thesis, let’s say, but it’s going to give you a flinch, a tightening. Maybe you’re going to lean forward or maybe you’re going to lean back in refusal. And a prompt you can use for this with your writing is, “The body knows,” or, “My body knows.” A third return might be to check in with your mood today before you write and let that be the angle.

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Are you feeling compassionate, crying at a medical show, raising my hand here? Or are you feeling angry, stomping around the neighbourhood, also raising my hand? Or are you just generally moody, mood swings, definitely raising my hand on that one too. But whatever it is, when you check in with yourself, you may have completely different feelings happening for yourself in terms of your mood. Come back to your material and write from that mood specifically.

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Not the mood you think this piece is supposed to hold, the one you’re actually bringing to the page today. And that one’s a little different from the body return. The body is about physical sensation, the flinch or the tightening. And this one is about emotional weather. What’s the climate you’re writing in today?

[00:11:27.410]
And what does the material look like through that particular window? And a prompt after working with this might be, “This piece feels,” or, “The mood in this piece is.” And a fourth return, if you want to keep going, is to come back to the same material at a different time of day. Read or write it first thing in the morning before you’ve talked to anyone, then come back to it late at night when you’re tired and your guard is down, and just notice what each version of you reaches for. Morning-you might reach for clarity, for getting it right.

[00:11:59.480]
Late-night-you might reach for the thing you’ve never said out loud in daylight. And neither version is more true than the other, of course, but the difference between them is something that tells you something about what the piece is asking for and what capacity you have to give it at different hours. What selves show up at those different hours? Maybe it’s more of your full self that can come into the piece that way. When I think about returning to and approaching things at different angles, I always think about another craft book that I love, Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, and Explode, about forms.

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I’ll put a link to that one in the show notes as well. She writes a lot about forms that move by returning rather than marching straight ahead. So sometimes the shape of a piece does not appear because we planned it, but it appears because we kept noticing what echoed. There’s that image that returned, the sentence rhythm that would not leave, the contradiction that appeared in every version, even when we tried to write around it. One angle might illuminate another until the draft reveals a shape that is both more complex and more simple than expected. And I think that’s how form can find you.

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It’s sometimes challenging to set out to write in a particular form, although often we have to choose something to get going. But I think eventually there is a time when the piece itself is going to show you the form that it needs to be in. And the only way that that’s going to happen is through that returning and noticing and trying different angles. So a session of writing practice, I don’t think always ends with everything solved, and that is both the challenge and the joy, I think, of approaching writing too, because there’s always something new to solve. But it ends, if we’re lucky, with maybe a better ear, a better eye for things, a little more trust in the material that keeps asking for attention.

[00:13:53.410]
And maybe that is because returning is not only about bringing another kind of attention, it’s also about bringing the person you’ve become in the meantime. The draft you opened in May may not be the draft you open in September. The sentences may be identical, the file is going to have the same name, but you’re not arriving with the same feeling inside. You have rested. How can you tell I have rest on my mind?

[00:14:17.720]
You’ve rested or not rested. You have read something that rearranged you. You’ve lost patience with an old explanation. That coma story isn’t holding up anymore. You may have become more tender toward something you used to flatten.

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I know I’ve certainly loved that aspect of writing, creating that tenderness toward the self when I felt really judgmental of the self, if I can therapize myself for a moment here in this podcast episode. But you know, you’ve become more tender toward something in you or more exacting toward something you used to excuse as well. The opposite can be true. So my son looked at the coastline and saw two things. Sea and sky, and it took another minute of looking to find the land in between.

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In fact, it was imperceptible. They really were all the same colour in that moment. And I think drafts are like that. There are two obvious things and a third thing hiding in the seam, waiting for you to look long enough to find it. It took some time for the light to change for us to see.

[00:15:19.920]
The page is not always the thing that changes first. The writer changes, and then the page becomes readable in a new way. And the writer changes through developing craft, through reading, through understanding more of the self as well. So maybe the work of the season for you has not been to finish every piece or make every draft behave. Maybe it’s been to practise returning without contempt, because I think, and I certainly hear from writers who get really fed up with their drafts as well and feel frustrated that they can’t push them and express things the way that they wanted to.

[00:15:54.950]
So maybe it’s to come back to the page with another way of paying attention to the same material and let it become strange again, alive again, specific again by choosing these different angles to approach it and letting the changes in you notice the way that you’re approaching the work again. I feel like this is the most useful work. It’s the quiet work of writing, and it’s also how a writer keeps growing without needing to abandon the questions that made them a writer in the first place, because I also believe when it comes down to it, writers are often writing the same thing over and over again, exploring the same things, because these are the things that drive them, that they’re curious about. And that’s not a flaw at all. I think that’s not a bug.

[00:16:39.510]
It’s actually a feature in terms of writing, being able to really, through that spiralling of knowledge, get closer and closer to the centre of something that you’re exploring and noticing in your writing. So this week, before I leave you for the summer break, I encourage you to choose a piece that keeps calling you back, or maybe a theme or an idea, and return to it with the ear, then maybe the body, then your mood today, then maybe even a different hour of the day, and just notice what you notice. And if nothing on the page has changed, notice how the person reading the page has changed. So as I take this little break from new episodes and rest, rest, rest, which is something I’m looking forward to obviously, and think and work on what’s coming next. A little aside, as you’ve listened to me going on about changing, I’m actually going to be doing some sandwich-generation-style caregiving over the next couple of months.

[00:17:32.250]
Gen X, if you know, you know. So it’s not all rest, but I hope to approach even this in a really restful way as much as I can. I’ll be back in September with new episodes. I’m hoping to have new conversations with editors and writers and more ways to help you stay close to the drafts that matter. Thank you for being here this season.

[00:17:51.980]
I’ve heard from a lot of listeners, and new listeners especially. Thank you. I know that you’re out there, and I appreciate you spending this time with me. And thank you for listening to the podcast, listening to yourself and your writing, returning, letting the work keep changing, and letting yourself keep changing. The Write, Publish, and Shine podcast is hosted by me, Rachel Thompson, with sound editing by Adam Linder.

[00:18:13.960]
To learn more about my work supporting writers, you can visit rachelthompson.co and sign up for my weekly Writerly Love Letters, packed with encouragement for your writing journey. Although those are going on a short pause as well, sign up for them and you’ll get them as soon as I’m back. If this episode gave you something to return to, share it with another luminous writer. You can send them to rachelthompson.co/podcast, or they can search for Write, Publish, and Shine wherever they listen to podcasts.

[00:18:40.860]
I want to acknowledge the El Muzina Bedouin lands in South Sinai, Egypt, where I recorded this episode. Thank you for being with me this season. Thank you again for that. I’ll be back in September.