I’m really bad at following my own advice about writing every day.

Or, the art of keeping the creative stuff going when…*gestures at everything.* Plus: a flash fiction treat.

After I mention that I’ve written a book and it’s on submission, almost every person I talk to says some version of, “wow, that’s cool!” Then, about half of them change the subject and start talking about themselves. Of the remaining half, some will lean in and confess that they’ve always wanted to write a book, but don’t know where to begin. They ask how I did it. I tell them I’ll let them know once I’ve published or figured out where this debut novel of mine is going to end up.

But more often than not, I tell them to do a version of what Stephen King advises in On Writing: write every single day, no matter what. Even if it’s terrible. Even if it’s only 15 minutes a day. Even if it’s a single sentence that you will delete during edits later. You can’t edit a blank page, and writing is rewriting, so you’ve got to get your reps in and crank out those words.

Once upon a time, when I was going through multiple rounds of revision with BE WELL, my novel currently out on submission, I was really good at following that advice. I was absurdly motivated, to be honest. I had a goal of seriously querying by the summer of 2024, so I had to get through those revisions. Then, when I signed with my agent, he very helpfully gave me some tight deadlines for our revisions together, so he could get me out on submission by January of this year.

Then January hit, and the waiting while on submission started. I’m still waiting. In the meantime, I’m picking away at an Anne Lamott-approved shitty first draft of my second novel, but I haven’t hit my stride with actually writing down words for it every day, even though my brain is buzzing with ideas. I can count on one hand the instances this year where I’ve actually had the time and space for what many seasoned writers would deem a “proper writing session.” My most recent, truly productive sprint was earlier this month, when I cranked out 2,000 words in a hotel room in Charleston while struggling with PST-to-EST-induced insomnia during a work conference. Otherwise, the most I’ve gotten done on it before that was the last time I met with my writers’ group for a Saturday writing session.

Photo credit: Canva Create. Cue the Simone Biles-level mental gymnastics floor routine I executed before using a generative AI tool for a post for this newsletter about my creative, human-generated writing. But anyway, here’s a visual rendering of how I feel when I talk about not writing every day.

Yes, there have been plenty of times where I could have written for an hour-plus and instead chose to watch Barry with my husband. And yes, I’m using that kind of time right now, on a Sunday afternoon on my couch, to write a Substack post. Because I need to remind myself yet again, by reminding everyone who reads this, that it’s good to write every day. Even if it’s only 15 minutes a day. Even if it’s a single sentence that I will most definitely delete during edits later.

Because right now, with…*gestures at everything*, it’s hard to sort through the morass of feelings I’m having about whether or not I’m doing enough to help stop the fall of democracy in America and whether or not I’m doing enough to keep my business going amid all the economic *~uncertainty~* and whether or not I have the wherewithal to get on TikTok and promote myself on yet another social media platform, even if it’s where a core segment of my potential readers hang out.

The answer to all of that is: I don’t know, and I probably never will feel like I’m doing enough.

But none of that is going to get fixed if I stop writing regularly. Especially since the “why” of my second novel revolves around the very real question of whether we can lean on the past to deal with our democracy’s current problems. Don’t worry, there will be a bonkers plot and witty dialogue, some drawn from my previous life as a politics-adjacent communications person in Washington, D.C.

In other words, I’m going to keep going to the protests, making the phone calls, tending to the Little Free Library, and speaking up wherever I can for the people who are being hurt by this administration. But I’m also going to keep up the creative stuff, because it keeps me human and energized. It’s something I have control over, even when I can’t control anything else.

On that note, I thought this would be a good place to share some flash fiction I wrote recently. I’m not submitting this in its current form to any literary magazines. I don’t reprint anything that’s been accepted somewhere, because you can read it at its original source online (like this piece, “Bright Red Nails,” in The Periwinkle Pelican).

But this snippet of a fragment could be the beginning of something. It was inspired by the encounters I’ve had with people playing instruments or talking about music in office parks full of tech startups (there a lot of those where I live in California). It was really cool to realize that I’ve actually seen people playing music in these places multiple times. Wherever we are, humans insist on being creative, and I like that thought.

Office Park Orchestra

VIOLIN

He practiced almost every single day after work. He played violin for 17 years, first in private lessons, then school orchestras, sawing away at Vivaldi and Mozart until they sounded reasonably pleasant. Now that he was away from school, out in the big wide world, he wanted to be disciplined. He wanted to retain that part of himself that was always praised, always worthy, always welcome. No way was he going to let his technical skills slide, even if his wrists were developing carpal tunnel from days spent typing code into a program that trained artificial intelligence to write code faster than humans ever could.

The parking lot, after most of the cars had left for the day with people going back to families and pets and after-work libations, was the ideal setting. He would set up under a tree next to a handicapped space. Sometimes he would bring his collapsible music stand for sheet music, if he was learning a new piece, but other times he would simply play on repeat a movement he knew by heart.

HARMONICA

The harmonica was something he always kept in his pocket. His father had been the same. His father was barely literate but could pick up a tune by ear like nobody’s business. He was literate, a prolific reader, mostly of online news, but he didn’t have the same gift for learning music. That’s why, as much as he loved it, he had to sit in his car sometimes on lunch breaks and practice finding exactly where to wrap his lips, how to blow air through, and when to change the position of his hands just to perfectly capture a popular tune.

He didn’t do it as often as he liked, mostly because he enjoyed talking to people in the building where he worked on his lunch break. His lunch breaks weren’t usually when theirs were, so sometimes they were short with him when he tried to chat them up at their desks. He didn’t like eating in an empty break room, and if he wanted privacy the cleaning supplies closet, where he kept his cart, was not ideal. So there was his car. He probably should have kept his harmonica in the glove compartment at this point, but he liked the idea of having it ready to go, in his pocket, at a moment’s notice. Even if he had never gotten it out and played in public before.

KEYS

She wished there was a way to put a Cassio keyboard in her cubicle. There was no room, of course. The fiberboard desk surface to her right side held piles of company handbooks and binders of policies, plus a book called How to Win Friends and Influence Robots. So she had to content herself with Garageband on her phone to pluck out a few notes, and otherwise listening to “Focus” piano music playlists as she fiddled with pivot tables.

She learned to play while accompanying her grandfather, who was a professional piano tuner, on various jobs during summers and after school. He needed an extra pair of hands to play some notes while he made adjustments, so he could ensure everything was right. He had a tuning fork but he also had a very good ear. Perfect pitch, in fact. You told him a note and he could sing it, perfectly on key. Her grandmother used to come with him in the early days of their marriage, but after they had kids of their own and she had to work, she could no longer be his chief player.

She stopped going when she went off to college, but now that she was home would still go with her grandfather after work, playing “The Entertainer” or the beginning notes of Fur Elise as he adjusted strings. He had brain cancer that was affecting his hearing, so he no longer had perfect pitch. His old clients were dying off, but work was what kept him alive, so she went with him wherever she could. And she had built an app that could tell both of them when a note was right.

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Hope you enjoyed that. I’ll let you know if it turns into anything more fleshed-out down the road.

As always, if you’re new here, feel free to follow @sarahflockenwrites on Instagram, the only social media platform my elder millennial brain currently has regular bandwidth for, at least until I finally cave and get on TikTok.