Three things I've added to my day to write a book

How I'm staving off the overwhelm that often consumes me doing this work and what's working for me right now

This post should be the fourth part of the “Key Themes of the Women of Ireland Project” series I’ve been sharing over the last few weeks. It should be about ‘Strong, Stoic, Doers’. It’s not. I’m interrupting that for yet another bit of self-indulgent reflection on my personal experiences of doing this work.

I recognise that I use this medium for such self-indulgences quite a lot. Never planned, it just happens. But there’s an honesty to sharing my ‘behind-the-scenes’ vulnerabilities, failings and realisations that I like. Plus, I hope that there may be something in this post, as I describe the structures I’ve been putting in place to deal with the (literally) over-whelm-ing sense of overwhelm I’ve been experiencing lately working on the Women of Ireland project book, that may be of use to someone.

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Last week I had a bad day. A particularly bad day. I have lots of bad days. My hindsight memories of most of the work associated with this project are of more bad days than good. Bad days being like the one last week, where I spent a solid 12 hours trying to express a particular idea and absolutely nothing came out of it. Not even one measly lucid sentence. In fact, I was left more confused, and therefore even less confident in my own ideas, at the end of those 12 hours than when I began.

(A good day — those beautiful, rare days— is when thoughts flow lucidly, forming themselves into easy, meaningful sentences that just keep coming. One sparking the next. When I can see the multitudes of connections between women of Ireland past and present stretching out in front of me in a clear pattern, just waiting for me to weave them in).

It was another day to be written off.

The day after, I licked my wound by doing the thing that makes me feel like I'm living — put a book in my bag, clipped the lead on my lovely dog, walked to my favourite coffee shop, got a latte, and sat in the big sofa chair by the window where I could read and people-watch while my dog snoozed or sniffed for crumbs on the floor.

The book I’d brought with me was “The Making of Inequality: Women, Power and Gender Ideology in the Irish Free State, 1922-1937” by Maryann Gialanella Valiulis.

Possibly a strange choice given my fragile state — it was a book that represented a prior failing. I’d tried to read it once before, about 18 months ago but just couldn’t get through it. I managed a chapter. Then gave up. Added it to the pile of other half-read things.

But this day, in the coffee shop, I found myself zipping along through it. It’s a well-written book (I’d recommend it). Academic yes, but it’s not heavy or dense, or so overly wordy that you spend more time trying to understand what a sentence actually means than take in the information it’s trying to convey.

I spend a lot of time reading stuff written for an academic audience, but that doesn’t mean I always find it easy, or even enjoyable, to read. I get just as fed up and fatigued by the dedication some academic disciplines have to using ‘insider’ terms and big, complex words (Sociology, I’m looking at you!). I attribute it to the fear embedded in academic writers (particularly in humanities and social sciences) to not make the cardinal sin of ever presenting something as a definitive fact. Consequently, academic writing can sometimes feel like an exercise in circling around, and always keeping at arms-length the thing you are trying to talk about. Keeping an ‘objective’ observer’s distance between you and the very idea you are interested in and are wanting to argue for. The complicated language helps keep the distance between you and it — the tool to ‘bat away’ a statement of definitive fact.

Anyway, I digress and ramble. Basically, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis’ book was not that. It was that rare thing — it gave a direct opinion, laid out the facts clearly and provided conclusions (not maybes, possiblys and potentiallys).

So why had it ended up on my ‘half-read-can’t-face-it’ pile?

Last time round it brought me face-to-face with the fact I knew so little about women’s history. And it’s in those moments that the cold reality of my having chosen to write a book that requires a deep knowledge of women’s history (which I don’t have) becomes paralysingly overwhelming (or overwhelmingly paralysing, I don't know which).

This time round, I zipped through it. The stuff she was writing about FELT FAMILIAR!!!! Hurrah. Whoop. Whoop — major breakthrough firework of thought flooded my internal body as I sat quietly and inconspicuously in the comfy sofa chair by the window in the coffee shop. A moment that brought to light something I was not consciously aware of — I have developed a working, useable, knowledge of (some parts of) women’s history in Ireland.

You see, my decision to write a book about women of Ireland — one that draws on historical factors to help explain the experiences of contemporary women of Ireland— is complete and utter madness.

Madness because I have never studied, worked in, or even had much interest in women’s history. The only transferable skill, or bit of expertise I brought to the Women of Ireland project was that of being a qualitative researcher — I knew how to interview people and analyse their experiences to produce ‘findings’. That’s it.

So, 18 months ago, when I first read that book, it was like encountering an alien planet. Even though it was the history of the country I grew up in, the reality of the world into which my grandmothers — as women— were born into and shaped by, I knew nothing of it.

I’ve always loved history, especially Irish history. And, in school, I was good at it. But I learned and regurgitated the standard history of how Ireland was formed, the one that puts men like Padraig Pearse and Michael Collins on a pedestal and makes cursory reference to some key women (like Maude Gonne and Countess Markievicz). Of women more generally, I knew nothing of their doings and experiences, and to be honest, I had little interest in it or even the recognition that there might be something to see there. ‘Gender studies’ wasn’t even a term I knew, and stuff about women was for ‘feminists’, and I wasn’t going to be branded as ‘one of them’.

Basically, I didn’t (and still don’t) fit the bill to write a book on women of Ireland.

But I'm here anyway. Doing it.

My mum has often said of me that I always choose the most difficult path. Considering I’ve had a very lovely easy life (stable, loving, extremely supportive family and spouse, opportunities for education, good solid friends, chances to travel etc.) it’s a statement that doesn’t seem to fit. But I think what she means is I tend to always choose the road-less-travelled, and I make a lot of ‘burn it all down and start again’ choices.

The complete and utter madness of quitting my ‘good job’ to write a book that so heavily relies on an area of study I had not a moment of training or knowledge in is just another example of that life pattern and trajectory of ‘choosing the most difficult path’.

All those ‘bad days’ have been the steep learning curve, the bitter painful reality that comes from ‘burning stuff down’ (i.e. leaving an area of research I had actual knowledge in) and choosing the path less travelled (i.e. madly deciding to write a book in an area I know nothing about).

As I see it now, there was a helpful naivety to my conviction, three years ago, that I could just launch myself straight into writing a book in an area I had not yet done the hard yards in (read extensively and done the proper research).

I gave a silent ‘whoop’ in that corner of the coffee shop last week because the familiarity of the information that greeted me in that book made me recognise that I now — and I say this tentatively— have developed a good working undercurrent of knowledge on women’s history in Ireland. I have a better understanding of how it all links together, of the key events and their repercussions, of the patterns across different epochs. It took three years to get this bit of a baseline.

So, an expert I am far from. But I am more well-read and more informed than when I naively began.

In practical terms, it’s contributed to that almost external instruction I received a few weeks ago which said “And now you write” — the work I’ve done on the book before now has really just been faffing and playing about (the necessary steep three-year learning curve that’s got me to this point). Now, all that’s left is to put this growing body of knowledge into action and write the thing!

For the first time, I actually (on the ‘good days’) feel able (less of an imposter).

However, this greater knowledge comes with a greater awareness of just how complex and vast the historical and cultural stratum I’m digging from to do this work, and explain ‘how it is that we women of Ireland came to be the way we are’, truly is.

And it’s the overwhelming-ness of that that floods me on the ‘bad days’.

But like the generations of ‘strong, stoic, do-ers’ of women of Ireland that I should be writing about for this post, I’m going to ‘get on with it’.

I’ve never been one for structure or too much planning. I’m a ‘seat-of-my-pants’, go with the flow, feel restricted and deflated by too much routine type of person. But, as many of the wonderful wise women who have helped me on the ‘bad days’ have explained, creativity needs structure. As Mari Kennedy, whose Celtic Wheel course I’ve been doing expresses it, the feminine (the creative) needs a masculine container (a structure).

And over the past month, I’ve crafted a container that, so far (all fingers and toes crossed) seems to be working.

It looks like this:

1. Write 300 words, first thing, for 25 days straight

Habit-stacking is the idea that if you want to create a new habit, the best way to do it is to stack it onto an already existing, solid habit. It makes the ‘doing of the thing’ less painful. I do ‘Morning Pages’ (one of the pillars of Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ method) every morning (well more mornings than not). So, I’ve stacked writing 300 words every morning onto that.

As soon as my last morning page is written, I flip open my laptop and work till I’ve produced a minimum of 300 words.

I’m currently on a 13-day streak. I put a tick in a diary next to the days I’ve achieved it, and I’m trying to not break the chain. If they say it takes 21 days to build a habit then I’m currently on shaky any-tiny-little-hiccup-could-break-the-chain ground. The idea that I would, as many people advise, write every single day, fills me with dread and a sense of exhaustion. Whenever I hear that advice, I notice it tends to come from male authors. I’m a (menstruating) woman, and so I’ve decided to adapt it to suit such a body. I’m aiming for a 22-25 day streak each month — the times when I’ll have just about enough oestrogen in the tank to actually ‘do’ stuff.

2. Reflect on ‘what worked’ at the end of each day

This is an effort to slow myself down. I have a fast mind that is always planning the next thing while it’s still in the middle of another. Consequently, I rarely look back at what I’ve done, or where I’ve come from — I just plough on, keep going. When I said, in hindsight I feel like I’ve had ‘more bad days than good’ — I don’t actually know that (it just feels like that), as I don’t keep track. I don’t know ‘what worked’ for me, but that’s the self-awareness I need to develop in order to shift a ‘bad day’ to ‘good’.

So, I indulged in my child-self’s love of stationery and got a lovely little notebook and some nice pens, and now am forming an evening ritual of noting down the day. It’s just a few ticked bullet points listing what I achieved that day and some short sentences on ‘what worked’ (i.e. what helped me to achieve what I did) or, most importantly, what didn’t work.

It’s turning into a lovely little record of the road I’ve travelled so far and helps remind me of the progress I have made when my brain screams ‘you’ve done nothing!’

3. Start the day at night-time

I once read that according to the ‘Celtic’ calendar, the darkness of night-time signalled the beginning of the day, not its end. I’m not sure how ‘true’ this is, but it stirred something in me. There was something that felt both intuitively right and deeply logical about it.

I can’t write those 300 words first thing in the morning ‘cold’. I’ve got to have prepared the ground for what I’m going to write about. Writing non-fiction is such a different beast to writing fiction — I can’t just pull ideas straight from my personal imagination, I’ve got to first put them there.

So, now I prepare them at the start of the day (i.e. at night), by reading something of relevance (whether it be a paper or a book chapter) to what I think I’ll write about the next morning. I think there’s some sort of juicy magic that happens overnight that helps transform, often dense information, into another thread of the ‘women of Ireland’ story ready for weaving first thing.

As I mentioned, I’m not routined and I don’t like it. I rage against such structures. But these three, fairly simple things, are really working for me at the moment. They feel soft and comforting — a solid surface to lean on when the going get’s tough, not restrictive walls that force me into doing their bidding. The challenge will be maintaining them, especially over the coming months where, once again, in my ‘burn things down and start again’ tendency, I am about to embark on another period of change (I’ll keep you posted).

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Hoping that this interruption to the flow of the ‘Key Themes of Women of Ireland project interviews’ was not too much of a digression — I’ll return next time with the ‘Strong, Stoic, Do-ers’ that are the Women of Ireland.

P.S. If you liked the post from a couple of weeks back on “Tight Culture”. I’ll be giving a talk about this on Wednesday 26th July at 3pm. Online and free for anyone to join.

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