Most mornings of the week my work day starts with a writing session shared with a group of writers spread out across the globe. After the session, we check in and share what we worked on, our struggles, and our joys. The other morning I shared that I had tried to talk myself out of writing from the moment I woke up, but I got my butt in the chair, did a little bit of work, and I took that for a win.
Some days are like that, and when you string together a long strand of days where the work feels tedious, that can wear on your brain. That’s where I’m at with my current second draft. I’m so deep it’s hard to see the big picture - of the story and writing life.
I’m turning to my knitting often throughout the day. I’ll sit for pockets of time with various projects, letting the yarn run through my fingers as the needles click and the project at hand grows. There’s a satisfaction in seeing the stitches add up to a whole, in the growth of a sweater, inch by inch, stitch by stitch.
At certain points of writing a novel you get that same sense of satisfaction - at the end of a chapter or seeing your work printed out, feeling the heft of pages in your hands. But ultimately, knitting is a more immediate gratification, even if the project isn’t complete in a day, you can see measurable progress.
That’s what this is about, I think. Measurable progress. In a first draft, it’s easy - you count your words each day and tally them up nicely and neatly in an organized fashion. In a second draft, you have to shift your ideas of what’s a measurable goal. Is it time? Is it words added to the draft? What about when you backtrack and fix something out of order? What about… what about… what about…
I ask myself that a lot right now. And more often than not I’m finding I don’t have the answers. The only one that I have consistently is to sit down and not try to figure it out - instead, try to feel it out. Maybe measurement isn’t for this draft so much as movement. Maybe I can let the words and paragraphs slip through my fingers, swooping my pen or keyboard in and around them like knitting needles do with yarn. The all-important tension a knitter holds their yarn with is like the consistency of a writer who shows up day after day for the work.
I finished up a sweater the other week, bound off the edges and wove in the ends. I soaked the garment in a bath of tepid water and suds, the stitches relaxed and softened, the sweater had to become something almost unrecognizable in that water in order to get it to the shape it was meant to be. I gently wrung the water out and squished it between two towels to take away the excess water, and then laid it out to dry. Slowly the water evaporated, the stitches plumped, the wool softened. And when I slipped the dried and blocked sweater over my head, I sighed with pleasure feeling the wool against my skin and the sweater hugged my form in just the right way.
Each moment spent with each stitch was worth it in the end. Just as each moment spent with each word will be worth it in the end, too.