Everything feeds the writing

Every. Thing.

Now that I’m back in the submissions groove, I started working on a quartet of poems about Montreal in spring, summer, fall and winter. Except, instead of focussing on the weather, I want to use a much-loved place in the city to evoke the season and centre it more on how the body and mind experience wind, sun, rain and snow.

I just completed winter and now I’m drafting spring. It felt appropriate to share the winter poem with you here, but then I hesitated.

For a Substack called “How to write a novel”, I haven’t talked much about novels lately.

But here’s the thing—all of those detours and moments of contemplation, whenever I observe patterns or share a new poem, even when I post a photo of something I make—all of that is part of writing a novel.

Writing a novel requires you to generate a steady stream of ideas over a long period of time. So it stands to reason that you must feed your brain a steady stream of experiences, images and words over a long period of time in order to generate those ideas.

I have been in a composting stage since last May. But rather than wring my hands over the novel that I wasn’t writing, I doubled down on hunting and gathering instead, giving my brain the “nourishment” it needed to eventually develop characters, scenes and dialogue.

From “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg

I began to think of myself as a maker and tried to be more mindful while baking bread and making condiments and embroidering flowers and teaching yoga. Just using my creativity in other areas of my life and letting every moment settle into my bones until the words began to flow again.

Last fall, while listening to a random podcast, the host quoted a snippet of Hegelian philosophy that I keep coming back to: From quantity to a new quality. Essentially, Hegel posited that a significant enough boost in quantity could lead to a new quality, process or system emerging.

I am not quite there yet, but I suspect that what triggers the new quality is also being intentionally present while you collect that quantity. Like, keeping that future novel in your peripheral vision, so that even as you make and do other things, you are aware of what’s waiting for you.

So yeah, everything feeds the novel. I’m off to try making focaccia right now. Until our paths cross again, here’s that poem I was talking about.

PS. Thanks for the great feedback on the video content! I will definitely do more from time to time.