Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

NaNoWriMo Week One: Embrace your writing process

NaNoReviseMo Week One is in the books, and I’m pleased with my progress.

And by pleased I mean, I came to my senses and cut my hourly goal by a third because it turns out I’m not a robot who can write a ludicrous number of hours every day for thirty days and, you know, live.

I also mean that chapter one—that chapter that had me stumbling in the fog a few weeks ago?—has been gutted, sworn over, and revised. It needs another cut pass—editing for us overwriters is all about compression—but I don’t think the wrecking ball is likely to level it again. On top of that, I did longhand rewrites for two chapters the Chicago section—aka the section that plays nice—and final polish for the prologue.

So the revision train has officially pulled away from the station and it feels like—to risk the jinx—I’ve found the digidum rhythm that will carry me through this draft.

The best part about the first week of NaNoReviseMo, though, is that daylight-saving time ends during the wee hours of the first Sunday of the month, but you know this already.

I know you know this not because your digital overlords (read: your phones and computers) made the change for you but because my feed was full of think pieces about the evils of letting capitalism wreck havoc with our circadian rhythms.

And the comics.

I love all the comics about dogs rioting over the injustice of delaying dinner an hour, but my favorite comic about the end of daylight-savings time is this one by cartoonist and writer Adrienne Hedger:¹

Not so very long ago, I was the lady in the pink shirt Edvard Munching her way through the time change, but these days, I embrace it. I always preferred falling back to springing forward—gaining an hour of sleep is a gift while losing one is a crime against all that is good an holy—but the sun setting around 5 p.m. did seem like a pretty steep price for an extra hour of shut eye.

As the cartoon and all the grousing from my friends on social media suggests the vast majority of folks don’t like being plunged into darkness an hour earlier on Sunday than on Saturday. My mother loathed it—my second memory of time changing was a conversation with my mom driving through my hometown when it was pitch black outside at 4:30 p.m. on a December afternoon.

At a red light, she leaned over the steering wheel and looked up at the night sky. “It’s so dark,” she said in an awestruck whisper. “We don’t notice how dark it’s getting because we’re so busy with the holiday, but it’s so dark—I hate it! Don’t you hate it?”

I had just been admiring the twinkle of the Christmas lights we were passing, so I kind of liked the dark. Plus I quite liked making snow angels in the yard under the stars, but mom hated the dark so adamantly that I convinced myself I hated it, too.²

It took the pandemic for me to remember I kind of loved the dark.

That first fall of lockdown, I dreaded the end of daylight savings time. The world was falling apart, everything was awful, and now you want us to lose an hour of daylight, too?

The answer from the unfeeling universe was basically: “You betcha!”

But once the time changed, I found I actually loved the dark.

We have a light in the living room set to a timer, so when I came out of my office to a dark house at 5p.m., the warmth of the light from that lamp felt more cozy than apocalyptic, which was quite the trick with Covid howling at the door.

For the first time in years, that December I hauled out my husband’s grandmother’s artificial tree up from the basement, strung lights, decorated with owl ornaments, and connected the tree to the timer.³ While everyone else was grousing about the dark, I was the lone weirdo digging it. In fact, I felt such cozy joy every time that timer clicked on and the living room exploded into a multicolor glow⁴ that we left our tree up until the end of February. ⁵

So much joy I leaned into embracing the darkness:

• I ordered a deep emerald housecoat that was soft as the pelt of stuffed animals made for babies.

• I ordered candles at a price point so high it might have been cheaper to burn dollar bills.

• And I became so obsessed with Netflix’s one-hour Fireplace For Your Home program, I quickly decided that only chumps read without first turning on the video fireplace. ⁶

And it’s not just the dark I love.

I’ve made a similar peace with the bracing cold.

I pile on the layers, pull out the joyful ridiculous of my Doctor Who scarf and wacky hat collection, and bliss out on walks that don’t leave me a sweaty mess. Maybe the girl who made snow angels under the stars was always going to find her way to loving winter.

This process of finding what to love in the things we’re supposed to hate—the coziness of the dark, the play of the cold—is a survival skill as important to our mental health as our thirst mechanism is to our physical health.⁷ And finding a path to coziness in the cold, dark winter has something to teach us as writers about the power of embracing some part of an otherwise difficult thing.

I’m a slow writer, and I kind of hate it. I put the hours in, but it takes me quite a long time to find my way through the fog of a particular piece. I’ve tried a variety of novel planning processes that promise to help me bypass this fog—Saved the Cat for Novelists, I’m looking at you—but even with a detailed outline, fog eventually descends, and I have to feel my way back to my story.

It’s s-l-o-w process, and—not sure if I mentioned this—but I kind of hate it.

But what if if instead of hating the process I’d developed to account for my particular cocktail of anxiety, depression, and executive functioning issues, I embraced it?

My first week of NaNoReviseMo, I had a bit of a tantrum after realizing that the middle of the chapter I thought was almost finished actually needed to be stripped to studs and rebuilt, and I developed a mean case of the if-onlys.

If only I was faster.

If only I could see though the fog.

But I’m not, and I can’t, and—quite frankly—I’ve wasted too much time trying to figure out how to cut straight through fog that’s only ever lifted when I submitted stumbling around long enough to find a single ray of sunlight that burns away just enough fog that I can a little and then a little more until—hot damn!—the fog has lifted and the chapter is finally done(ish).

Embracing my process isn’t a new idea—for me or for anyone.

But I do find that I need to recommit to my process a few times a year.

When I’m in a fog and paralyzed with the certainty that there has to be another way—a better way, a faster way—I need to remind myself that the best and fastest way to cut through writing fog is to embrace the tools that work for me and my weird little writing brain. Because like winter darkness, my process isn’t going anywhere, so I might as well find a way to love it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write longhand in a nest of pillows while a fireplace crackles on my laptop.

How about you? How did the first week of NaNoWriMo go for you? And how have you made peace with the dark or your writing process?

1. Hedger’s work reminds me how much fun I have when I let myself draw. I’ll add it to the list of things I’d like to get back to, but it’s a very long list. Which reminds me I’m supposed to be getting to the pool once a week—excuse me while I scribble a quick trip to the pool on my calendar for this weekend.

2. My confusion about whether I loved falling back maybe had more to do with my mom’s rigid ideas about sleep—I had a bedtime the entire time I was under roof—but my relationship with sleep is another essay entirely.

3. My distaste for Christmas and all the fixings is also another essay entirely..

4. Part of the joy was the tree full of owls—this Substack is called HIBOU, after all—but this is a post about light so I’ll keep the focus on stringed lights not strigiformes.

5. Try doing THAT with a real tree!

6. I can feel the collective anguish of you fireplace purists who insist there’s nothing like a real fire, but I have to insist you’re wrong. A real fire in a hearth cooks one side of me and leaves the other to freeze—a blanket in front of a fake fireplace is consistently cozy. A real fire in a hearth comes with the real risk of burning down the house—the Fireplace in Your Home Video has never burned down a single home. And a real fire creates soot that must be cleaned—when my fake fire burns out, I just turn off the TV.

7. As someone with depression and anxiety that always seems to get a little worse at the end of the fall, my rebranding for winter feels like a miracle, though I want to be clear that I’m pairing it with a lot of other self care—medication, sleep, exercise, the support of a therapist when needed—and encourage anyone who’s feeling low to reach out for help. You can get help at the Substance Abuse and Mental Services Administration at this link, call 1-800-662-HELP (4357), or text 988 for crisis management.