When you think of “detox” perhaps you imagine throwing out all your Tupperware and drinking smoothies for a week. But have you ever considered detoxing your writing? The whole point of a detox, of course, is to get out what is bad—the poisons, the toxins, the allergens—and leave a clean slate for what is good. This concept can easily be applied to writing and all the anxieties, uncertainties, and confusion that can come along with the writing life. I can’t promise you will lose ten pounds in three days (if that happens, I don’t think you’re doing it right), but I can promise that at the end of this detox, you will feel ready to tackle a new writing project with fresh energy and confidence.
Day 1: Cleansing Your Writing Past
Look at everything you’ve written. By this I mean pull out all the files—whether you keep them on a laptop or printed out. Separate them into categories you find useful; for me this would be published, unpublished, and discarded, but for you it might be submitted, unfinished, and abandoned. You might also organize other categories related to your writing—a file for your book proposals, for prose, for interviews, for author bios, or for promotional writing.
After you’ve separated your writing into distinct and meaningful categories, look at your organizational system. What material do you need to be able to access quickly? Perhaps that is work you have recently submitted or work you are currently revising and editing. What can you file in less readily accessible places? Take some time to reorganize your writing files, aiming for simplicity.
Now look at all your published writing—if you have been published. What is going on with those poems, stories, essays, and/or book(s)? You may find themes, styles, or tones that these published pieces share, commonalities that you could bring forward and expand on in your current work. Consider what you can learn from your previous successes. While you’re at it, think about whether you have fully capitalized on that publication; in addition to listing it in your author bio, have you included a link to the publication on your website? If your publications include shorter works such as poems, essays, or short stories, could they form the start of a collection that gives those works a second life?
Now let’s look at your discarded writing—drafts that were never finished, poems that never seemed to completely hit home, novels that remain in unedited limbo. Are there pieces in here that could be reimagined, revised, revived? Parts of poems that could be used for new poems or combined to create a longer poem? Novels that could become short stories? Feel free to scavenge: See what you can reuse here. You never know what passage or line, buried in an otherwise unusable piece of writing, might provide fresh inspiration—a starting point for something completely different.
On the other hand, if there are pieces that are truly not worth the paper they are written on—or the bytes they are taking up on your hard drive—consider throwing them away. It is okay to delete material if it no longer contains anything of value and, despite your hard work on it, includes no line, phrase, or idea that resonates with you. The point of that piece of writing may have been to move you to another piece that is more successful.
Try to avoid a scarcity mindset when it comes to your writing. If you have been writing and rewriting a piece for years, but it still does not satisfy you, whether it is published or not, then it may be that you aren’t ready to write it just yet. You may want to put the idea back in your writing notebook and approach it later, when you have the lived experience and perspective to achieve your vision for that piece.
Finally, look at what you are currently writing: the unpublished, the works-in-progress. What are you excited about here? What about this writing draws you back to the page every day—a character, the metaphors, a topic or cause close to your heart? If you are doing this detox because you’re stuck, what about this piece feels stagnant? Can you imagine a better way forward?
The last part of today’s challenge is reserved for the emotional, perhaps even spiritual, component of writing. Think about old ideas you may have about your writing and yourself as a writer.
Do you consider yourself a poet and only a poet? “I could just never write a novel,” you think. “I am only a poet.” Why do you believe that? Was it what you were told in Introduction to Creative Writing a decade ago? The lines between genres are blurry. If you are a poet dreaming of novels, consider dipping a toe in the prose pool and try a prose poem or flash fiction. Writing outside your genre is not entirely the same as starting as a beginner. You will still be bringing everything you have learned from your familiar genre into the writing in this new genre, and that could result in some exciting new work. Writing is more than producing a product—it can also be play. Have fun and try new things! Do you think you’re never going to get published? Or, even if published, never be read? Try sending your work out to a few journals today, a small step in the right direction; those journal editors, whether they publish you or not, will be reading your work.
What negative thoughts are weighing down your writing process? Take all those thoughts and ideas and labels you have for yourself and your writing and jot them down on a blank piece of paper. Don’t leave anything out; include even the ugliest, darkest thoughts about your writing and your writing self.
When you are finished, try saying something like: “This is not the truth about me or my writing.” Then destroy the paper however you see fit. I am partial to the purifying power of fire.
Day 2: Rejuvenating Your Writing Present
Start by looking at where you write. Maybe this is at a desk in your bedroom, an office in a school, outside under a tree, a coffee shop. Begin with the place you go when you really want to get some writing done. How can you improve this space? Does it need more light? Are you comfortable? Does your back hurt after five minutes? Is the temperature just right? Too loud, too quiet, too many distractions?
In my case, I share a desk with my husband, and I needed to get some of his paperwork off my writing desk because I like a completely barren surface on which to do my writing.
If you have more than one place, look at those other spaces and see how they could be improved. My secondary place is on the floor of my bedroom, behind my bed, often next to a large pile of laundry. I think that is pretty much fine as it is.
After examining places where you typically write, brainstorm ideas of new places that you would like to try out as your own special space for writing, somewhere around the house or apartment, somewhere outside, somewhere far away from the domestic pull of the place where you eat and sleep—and feel the pressure to do chores.
My list looks like this:
- The library
- The basement playroom
- The backyard
- The local coffee shop
- The park
Try to think outside the box but also consider what is doable. For example, I would love to write in a local university’s library, but it would be a huge hassle for me to get there, if I would be allowed in at all. You don’t want accessing your writing space to be a barrier to getting writing done. Find a space where you feel comfortable emotionally and physically, one that will allow you to focus on and enjoy the process of writing.
When your detox is complete, I challenge you to choose three of those new places from your list and attempt an hour of writing in each one.
We’ve all heard the expression that you are what you eat, but I would take it a step further: You are what you write with and what you write on. Consider what you use to write. Do you typically write on your phone’s Notes app? Do you write with pencil on legal pads? Or perhaps on your laptop? Make a list of how you typically write your drafts.
My list, as a poet, looks like this:
- Notes and rough drafts go in my writing notebook (written in ink).
- “Finished” drafts are typed up on the computer.
If you typically start on the computer, next week, when you begin writing again, try starting on paper. If you typically write with a pen, try a pencil. If you use a phone app, try the computer. The point is to experiment with something different and see how it feels. You may hate it and go right back to what you were doing—or you may find a new way to write that invigorates your writing practice.
Now read through all your works-in-progress. Don’t worry about editing or adding to the word count, just read them. If you need to, imagine you are an editor and these pieces all showed up in your Submittable queue. Spend some time thinking about your current work.
Make a list of what you love about your current pieces. That’s it. Not a list of what you want to revise or what needs work or what you are unsure about. Just write a list of what you find exciting, new, and beautiful.
Day 3: Focusing Your Writing Future
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that,” writes Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000). Most writers are readers. Or if they aren’t, they should be. When you read, you are absorbing style, tone, and pacing, even subconsciously. Reading voraciously shows up in your writing. I encourage you to look at the last ten books you’ve read and who wrote them. Pay special attention to the books in the genre you also write.
Who are the authors? Are you in a rut, reading the same style of writing again and again? Sometimes breaking out of your old reading habits can help inspire you.
Make a plan to go to the library and check out five books in the genre you write in, by an author you have never read (better yet, an author you have never heard of). If you aren’t sure what to choose, ask a librarian for help. Or flip through the pages of this magazine for ideas.
After having spent time with your past work and current work, look toward your future work. Briefly write down where you would like to see yourself ultimately as a writer. Don’t be afraid to dream big. (Poet laureate! New York Times best-seller!) Maybe you want to publish one poem in one specific magazine. To finish a book just for your friends and family to read. Your dream is your dream; it doesn’t have to look fancy to be important.
Then work backward from there. To get to your dream, what is the step right before that? The step before that? Follow it back to where you are now.
If you outline novels in your head but write nary a word, do you think your dream of being the next Marilynne Robinson is going to happen?
If you dream of publishing a poem in the Southern Review but never submit your work, do you think you will publish a poem there?
Write down ten actionable steps you can take this week toward your dream. Maybe this looks like a list of literary magazines you would love to be published in—and sending your work to five of them. Or maybe it has to do with your writing—finally revising the novel you half-wrote this past summer and thinking of a few publishers that may be interested in it. The point of this exercise is to look at what you hope and dream for your writing, then block out time to take these steps in the coming weeks.
The last exercise in this detox is to look at your daily, weekly, or monthly writing habits. Take a moment to think about how much time you spend on writing each day, week, or month. You may write daily, a little here and there, or you may devote an entire day to writing once a month. Is your daily writing habit helping you reach your ultimate writing goals?
If you aren’t sure, pull out a calculator and do some quick math—for example, if you want to write a complete poetry manuscript in a year and you are starting from scratch, then you need to write five (very good) poems a month to hit the roughly sixty pages needed for a full-length manuscript. Good! That gives you a goal—you can see how far away you are from where you want to be, so now devote yourself to writing X number of poems each month to get there. If you are a novelist or memoirist, calculate how many words you need to write a day, a week, or a month to hit your goal by a certain date.
Setting goals is not meant to burden you but rather to propel you forward in your writing. As you meet your goals, you draw one step closer to your dream.
Now that you have finished the three-day writing detox, start writing again. I hope that taking a few days off and examining your writing, where you write, what you write with, and what your goals are has refreshed your spirit and reenergized your writing practice. Though this detox will not necessarily boost your word count, it can reset your writing life, making you more mindful and more deliberate, so you can be the fully realized writer you have always wanted to be.
Renee Emerson is the author of the poetry collections Church Ladies (Fernwood Press, 2023), Threshing Floor (Jacar Press, 2016), and Keeping Me Still (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014). She is also the author of the chapbook The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants (Belle Point Press, 2023) and the middle-grade novel Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike (Winter Goose Publishing, 2022). She lives in the Midwest with her husband and children.
Thumbnail credit: Susan Emerson
