A Word of Advice About Your Writing Process

By Bucket Siler

There’s nothing wrong with it. Go for a long walk around your neighborhood. Listen to The Cranberries. Watch television. Crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and send a text message to yourself that confuses you the next morning when you read it. Have a hundred ideas. Write down the first two sentences to twenty-five of them. Make a salad. Avoid people. Consider the possibility of a novel. That is, consider the possibility that sometime way waaaaay in the future, you might write a novel. Write a poem. About the television show you’ve been watching. Seriously. It doesn’t matter. No one’s paying attention. Browse Tumblr. Eat a pizza you made by putting pasta sauce and cheddar cheese on sourdough bread and then chopping up olives and a leftover meatball and melting it all in the toaster oven. Sleep ten hours. Sit on the porch with a cup of tea until the neighbor’s cat hops over the fence. Pet him. He’s warm and soft, and doesn’t care what you do today.

You could describe this phase as: Restorative, exploratory, generative, dreamlike, a precious reprieve, a fallow field, etc., etc.

Or a Nothing Waste of Time You Unproductive Piece of Shit.

It’s up to you, my darling.

There’s nowhere you have to be today.

Bucket Siler’s writing has appeared in Storm Cellar, The Offing, Atticus Review, Bracken, and elsewhere. She lives in New Mexico, where she organizes Santa Fe Zine Fest.