How Do You Keep Writing After You Graduate?

Do you still write?

This question gets asked every semester when Mount Mercy English hosts one of its alumni career panels—What Can You Do With An English Major?

Do you still write?

The question is usually asked by students who adore creative writing and who are on the verge of graduating. These students and their question evoke a mix of emotions in me. Pride, hope, sadness.

My pride and hope come from the students’ love of writing—their desire to keep doing it. My sadness creeps in because these students also seem to fear that they will not continue writing.

I remember that fear. My own long-ago college years were a time of explosive intellectual and creative growth. How, I wondered, could life after college possibly measure up? How would I keep writing without a teacher’s prompts and deadlines? Without a teacher and other students eager to read my latest story? How would I continue to develop my creative writing in a rigorous graduate program that required LOTS of academic writing?

Many Mount Mercy seniors like Dori Whitlock ’19 (and others not going to graduate school right away) likely wonder how they’ll fuel their creative writing as they start “real jobs” and begin “adulting.”

What they are asking (and what my younger self was asking) is this:

How do you make your own writing life?

(This question should not be confused with how you make a living writing. Or with how you publish. I’ll write about publishing in a separate post. Here I’ll simply say that you can make a writing life without publishing and that even if you do publish, it’s far from the most rewarding part of writing.)

So how do you make your own writing life?

The bad news is, there are no pat answers. But that is also the good news. The exhilarating (and sometimes daunting) truth is that there are no rules for creating a writing life. You get to find what works for you, and if you’re like me, the search will never end. In other words, your writing life will evolve as you change and grow.

That said, I will offer some guidance for recent graduates who want to keep writing.

After you’ve finished the last of your graduation cake, reflect on your experience with creative writing in college. What, specifically, helped you grow as a writer? What, if anything, got in your way? Those things that got in your way? Don’t let them back in your life. Whatever helped you? Keep or recreate it. Or build on it.

For instance, if there were other students who really got your writing and gave you helpful feedback, stay in touch with them! Form a partnership or writers group. If you lose touch with these classmates, ask yourself what it was about them that made them supportive and energizing readers of your work, and find new readers like them. Become one yourself so that you can return the favor.

If your professor’s deadlines fueled your creativity, learn to set your own deadlines, or set deadlines with a writing buddy. If your professor made you freewrite, and it loosened you up or helped you produce a few gems, make yourself freewrite.

Learn to feed your own creative spirit. Which writers make you want to write? Read them!

What else inspires you. Art? Music? Film? Nature? Be choosy about what you feed yourself. As Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life, a writer “is careful of what he [sic] reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.”

But, you may be saying, how do I find time to inspire myself? How do I find time to write?

Camille Dungy, a poet and essayist who visited Mount Mercy in 2011, addresses this question in the fun essay “Say Yes to Yourself: A Poet’s Guide to Living and Writing.” It appeared in the most recent edition of Poets and Writers, and is not yet available online, so I’ll share a bit of the opening here. Dungy opens with the ideas of Puerto Rican poet Judith Ortiz Cofer, who says she doesn’t find time to write, she makes it. She steals it. Dungy writes, “No one was going to give her time to write. She had to take it for herself. Sometimes she had to take it from herself.”

If you want to write, you need to make it a priority. Often you need to get up early or stay up late.

Discover your ideal writing session—the conditions that enable you to do your best work—and try to create such sessions for yourself. If you can’t write under ideal conditions, then learn to write under the best available conditions.

For example, my ideal writing session starts early in the morning at my home office and lasts at least three hours. During this time, I’ll have no interruptions or distractions, and if my writing feels like it’s going strong, I’ll be keep writing until I’m spent (usually five or six hours max).  Given my career as an English professor, I can make such ideal situations happen more often than nearly anyone except for a fulltime writer. I have summers and sabbaticals to write—and often Friday and weekend mornings.

But most of us don’t have our ideal writing conditions most of the time. So if we want to write regularly, if we want to build and keep momentum on a writing project, we need to adapt. We need to learn to write in less than ideal conditions.

Consider Mount Mercy alum and freelance writer Christina Capecchi Ries ’04. She has four children under six, yet she publishes in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her most recent piece appears in a site called Minnesota Parent.  

It describes her strategies for making her secondborn feel special, and these strategies, I believe, also apply to making a writing life. Ries notes that it’s easy for a secondborn to feel overlooked. “These days I’m trying to combat that feeling and be creative about little windows for one-on-one time. It doesn’t have to involve a grand outing.”

Just as Ries’s time with her secondborn doesn’t have to involve a grand outing, writing time doesn’t have to be in a room of one’s own while you produce the Great American Novel or scale the heights of Parnassus. In fact, lowering your expectations and settling for less can sometimes yield astonishing results. Dungy went through a period when all she could manage was fifteen minutes a day, yet those minutes enabled her to create several essays and poems.

During my current sabbatical, I was struggling to write, not because I lacked time, but because I lacked—or so I believed—emotional and intellectual energy. My elderly mom was experiencing health problems and in a nursing home for the first time (temporarily, I hope). I was frazzled, fearful, and sad—sorely tempted not to write, but I told myself, Vermillion, you don’t have to create anything good, and you don’t have to try for long, but you do need to spend half an hour trying to grow the draft of your novel. Lo and behold, once I got past my initial resistance, I got blessedly lost in my writing. I discovered something important and new about one of my main characters. Three hours passed before I noticed I was hungry.

This complete absorption is one of the key reasons why I write. You’ll find your own reasons. And your own ways of building momentum.

In an article on WritersDigest.com, Lynn Dickinson asks questions that can help you create a rich writing life:

• How do you feel emotionally when you are writing? How about when you are done for the day?

• What does your writing practice do for your heart? Your spirit? Your peace of mind? Your degree of attunement to your inner world? Your flow of creativity? Your connection to others around you?

If you write every day, good for you! I don’t. Not all writers do. If you don’t write for a while, it does not mean that you will never write. You may simply be refilling your creative reservoir. Your subconscious may need time to work, or you may simply need a breather.

Of course, if you never write, you never write.

Annie Dillard opens The Writing Life with a quote from Goethe:

“Do not hurry; do not rest.”

Goethe is speaking of the midway, the delicate balance needed for a writing life. Do not be too hard on yourself, but do not be too easy either.

Do not hurry. Be willing to revise and edit. Trust your writing process. Learn from it. Savor it. Refine it. Allow it to expand your world, your mind and heart.

Do not rest. If you need to, take breaks from drafting, revising, or editing, but do not give up on your writing. Never stop seeing the world through a writer’s eyes: with curious, close attention and with a belief that you can transform any experience into something interesting or beautiful.

I wish all recent graduates much joy as you make your own writing lives. Less recent graduates, what wisdom can you share?

Do you still write?