Rachael Herron

(R.H. Herron)

Rachael

I Know You Don’t Want to Do Your Creative Work

[This is from an upcoming collection of letters to writers, but it applies to all creative makers. This was written after my first Venice retreat, so more than a year ago now. If you’re interested in the weekly writer’s letter of encouragement, sign up here or below!]

Hello, writers!

I’m back from my writing retreat in Venice, which went spectacularly. The people who came were amazing, and together, we inspired the lids off each other. The tops of our souls were opened up, we looked inside each other, and we came away better for the seeing and hearing and writing we’d done. We’d write all morning and get lost in the Venice calli all afternoon and evening. The weather was perfect. Our pens were fresh and new. Our pages turned from blank to scribbled-upon. The water rose and fell and rose again, as our hearts did the same.

It was my first time leading a retreat.

I’ve done a lot of teaching, so I had that to rely on, but this was my first time being The Organizer (let’s not talk about the $11,000 wire transfer that was lost for three weeks before it was found, holy helen in a handbasin. My hair is whiter now).

And I loved every single minute of it.

Since then, though, I’ve done another writing retreat. Okay, the second one was just for one person, but she can be kind of a whiner, so I’m glad she enjoyed it. That retreat—of course—was for me. Seven days in Venice, mostly by myself, to rest, to write, and to wander. I wanted to fill the well. And boy, howdy, did I.

I got two book ideas out of it, and I filled a whole notebook. I wandered when and where I felt like it. I took notes on everything from the noise inside of my cluttered mind to the sound of the seagulls arguing over the fish market.

And every night, I’d look out the windows of my wee apartment onto the Grand Canal and think, “How did this happen to me?”

Luck, luck, nothing but luck, one voice answered me.

Hard work, another one said.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

I’ve worked my ass off. And I’ve gotten really lucky in many, many ways.

But the one thing I know that’s been one of the biggest helps to me is this: You never feel like doing your heart’s work. (Okay, sometimes you do, but those times are very rare and can be relied on exactly as much as you rely on your Uncle Earl to not spit off the porch.)

I just watched a great TED talk on this, and the speaker says exactly what I’ve felt so many times:

We get in ruts because they’re comfortable. Auto-pilot is our default setting and it feels good. Doing something new/different is really hard.

And if you wait to feel like writing?

You won’t write.

You just won’t.

No one feels like writing. It’s hard almost every single time we sit down to do it. This very letter, in fact, I started this morning and gave up ten minutes into it. I walked the dogs, I recorded a podcast, and I took a nap before I made myself get back here to finish it.

You will not get what you want unless you make yourself move toward it.

The funny thing is, this applies to almost everything that’s outside our routine.

There was nothing I wanted more in the whole world than to lead a writing retreat in Venice. I would say it’s up there with those bucket-list items you don’t really think will ever happen to you, like sleeping in one of those clear-ceilinged hotels under the Northern Lights.

But I didn’t want to get on the plane to go. (When I was on the plane, however, I was nothing but excited.) I was overwhelmed thinking about how much work it would be. (When I was working, it was energizing, not exhausting.)

That first night, when I set out the prosecco and strawberries at our get-to-know-you meeting, I had to keep my knees locked to keep from running away. (When we were all chatting, of course, it was exciting and fun.)

I did not want to walk into our meeting room that first morning. (When we were writing together, of course, it was wonderful.)

I couldn’t wait until I felt like doing any of these things. I had to make myself. And the rewards were above anything I could have imagined.

I can’t wait until I feel like writing a book to write one. I have to make myself work, daily. Like the speaker says in TED talk linked above, we have five seconds to make that choice. Feel the impulse, move toward it within five seconds, or you’re going to slip back into your status quo.

Watch the video linked above, and see if it sparks anything for you.

When you’re done, you can watch my video-podcast of the latest How Do You Write episode, which I shot from the Venice apartment, in which I was still giddy even though I was in my last hour of being in my favorite city.

This Monday morning? Maybe don’t hit snooze on your alarm clock, or your life. Make yourself. See what happens.

Love and prosecco,

xo, Rachael

Grateful in Barcelona

I think a lot about how lucky I am, and right now I’m thinking particularly about Lala. I’m the one in the relationship who likes to Get Things Done. I’m the list maker and the do–er. Lala is happy to sit around and enjoy things, and I learn so much from her about this way of life. I get serious joy from being a control freak, though loosening the reins in my hand is always something I’m trying to do. But I know that Lala likes that I got to Barcelona first and got the lay of the land (I know this because she said so). She appreciates that I figured out the bus system so we can use it every day and she doesn’t have to worry about it. She likes that I go out in the morning and buy our coffee and talk to vendors about cheese and jamon. I make the bike tour booking, and I lead us there on the foreign streets. I tip the people who get tipped. These are things I love to do. They give me pleasure. 

But when I’m fighting a migraine in a foreign country, I adore the fact that I can wake up and think, “Oh, Lala will handle this now.” When I say, “I’m feeling terrible. Can you go to four different stores and get me a coffee from the cafe, some bananas from the fruit vendor, some eggs from the meat market, and some Vichy Catalan from the convenience store?” she says, “Absolutely. I’m on it.” She puts on her handsome jacket and her newsboy cap. She grins and goes out. I get to rest, to type here in this bed four floors above Carerr de Villaroel, listening to the buses wheeze past, to the motorbikes buzz down the street, knowing she’s on her shopping-way to take care of me.

To have chosen to marry her is the best thing I’ve done in my life, and the fact that she chose to marry me back (quite convenient for me) is just sheer good luck. At the end of this month, we’ll have been married for twelve years, together for fourteen. I’m so full of gratitude for her, even on the days when I’m grumpy and ill–suited for company and grateful about very little.

We went to Sagrada Familia!

We learned as soon as we went in that the particular ticket we’d bought wasn’t going to be honored – we wouldn’t be able to go up the tower because of wind, which was terribly disappointing. It turned out to be a weird kind of nice thing, though. Because we weren’t going up, we didn’t worry about going up. We took time with the audioguide, and looked at the museum and all the things, but mostly: We just spent time in the space.

It was built to be a forest of light, and the stained glass, which only went in in 1999, makes it a living, breathing space. From the blues and greens that light the place in the morning, to the reds and oranges that fill the space in the afternoon as the sun sets, it’s as close to heaven as I’ve ever seen. The religious shit isn’t too—well, for a church it isn’t bad. Lala noted that the stations of the cross aren’t evident, and few of the saints are looking pained, except on the bleak passion side, and even they are gorgeous in their despair.

But the light—the light! I want to someday arrive in the morning and stay all day, just watching. I bet people do that, pack a lunch and stay for hours. Watch the colors change, watch the tourists mill through, ants crawling below the glory.

Instagram pics HERE, one for reference on this page.

Boy, am I one lucky woman.

Draft Three

Yesterday, I finished the draft of Every Little Lamb! I sent it off, finally, to Susanna. I am ready for her to take this book out to sell, and I really, really hope that Susanna thinks so, too. I need an editor’s hand to shape it now. I do not think it’s ready to hit the shelves; I have enough sense to know it’s not. But it’s ready to sell, I think. I hope.

I finished the draft in a soulless Panera in Walnut Creek as I waited for my car to be tuned up (all day, at the cost of a thousand dollars – really need to sell this book!). I love a Panera because there isn’t enough there there even to despise it. You can just go and sit and drink good–enough coffee. They have one gluten-free chocolate cookie. Their salads are subpar but edible. Their music is low enough to be covered by white noise, their internet fast enough to read email, and their chairs comfortable enough to sit in for long periods of time. Their employees don’t give a shit if you stay for hours on one cup of coffee—it’s just one less table they have to clean for a while. And there are always enough tables so that I don’t have a moment’s guilt of taking one up for a long time. It’s corporate. It’s McDonalds for cafe writers.

And that’s where I finished this third draft! I never knew I could feel such joy in such a plastic place! I had actually forgotten the new ending (no surprise to me, the forgetting itself), and I gasped as something rather shocking happened. And I almost cried! Given that I can cry over nothing but the Very Biggest Bad things right now, that was awesome. I love crying at my own work. Some people think that that’s the sign you’ll really move people, that if you can make yourself, the creator, cry, that you’ll make everyone else sob. I don’t think that’s true, though I do love to make people cry with my books. I think that the author gets so damn close to the characters and sees them in so many different lights for so long, that we might be the easiest of all to make cry with our work. Feels like cheating. But since I got close to it, I’ll take that as a good sign. My fingers are so firmly crossed they ache.

Big and Small

Oh, so many thoughts, and no way to corral them — that’s not true, I have this way to corral them and what on earth do people do who don’t have this to steady them? Even when I’m not normally journaling as I have been for the last three months, I write. Really, what do people do? Talk on the phone? Post on Facebook? Seems like we all need to be heard, and to me sometimes it’s enough to just be heard by myself (though then I ruin it all by posting my morning pages on my blog, which is something of a nervous tic—I post, therefore I am).

Went to see Hilton Als speak last night. I’d originally wanted to cancel and stay in and be sad some more, but when I offered my tickets to my sisters, B said she was already going and C said she wanted to go, so then I wanted to go, too, to be with my sisters. It was great, and he was wise and funny and sweet, but there was something missing from him. C said he felt somehow empty, or flat, and I said that he didn’t seem quite authentic. I figured out what it was in the middle of the night—he admitted no flaw that I remember. He showed nothing broken, and therefore, he didn’t feel quite real to me. I like seeing brokenness next to patched repairs. I think it might be one of my favorite things about humanity—when we meet each other and display the cracks. I lift my shirt and show you my scar, and you lift your shirt and show me yours. Hell, even if you don’t show me yours, I want to tell you about mine, so that I feel less ashamed and perhaps you feel emboldened at a later point.

And I’m so broken, in so many ways. I fail and screw up and land in the wrong places over and over, and if I keep all that secret, then I choke and drown in my own shortcomings. But if I show them, I own them. I am given empathy (not the scorn we naturally expect when rolling over to show our bellies) and then I can show more. I like using the belly analogy because my own belly button is like a saloon’s swinging door—it’s been opened and shut by various surgeries so many times I can barely stand to look at it.

So therefore, I look at it.

Navel–gazing.

Which is EXACTLY what I’m doing now, what writing often is.

And that’s interesting—it’s one of the things new writers are scared most of. “Am I navel–gazing by writing this? Am I just solipsistic and annoying and self–obsessed?” Well, hell, yes! We all are! I think the more we can admit the automatic narcissism that lies within us the easier we can feel about it. It doesn’t make us narcissists in the clinical sense of the word. I’d argue it does the opposite—it gives us empathy for everyone else around us, each of whom thinks they are the center of the universe. And that’s fine. They should.

I’ve said this before, but when I meditate I take a moment to notice how I feel physically, emotionally and spiritually. I try not to judge the answer, just to notice it.

Spiritually, since I’m not religious, I like to inhabit for a second the awareness that I am all that matters in my solo world, the only person living in this body, and then I like to immediately think about that the fact that I’m one of over a hundred billion people who have existed on a planet that is in one of a hundred billion solar systems that is in one of a hundred billion galaxies. I’m literally nothing. I don’t matter—this can be argued empirically. But maybe what I do and say and who I touch matters a little bit. I let myself have this small hope, and it feels large. The knowledge that I’m so small can be frightening, yes, since this body is all I know, but it’s also comforting. No matter how much I screw up, it’s not that big a deal.

And I still get to stand at this desk and look out my windows and see the sunlight on the green, grassy hill that hangs just under my porch eave. I look at a couple of dozen houses on the hillsides, their windows shining in the sun, and think that in each of those houses live people who are exactly as tiny and as huge as I am, with all my same emotions, all struggling to avoid pain and find love and connection, and that in itself makes me feel like this life is sacred and shared.

This idea lets me get excited about tiny things like really excellent backpack zippers, and also about really huge things like birth and death, the universe’s creation and its annihilation.

And I’m allowed to get super excited about the fact that I get to sing Xanadu’s Magic at band practice on Sunday. It’s little (huge) things, of course, that matter.

Ep. 076: Rachael Herron talks about her new book, Fast-Draft Your Memoir

Rachael’s new book, Fast-Draft Your Memoir: Write Your Life Story in 45 Hours is about writing quickly while still creating a compelling narrative arc out of the story only YOU can tell. Enjoy two free chapters of the audiobook in this episode!

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.

Listen above, watch below, or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

Ep. 076: Rachael Herron talks about her new book, Fast-Draft Your Memoir

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and WritePDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).

Ep. 075: Joanna Penn talks about The Healthy Writer

With her coauthor, Dr. Euan Lawson, Joanna Penn has just come out with a new book on living the writer’s life healthily – The Healthy Writer.

Joanna Penn is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers under J.F.Penn. She also writes inspirational non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning creative entrepreneur and international professional speaker. Her site, TheCreativePenn.com is regularly voted one of the top 10 sites for writers and self-publishers.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.

Listen above, watch below, or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

With her coauthor, Dr. Euan Lawson, Joanna Penn has just come out with a new book on living the writer’s life healthily - enjoy this episode!

 

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and WritePDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).