Sit in the chair

Authors on the art of the slog//work in process 52.

Life’s been extra full lately with the end of school + a surprise new puppy (more on that next week), so i didn’t get to my posts this week. I woke up this morning (Saturday), realizing I was going to have to take my own advice and SIT IN MY CHAIR and write!

Because no matter how many other ways you have of writing or making your art—in your mind, in your body, in the mountains, on your bike—eventually you get to the point where you just need to park yourself in one place and get it down.

So here i am on my portal on a Saturday morning watching the big dog and the littlest dog frog around, the little dog bouncing in the tall grass like he’s a head on springs. All I see are ears.

But there’s almost always another, real reason behind the reason you think you’re procrastinating. (And it’s not about the puppy.)

Usually it’s fear.

I’ve finally found my way into the book I’m writing. I’ve been fighting with it and with myself for a long time, foolishly thinking i needed to exert my authorial power over it. Like I’m its boss. When what I really need to do—what I always have to do when writing—is listen.

In Italy i got to listen deeply, to poetry and the hills and my new friends, and in the quiet i could hear my own voice and that of my book. It’s known what it wants to be from the start, and finally i was ready to hear it, too. When i got home my dear friend Kelly came to visit for the weekend and when I told her about it, she could hear it, too. I sat down and dove back in.

Now I’ve entered a bit of flow. But it’s not jolly all the time. (The puppy is teething + still having accidents.) You still have to bash heads daily with your ego. You have to picture yourself taking your head off your body and putting it on a shelf, like the one where supplements go to die, where it can stay while you write in peace. You still have to remind yourself not to look at the bestseller list to be reminded that your book is not like all those other books that sell millions. In fact, the book in your mind is like no other book—that’s what scares you. You will definitely still find yourself desperately combing your bookshelves for a book like the one you’re writing to see how that author did it, and when you don’t find one, you will have remind yourself that it’s not because such a book shouldn’t exist, it’s because YOU are writing it.

In times like these, it helps to bathe in the sage words of other writers who have battled the demons + found their way to flow.

At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival two weeks ago, the Irish novelist Colum McCann described writing like this: “To be a writer is to be an explorer. You’re in your little boat in the bay. One day you keep going and going and come to an island where you try to form a theory of human nature. If you knew where you were going you might not have gone . . . You have to embrace the mystery.”

I caught a snippet of an Instagram reel with novelist Curtiss Sittenfeld who explained that, in her decades as a writer, she’s learned that struggling with a work doesn’t mean she should stop doing what she’s doing or find a new career but rather the opposite—just keep going. Sit in the damn chair.

Lauren Groff, on the marvelous “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing” podcast, was inside my brain when she spoke about listening to the form a book wants to take. The book knows, she said. You can’t rush the process. It’s an unfolding.

Miranda July, speaking at the Lit Fest, originally thought her wildly popular novel All Fours would be a reported nonfiction book about menopause, until about 8 months before she finished writing it. Thank goodness she listened!

Terry Tempest Williams exuded deep Buddha wisdom when she told the Lit Fest audience, “Before we can save what we’re losing, we must learn to savor what remains.” She was talking about environmental activism, but the same is true of art: Pay close attention. Listen deeply. The best writing, like resistance, is hyperlocal. Start where you are, with what you have. Colum McCann put it another way, “Don’t write what you know, write what you want to know.” Or, this one, which I love and live by: “Be available.”

“Start where you stand,” my friend Kelly told me one morning over coffee on our sunny patio, the puppy romping our feet.

I take all these words to heart when the voice in my head becomes overpoweringly punitive, when the puppy looks at me with his inquisitive eyes and I want to get up but don’t, when I write a page and the words feel sticky and forced and I realize while they may be mine, they’re not my book’s. So I listen.

And keep going.

I hope you do, too,

Xo Katie

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Come find your flow with us September 5-8 at Mountain Flow Camp, at High Camp Hut outside of Telluride. This is a generative, high-altitude retreat where we’ll immerse ourselves in daily flow practices including writing, hiking, silence, stillness, camaraderie, of course nature. Our movement practice at 11,000 feet is exploration and time on our feet versus “running.” If your dream day starts with a morning on the trails, followed by time to write, read, ramble, reconnect with your innate creativity, and come away refreshed and inspired to take next steps in your life, you’ll love Mountain Flow Camp. Sign up at the link below + don’t hesitate to reach out to me for more information! If you register with a friend, you’ll both receive $100 off your retreat cost of $2600.

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I’m honored to be giving a dharma talk on “How to Disappear” at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe this coming Thursday June 5 at 5:30 pm MDT, in-person and in the cloud zendo. ALL are welcome. Please join us IRL or online! Info here: