Summer is a time for breaks, relaxation, vacations, and planning. It’s easy to be swept up in the excitement of trips or dejected from the constant sheath of heat. So where does that leave our writing practices? With the irregularities that these months can bring to our schedules, how do we stay tethered to our words? We Kernelists share what it’s like for us below. Let us know in the comments what summer brings to you!
Shelby’s Summer Practice
This summer has been one of transformations, or transitions. I completed a novel draft that is out with my workshop group and will be critiqued in a week; I made the conscious decision to focus on my next novel idea rather than return to drafts of short stories sitting in my Google Drive; and I am slogging through the grammar resources I mentioned last week. While on paper this sounds productive, it’s left me in the in-between where my writing routine has faltered as I instead read through books and spend time in my head thinking about this next story.
I’m trying to embrace the uncertainty and trust the process, but I miss having a project I thoroughly understand and could work on daily. Summer depression, or at the very least summer sadness, hasn’t helped. Yet, I persist because I know stabilizing my writing practice helps to keep myself regulated. So I show up to my desk and do the work. Even though we’re in the dog days of summer, there have been moments while I’m sitting at my desk and looking out the window that have felt like the first inklings of fall. I don’t know about you, but for me fall incites magic. It incites new beginnings. It incites importance and opportunity and a resurgence of life.
Until I can get back to those feelings, I’ve dedicated Wednesday nights to exploratory writing for my new project. It’s a small push towards my normalcy, but I’ll take it. I know that, soon enough, I’ll be in the thick of this novel, with these characters and the plot, and feel in the zone once again.
Sarah’s Summer Practice
I always expect summer to be my most productive writing time. Freed from my family’s usual academic calendar, I ought to have long stretches of days to devote to writing fiction, but what usually happens is that I look for every opportunity to take me out of my small Mississippi town. Already this summer, I’ve spent some time in Colorado and Florida, and now I’m ensconced in Connecticut for six weeks.
All of this travel is exciting, but it’s also disruptive and exhausting. It takes a lot of time to settle my family of six into new spaces and new routines. I also have no childcare during the summer months, so I’m home with four children most days, which isn’t conducive to a regular writing practice.
Nonetheless, I am writing. I try to fit in a little time each morning before my children wake up. I type notes on my phone during visits to the playground or the public library. I jotted down thousands of words in a windblown composition notebook while on a recent beach trip. And when I’m too tired to write, I do the all-important writing-adjacent work of reading. In this hodgepodge way, I’ve drafted most of a short story and about 20,000 words of a novella.
After several summers spent this way, I’m finally accepting that these months of travel and disruption are critical to my writing process by filling my well of new images and experiences. This summer in particular I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about art: reading artists’ biographies and visiting art museums every chance I get. (While based in Connecticut, I’ve been taking the train to Manhattan every Sunday to visit art museums). Learning about the lives and practices of artists is helpful to my writing in a very direct way: lately, most of my protagonists have been visual artists of some sort. But I feel it helps me indirectly, too: what are writers, but artists who work in the medium of words?
Next summer will be the final summer of my three-year MFA program, so I am mentally preparing to have the sort of quiet, stay-at-home summer that will be conducive to writing my thesis. But I’m sure that after that I will fall back into my usual summer “routine” of adventuring, because ultimately that seems to really feed my writing.
Natalia’s Summer Practice
My summer started with intentions to finish a draft of my novel before the fall hits. That was quickly dashed by reality so I’ve shifted to a daily time goal, which is my go-to when the writing life gets difficult and 10 minutes a day is the best I can do—on a good day, that is. Summer is filled with hope though so maybe there’s still time for meaningful progress.
Neidy's Summer Practice
Contrary to many other writers, summer is usually my most productive writing time. It is not uncommon for me to take a week off from work and in that short time write words in the thousands (in the tens of thousands last summer!). And yet, I am moving at a different pace this time around.
In the past year, I have alluded to changes in my personal life which have affected my writing practices, and this summer, like so much of this year, is being spent recentering myself and reorganizing my priorities. To share what I haven't yet: last August, I separated from my partner of 13 years. So, my writing is taking a backseat to co-parenting, moving, and reestablishing myself.
I do not share this personal information as an excuse for not writing, but rather, to contextualize my feelings around a summer spent intentionally unproductive. Writing is my greatest passion, but it is also often a great frustration. It can take hours, weeks, years to figure out what I am trying to say in my stories or how to best say it. I do not presently have the mental or emotional capacity to give my stories that kind of attention, and (this is perhaps the most important part) I respect my art and my work enough to wait rather than write and edit poorly.
I believe it is creatively worthwhile to spend time, even an entire summer, investing in myself to ensure I will have a future where my art is nurtured rather than dragged along.
Our kernel of advice: Find a summer practice that is sustainable, healthy, and above all, nurtures your creative self.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby finished her third re-read of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and started Grammar as Style, which is already proving to be a useful resource in the poetic assemblage of words. She also started reading Four-Season Harvest thanks to Sarah’s recommendation. Don’t be mistaken: Shelby is not a gardener, but a new character she’s writing about works at a garden center.
Natalia finally finished Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and was caught with a complex set of emotions about when you get out when the world around you is falling into chaos.
Sarah read two books this week about complex, ill-fated and inappropriate relationships. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is a weirdly wonderful work of historical fiction about an 18th century German Romantic who falls in love with a simple girl of 12. The novel wears its deep expertise lightly, which is perhaps why it’s considered one of the greatest historical fiction novels of all time. Sarah also read Marguerite Duras’ work of autofiction, The Lover, about the author’s affair with a much older, wealthier man while she was fifteen and living in French-colonial Indochina. And even though Sarah has also seen the film adaptation, she still doesn’t know what to make of the novel’s sexual politics, racism, and tragically dysfunctional family—not to mention its style—so if you’ve read it and have thoughts, please drop a line in the comments!
While visiting friends and family on Long Island, Neidy stopped by a bookstore and ran into Taffy Brodesser-Akner. She got a copy of Brodesser-Akner's latest novel, Long Island Compromise, with a personalized message. Brodesser-Akner told her it was the first time she was signing and handing a reader a finished copy of her latest novel!