Reflect | August

My writing life this month: a summer pause, my imposter syndrome is growing alongside my word count, and reflecting on The Chain's six week flash memoir community.

Reach 53k words on my WIP

Smashed it mate (comparatively speaking). As of Friday 29th I’ve got just over 55,000 words, and I’m trying really hard to focus on the achievement of that - particularly as there’s been around 14 non-writing days this month (see my much needed summer pause, below). But imposter syndrome has got me in its clutches again, and instead all I can think about is how many of those 55,000 words are probably the wrong ones. I’m resisting a strong urge to put everything I’ve written in this first draft to one side and start again. Do it better next time.

The problem is that I know that this is an option, I’ve read plenty of posts here on Substack in which the writer talks about getting a good chunk into a first draft before realising that something wasn’t working and scrapping it, going back to the beginning. I could do that. Maybe I should do that. But my gut instinct is (still) to keep going, to keep writing my way through this first draft until I reach the end. Once I have a complete first draft, then I can go back to the beginning and start redrafting. Take the skills I’ve learned through the writing of it, the ideas I’ve had on different ways to approach or frame specific sections, and apply them to the whole thing.

If I let myself stop and start redrafting now, I’m likely to keep letting myself do that. I’ll end up with a perfectly polished chapter one and an empty expanse of nothing where the rest of the text should be. This is how every piece of fiction I tried to write in my late teens and early 20s ended up, and I don’t want this memoir/ creative non-fiction project to go the same way. Far better, surely, to surf the wave(s) of self-doubt and keep going even when my inner voice is screaming at me that it’s all shit. If I can ride it out, then I’ll have a completed thing to work with. It’s easier to shape and polish something that exists in the world - on the page - rather than only in my mind.

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Take a much needed summer pause

I’ve taken a much needed summer pause, but I still feel like I’m operating on about 60% battery reserves and could do with another holiday to recover. Every year I both yearn for and fear the six week school summer holidays. It’s lovely to get to spend more time with my children, to watch them gradually relax out of the rigid timetable and social expectations that school places on them and find their own rhythms again. But it’s exhausting, and it’s such a long time. They have six weeks off, we as their parents do not.

I’ve taken 13 days annual leave from my day job this month (our 9 day holiday in Northern Ireland plus 4 days dotted here and there across the rest of the month to fill in with childcare). There’s been a lot of working from home with my children causing chaos in the background, variously delighting in each other’s company or desperately trying to escape it. The lockdown vibes have been strong: endless requests for snacks, declarations that one or both of them is bored, pleas for me or my husband to stop work to play football or table tennis with them, give them a lift somewhere. I’m trying to focus on my gratitude that they’re 13 and 9 now, much more able to be self-sufficient than they were in 2020 and 2021. But a slightly guilty part of me is counting down the days until they go back to school.

Any opportunity to share more holiday photos! This perfect silver sea was below our clifftop campsite on the final night of our holiday, just outside Portpatrick in Galloway. The tidelines on. the limestone rocks reminded me of Pembrokeshire.

I’ve also probably taken a two week break from writing this month, again mostly in a block while we were away on holiday, with the remaining days dotted here and there. This feels huge - both because it’s the longest break I’ve taken from writing this year, and because it hasn’t broken my writing habit. I’ve been writing most mornings in 2025, an early morning 30-60 minute slot depending on when my children wake up, and a large part of me was convinced that taking a break from this would irreversibly break that habit. Which sounds silly now I come to type it out. But I’m pleased to report that the morning after we came back from our holiday, I bounced out of bed when my alarm went off, delighted to get to dive back into my WIP.

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Participate in the last two links in The Chain

Signing up to take part in The Chain, Lindsay Johnstone’s summer offering for her membership, was perhaps my best decision of the season. A 6 week experiment in writing and responding to flash memoir as a group. Each Sunday, Lindsay published a piece of flash memoir as a prompt and later that day we gathered on Zoom for an hour to write - independently but communally - our own piece of flash memoir in response to it. Over the next few days, Lindsay would then select one of these responses to be the prompt for the following week, and the chosen writer would have a little time to polish their piece up a little, before Sunday rolled around again and the process was repeated.

Honestly, part of me wanted it to never end, for every week to end with a new link in The Chain and making space to read and respond to the latest piece of flash memoir. It was a delight in every way. From spending time on a regular basis with a group of talented and generous writers, to Lindsay’s skill in weaving a safe space for us to experiment with our writing in and fostering the blossoming of a real sense of community. It was fascinating to see the variety of different ways in which we all responded to the same prompt piece - the web of topics, styles, tones, voices and perspectives that spilled out of us each week, all with their own shining threads. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and written about some topics I didn’t expect to (or written about familiar topics in ways I wouldn’t have expected to).

One particular delight (or lesson) that I want to keep with me is how liberating it can be to just sit down and write in a short burst, 40-45 minutes and then you’re done. There’s no time to agonise too much over word choice, or whether a paragraph should be rewritten in a different tense or if there’s a better way to frame a particular scene. The Chain gave me permission to just dive in and keep going and see what comes out. My writing feels looser and more expansive as a result. The pieces I created for The Chain might be flawed, or I might have since thought of ways I could have written them differently (or better), but most of them feel like the bones of something good, something that I could choose to build on and develop further.

Beautiful turkeytail fungus, which featured in my piece that was selected as the prompt for week 5 of The Chain

I was also delighted that one of my pieces was selected as the prompt for the following week. My submission, which I’ve linked to below, was an unexpected detour from my usual style into a little magical realism. It was so much fun to write (even if one image in particular is still lingering with me three weeks later!), and possibly even more fun to get to read everyone’s different responses to it.

Ellen Chapman Writes...

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Take part in the mini 1000 between 15-17 August

This was a 3 day version of the 2 week 1000 Words of Summer challenge Jami Attenberg ran in back in June. The challenge is simple: to write 1000 words a day. I’ve attempted the 2 week version of the challenge a few times in recent years, but never completed it. This year, fuelled by the support of Ingrid Fernandez as a writing accountability buddy, as well as my own stubborn determination, I did. Riding high on a sense of accomplishment in the aftermath, I made grand plans to repeat the challenge under my own steam in late August. I imagined myself harnessing the back to school energy that is beginning to bubble up. How hard can it be? I thought, as I do every year about the 6 week school holidays.

Now, at the tail end of those 6 weeks with 1 day left of the holidays for my younger son (and 2 days left for his big brother, a fact which is caused a significant amount of tension in our house at the moment), I remember, as I do every year, that it is quite hard. The school holidays are tiring. They’re an endurance event for parents, particularly if you’re also juggling a day job that pays the bills. Over the past 6 weeks I have been parent, employee, playmate, entertainment coordinator, tour guide, taxi driver, storyteller, counsellor, conflict negotiator, chef, general dogsbody and occasional (verbal) punching bag. Ah, hormones (both mine and the teenager’s).

So, a repeat of the 2 week challenge has not happened (maybe I’ll attempt it in October, say, to give me a month to adjust back to term-time rhythms). But thankfully Jami decided to run a 3 day mini version this month, so I jumped at the chance. I always work better with a little external motivation and accountability anyway. We returned home after 9 days away at tea time on 15 August, so I decided to complete the challenge a day behind everyone else, writing 1000 words a day over 16-18 August instead. It turned out to be exactly what I needed to ease me back into my daily, early morning writing habit after a complete break over our family holiday. I wrote my August Compost post on the first day and got just over 2000 words written over the next two days for the half-finished chapter of my WIP I was working on before we went away.

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Looking Forward…

Pleasing diagnonals in the landscape on a last hurrah of the summer holidays: an 18k bike ride with my two boys from up the moorland on the edge of Weardale back to our house in the next valley over

I’m trying to soak up these last few days of the summer holiday, but part of me is also eager for September to start. I’m hoping the back to school energy will help me shift this lingering imposter syndrome and plunge back into my writing, rather than the slightly tentative paddling I’ve been mostly doing over the last week or so. August has been feral in all the best ways, but I’m ready to reestablish some steady rhythms and routines now.