Author: Kelly Caldwell

I shared a pretty embarrassing story with my students the other day, so I figured, why not go for broke and tell it to you all as well.

For a few months when I first started freelancing, I found myself completely stymied whenever I began a new story (often on deadline!). I’d try to start in the middle. I’d try to download my research. I’d try to start at the end. Every time, I ended up deleting everything and starting over.

I could only really begin writing (and this is the embarrassing part) after I’d type out seven words:

The Ottawa County Board of Commissioners today…

When I first got out of college, I worked as a reporter for a community newspaper and wrote hundreds of articles about the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners. Apparently, I’d moved on, but my mind had not.

That I couldn’t work before typing that phrase infuriated me. It’s not like that board was the only thing I wrote about. When I wasn’t writing about tax millage, I wrote about disaster aid. Heroic rural maternity nurses. An obscenity trial that echoes our current struggle with book bans.

Compounding that, I accused my mind of sedition. “I don’t live there anymore,” I’d say to myself, arms crossed, refusing to type the words my mind wanted to hear. It felt like some part of me was trying to drag me back to when I was 22, inexperienced and unsure. So I resisted.

Because that always works so well.

What I failed to realize was that I’d inadvertently created a ritual.

I mentioned rituals last month, and wanted to return to them, because some people (read: me) undervalue the role they play in our writing process. But we ignore them at our peril. You might create one you hate by accident.

More likely, you’ll keep struggling every time you sit down to write, when there’s a tool that can help you make that happen more quickly.

Rituals, says the writer Amitava Kumar, fill a need, “the need for those conditions of work, the meeting of place and habits, that allow the right words to emerge.”

Or you can think of them another way, as a way of staking out territory for yourself, and your work, says writer Sheryl Garratt.

“Ritual can be a way of reclaiming space,” Garratt writes, “of bringing us back to the present moment.”

Kumar’s ritual is walking. When he laces up his walking boots, he says, “The work of writing has begun. As important as the act of shutting the door of the study has been the act of opening it and stepping out for a stroll.”

Other writers clear their desks, eat a sandwich, do yoga, play three hands of computer solitaire. Saul Bellow did 30 pushups. Jesmyn Ward makes herself a cup of tea. (For many of us, caffeine is involved.)

The precise actions involved don’t matter, as long as they help you cross that bridge from your busy life into your imagination.

That was the real problem with my accidental ritual—when I started accusing my mind of trying to force me to live in the past, when I fought it, the ritual I never meant to start stopped serving any purpose. Eventually I replaced it.

And then, when my life changed, I changed my ritual again.

Next time you make time to write, pay attention to what you’re doing just beforehand. Do you have a ritual? Does it help you build a bridge, or is it getting in your way? If you don’t have one, or you hate the one you do have, create a new one. Build it for yourself with the generosity and enthusiasm you’d bring to knitting your BFF a new scarf, or making a loved one an omelette. Find one that soothes the chattering part of your mind. One that works.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Another January, another season of watching my fellow writers experience a surge of energy for their work. Sometimes, it’s brought on by the downtime over the holidays; in others by the shiny, fresh feeling of a new year. 

Perhaps you’re among these writers, for whom the January reset comes with a little extra gas in the tank. I hope so. And if you are, let’s talk about how you can make the most of it while it lasts. 

• Don’t squander your surge on research, unless it’s the most important thing your project needs right now. 

As a former newspaper reporter, I’m particularly susceptible to this one. “How can I write if there’s more reporting to do?” I think. The truth is, there is always more reporting you can do. The real question is: Is it necessary? Or is it just procrastination?

If that “research” involves social media, it can probably wait. 

Instead, make a list of the questions you’re thinking about researching. Then switch to your project and start writing. If, once you’ve got your writing done, those questions still feel urgent, by all means, dive in! 

• Do create a bridging ritual. 

The writer Sheryl Garratt says that between fast-paced lives and constant distractions, many of us have forgotten the value of performing a ritual as we shift from task to task. 

“Ritual can be a way of reclaiming space, of bringing … ourselves fully into the present moment in order to do our best work,” Garratt writes. “Bridging rituals are the tiny things we do to move from one role to another, to shift from one task to a different one, to change our state of mind and find focus in a world of constant distraction.”

Garratt suggests small, easy rituals like making yourself a cup of tea, or clearing your workspace. You can, like Mister Rogers, take off your jacket and put on a cardigan. She also suggests taking three deep breaths and then saying aloud, “I am now here to make art.”

OK, that one might not be for everybody. 

Find one that does work for you, and then do it. (Ignore your dog giving you the side-eye.) 

My last suggestion comes in two parts, which may at first sound antithetical: 

• Don’t write for 5 minutes, then give up. AND, make time for breaks.

You need to give your mind time to simmer down, to shed the world, to reach The Zone. If you get impatient because it’s taking more than a few minutes to find, you’ll never actually get there. 

You also need to respect your poor beleaguered brain when it’s tired. Gotham teacher Angela Lam has written about this, and says that our minds are like nutrient-rich soil — they need rest to remain fertile. 

“Sometimes,” Angela says, “while laying fallow, a seed germinates and sprouts, out of control, into an award-winning story.” 

Let that be a benediction for us all— ride your new-year wave, and let us read your stories!  

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

The song “The Show Must Not Go On” by the band Harvey Danger, has this couplet:

You can bash your head against the wall, forever, the wall will never change

But if you start to like the bloody bruises, the wall cannot be blamed.

It cracks me up every time I hear it, but it also puzzles me. Is it about reveling in your own stubbornness? Or is it about persistence?

Recently Gotham teacher Teresa Wong suggested an answer, when she visited my class recently to talk about her new memoir All Our Ordinary Stories, because writing that book took her 20 years.

She wrote the first draft when she was in her mid-20s, after taking a trip to China and Hong Kong with her parents. She knew there was a story there, about that trip and her parents, but she couldn’t find the right way to tell it.

“It was just fundamentally flawed in a way that I couldn’t understand at that point and that I do kind of understand now 20 years later,” Teresa said

She put it away, came back, put it away, came back, trying out new approaches, none of which worked.

Meanwhile, Teresa did some other things:

• She became a mother.
• She became an artist and cartoonist.
• She experienced post-partum depression and write a book about it, which became her memoir Dear Scarlet.
• During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, she started her Substack, Closet Dispatch, where she draws and tells a story about one item of clothing in her closet.
• She became an Artist in Residence at the University of Calgary.

“I needed to add that extra layer of my having my own kids before I could understand my parents as well as I could in the book, to add the depth and perspective to everything,” Teresa said. “I needed to become a cartoonist, because I really needed the imagery and the interplay between image and text to really bring out my parents’ experiences in vivid detail.”

No doubt, trying and failing to write All Our Ordinary Stories helped Teresa write Dear Scarlet. And completing and publishing Dear Scarlet helped her solve the riddle of how to write All Our Ordinary Stories.

For some stories, when we say they need time what we’re really saying is they need you to keep living your life. You need to go to Hong Kong, have one more conversation with your mother, drive cross country, take and quit that job with the crazy boss, write other essays or poems or scripts or books. You need to come back again and again and hit that wall again. You need to fail.

And then, the miracle happens.

“What I ended up doing was just listing out all the stories that I wanted to tell, and then trying to group them into loose themes,” Teresa said. “Once I had that, it made it doable in a way that I hadn’t figured out for the many years I had been working on this.”

Persistence sometimes feels like bashing your head against a wall. But it’s not. It’s a vigil you hold for your story, so that when the right way to tell it finally shows up, you’re there, ready to usher it in.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty