I have heard that some people need a clean workspace in order to write – the unproven hypothesis that it promotes productivity. So I wince a little when I think of my office, a place where Rand will occasionally poke his head through the door and ask, “What is happening in here?” His tone is curious rather than judgmental. The room is like a science project, an anomaly when compared to the rest of our home.

“I’M GOOD AT OTHER THINGS,” I yell by way of reply. The bacchanalia of papers and dust and empty mugs on my desk is oddly comforting. I’ve hit organizational rock-bottom. I can scribble on pieces of paper, I can pile mail on top of more stacks of mail. I can shuffle Post-It notes that have lost their adhesive quality and are now just squares of brightly colored paper, moving them around like a Vegas card dealer. The only place to go from here is up.

I am an organized person. My mother says I inherited this quality from my father. She claims that fastidiousness can’t be taught; you either have it or you don’t. I’m inclined to disagree, because her argument removes personal responsibility from the equation. Order is something I work at, something I’ve learned. But I see her point – she loses her keys so regularly I’m not sure she ever had them. She once misplaced a piece of paper the instant I handed it to her, making it vanish like a magician performing a parlor trick. It follows that I must have been born with a sense of order, because I sure as heck didn’t learn it from her.

I’ve been procrastinating on my book for a while. Not making the progress I hope for, feeling uninspired by, well – gestures broadly at everything. No one wants to hear about it – the only thing worse than a self-satisfied writer is a self-loathing one. When the only thing standing in your way is you, you don’t get to complain. Sitting in front of my computer, the page count stagnant, I decided to tackle other projects. I hung curtains and cleaned out my closet. I threw out bags of items. Had I kept the things that sparked joy? I wasn’t sure. Mostly, I had just sparked existential dread. I felt like a failure.

My office was the last hold out, my desk the final boss. There are no before photos. The shame is too great. I shredded documents like I was an mid-level exec in a Ponzi scheme. I found stickers from the Washington State Book Awards that I was supposed to put on copies of my memoir, published years ago. I found the actual paper copy of my James Beard Award, and wondered if maybe I wasn’t a failure. Maybe I just needed to clean out my office more. (This moment of confidence was short-lived.)

I went through all the tiny scraps of paper I saved, ones which at the time I could not throw out. I always thought there might be an answer on them, something that would crack my manuscript wide open, fill in all my plot holes, save my protagonist.

I … I saved this for some reason.

“Filled in all my plot holes.” #headdesk

The realization that organizing my office wasn’t the answer to my writer’s block hits me like a wave. I gently rest my head on my newly cleaned desk. There is plenty of room to do this now. My office is neat and tidy. It is not a reflection of the innerworkings of my brain, except in this respect: it feels a little too empty, and I don’t know what to do next.

P.S. – Yes, I have a Chris Pine calendar because my friends are awesome and he is the best Chris, after Lloyd.

I think I hit mine. (I say “think” because I realize that it may not have been it – that something worse might still be coming.) It happened a few months ago, knocking the wind from my lungs. I wanted rage at something, at the world and the circumstances that had shaped it into what it was, but it was like those dreams where you try to scream and nothing comes out. It just stays inside of you and you feel a little like you’re drowning. I was uncertain of what to do – everyone is falling apart at different times, and so whenever I do, it feels like I’m the only one who is.

I took long walks and cried and I did that again and again until the bruise from hitting the wall didn’t hurt so much, even when I pressed on it.

In all of this, I have been trying to be creative. I’ve spent a year working on a book and made little progress, and it’s a daily battle with myself and my brain. I look at the book that I wrote, years ago, and it is a piece of alchemy I do not understand. I put words together, again and again, enough of them to make a memoir, and it feels like someone else did that.

I spoke to my friend Rachel Friedman the other day, who wrote one of my favorite books about creativity (a book that made me cry because she wrote about things that I had felt acutely). We talked about what it means to try to create right now.

For me, I feel like I have no excuses. I have large swaths of time, a quiet office, few distractions. I don’t have children to homeschool or feed or keep alive. I have a husband who is clean and tidy and considerate and makes me dinner almost every night, and sometimes when I am tired and cranky he makes me lunch, too. The only thing stopping me, as always, seems to be me. This is insufferable, I know. No one wants to hear about a writer struggling to write. It’s a navel-gazing ouroboros, a nice big loop of self-woe from people with too much time on their hands.

“I don’t think writer’s block exists,” Rachel says to me delicately, when I tell her that I am wrestling with trying to make something in all of this mess. “I think what it is is fear. I think we’re afraid, and that fear means that we stop creating.”

There is truth to this, of course: I am soaking in fear and self-doubt. But I also have to get something done, I tell her. I need to make sense of this time. Because simply getting through this stretch doesn’t seem like enough. “Everyone keeps talking about how Shakespeare wrote Lear during the plague,” I say.

Rachel laughs, but it’s somehow gentle and light, not mocking. She tells me she doesn’t even know if that’s true. (I am inclined to agree. I tell her how I think Emilia wrote half his plays, and one day I’m going to write a book from her perspective, just one more in a list of projects that I talk about but never do.) Rachel tells me she thinks creativity isn’t as isolated an activity as we often think it is, and at a time when we’re all so alone, it’s unfair to expect that we can produce art.

And there is the crux of it, the catch-22 of it all.

So many of us are trying to create, because it seems like the only way to make sense of this lonely, sad, impossible moment in time.

But it’s so hard to create right now, because of how we feel in this lonely, sad, impossible moment in time.

I don’t really know what the answer is. Sometimes I tell myself that the only way I’ll get through this is if I finish this manuscript. Other days, I remind myself of the lesson in Rachel’s wonderful book – that there are so many ways to be creative. Like finding a new way to calm yourself down when the world feels impossible. Maybe it is a doodle you draw while you are on a Zoom call, or the cookies you bake your neighbor. Or the thread of texts that you and your friend send one another so that you each feel less alone in the quiet hours of the night.

If you are my husband, your creativity is in the food you cook, so lovingly that it makes my heart itch a little.

These are the things we make that are not books. But they make these days easier, and maybe that is miraculous in and of itself. Maybe that is its own kind of art.

Writer’s block doesn’t really cover what I’m feeling, because it’s not really a block. A block implies something complete and impenetrable, and this isn’t. Someone recently said that writer’s fog is a better way of describing it. Just a cloud that you are stuck in, everything hazy and unclear. On a good day, I can make out a shape or two.

I will invariably hate the shapes I make out.

“Everything I write is trash,” I tell Rand with a sort of self-indulgent loathing that surprises both of us. I had always thought you had to be confident to be this insufferable.

“It’s not trash.”

“I’m not good at this.”

“Maybe take a break,” he says gently. And I wonder how one can take a break from nothing.

—–

The last time I blogged, I wrote about how all of these feelings were okay. How it’s okay if we just can’t right now – and it’s okay if we can’t write right now. All of those things that used to come so easily, the bare minimum achievements of being a functional person, are now the things that we congratulate ourselves for doing. Getting up, brushing our teeth, putting on pants. (The last one being increasingly optional in a world where most people only see us on video from the waist up.)

I have a small checklist of these achievements that I go through each day, like I’m a houseplant on the verge of dying. I make sure I get enough water. I try to expose myself to a bit of sunlight. I make sure that I’m neither too hot nor too cold. The world is falling apart, but I am, at least, well hydrated.

Somehow, in the midst of all of this, I genuinely thought that I’d be able to get work done. I thought that the rules didn’t apply to me, that the last blog post I wrote would be a talisman against the encroaching fog. If I wrote about not being able to write during a pandemic, then, suddenly, I would be able to.

When my uncle died, more than a decade and a half ago, after a long and unforgiving illness, I remember quietly spiraling in, cocooning into a blanket and seeing no one. I blipped off the radar, though I was courteous enough to let people know before I did. My reaction was strange not simply because it was out of character (I am, above all else, an extrovert) but because it wasn’t a reaction. That is to say, it didn’t feel like I was responding to an external stimulus. It felt like it was just who I was now, emanating from within, wholly independent from what was going on. My uncle died. I was going to live in a blanket fort. I saw these things as unrelated.

One of the people I was closest to during this time sent me a barrage of texts and calls regarding my absence from our social scene. I finally gave in after six weeks of increasingly aggressive messages and met her for lunch, my first outing in a month and a half. I dreaded it, knowing I was in for a scolding. Sure enough, the first words out of her mouth were how angry she was that I hadn’t contacted her.

“I haven’t seen any of my friends,” I said.

“I’m not like your other friends,” she snapped.

Our friendship didn’t last long after that. I was tired of being yelled at by someone who didn’t understand what I was going through, even if I barely understood it myself.

Staring at my computer, aimlessly pecking at keys, I realize I can’t bully myself into writing any more than she could bully me into friendship.

I tell myself that the fog I’m in is unrelated to what’s going on in the world. And maybe it is (it’s hard to A/B test right now). It’s been going on for a very long time. If I squint, I can almost see when it started, but then everything gets blurry. It’s hard to know, really. Sometimes the world falls apart, and you go hide in a blanket fort. I see these things as unrelated, but who knows.

I’m trying to remember that I’m not immune to any of this. That telling others it’s okay to feel awful doesn’t somehow safeguard me from feeling awful. I can’t brute force my way into writing something beautiful. I can’t bully myself into creating a book during a pandemic. When doing simple things like going to the store or giving someone I love a hug are impossible, maybe the already-difficult-when-we-aren’t-in-a-global-catastrophe task of writing isn’t that easy, either.

“Maybe spend today doing research or outlining instead,” Rand says gently.

“Yeah.”

I stack up some papers, I close a few open documents. I stare at my wall of notes and squint, trying to see something through the fog. I can’t make out anything but a few shapes. I try not to beat myself up over it.

I’ve noticed, they will write, and I can practically feel the gentle trepidation as they do so, that you seem to have fallen off the planet and are living the life of a hermit. 

And not even a *good* hermit? Like, you are still tweeting and getting angry about things on social media. You are still spending time on your computer (at this point, I imagine them shaking a stack of papers on which they have, rather interestingly, printed out my tweets and instagram posts, evidence of my digital procrastination) but it is not productive time, Geraldine. And so I was just wondering what became of you, and if you are okay, and if you’ve like, showered today.

Hello. I’m fine. I’m just trying to get my shit together, and also my mom’s shit together (after her house burned down – oh yeah, I forgot to write about that – but yeah, yeah, that happened) and no, I have not showered today, but I showered late last night and I’m going to the gym later, so I’ll shower after that, and my god, who are you, the shower police?

*heavy sigh*

Getting messages about why I haven’t blogged is really difficult for me. Because they’re so well-intentioned. They’re so kind. The people writing them clearly care about me, and my work. They’re reading this blog. They’re the reason I have a career.

It also hurts like hell to get emails like that. Because it’s just a reminder of all the things I’ve dropped while trying to learn to juggle.

Asking a blogger why they haven't posted is like asking someone why they haven't gone to the gym.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 13, 2020

I don’t know why I haven’t been blogging.

I guess I haven’t felt like it.

This blog sits in the corner of my mind, nagging at me. Or for a while, it did. It always did when I neglected it. And then, eventually, even that stopped. I just ignored it long enough that it finally stopped and even Rand stopped asking because every time he did, I’d glare at him and say something like, “I’m busy.”

Even if I wasn’t busy.

I’ve written a lot about the life cycles of blogs, and the relationships that bloggers have with them. And the unofficial conclusion I came up with was that we each get about a decade out of these strange little sites of ours before we start to lose steam. Before the thing we love starts to feel like an obligation.

I started my blog in 2008.

It’s been a dozen years. And a few awards and a book later, I feel like my blog is a spouse that supported me through the tough times, who I’m now neglecting because … because …

I don’t know if I’m in love anymore.

No, no! That’s not what I mean. I’m still deeply in love with Rand. Look – I mean, look:

It’s been more than 18 years, and today I was driving home and it hit me straight in my chest. It happens now and then, and every time it feels like a revelation, like my brain is catching up to something the rest of me knew already. Sometimes I email him when this happens. Sometimes I text him.

Sometimes I just sit in my car and listen to whatever music is playing and focus on the feeling, and how ridiculous and rare it is to love someone like that, so much that it makes your eyes water and your fingertips vibrate after twenty years.

It’s fucking stupid is what it is. It doesn’t even make sense.

(Geraldine exhales in a long sigh. She wonders if this blog post makes any sense. It’s been a while since she’s done this. And then, a confession:)

I know what it’s like to be in love. So I know I’m not in love with blogging anymore. It seems like the only time I’m ever here is to make make excuses for why I’m not here. And when I get emails asking me why I’m essentially not in love with the thing that gave me the career I now have … well, I don’t know how to answer that.

I really wish I did.

I am working on some stuff, though. Which means I’ll probably wander back here, because my brain needs a break from the other things. In the meantime, and I know I say this a lot, but here we go again: there are years of archives. And a book. And I’m on Twitter. I’m around, friends. I’m alive. Sometimes I’m even showered.

Mostly, I’m just trying to figure it all out.

Sometimes I’m able to ignore it. Other times, I just pout and check Twitter and then do laundry (this happens a lot). People always ask me if it’s difficult to decide what to save for The Everywhereist and what to pitch, and I’m tempted to laugh, because no, no it is not difficult. It is very easy, because there is usually no alternative. It is here, or nothing.

I published my essay about Mario Batali and his shitty cinnamon roll apology on this site because I assumed that no publication would want it. It ended up getting a James Beard nomination for Journalism in the Personal Essay category.

And then it won.

This doesn’t fall into the schema of dreams coming true, because this was never a dream I’d had. It’s not something I thought was in the realm of possibility. It’s up there with “Getting a Grammy for flossing properly” or “Winning an Oscar because you just had a very satisfying poop.” Like, these things just don’t exist.

My blog was up against publications whose editors don’t even reply to my emails. In the intervening weeks, Rand (who, if you’ve been playing along at home, adores me and thinks the world of me) and I had many discussions about how just getting nominated was an honor. And that was true, of course, but it was also designed to set my hopes appropriately. Because even we didn’t really think I’d win. My entry was filled with cuss words and amateur photos taken in my tiny, poorly lit kitchen. It didn’t feel like it was in the same category as the other pieces. I was going to lose, and that was fine. I’d already achieved more than I could have ever dreamed.

(Note: I do not want your takeaway to be that this is some triumphant underdog story, because that is self-serving and not really accurate. I am a woman with a hell of a lot of privilege. I have a safe place to write, and a strong internet connection, and a supportive spouse, and nearly unlimited time to devote to all of this. I don’t have to deal with systemic racism or ableism or transphobia or homophobia when I put my work out there. The only thing I have to overcome is my own damn self. And institutional sexism.)

I couldn’t go to the awards ceremony, because Rand and I were speaking in a conference in Victoria that weekend. I told myself that this was for the best, because I couldn’t really afford to go all the way to New York and get a hotel just to attend a party where I wouldn’t really know anyone. Plus, the voice in my head, the one telling me I sucked? It can be so loud, y’all. And when Rand’s not around, it’s even louder.

We took a seaplane up and I got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat and holy hell was it neat.

So we went to Canada. And we both gave our presentations, and I’d temporarily forgotten about all of the James Beard stuff for a little while. On Friday afternoon, Rand and I walked along the waterfront in Victoria, and the wind was so brutal it somehow felt personal. We took refuge in a coffee shop and I remembered that the awards were happening at that very moment in New York and there I was in Victoria with hair that had been ravaged by the wind.

Me, trying to look cool and pretty much failing.

The winners were being announced, and I fastidiously checked Twitter for a while.

“That’s it, I’ve lost.” I told Rand three separate times, because I’d forgotten what category I was nominated for. And then I put my phone away, before I descended further into madness.

But Rand did not.

He was watching the livefeed of the awards when my name was flashed on a screen.

“You … you won.”

“No,” I told him. “They’re just listing the nominees.” I didn’t consider the fact that up until now, they hadn’t listed a single nominee – they’d only announced the winners.

“But … they just tweeted your name.”

Personal Essay, Long Form: Geraldine DeRuiter for @everywhereist #jbfa

— James Beard Foundation (@beardfoundation) April 27, 2019

“No,” I said again. “They’re just tweeting the names of the nominees.”

(Note: impostor syndrome is a hell of a thing.)

“BUT THEY AREN’T TWEETING ANY OF THE OTHER NOMINEES,” Rand said. And then he showed me the tweet from the James Beard Account, with a tiny little medal emoji next to it. And I noted that it did seem weird that they’d do that just for a nominee and –

“GERALDINE YOU WON.”

“I won?”

“You won.”

We reacted pretty much how you’d imagine.

Seen here, freaking out on the sidewalk in Canada pic.twitter.com/PbM3hFmVV6

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) April 27, 2019

HELLO I JUST FOUND OUT I WON A JAMES BEARD AWARD AND I AM SCREAMING FROM A CANADIAN SIDEWALK

THANK YOU, @BEARDFOUNDATION AND JUDGES pic.twitter.com/P9T5tbYVYM

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 27, 2019

And then this damn fool kept looking at me like this all night:

It’s been a week, and I remain still a little bit shocked by all of this, still immensely grateful.  I’ve been overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who’ve reached out to me, by the texts and emails and tweets and comments. By an effusively kind thread on a website not known for its effusive kindness (it was so kind, in fact, that I sobbed as I read it). I am stunned – stunned – by the fact that my piece was recognized is such an incredible way. I feel like that is a singularly profound and wonderful thing. My friend Mara put it so succinctly:

I’m gong to go revisit the piece, scream the way I screamed when I first read it & marry it with these continued screams. But seriously, Geraldine, you have broken some invisible glass ceiling of the establishment recognizing female emotion as something other than hysteria

— Mara Zepeda (@marazepeda) April 27, 2019

But. But. But.

I want you to remember something. That even if this piece hadn’t been nominated, that even if it hadn’t won, it still existed. My piece was written more than a year before it won the award. People are congratulating me on something that I created a year ago. The only thing that’s changed since I wrote the piece and now was that I was able to scream “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” over the voices in my head that are constantly telling me that I suck for long enough to submit it for the award.

And that happened thanks to people like Max Falkowitz (who I have never met but who has changed my life) and my dear friend Naomi Tomky (who I have met and who has changed my life). They both told me to submit, and Naomi sent me the link at the eleventh hour, telling me to finish the application before the deadline. (I almost didn’t, but Naomi is terrifying.)

apropos of tomorrow’s beard journalism award deadline, if @everywhereist’s cinnamon roll piece doesn’t win at least one category I say we revolt https://t.co/959QlW21fp

— Judgmental Fish Nun (@maxfalkowitz) January 2, 2019

It happened because of all of the judges who voted for this piece. And it happened because of people like you telling me that this piece was important to you.

Do you understand? The essay that won the award and the essay that didn’t win (because it was never submitted) are exactly the same. The pieces that never see the light of day because no editor wants them and the pieces that go viral are the same pieces. If someone rejects your work, it doesn’t mean it’s not wonderful. If your work doesn’t win awards, it doesn’t mean it’s not incredible. Maybe it still needs a little work. Maybe the people in charge weren’t quite ready for it yet. Maybe the right people aren’t in charge yet. Maybe someone hasn’t scared you into realizing your own greatness.

That’s the part that I want you to remember. You, sitting there in front of your computer. You, struggling to write, and getting your pieces rejected from editors (or perhaps not hearing back from them at all). You are wonderful. Don’t disagree with me. I warned you I would do this. I warned you this award would go to my head. I HAVE A JAMES BEARD AWARD AND I THINK THAT YOU ARE GREAT AND SO I AM RIGHT.

You might not believe me. And that’s fine. You don’t need to believe me. (There are days when I don’t believe me. Right now my award is in Chicago, and after that it will head to New York and eventually I’m going to be able to pick it up, and I’m still sort of think someone just made a clerical error.) The only thing you need to do is make enough noise to drown out those doubts that creep into your head. Distract them just long enough for you to get your work out there.

And then, then, just see what happens.

How it came to be was radically different from my own path. When I wrote a book, it became a job, it became the thing I was doing because on a daily basis, there’s not that much else that is asked of me. But there are always things asked of Rand, and I watched him write this book in stolen moments between a thousand other obligations.

I would ask him if he had plans for the weekend, and he’d reply that he had to get two chapters done by Sunday evening. I stared at him, mouth agape. I didn’t understand. I still don’t. But that is the nature of my husband. Give him any measure of time – a scrap of it, a spare moment, a half hour uninterrupted and left to his computer, and he will make something great. Give him several measures of time, and that great thing will be a book.

It is called Lost And Founder and it is part-memoir, part-cautionary entrepreneurial tale, part-startup guidebook.

It’s been fun to be on the other side of things, to sit in the crowd and listen as Rand reads from his book, to see friends as well as strangers stand in line, waiting for him to sign their copies. To hear him answer the questions his moderators and the audience asked of him. To finally – after being the recipient of so much good advice from the love of my life – be able to offer a small measure of it in return.

“Read every excerpt beforehand to yourself,” I said.

“But I’ve already done that. I recorded the audiobook.”

“Trust me,” I told him. And as we sat at the dining room table, Rand read a few paragraphs about when he found out about my brain tumor. And even though it was years ago – firmly cemented in the past so that months go by and we don’t even think about it – he broke down. He looked up at me, stunned, as if I had an answer to what was happening.

I shrugged.

“It’s just what happens when you read something aloud in front of someone else,” I explained. I had learned this when preparing for my own reading: a couple of lines into certain chapters about loss and love, and I found myself crying. But after reading it a few times, the tears exorcised themselves.

The read-through technique worked much the same for Rand. By the time he read for the crowd in Seattle, he was fine. Actually, he was great.

Was he heckled by an audience member for his excessive handsomeness? Yes, yes he was. (I regret nothing.)

I told him that this was way too much to write when signing someone’s book. He ignored me.

“Rand, first question: are those leather pants?” – our friend Glenn, who is a ruthless interviewer.

For his New York reading, we had a car pick up his grandparents in Jersey and drive them into the city. The room was packed.  The bookstore supplying copies for the event sold out of Rand’s book.

My photos are blurry because I sat high atop some bleachers with some dear friends in the back. Both Rand and Mike, our friend who moderated, were brilliant, and yes, I am biased, but it’s still true, damn it.

Afterwards, my husband’s grandparents, now firmly in their 90s, walked through the streets of New York with us – streets where they had grown up – and told my husband how proud they were of him.

Later, I would ask him if getting a book published was the realization of a lifelong goal.

“No,” he said, “it’s the realization of a two-year long goal.”

I love him dearly. And so I resisted the urge to hurl a hardcover copy of his 2-year-long-goal at him. But that, I realize, is how he operates – these accomplishments of his – these things which I think are unquestionably incredible – are not the apotheosis of his career. He’s still searching for what that is. In the meantime, he finishes projects in those spare pockets of time he has. And sometimes, those projects are a really wonderful book.

“No. Your book has been out for a year, and they have a lot of copies. That’s a good sign. That means they keep it in stock.”

“Are you sure? Because doesn’t it mean that no one’s buy them-”

“No. It’s a good sign. They restocked them. They’re selling for full price. This is good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It’s still a surreal thing to see my book in bookstores. I don’t really process it as something I’ve written. It’s more like when you see something that you own that you haven’t made – like a shirt or a mug or a lamp – in a store, and you think, “Hey! I have that at home!” It’s just a neat little coincidence. It’s certainly not enough affirmation of your career to counteract the lifetime of self-doubt that you’ve managed to accumulate.

Ahem.

And now recently, I’ve had the added privilege of seeing my beloved’s book on bookstore shelves, too:

But this deserves its own post.

While down in Portland last week, Rand and I stopped into Powell’s, where I had the slightly-less-awkward-now-than-it-was-the-first-dozen-times-I-did-it privilege of explaining to the staff that I wrote this particular book and would it be okay if I signed a couple copies? I’ve found that the people who work in bookstores – both independent ones and big chains – are always incredibly grateful and obliging when you ask this. And you know those “Autographed” stickers that you see on the cover of signed books? They always have those on hand, and as soon as you’re done signing your book, they slap one of those on the cover. It’s … well, it’s really fun. I need to remind myself of that, because sometimes I forget to take the time and really enjoy those moments.

At some point, as I was signing books at Powell’s, I looked up and caught Rand taking photos of me.

He captured the exact moment I realized what he was doing.

Until I spotted him with his phone out, I hadn’t considered that what was happening might be a photo-worthy event.

I mean, it was just me standing there.

In one of my favorite bookstores.

Signing copies of my memoir.

Of which they had plenty in stock.

It’s really easy for me to lose perspective on how great my life is. Luckily, I have someone who is always reminding me.

“Hello, friends who also make a living making sentences. Do you know how sometimes the sentences are hard to make? How putting words together … don’t happen good?”

How do you talk about not being able to express ideas? It always feels like you’re cursing yourself – like writer’s block wasn’t really writer’s block if you didn’t give it a name, but once you utter those words it’s like an incantation to the heavens to turn your brain into pudding and suddenly make you want to click on all those spammy links at the end of an article.

“Why, yes, I do want to know what the cast of Head of The Class looks like now! Thank you for asking!”

And just like that, you’ve been sitting at your computer for a thousand years and you’ve written three words.

(Those three words aren’t good.)

TV and movies would have you think that writer’s block involves you endeavoring to write but being unable to do so. That’s never been the case for me. For me, writer’s block means I don’t even endeavor to write. It’s not writer’s block. It’s writer’s … distraction. I know the discomfort of staring at a blank screen, trying to will words out, and so I avoid it altogether. I buy shoes. I spend endless hours on Twitter. I have such terrible posture that I give myself the sort of headache that could fell a lion because I’m sitting back and clicking a mouse and physically trying to move as far away from my keyboard as possible while still sitting at my desk.

I’ve always had spates of this – days or weeks where I had the attention span of a moth, publishing nothing save for the occasional insipid, boring post. But insipid and boring is better than nothing. Because at least I was writing. For the last few months – arguably for the last few years – I haven’t really been doing much of that.

I try to pinpoint the cause of things. I wonder if it was my dad dying. I wonder if it’s just the malaise that surrounds publishing your first book – a sort of strange career crisis that has you wondering what they hell you are going to do next. How do you follow up the realization of a lifelong goal? How do you explain to people that the realization of that goal, while wonderful, never erased that constant gnawing feeling that you have in the pit of your stomach every time you think about your writing career?

Or maybe I don’t feel like writing because the weight of the never-ending dystopian nightmare that is our news cycle is starting to – I don’t know – kill my soul? That excuse feels equal parts reasonable and overly indulgent.

I’m too distressed to write! sounds like the pinnacle of privilege.

And it’s a pointless realization, anyway. Once you’ve identified why you are unable to write, the problem doesn’t magically go away. You’re just left with a problem, and its suspected cause. That doesn’t mean you can solve it.

I can’t write. Because I’m sad. And distracted. And I miss my dad. And the news is awful. And I don’t feel like writing.

See? There’s no real solution there.

The tipping point for me is this: eventually, the discomfort of not writing exceeds the discomfort of writing. And when that happens, I come back to it. But it’s like working out a muscle: the longer you’ve been away, the harder it is. And I’ve been away for a very long time.

Right now, the act of writing makes me deeply uncomfortable. My leg hurts from sitting at my computer for too long. My left butt cheek is asleep. But writing is also a gift.

I wonder what it means to have to your child taken from you when you are simply trying to come to America to make a better life for yourself. I think about how my grandmother did that when she fled Ukraine with my dad and uncle (and then got stuck in Nazi Germany for a while) before she made it to the states.

My grandmother with my uncle (left) and my dad (right) circa 1950 in New York.

I constantly feel like I’m going to cry. I don’t know what to do with myself.

So I sit down in my safe little office in my safe little corner of the world, and I start typing. It’s deeply uncomfortable. But I just hit the point where not writing is even worse.

One question kept coming up again and again, and because it’s one I get often, I wanted to share the answer here on the blog. The thing I am always asked, especially now that I’ve published a book, is this: How do I get better at writing?

Now, when I first started getting this question, it struck me as the literary equivalent of asking Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation for fashion tips. Like … perhaps you should look elsewhere? Maybe?

Although to be fair, Randy Quaid is ROCKING this look.

But I realized people weren’t asking me how to become a great writer, or even a good writer (WHICH IS GOOD, BECAUSE I DO NOT KNOW). They were simply asking how to become better. And I realized I can answer this question! Because I am not great, but I am way better than I was.

I started this blog nearly nine years ago. And if you go back and read some of my early posts, well … they’re bad. I’m not being falsely modest here. The writing is awkward and stilted and it doesn’t even sound like me. I hadn’t found my voice, or figured out what the goal of this site was. I didn’t even really know what a good blog post entailed. Slowly, with time, those things sorted themselves out. I got better. I figured out how to write a blog post. I still keep those early posts up, because I think it’s important that people see the progression of this site and know that things don’t improve overnight.

There are two things that I did that contributed to me become a better writer. Neither is terribly interesting or innovative or sexy. Neither is a quick fix. You’ve probably heard both of these pieces of advice before, but that’s because they work.

1. Just Keep Writing. I suspect everyone hates this answer, because it’s just so damn frustrating. Like, I just have to keep doing it? That’s it? But believe me – it works. The way that we get better at anything is to do it over and over again. Have you ever watched a baby do something? Babies suck at pretty much everything. There are so many things we do on a daily basis that are now second nature to us, but there was a point in time that we had to figure out how to do those things. So why do we think writing is different?
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   I suspect it has to do with the mechanics of writing itself. A poorly constructed sentence and a great sentence are essentially the same. They’re both made of words and punctuation. But imagine a wonderfully constructed house and a terribly constructed one. You can often tell just by looking that one is better than the other. You can tell that more work and energy and time has gone into one versus the other. But with writing, that’s not as evident. When we see a beautifully written paragraph, we just assume that the writer is talented. We often don’t see the time or work that went into it. We don’t think about the hours spent revising and rearranging and reworking sentences. It’s hard to see that in the finished product, especially because sometimes we’re able to write something brilliant right off the bat. That makes us think that all writing, if we were truly good at it, would be effortless.
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   Writing is easy. Good writing is not. The path between mediocre writing and good writing is not a linear one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at my computer and beat my head against my keyboard, and wrote garbage for days, which I kept deleting. And then, finally, I wrote something that was worth keeping. At first glance, it seemed to be totally unrelated to all the other stuff I’d written. But it’s not. See, I had to wade through all that worthless stuff to get to that good sentence. That journey isn’t often evident in the final product but it’s still critical.If you want to get better at writing, keep at it. Know that you will write things that you hate. Know that for every one fantastic sentence you keep, you might write twenty that you delete.
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2. Read the Stuff You Wish You’d Written. Admittedly, I am not the world’s most confident person, so this is difficult for me. Sometimes, when everyone is raving about a piece of work, I’m inclined to run from it. But I should be doing the opposite. If something is wonderful, if something makes you burn with envy because it’s so good and you really wish you’d written it yourself, then that is absolutely the sort of thing you should be reading. Great artists became great by studying other artists. It’s no different with writing. If something is being hailed as a work of genius, you need to study it. Take it apart, look at all the pieces, and try putting it back together again. Pay attention to sentence structure and word choice. If a paragraph resonates with you, ask yourself why. (This is also a great tactic to do with a piece of work that you hate.) This isn’t about copying or plagiarism – it’s about understanding the mechanics of writing.
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   Some will argue that such an analytical look at a piece of art is antithetical to its existence, but I’m inclined to disagree. Entire fields of study have been built around analyzing literature. And while poring over Dorothy Parker isn’t going to necessarily give you a blueprint of how to be brilliant, it might make you more mindful as you write, and force you to pay attention to stuff that you wouldn’t normally – and all of that will make you a better writer.
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   Besides just that, I’ve found that reading wonderful stuff, especially in the genres in which we’d like to write, can be incredibly inspirational. Just think of how many times you’ve read something, or listened to a song, or watched a movie, and afterwards your brain just goes into overdrive? It’s called filling your creative gas tank – and it’s something that a lot of us forget to do. Plus, it’s a great way to combat writer’s block. Whenever I’m having trouble getting words down, I try to consume something wonderful – in hopes that I might regurgitate something not terrible.

Honestly, that’s it. It’s the same advice I give again and again. If you want to get better at writing, keep at it. And if you want to write well, then you need to read well.

Writing can be difficult. I know that sounds really indulgent to say – I mean, I stand in front of a computer all day. How hard can that possibly be? My grandmother had to fetch water from a well and carry it back to her village in a ceramic jug on her head and I’m a sunlit office complaining because I don’t know what words I should make magically appear with my fingers. 

But I suspect all writers feel that way. We are mired in self-doubt and neuroses. Even when we create something that a teeny part of us may actually think is good we still sort of hate it. And then we think of how ungrateful and useless we are because just the fact that we have running water, much less the opportunity to write, is a gift. That push-pull of self-loathing and doubt and gratitude is what makes us writers.

So rather than create any cogent advice, I decided to chart out the path of my neuroses as it comes to my work. I made a few flowcharts and diagrams. If you are a writer, you’ll probably relate. And for that, I am entirely sorry.