I spent most of May moving from one space in my house to another—and doing all the tasks that go along with any sort of move. Packing, cleaning, lugging, re-painting, unpacking, figuring out what goes where, wracking my brain to figure out what box the one thing I desperately need had been tucked into.
Over the past few weeks, my writing time has been scarce, just the time and energy required to lug stack after stack of books down two flights of stairs meant fewer moments with the blank page. And though some writers can sit and write anywhere, I found the chaos and disorder and upheaval in the space around me meant I couldn’t really find many moments of flow.
What I did find is that many of the things I was reminded of during the move could also be applied to my creative process, so here are a few of my moving lessons.
Sometimes you need a little leverage
Some of the flooring in my new space needed replacing, so I spent a weekend pulling off baseboard till my arms felt like jelly and then scrapping at (too) well-glued carpet padding with a shovel. Removing baseboard meant also removing the nails that had held it in place for decades, so I crawled around the room on my hands and knees, trying to pry free 3-inch pieces of metal that had nestled themselves firmly into the walls. Many of the nails just wouldn’t give, no matter how much force I applied.
What did work was wedging a small piece of wood beside the nail, which the hammer or pinchers could then push against at an angle as I pulled. It still took a lot of effort, and there were some particularly stubborn nails, but in the end, each one gave—and you could even feel that moment of give, of release, the ease at the end after all of that struggle.
It feels like there were several lessons in this one part of the moving experience for me. The need to hold firm but also the danger of too much rigidity, the pain that comes when we hold on too long. Maybe, too, the lesson is one of tenacity or endurance, of continuing to try—and the need to try a different angle when the current one isn’t working. To find the right kind of leverage.
Use the right tool for the job
Two rooms in my new space needed painting. It’s a task I love, the meditative and also precise nature of it. But the corners always present a challenge. That space where wall meets wall and ceiling or baseboard, and I try to get the paintbrush in at exactly the right angle, but it never works. I always end up with a small unpainted spot where the two walls meet or—more often—paint on the ceiling from trying to jam the brush right into the corner.
The solution is usually a smaller brush, but I find I always resist this idea initially as if trying a different tool or tactic is somehow a failure on my part.
It made me think of all the times in my writing process where it felt like I was metaphorically butting my head against a wall, trying a process or way of working that was keeping me stuck, but how I always resisted changing tack because it felt like the way I was doing it was how it “should” be done.
But maybe instead of sitting down and forcing myself to write 1,000 words, the solution that day is falling down a research rabbit hole or adding to my word maps or reading one of the many books in my inspiration stack for that project. Sometimes it takes time to find the right tool for where you are in the process, but it’s more useful to experiment than to remain in that place of stuckness.
Even when you’re not writing…you’re writing
One very common piece of writing advice is around the need to write every day. I don’t think it’s true for all writers, but for me, I know it’s important to be connecting with my writing every day.
But there are some periods where that’s just not possible, not in the way that I want it to be, and this move was one of those times.
Writing, though, isn’t just words on the page. The mental space I had while scrubbing and unpacking was time I could mull over some ideas for my current work-in-progress, to think of how a particular thing I was experiencing might find its way into a new short story, or ideas for this and future blog posts.
Even when there is more “life” than usual demanding our attention, it’s all something you can use, and just the act of being alive to this experience will be useful to your writing.
Embrace the mess
Moving is messy, and sometimes we have to live in that mess, in the chaos, in the uncertainty of the unstructured or in-process space. The same goes for certain stages of the creative process.
Becoming is messy. Uncertain. Chaotic. It also takes time and trust—trust that something will emerge if we work at it, show up, give it time and space, and, most of all, believe in its becoming.
