A Quick Piece of Writing Advice from a Chinese Premier

And deadline reminders! Mini-retreat, Discounted Writers' Circles

Hi!

Write with me!

I don’t usually show up in your inbox twice in a week, but I wanted to remind you that you are invited to our full-day mini writing retreat tomorrow and you can sign up here if you need the schedule and the link. If you’ve been feeling isolated, this is a fantastic community to write with. You can sign up here, I’ll email you the link and the schedule, and we’ll write together.

Also, if you’ve been thinking about signing up for writers’ circles for the spring, this weekend is a great time to do it! These circles are a fantastic way to keep in touch with your writing as the semester begins. I’m extending the deadline for the discounted price through next week because we all need a little grace in our lives. No money is due when you register, but registering early does mean I’ll use your schedule when I choose a time for the group to meet. Win-win-win! The group for mid-career and senior scholars is just about full, which is another great reason to register early. End of gentle nudging.

Finally, if you’re looking around X and wondering where all of your friends have gone, everyone’s on Bluesky these days! It’s like early Twitter—come hang out there. You can find me here: https://bsky.app/profile/kellyclancy.bsky.social.

Don’t let them kill your book joy

A piece of advice, based on a possibly apocryphal anecdote (my favorite kind). In 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai about the impact of the French Revolution, and he responded, “it’s too early to say.” (People think this conversation may have actually been about the 1968 protests, but don’t let facts get in the way of a great story).

Photo by Dana DeVolk on Unsplash

I keep talking to clients with lovely, well-developed book projects, who feel like the looming presidential term is going to force them to reimagine the whole thing. And I get it—there are a lot of big promises to break things right now, and that feels scary and existential.

But the great thing about book projects is that almost all of you are writing things that are bigger and more durable than the politics of the present.

My friends, it’s too early to know how political events in the United States and globally will unfold over the next several years. Things will undoubtedly be stupid and surprising and infuriating, but we don’t have any clue what flavor that stupidity will take.

The good news, for those of you who are working on long-term projects, is that you have time to let those things shake out. Open a new document, call it “Outrageous shit that could impact my research” (maybe workshop the title), and everything that gets said right now that could force you to rewrite—dump it there. No fancy prose, no wrangling with whether it gets at the core argument of the book or forces you to rewrite things—just first, raw impressions.

And then go into your cave and keep doing your work, the real work, which has, at its core, an important argument that needs to be in the world. When you finish writing this draft, you can circle around and see what needs to be said about the politics of now. But until then, your book is your book, and nothing that has happened will take that from you.

Like toddlers who have eaten too much Halloween candy right before bedtime, the point is chaos. But we can nope out of letting that chaos influence our research and our thinking and our writing.

In solidarity (and with permission to go steal a kit-kat from your kids’ Halloween stash),

Kelly