Getting Emotional Distance: Using Lists to Help Your Writing Practice

First Sunday Q&A: Working with Ke... Weaving a More Complex--and Interesti...

Getting Emotional Distance: Using Lists to Help Your Writing Practice

My new novel, Last Bets, is now available for pre-order! You can help me rise in the Amazon bestseller lists by ordering your copy today. Release date is April 21. Thank you!

Pre-order my new novel Last Bets!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Hello from the road! I’m on a winter trip in our camper van (read: tiny house on wheels) with my spouse and two pups. We’re camped in South Carolina today, heading further south tomorrow, stunned by sunshine and warmth. This translates to lots of staring: at the fields we’re camped near, at geese by a pond, at my two dogs rolling on grass they haven’t seen in months. Staring lets my brain relax, and it sure needs it, after nine hard-working months and two book launches.

One thing that’s kept me alive and writing, during all the book hoorah, is this newsletter, which enables me to be true to my own writing practice. who is one of my favorite Substack writers said as much this past week in her wonderful post about the danger of getting too wrapped up in activities that encircle the writing life, but aren’t actually writing. Read Emma’s post here.

So thank you for reading and keeping this writer honest each week. No matter how distracted I got with my book excitement, I always came back to write. I’m not writing fiction, but I am writing—and it means a lot to keep that going. I especially thank those of you who are paid subscribers (almost 100 of you now!). I am very glad you benefit enough from these weekly posts to say so.

I have another three months before Last Bets is published on April 21. But I’m doing something very different than I chose to do with A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue last year. I’m allowing myself to rest. I’m processing what happened, all the learning I went through, and I’m letting the momentum of A Woman’s Guide carry this second novel. Who knows if this will end up being correct or a grave error. But it’s the best I can do. My winter trip, full of staring and ruminating on the writing life as I’ve lived and experienced it these past nine months, is a good way to rest.

Although there are still a thousand things I could do, I have to find my way back to the basics again, replenish the well.

One of the joys of being in writerly community with you is the questions that I get about everything to do with writing. A songwriter friend asked me a great question recently, and I couldn’t help but let myself ruminate on it as we drove through Virginia and North Carolina. She asked how a writer might avoid the internal scramble of emotions that surge each time we face a new risk during a creative project.

I thought a lot about emotions, their gift to creative people, as well as their handicaps.

So this week, I want to talk about how I get distance from and balance out the very natural emotional surges I experience. I want to talk about my lists.

Lists give distance

I learned list-making from my mother. She was a pilot, trained in pre-flight checklists, which contain many tasks that guarantee safe travel. She kept her love of lists as she had four kids, went back to work full-time, and juggled the countless tasks of a fifties housewife. She scribbled thoughts and to-do’s on the backs of envelopes or notepads. Her kitchen was her office; the lists occupied one counter by the stove.

I watched my mom make these lists, sometimes snuck a peek. I could never make sense of her—or most anyone else’s—lists, though. I knew they worked: she rarely forgot something she’d noted.

When my mom worked, my grandmother took care of us as very young kids. She also made lists during her “quiet time” each morning, her way of preparing the day. She used tiny loose-leaf binders, the size of a big hand, and a favorite fountain pen.

Two strong, pioneering women—my mom was a pilot and my grandmother ran a summer camp for kids—both with dozens of plates in the air.

Not unlike writing, revising, and publishing a book! Tasks for books are endless, it seems. This inherited love for lists allows me to get those tasks out of my head and onto paper, giving much-needed distance and calming those emotions before overwhelm sets in.

I was not so great at emotions as a child—I felt everything so keenly, and I didn’t have vocabulary or skills to communicate it much. My art, both writing and painting, became how I spoke to the world about what I felt. The challenge of this was not having perspective. Everything felt strong and intense, and I couldn’t triage the feelings.

I’m grown and skills have developed now, but I can still slip back into that place of not being able to step back far enough when I feel. This is, I believe, what my friend was talking about.

I thought of one of my first trade reviews for my upcoming novel, Last Bets, a reader who didn’t get the purpose of the story. I was so eager to receive that first review and so crushed when I read it. Looking back now, it was fairly glowing, but my compromised self focused on the one criticism, about the story being too complicated, and panic set in. Maybe I wasn’t the writer I thought. Maybe—even worse—the novel was not what I’d hoped.

Forget all the positive feedback, the agent who loved it, the editor too. Panic waited inside me for the first opportunity to slash at my belief.

None of us are immune—we just receive it differently. Some writers get critiqued and take it in stride, only to find themselves not writing after the feedback session, unaware of how much they’ve been affected. I bulldogged my way through many stages of finishing and producing my novels, only to get hit at the end game.

So my friend was asking: How does a creative person navigate this tricky emotional reaction at any stage of the book journey?

Emotions are also a gift

I believe that emotions create much of what we experience as writers on an unconscious level. Take, for instance, writer’s block (being stuck). My theory is that writing practice is the habit that breaks the need for writer’s block—mostly because it gives distance from the emotions. It’s a practical agreement you have made with your creative self: you’ll get into a chair, you’ll place fingers on keyboard or pen to paper, and you’ll write something regularly. In my experience, the block happens when we don’t get our writing practice regularly and we break our agreement with ourselves creatively.

Not all writers believe in the block. I’m aware of when I lapse in my writing practice, because its lack of momentum grinds me to a stop. And, as hard as it sometimes feels, getting back in that chair and writing even awful stuff will get me past it. That practice saves me every time.

My friend was talking about an acceleration of emotions that is scarier than writer’s block—the deep fear that even writing practice can’t ease. It hits unexpectedly, wiping out all of your confidence in what you came here to do, creatively. It’ll blast your belief in your work, but worse, it'll erode your belief in yourself.

But rewind for a minute to cheer on emotions. They’re not just dangerous to writers, of course not. Emotions are part of what makes us creative people go beneath the surface of life and find new ideas to bring forth. Emotions give us clues when something is off, when we’ve strayed away from the original purpose of a story. Or when someone’s feedback and ideas cross the line. Emotions tell us when we’re comparing too much to others.

Emotions also engender enthusiasm, spark, and excitement at the start of a project, giving permission to try something completely outside the box. We get fuel to take a creative risk and reach beyond current experience.

But just as much as they are creative cheerleaders, emotions love to ramp up false reactions and curtail all generosity by telling us we’re less than. Less than another writer, specifically. They make writing all about comparison rather than bringing forth an internal vision.

I wonder if this is because emotions are raw material—they can’t tell time, they can’t evaluate perspective, they don’t know when it’s too soon to say an idea is working or not. They aren’t so patient—at least mine aren’t.

Before I start my writing each day, I look at my lists. I use lists to assess the importance of any particular idea I’m considering. I use them to find balance with my emotions about my writing. I use them as a gateway to my daily practice. I use them for both sides of the brain.

Lists for both sides of the brain

Not everyone loves lists like I do or finds them helpful for emotional balance. Sometimes they feel like just one more nagging voice reminding you of everything you’ve still to do.

But lists aren’t just tasks. They are also ideas. They become a place to corral every fleeting image and suggestion your creative self sends your brain.

I didn’t always know this. Once I read a book by a writer who believed lists were the enemy of creativity. No one should have to ever live with them; we live much more freely without. I was feeling burdened by the limits of lists that day so for a few weeks, I stopped writing any writing ideas on my lists. At first, there was huge mental freedom indeed. Nothing got written on my calendar either; no notes in journal margins, on my desktop. It all created the sweet illusion that I had endless time with nothing demanded of me.

But soon, a real feeling of loss hit. I started getting swamped by emotions about my writing life, comparing myself endlessly to others during my doom scroll on social media. That led to slipped deadlines, important stuff forgotten. Of course, each mistake added to my ability to trash myself, and the emotions had a field day.

I realized my lists had become ballast for my creative life. But I was determined to make them work for me in a new way.

MacBook Pro, white ceramic mug,and black smartphone on table

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

One side of the brain is global, one is particular—that’s simplifying things, but it helped me realize the kinds of lists that would actually help my writing practice.

The global side of my creative self craves an overview. For it, I make a master list. A master list is a dumping ground, essentially. I write down every single thing I want to consider or do for my writing project. At first, the more logical, triage-oriented part of me rebelled at this: Why combine a maybe-someday task like “research library sites” with a definite task like “ask X for a blurb?” But I soon found myself using the master list a lot—my brain, it seemed, needed a place to just accumulate, not decide.

By having a master list, I relieved my brain of the often-difficult task of triaging an idea’s importance here and now. Everything went on the master list without judgment.

I remember the first time I tried one—I was in the drafting stage of a new book, so my master list became a conglomeration of ideas and resources and research questions and character questions, among other things. I noticed an easing in my chest and gut, where I had become habituated to tension around “not getting things done” and “losing ideas” and all the other negative feelings that swim by during my writing practice. I used the back pages of my writing notebook for this early master list—I have one notebook in process for each book or project—but it soon outgrew it because I added something almost every day, as ideas came to me, wishes I wanted to explore for this project.

The beauty of the master list? I didn’t have to consider the how or why, just the what. No timeline, no level of urgency, just simply writing down the thought.

The list expanded further into ideas borrowed from other writers, stuff I read about somewhere, an idea captured from a dream or during my walk. (I got used to carrying index cards or Post-It notes and a pen with me on walks to jot stuff down; now I just record them on my phone.)

Back then, it was important to me that this list was tactile, not electronic. Something about the kinesthetic movement of writing it down often broadened the idea, gave me other, tangential ideas, or made me realize the importance of it and perhaps even its timing.

As I got in a groove with this master list approach, as panic about my writing decreased, I noticed that my imagination got freer. It roamed to new ideas. More lightbulbs went off in my head for that book project than ever before!

Maybe my global brain had been trying to hold onto too much? Or was it also trying to contain AND judge the worth of each idea that surfaced? Too much work! Before the master list, some of my greatest, although unformed and seemingly impractical, ideas were completely discarded before they could even be tested.

I began using the master lists for my personal life as well as my book life. Whenever my get-it-done-now brain gets weighed down by the enormity of the master list, I stop looking at it for a few days. I take a list vacation. I promise myself that there’s nothing hugely important to forget, no impending deadlines, then I close the book on my lists until that part of my brain relaxes.

But most of the time, the list feels fun and expansive, not burdensome. As long as I keep it loose, untriaged, not pressured, it works.

Have you ever worked with a master list for a writing project?

Leave a comment

Triaging the list—creating list categories

I mentioned above that I believe there are two sides to the creative self—global and particular. After I’d worked with the master list idea for a few months, I took the next step, which was for the particular side. Triaging is when you choose priorities, you sort, you arrange by importance, time required, or urgency.

As long as I kept my global self happy with the master list, I was able to concentrate on triaging and actually accomplishing tasks in their order of importance. To determine this, I used different colored markers for the three levels of importance, time required, and urgency. Some tasks required tons of research (time) but were not at all important to my project—a side trip, in a way, but interesting to me. Others were fast, one phone call or search, and urgently needed to finish a chapter or get legal information squared away for pub date.

As I color coded, I could easily see some tasks didn’t need my attention right now, while others jumped forward.

How to use both lists

Each week, I set aside half an hour to scan my master list. I used my colored markers to highlight a handful of tasks that appealed to me, giving them priorities. Then I’d tackle the ones that needed attention now.

What about the fun ones, that didn’t feel urgent? I like dessert, and these felt like dessert to my creative brain. As long as the urgency got handled, I gave myself the fun of several weekly tasks that were low priority. That also kept the emotions balanced, so I didn’t start feeling like everything was just hard work and no play.

The master list solved my frustration with too many lists (Post-It notes!) in too many places in my life. The color coding to triage into priorities gave me the satisfaction of actually accomplishing tasks. It was an approach that worked for me, and both parts of my brain. I couldn’t work with just my mom’s approach of small pieces of paper stacked on the kitchen counter or contain my ideas to a tiny loose-leaf binder page like my grandmother. With a master list, I had the freedom to expand as much as needed, to create a place for the flood of ideas that usually come with a book project so none were left behind, to have everything in one place. And with the triage system, I was able to feel accomplishment each week.

When the list got too old, cluttered, or hard to use, I’d transfer it to a new set of pages and triage again. Interestingly, the importance of each task changed as the book project evolved. Some items on the list never got addressed—they were irrelevant now—and others got expanded.

Specialized master lists

Sometimes, a task exploded into many small steps. It needed its own master list. I found this also helped my emotions (overwhelm, especially) stay in check. For instance, when Last Bets was in final revision, I made a master list with categories such as:

timeline (when does each scene happen)

seasonal/weather details by scene

character continuity (consistency of names, hair color, glasses, type of clothing, gestures)

backstory placement (when the reveals happen, how they are spread out, their relevance to each present-time scene)

beginning and ending of chapters (varying how I opened and closed chapters)

fact checking (the storm at sea, the distance of the island from the nearest land mass, etc.)

When the same novel got close to publication, I created another master list for all my promotion ideas.

If you’ve read this far, I encourage you to try one or both of the lists. You might not be swamped by emotions—panic, angst, comparisons with others, any of the down-pulling feelings that come with any high-risk creativity. But you might find trying a list or two gives you unexpected distance and balance when you most need it.

List-making will always be part of my daily life—I am my mother’s daughter, after all. Its true gift to my writing life is distance and objectivity when things go south. Nonjudgmental list-making is very healthy, as long as it doesn’t take over my actual writing time. When I find myself making lists instead of drafting or revising scenes, I get back to being a writer.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This week, try a master list for your current writing project. Start with a small number of items jotted in the back of your journal, on your desktop, or in your writing notebook.

If you’re contemplating a new project or a creative dream, use a master list as a dumping ground—capture every idea, thought, and task, without assessing its usefulness or importance yet.

Hint: Write as fast as you can, no editing. Set a timer if you want to make it really fun. See if you can get 25 items on the list.

When you’re finished, step back and assess. Evaluate how it feels. Are your emotions calmer, more balanced? Does your brain seem freer, emptier? Does the master list overwhelm you or calm you?

Mary Carroll Moore's Blog

Mary Carroll Moore's profile
100 followers