What is Your Relationship with Routine?

A Loose Overview of "A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers"

While There is No Such Thing as Failure, there is such a thing as not caring enough for yourself as a writer. I’m all for risk-taking and learning, playing and stepping back to access, and I am also all for exploring what it is I don’t know that I don’t know. How can I support myself better as a writer? Do my routines ultimately support who I can be as a writer? What else could I be doing to help myself become a better writer? And in turn, how can I help you, my readers, to think about this?

I’ve been reading through A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, Ed. Barbour & Biddinger, reading an essay here, flipping through and reading another essay there. Lee Ann Roripaugh notes in her essay, “Unshelled”, that being a mollusk without a shell is…”an evocation of feeling vulnerable and raw…your hypervigilance and hypersensitivity” leaving you feeling overwhelmed. It has certainly been my experience that writing asks you to be vulnerable and raw—if you are doing it deeply and well, that is.

So, if as a writer, I want to follow the threads of my curiosity and expose my nerves to memory and inquisition, how can I do it safely? How can I love, care and support myself in this unshelling? Whether we write through prolonged hours or in mad, short dashes; in solitude or around others; in mindful immersion of deep, thoughtful revision or in the stop-and-go planning stages—we all need to feel nurtured and secure in our endeavors.

How do we embrace curiosity?

How do we rid ourselves of restlessness?

How do we spark new ideas?

How do we dig deep into ourselves to write what scares us?

How do we consistently pay attention and show up for ourselves?

Just as how we approach our writing will vary, how we support and nurture ourselves will look differently for each writer. What routines, what rituals, can feed our souls?

Do we listen to music that inspires us? Do we play? Do we engage in art? Do we take delicious walks? Do we buy used magazines and books at our local library? Do we listen to podcasts? Do we meet with other writers periodically just to hold space for each other? Do we workshop our poems/essays/creative nonfiction/ stories/chapters? Do we nap? Do we take notes about what works for us or doesn’t work and learn from them? Do we restrict our social media intake? Do we sit with our pets for calm, quiet fellowship? Do we split our months or years by working in solitude, finding our voice, and then spend time with others, workshopping our writing? Do we schedule small writing retreats for ourselves? Do we allow ourselves days off to process what we want to write before we sit down to write?

As with almost everything in life, I believe diversity is the answer—don’t just eat sweets; eat a balanced meal including sweets. Don’t just read; listen as well. Don’t just write in isolation; write with others as well. Be active and rest. Our routines and rituals should incorporate all of us—our minds, our bodies, our past and present selves.

Whatever rituals we embrace, are we serving ourselves as best we can?

One of the prompts in A Mollusk Without a Shell, suggested by Suzzanne Frischkorn is to “write an ode to the place or space that nourishes your creative spirit. Choose a word that can be used as a verb and a noun—use both variations of the word throughout the poem.” Maybe this exercise can help you to think more deeply about what has worked, is working, or could work for you in building a self-care routine directly related to supporting your writing self.

All in all, I can recommend reading this book for others’ experiences and writing prompts concerning self-care as a writer and I can definitely recommend adding more self-care rituals into your writing life.

Please, share what works for you and/or what has worked for you to help others enrich their own rituals and routines.