Reflect | June
My writing life this month: 1000 words of summer, spiralling into a new structure, thinking about homes and houses, imposter syndrome (again) and turning unexpected moments into mini writing retreats
Part 6 of my monthly Reflect posts: a check in with my writing goals for the month that’s ending, where I’m at with the first draft of the memoir project I’m hoping to complete by the end of 2025, and any interesting ideas emerging from what I’ve been writing about.
Take part in Jami Attenberg’s 1000 words of summer challenge (31 May - 13 June)
I successfully completed this challenge for the first time (having attempted it a couple of times in previous years) and wrote some initial reflections on having done so in my Compost post earlier this month:
I’ve also decided to set myself the same challenge at regular intervals over the coming year - once in each season - as a way to help me reset a little and focus on my word count. I have a tendency to get distracted by writing adjacent activities, like research. Having now completed both a fortnight and a month long version of this challenge, I think two weeks is the sweet spot: long enough to give a significant boost to my work in progress, but short enough to be achievable without needing to put some other parts of my life on hold for too long. I’m thinking of doing the challenge again in late August or early September in order to harness some of that back-to-school energy. Let me know if you’d be interested in joining me, and I’ll share the dates closer to the time and set up an accountability chat.
Jami Attenberg also runs mini 1000 challenges several times a year, supporting a community of writers to write 1000 words a day for 5 days in a row.
I’ve also realised that completing a daily word count writing challenge seems to come with a hangover for me - a period of roughly equal length immediately following the end of the challenge where I don’t, or can’t write. I need to let the words I’ve carved out settle a little, to get some distance from them before I read back over everything I’ve produced during the challenge. I probably also need a period of rest, just as I would if I’d completed a half-marathon. Both times it’s happened, I’ve found it very frustrating - the gear change of going from the urgency of needing to produce 1000 words a day to suddenly idling in place with the loss of that external force driving me to create. It’s hard to shift into being a critical reader of my own words, when for 2-4 weeks I’ve been solely focussed on getting my ideas down on paper, with no real time or space to think about the craft elements of what I’m writing (past tense or present tense? first or third person? what if I framed this section in a different way? what if I moved this paragraph to the beginning of the chapter rather than the end?).
I’ve experienced the double whammy of writers’ block and imposter syndrome in the aftermath both times I’ve completed a 1000 words a day challenge. There’s a brief period of euphoria (I did it!) and then a long, slow comedown as I question whether anything I’ve written is any good and why I even bothered (you’ll never finish the memoir you’re trying to write, my inner critic whispers persuasively in my ear, how silly of you to think you could be a writer, it’s too hard, it’s too big and complicated, and even if you did finish it, why would anyone else would ever be interested in reading it?). I suppose it’s a natural side effect of having produced a lot of words in a relatively short period of time: now I have to work out how (or if) they fit together, where they fit within the larger narrative structure of the memoir, whether that structure needs to change to accommodate any unexpected but interesting new paths I’ve explored through the challenge.
Last weekend I took my newly minted 13 year old and two of his friends to Forbidden Corner, a ‘fantasy gardens’ near Leyburn in the Yorkshire Dales National Park that felt stepping into the the set of the Labyrinth movie (sadly no David Bowie in tight leggings). This involved setting up a base point where I hung out for most of the day while they went off to explore by themselves and pretended not to know me until they got hungry. It gave me a lot of time and space to think, and by the end of the day I’d surprised myself by having thrashed out a new structure for my memoir - essentially it’s the same structure as it was before, but a different shape (a spiral rather than converging parallel lines). I took an online writing workshop with Ruth Allen towards the end of last year (Natural Forms and Narrative Journeys for Non-Fiction), and I think some ideas from that must have been slowly percolating in my subconscious over the last 6 months before finally coming to the boil. She’s running this workshop again in July and if you’re grappling with narrative structure or interested in thinking about storytelling in a different way then I highly recommend signing up!
I also came away from my day at Forbidden Corner with some draft chapter titles that are helping me think about what events, places, themes and objects each chapter will contain, and the various narrative threads that will connect them. So all in all it was a surprisingly productive day on the writing front, and I’m feeling excited about the project again and fired up to get stuck back into the first draft.
Publish 3 posts on my Substack publication/ blog/ newsletter
Completed!
I’ve published my regular Compost and Reflect posts this month, plus the second instalment of a mini-series about all the houses I have lived in (inspired by a similar mini-series by Laura McDonagh. This month I wrote about the places I lived between the ages of 19 and 23, aka the core student years. Looking back from the dizzy heights of 43 and having now lived in the same house for over a decade, I’m exhausted by the thought of moving house every 12 months! But it’s been really fun spending some time remembering each of those houses, thinking about the people I lived with, what was going on for me in each of those years, and working out how to write a brief snapshot of each house in a way that’s hopefully interesting for other people to read. There’s one more instalment of this mini-series to go, which will cover what I think of as the true adult years (getting my PhD and then a full-time job, moving in with my partner, becoming parents, getting married and buying our first house). Watch this space!
Write a hero post for my Substack publication/ blog/ newsletter
Fail!
I haven’t even started work on this - I think realistically this one got bumped to being a task for next month once I’d decided that my third post for the month would be the next instalment of my mini-series about the different houses I’ve lived in over the years. As I wrote in my goal-setting note on 1 June, I’m feeling all the imposter syndrome about the idea of writing a hero post for my little publication. I haven’t turned on paid subscriptions - everything I write here is free to read for everyone - and currently I have no plans to do so. I’m not really thinking about what I offer to readers or how to grow my subscriber count. First and foremost this publication is about me taking up space for myself: daring myself to write aloud and in public, to call myself a writer, to challenge myself to stick to a regular posting schedule, and to practice and polish my slightly rusty writing skills. It’s also about having fun, and about finally allowing myself to write, something I’ve been yearning to do for years but have found various (occasionally valid, mostly not) excuses for why it wasn’t the right time to do so.
But I’ve been writing here for 8 months now, and I think it would be a useful exercise for me to look back and reflect on what I’m writing about and why, and to try and write an overview of what readers can expect to find here and why they might want to subscribe to Writing Aloud. I’ve published over posts now - that’s a lot of words - and I’m sure there will be some common themes or unexpected connections that I’ll spot if I give myself some space and time to read back through them all. This goal is one I’ll come back to next month.
Reach 50,000 words on my work-in-progress
Anticipated fail!
I’m writing this on Thursday 26 June and I think I’m likely to end the month on around 45,000 words. Reaching my target of 50K was largely dependent on all the words I wrote during the 2 week 1000 words of summer challenge being related to the big memoir project, and they weren’t. I also worked on my June Compost post, started drafting the second instalment of my mini-series on all the houses I’ve ever lived in, and wrote an unexpected 600 words about my first ballet teacher in response to Lindsay Johnstone’s example prompt on how her summer co-creation personal narrative writing experiment The Chain will work.
I’m feeling OK about having missed this target - I’m confident that I’ll reach the milestone of 50,000 words next month, and I’m also feeling excited about the project again after my latest bout of imposter syndrome. I listened to Melissa Febos talking about her latest book The Dry Season at an event in Durham last night, and during the Q&A she talked about how important it is in memoir writing to allow yourself to write everything down in the first draft, without worrying about how potential future readers of your words might feel about them or what they might think about you. The first draft is for you: you don’t have to share any of it with anyone ever, but you need to write it all out of your head and onto the page so that you can see what exactly it is you’re writing about. Once that is done, you can start to shape the narrative, adding to and subtracting from it, moving a paragraph here, reframing a section there.
I also watched the replay of Lily Dunn’s latest Memoir WIP Surgery earlier this week, which was on the importance of the reflective voice in memoir. Lily also talked about the benefits of writing it all down on the page in your first draft, and how even if you later cut a section, it will leave a trace, informing the narrative because it was there, because you thought about it and wrote it down and wove it into the story you’re telling.
All of which is a long winded way of saying that I’m (currently) feeling OK that I might be the only person who ever reads this memoir. I’m enjoying the process of thinking and writing about a very pivotal time in my life, and of polishing my writing skills. I think writing this story will be hugely beneficial for me and for my life in terms of allowing myself to think about and explore and critically reflect on a lot of big, heavy themes that I have spent much of the last ten years only glancing at from the corner of my eyes: terminal illness and death, pregnancy and birth, mothering without a mother, being the only woman left in my immediate family. And that is enough.
I am so impressed by all you've written Ellen, the commitment to it all. I bet you won't be the only one who reads you memoir, you have quite a few quiet fans here.
So you’re doing The Chain - me too! Looking forward to meeting you. I’m very impressed and inspired by your commitment to your writing, I’ll have to up my game a bit!