Category: Writer’s block

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How to Grow a Book: A Feeding and Watering Guide for the First-Time Nonfiction Writer

Celebrate Nonfiction November with me! I gave this talk as part of the Mizzou Alumni Webinar Series (hello, pandemic adjustments…). In it, I discussed the practicalities of writing from life experience: how to start, what it means to embark on a book-length project, and how to take the first steps toward publication.

Thanks to Stephanie Anderson, the Mizzou Alumni Association, and the University of Missouri System Presidential Engagement Fellows Program for setting this up and hosting me.

About Me:
Julija Šukys is an award-winning author who works with emerging writers of nonfiction to help them craft literary texts from memory, experience, and research. Julija knows what it means to be driven to write a book, how to go about researching eclectic subjects, and what it takes to bring an ambitious writing project to fruition. For her, writing is a way of life: it’s how she understands the world around her, the means by which she survives it, and (as Joan Didion says) her way of finding out what she thinks, sees, and fears.

Julija is the author of three books, one book-length translation, and of more than two-dozen essays and articles. She is currently working on a project about university and college campus shootings that took place across the United States and Canada between 1966 and 2015.

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100 Words at a time…

Look, it’s OK if you’re not writing. I’m not here to pressure you to be productive or make you feel bad about yourself. I get it: we’re all coping with the pandemic in our own ways. Writing may not be in the cards for you right now.  Do what you need to do to make it through.

That said, if you do want to write and need a little push or a bit of support, then read on.  I’m going to tell you about something called “The 100-Word Writing Group.”

Books get written bit by bit. Word by word. Or, in my case, 100 words at a time.

Together with 6 other writers, I belong to a 100-Word Writing Group. You get the picture: 7 writers = 1 day per writer.

Every day 100 words land in my inbox and onto our shared Google doc. This next part is important, so take it to heart: The 100-Word Writing Group is not a critique group or workshop. The 100-Word Writing Group is about being part of a writing community; it’s about writing not production, if that makes sense… Comments may be shared, but only privately, and only words of encouragement.

Sometimes I read the 100 words that arrive each day and sometimes I don’t: the elasticity, low-pressure quality of this whole thing is key. Still, even if I’m too swamped or distressed or busy to read everything, I’m always aware that my friends and colleagues are writing and that my day to share is coming. And when it does (Tuesdays), I send the other 6 members of the group a small piece of whatever I’m working on.  I don’t give context for the fragment and never explain. I just grab or write 100 new words that don’t feel too embarrassing and send them off.

I hear you: Of what use are 100 words? It’s not even half a page!

True. 100 is not a lot of words. BUT it can be enough to get you rolling. I often have to force myself to write on Tuesdays (which were teaching days this semester) but often I end up writing way more, despite myself.

Here’s the point: If you’re wanting to write but are having trouble, consider forming such a group. (If not, well, see above.)

Here’s also the point: Books, essays, and stories get written 100 words at a time.

Happy writing, fragment by fragment

[Photo: Väylä]

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Postcard from Siberia

Pictured above is one of my most cherished possessions. It’s a 1947 postcard sent from my grandmother in Siberia, addressed to her husband and children. It was sent to a town in Massachusetts where we had relatives, though at the time my grandfather and his kids (my father among them) were living in the UK. My grandmother wrote their church’s address from memory, I think, and sent it off as a kind of Hail Mary attempt to reach her loved ones.

Amazingly, it made its way out of Stalinist Russia and into the hands of distant cousins in the US. From there, the card found its addressees: my father, my two aunts and grandfather. It was the only moment of communication my grandmother had with her children between 1941 and 1955, when regular correspondence between Siberia and the West became possible.

The back of the postcard reads:

1947.II.16

My Dear Children Birutėlė, Janutė, Algutis and Antanukas [the latter, her husband, is addressed as one of her children, because she had told Soviet authorities her husband was dead],

It made me indescribably happy to learn that you were alive and well. I’m healthy, I work on a farm. In my thoughts and in my heart I am always with you.

The priest, my uncle, is still alive and lives in Liepalingis [Lithuania], as before.

Write to me, all. I await your letters.

Your mother,
Ona Šukienė.

After weeks of working my way through my travel notes from Siberia, I’m now back to my archives: reading my grandmother’s letters, and travelling in my mind across languages, time, space.

My grandmother wrote letters to her children from Siberia from 1955 to 1958, then from Soviet Lithuania from 1958 to 1965, when she joined her family in Canada. The above card marks the first step in their long process of return to one another. For me, now, it marks the beginning of my next stage of writing.

While working through my Siberian travel notebook over the past few weeks, I wrote a great deal in a very short span of time. It was going so well that I didn’t dare stop, question, or even re-read too much. In fact, I was working so fast that I  became uneasy, and started bracing myself for the other shoe to drop.

Well, crisis averted. With the complex tasks of weaving past with present and of melding my life with that of another back in my sights again, the familiar feeling of wading through mud has returned. Writing hurts again and the book resists.

All is well with the world in this regard.

Onward. (Squish.)

[Photo: J. Šukys, Ona Šukienė’s Siberian postcard from 1947, private collection]

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On Literary Friendship

It’s grant season, so I’m writing my yearly emails asking friends and mentors to act as references in various competitions. I’ve been particularly overwhelmed by the encouragement and unqualified support I’ve received on all fronts, even from writer-friends I’ve never met in person and only know through email. All this literary love, as it were, has gotten me thinking about friendship.

It’s a lot easier to put your head down and keep working when you know you have supporters behind you.

One of my first real literary friends (not counting my husband and my friend, Mark, who reads all my manuscripts) came into my life about two years ago when I published a short piece from my now forthcoming book, Epistolophilia.

It was a bad time. My writing was stalled and I had begun to despair at whether I would ever finish the monster that had already eaten up some six years of my life but whose end was not at all in sight. Then one day an email arrived from another writer, a Toronto novelist, saying that my piece was the most exciting thing he’d read in a particular journal for years.

This note from a perfect stranger who had taken the time to track me down for no other reason than to extend himself in friendship gave me a boost that may just be responsible for my having finished my manuscript.

Literary friendships can be harder to come by than you would think. Writers are loners and they are competitive. We suffer from schadenfreude and pettiness, but our worst vice is, without a doubt, envy. And envy coupled with self-doubt is a very bad combination indeed.

It’s been over a year since I consciously started to try and follow that Toronto novelist’s example, and to extend myself to other writers. To do so, I had to work on conquering my jealousies.

I decided that when another author got an agent, I would be happy for her. When a writer I knew signed a contract, won an award or got a grant, I would celebrate his accomplishment. I would take the success of others to mean that I too could succeed.

I don’t know if it’s the new outlook, or if my work has actually gotten that much better, but there’s a lot more literary love in my life since I made the change.

So, to my writerly friends: thank you.

Because of you, I am less alone at my desk.

[Photo: Jenser (Clasix-Design)]


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Life-blood: Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Random House, 1994.

Perhaps you know this book already. If you’re a writer, chances are it’s been recommended to you, or you’ve come across it on lists of good books on writing. I know this, because it’s been on my horizon for years. I finally decided to familiarize myself.

I read my tattered second-hand copy this week while navigating through contract negotiations for my second book. (Because of this, Lamott’s description of a New Yorker cartoon struck me as particularly funny: “We’re still pretty far apart,” says a writerly type to a ‘normal’ person at party. “I’m looking for a six-figure advance, and they’re refusing to read the manuscript” [162].) I’m happy to report that negotiations have gone well.

But reading the book on the heels of completing a major project has allowed me to bounce Lamott’s description of the writing process against what I’ve just lived.

Even though she most often appears to be addressing relatively green and unpublished writers, I found many echoes of my own solitude, frustration, demons and necessity of faith and discipline, as well as confirmations of  hunches about the need for truth, honesty and mining  your past for material. Someone recently told me that if I wanted to get published in a “real” magazine, I had to stop writing about myself and start writing about others. Lamott, it seems, would disagree, at least to a certain extent.

In some ways the book is a how-to manual. There are practical tips about how to organize your time (sit down and write every day, even if you feel like you have nothing to give), how to narrow your focus (to the size of a one-inch picture-frame) if overwhelmed, to listen carefully to the world around you (and take notes on index cards), have friends read your work, and write in letter form to loosen stubborn ideas.

In other ways, the book serves as a warning. Writing is hard work and for most authors it reaps few material rewards. Fame, fortune and even publication may remain beyond reach for many, but, Lamott stresses, “the literary life is the loveliest one possible. [. . .] One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. We see our work as vocation, with the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood” (232).

This is a book writers recommend to other writers perhaps because it puts the act of writing (not publishing or book promotion) at its centre. It reminds of the dignity of our work, and reconfirms its importance to culture at large.

For Lamott, writing is a gift to her child, her father, a dying friend, and probably herself. And, for her, writers (despite what the character Julie of the film Julie and Julia might have us believe — “You’re not a writer unless someone publishes you,” was it?) are people who write.

[Photo: TalayehS]

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The Writing Life

A writer friend of mine asked me recently how I keep going when things aren’t going well, and what I do when I become blocked.

The most useful thing I do when I feel empty is read. I turn to authors whose work I want to emulate: Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, Assia Djebar, Joan Didion, for example. I try to feel their rhythms and learn from what they do. I also read for content, and try to learn more by following a trail of bibliographies and footnotes. Lately (and weirdly, for me), I’ve been reading anthropologists. Even though these books look nothing like what I write or want to write, a fresh perspective and a hit of learning is always good for a frustrated writer.

Next, when a text isn’t working, I’ll try something formal to shake it up: I change voice from first- to second-person (two of the articles I’m most proud of are written in the form of letters), I change tense, or cut a text up into very small pieces and start rearranging. Often, I do this literally, sitting on the floor with tape and scissors and paper fragments. Proust’s archived manuscripts are apparently full of pasted-in bits that fold out in all directions. It’s a time-tested technique, and there’s something about physically cutting something up that works differently for me than cutting and pasting on screen. It’s easier to see the crap for what it is, and to tease out the good stuff.

Finally, if I have nothing to write about, I do something. I travel, I go in search of something (I’ve written about visiting the Paris apartment building Šimaitė lived in and travelling to an Iowa town named after an Algerian national hero). The journey is a classic frame, and it works for me.

My next trip will be to Siberia to find the village where my grandmother was exiled for seventeen years. What do I hope to find? If nothing else, the sky she saw and the earth she walked on. That alone will give me something to write about.

[Photo by austinevan]

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