“In the summer before my final year of grad school, I needed to finish a complete first draft of my thesis, a novel. My loony plan was to do it in one week while I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s unoccupied condo in Colorado. I packed my bags. Before I left, the great Robert Boswell—then and now my mentor—offered me this advice: ‘If it’s not working, change something.’ Here’s what he meant: If you find yourself going in circles, identify the variables by which you work, and one by one, session by session, change them. Keep changing them until your circling straightens out. If you’ve been writing in the morning, give the afternoon a go. Or post up at the kitchen table instead of the desk. Or head to the library instead of the café. Or drink tea over coffee, or beer over whiskey, or horchata over anything. Or slap your laptop shut and write in longhand. I’ve found this advice to be practical, beautiful, and enduring. Whenever I notice that I’m going in circles, it’s under an unswerving set of rituals. Rituals need to be reinvented to stay relevant. Find your rituals—change them.”
—Joseph Scapellato, author of Big Lonesome (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
Photo credit: Ryan LeBreton