Building a Writing Habit While Living with Limitations

Written By Esme Wang
 

Presented by Esme

In Building a Writing Habit While Living with Limitations, you’ll learn what a writing habit that works for you looks like when it includes your limitations, without “overcoming” anything.

If you wish you could have a regular writing habit, but struggle with the unknowable factors of disability, illness, or caretaking responsibilities – this resource is for you.

  • Resources

    Content timestamps

    (00:02:22) Introduction

    (00:06:26) Housekeeping

    (00:09:30) Beginning

    (00:13:37) Assess your situation

    (00:23:00) What are your writing goals

    (00:31:08) Reaching your writing goals

    (00:35:38) Your resource inventory

    (00:40:10) Reviewing the productivity equation

    (00:42:09) Using your strategies for reevaluating your 24 hours

    (00:48:00) However…

    (00:53:21) 2 options

    (00:55:27) To clarify

    (00:56:46) Q&A begins

    (01:04:03) All about the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy

    Q&A Timestamps

    (00:57:14) Is it okay to have multiple desired objectives for one goal? Or, is it recommended to have one DO for one writing goal?

    (00:59:03) Any suggestions on how to do tasks such as reaching to people for someone with moderate mental illness such as social anxiety, low self-worth/esteem, extreme fear of rejections (leads to panic attacks, etc.). Assume already in therapy.

    (01:00:49) I am publishing a mental health memoir about SMI serious mental illness bipolar 1 with psychotic features and PTSD. What things did you find when you published your memoir that you would be willing to share when dealing with the writing world and the public? I am working on bylines, jacket info. and press briefs and am hoping you can give some insight since this is my first book. Thank you.

    (01:01:46) How do you get yourself to enact Option 2? What do you tell yourself as motivation?

    (01:02:20) What are your favourite planners & organisation tricks?tion text goes here

  • © 2025 Esmé Weijun Wang

    This transcript may contain errors.

    —

    Building a Writing Habit While Living with Limitations

    Esmé: Hi, everyone. Can you hear me okay?

    Awesome. Well. Good morning. It's very exciting to have you all here and I see that there's some activity going on already in the chat. It's just so terrific.

    I was having some issues with my earbuds, so I'm using my back of the ear buds and we'll see if I need to switch partway through. In the meantime, I'm going to pull up this beautiful keynote Chloe helps prepare. Okay. I'm not sure why this is not to me.

    I don't think it's Mercury Retrograde. It's something. This means miracles are happening.

    All right. We'll try that again. Here we go. Awesome.

    All right. So welcome everybody to our free webinar: Building a Writing Practice While Living with Limitations.

    And I decided this would be an interesting topic for a webinar because before we start talking about all of the things that we might want to know about when we're writing essays or memoir, is the actual process of getting to the page, and it's all good to know about a change or how a book proposal works. But what about the actual parts that involve actually making sure that you're writing on a regular basis?

    So before I start with the material, I do, I'm curious to see in the chat if any of you have been struggling with having a regular writing practice, and I'm curious to know what your most common struggles are. Is it that you don't have the time? Is it that you're too fatigued or burnt out to be writing? What are some of these struggles that you are dealing, you all are dealing with?

    Okay. Somebody mentioned depression. That's that's one for me, this for sure. And as someone mentioned, "I used to write first thing in the morning, but now I have POTS," which is something I can definitely relate to. I used to write at least get up before my 9 to 5 and write at four in the morning every day. And that became much less possible once I developed POTS.

    And somebody mentions Beth mentions "I struggle with prioritizing creative writing when it's not paid work." So yes, there's that kind of mental state that we might want to have about creative writing when it's not paid work.

    Let's see. Focusing on writing in confidence. Chronic pain. Brain fog, which is definitely associated with POTS but many other disorders as well. Yeah, I see that brain fog and fatigue is a recurring one for a lot of people.

    Somebody, Rachel mentions anxiety and freeze, which is one that I deal with quite a bit and I kind of just stuck, stuck in a frozen mode and not being able to write.

    Okay. So I see that there is no shortage of difficulties that we might run into when we are trying to build a writing habit or a priority practice. And I won't necessarily be able to fix those challenges during this webinar, but hopefully I can kind of introduce you to some new ways of thinking about what writing might look like for you and how you might be able to build your writing practice while living with limitations.

    All right. So for—All right. So. Before we get started, I want to mention a few housekeeping things. So in case you are wondering, a recording of this webinar will be made available in the follow up email. So that'll come either later today from Chloe or it will come on the 21st. It will be pretty soon. There's also going to be a live transcript.

    Great. Awesome. So that's if you need that for accessibility reasons or just if you want to follow along, get a lot of transcript we use as just a helping thing to order that transcribed things for us.

    At the end of this workshop, there will be a Q&A. So there is a Q&A box on your dashboard where you can leave your questions and then I will answer this. The end at the very, very end. I'll share more on the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy which is currently open for registration.

    And you have already begun to use the chat, which is so great. And this is for you can introduce yourself, share your opinion from and just kind of talk among one another. There are definitely a lot of really great people here and you know it's a good place to make pals and make friends and to be in a community who understands common conditions.

    One thing you might want to double check is to make sure that the default next of the two of where you're sending your messages is to host and panelists. So just make sure that you're "to" says everyone so that everyone can see what you're saying.

    All right. So that tells you kind of the housekeeping issues.

    All right. So, Barton. I just want to start out by talking about some of the things you may have heard in the past about what building a writing practice might look like or what a writing practice should look like. And I have found that many of these kind of rules about being a writer and what your writing practice should look like make a lot of ableist assumptions about our bodies and minds. And not just that for people who live with disability, as many of us do, but they may also make a lot of classist and sexist assumptions, too, about caretaking responsibilities or multiple jobs. People need to work just these assumptions that assume that we have all the time in the world to write. Never mind the freezing remains or the brain fog. There's also this assumption that we have so much time.

    And all we have to do is seize that time as opposed to considering you have caused me to take care of you. Right. And to take care of elderly parents. And yet there are all kinds of hurdles that we may need to surmount that is not taken into consideration when we're told that we should build a writing practice.

    Aaron mentions how the importance of work in the chat and that is a perfect example of how Newport—I don't know, called Newport personally. But I did purchase the work when it came out and it's hilarious to me just how many assumptions he makes in his work as though everybody has the same, the same privileges that he does. Sorry, I'm dealing with my own little brain fog here. He very much assumes that everybody has these expansive periods of time. I often wonder when I was really deep worked with taking care of his children. And it doesn't seem like he is taking on a lot of caretaking responsibilities. He's just kind of focusing on his work because he is the man. He's the man of the house, and he has this very important work that he has to do and therefore he can just go ahead and do it. So, yeah, this is absolutely the Lehman fallacy.

    So another example, also written by a white man was the book On Writing, which is incredibly lauded in the literary community. Stephen King wrote that book and I read it years ago. I read it when it came out and I have never read it since because I was so angry by how didactic Stephen King was about the idea that you have to write every single day in order to be a writer. You cannot be considered a writer if you do not write every single day. There's this mentality that Stephen King was bringing across in this book, and I was just kind of like, That's not true. There are so many reasons you might not be able to write every day. And and it's it seems very strange to me that you would kind of make this very bold claim that would eliminate so many people from being able to be called writers.

    Okay. So even though there are all of these kind of very problematic waste approaching writing and thinking about building writing practice, there isn't a true element to that, which is we do need to write in order to be writers. So the question that I want us to kind of think about as we're going through this class is how do we build a writing practice when we live with limitations? We're not trying to pretend that limitations don't exist. One huge element of this class is looking through and thinking about our limitations. But I think there's something in between focusing only on our limitations and this whole Thoreau's debunking how Newport way of looking at how we can build a great practice. Okay.

    So one thing I want to start us off with was assessing our situation, right? So we all have different situations that we're coming to this this problem or this issue with. A lot of us share similar situations, share similar challenges and limitations, but we all may have slightly different ones. We all have different resources, different responsibilities, different limitations, etc. So we will be addressing this thing that I've come up with called the productivity equation, which is the basis of everything that we talk about going forward regarding building this operating practice.

    But for those of you who have or are going through the class, the self paced class Dream Hunting with Limitations, some of this will sound a bit familiar, so to assess our situation.

    I would love if you could just spend a couple of minutes and hopefully you have some pen and paper or something to write with. Ask yourself and make notes for each of these three questions. One, what are your limitations? So chronic fatigue, brain fog and needing to work a job need to work multiple jobs, etc.. These can all be limitations that we're facing.

    Two, how do they impact your life? And three. How are you currently spending your time? And these are all kind of big questions and we're not going to be able to list every single factor. But I do want us to spend maybe 2 or 3 minutes just kind of jotting down the answers to these questions.

    So I'm going to turn my camera and sound off and give us about 2 or 3 minutes to just kind of write down our answers to these questions.

    All right. So thank you for bringing coming back and for spending some time jotting this down. And so I think there the question how are you currently spending your time is a tough one to answer, in part because we may have kind of a mental idea of how we spend our time that is very different from how we're actually spending our time.

    And if you want to get kind of deeper into assessing your situation and figuring out how you are spending your time and you're like kind of fit all the little tasks, which I do I would recommend, Let's see, this next slide includes this.

    Okay. No, not yet. So I would recommend using a worksheet that measures time. Half hour by half hour. And then to kind of fill it out for a day or two, depending on what you're doing at any given time. This is a good way to kind of track how you are actually spend your time. So I will recommend some planners later that you might find helpful, but Chloe will include a worksheet that's a free worksheet that is measuring time by half hours. That could be a good way to start. It's from the Passion Planner, which is one of the planners that I use.

    So one thing that you can see from recording your time this way is how you are actually spending your time. I know that none of you probably do this, but I will fall into these hours long rabbit holes where I am just reading like infinite comments on an Instagram post. Or deciding like, I'm just going to look up this one thing on Wikipedia. And then, you know, an hour later I'm still reading Wikipedia, except now I'm like reading a completely different Wikipedia post than I had started out doing. I know none of you probably do that these things and it's probably just me.

    But yeah, so I think it's good to keep track of how you're actually using time and kind of figuring that out. Not so much to be like, you should never go down rabbit holes on Instagram, but just to kind of be honest with ourselves. And I do want to say also, and this is relevant to a class that the brilliant writer Henry Frederick was teaching in the academy last week, which is that rabbit holes are great, like they're part of the writing process and we're not me recommending that you figure out how much time you may be spending on stuff like that is not for you to kind of slap yourself on the wrist and be like, I should never do this, is just to kind of assess how much time you may be spending on stuff like that. So that's just one quick thing about how you're currently spending your time.

    All right. So one question that I want you to ask yourself while we're kind of thinking about building writing practice is what are your writing goals?

    You know, I—one thing about goal setting, and especially about writing goals is I want us to think about writing goals that we have control over. So I think I, you know, back in the day when I first started setting goals as a young person, there was so much goal setting that I did that I had no control over. So setting the goal, I want to win the Nobel Prize for literature. I mean, that's great. I really hope that you can get there. But it's not something that you can do. It's not something that you can control, is what I mean. So you can write the best you can. You can write the most amazing work that you can. But unless you're on the Nobel Prize Committee, you don't actually have any control over who does win the Nobel Prize for literature.

    So I just want to recommend that when you are thinking about your writing goals and writing them down, I would love for you to kind of write goals that you have control over. So instead of "my goal is to win the National Book Award," the goal would be "my goal is to write a memoir about my experience growing up in during the Cultural Revolution as a woman."

    And so those two goals are very different. One, you do have control over and the other one you don't. So next to each goal as you're writing them down, I would also like you to write down what is what is called the desired objectives, which is a concept that I learned from Fizzle.co and the idea bit behind writing down the desired objective or the why. Sorry. It's by fizzle. Fizzle.co I'm putting in the chat.

    And the idea behind use putting the desired objective next to the goal is that it reminds you of what you're actually trying to achieve by reaching the goal. So people's desired objectives will vary. Even if you do share a goal with somebody else. So even if your desired objectives are both, I would like to write a memoir. One person's desired objective for writing a memoir might be "I want to connect with and help other transracial adoptees to feel less alone." Whereas somebody else's goal for writing a memoir may be "I want to persuade people involuntary hospitalization is never okay."

    So that that's kind of behind the desired objective. So I'm going to again, let's spend about two minutes writing down your writing goals and next stage for I would love it if you could write your desired objective or objectives. And if you feel like it, please drop them in the chat.

    Amanda, I love that you dropped your desired objective right there. Thank you so much. And that is that's a great, I think, desired objective. So here we go. Here's a little bit of time. Two minutes.

    I am loving these goals and desires, objectives. People are putting in the chat and already becoming very excited about reading your work and. Has. I think that's one of the most amazing things about doing the work that I do and and being in this community is, is being able to get excited about and think about and just like the amazing work that has yet to be written and how it's going to be in the world someday. Hopefully, if things go well enough. And I find that incredibly moving and also just so exciting. It's something that I you know, it makes me think about the future in it in a really positive way. So I love I love being able to read all of your goals and desired objectives. So thank you so much. I hope that you all are feeling as inspired as I am. You just think this is just great and okay.

    So now that we kind of have our writing goals and as a reminder, all of these activities like writing down your goals or writing down your limitations, etc., you can always come back to these and these just I'm just giving you a couple of minutes to do this during during this particular class. So let's see.

    All right. So the thing about reaching our writing goals, the reason that I one of the reasons I want us to kind of think about this is that when we are looking at building the foundations of our writing practice, reaching our writing goals requires a lot more than just actually drafting the work of reaching our writing goals includes a lot of other components.

    So here are some of the components of what it might take to reach your goals. So research, especially in writing nonfiction, creative nonfiction research, can be a really big element of of writing your work. To go back to it, to me for saying he said that for this one essay he watched hundreds of hours of Soul Train, which is a kind of research or your research may look more at standard like spending hours on JSTOR or reading academic articles. Or interviewing people and transcribing their words. So there's that there. That may be one element.

    The second element is dreaming. So like I said, kind of going down these rabbit holes and going for walks and letting your mind wander and make connections. I think we don't give enough credit to the things that that aren't drafting, like dreaming. I think especially in our very capitalist society, the idea of dreaming seems wasteful when in fact that's where we're making our connections and that's where we're making the connections between our ideas and coming up with new ideas. So I just want to give a shout out to dreaming and staring out the window and, you know, like sketching and thinking.

    A third task is a bit grim, but but necessary. So administrative tasks such as email to reach our writing goals. There may be a lot of issues that require like emailing people. So these interviews that you might do, for example, don't just come out of thin air. You have to reach out to people. You have to send them emails. You have to schedule when your conversations might be. You have to travel to wherever your research subjects are so that you can interview them. You're spending time doing administrative stuff like, you know, transcription screen transcription or arranging for somebody else to transcribe your work. So there are a lot of administrative tasks that also go along with writing.

    There's also the actual drafting and writing, which I think is the first thing that we think of when we think about building a writing practice. And so that is just actually like sitting there with your pen to paper or your pencils or paper or your fingers on your keyboard or dictating into a voice memo, whatever your drafting might look like.

    And then there's stuff like education. I love taking classes about different aspects of writing. And there we have the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, which takes a few hours per week. If you're focusing on taking the classes and then putting things into action. So these are all elements that will vary depending on what your limitations are, right? But we can think about all of these things as components of reaching your writing goals.

    Okay. So one thing that I think is nice to spend some time in to think about is the resources that can help you. So we just went over a whole bunch of things that can make up our rating practice. And we went over limitations that we may have right now. In thinking about these two things in in context with one another, we can start to feel kind of. Depressed or bummed about, just like just how many limitations we're dealing with, especially when we have so many components to our writing practice that we want to build. I'm just really quickly. And has would you mind dropping that question in the Q and A and then I can I get to it at the end?

    Thank you. So what I want us to do is come up with a resource inventory. So this resource inventory is going to vary depending on who you are and what your limitations are. But you already have some resources and you might be able to access more resources. For example, what are your resources for chronic illness and disability? For mental illness? And I'd like us to spend a couple of minutes to create our resource inventory.

    So, you can put create a list of resources and then put them in categories. So you have someone who can babysit for you. Do you have a small budget so that you can have food delivered instead of spending the time and spoons or elements of energy needed to make the food? Do you have a relative who might be able to share some of their weekly meal prep with you in exchange for something that you can give to them through bartering, for example?

    So you can keep adding to this resource inventory whenever you think of one. This I'll give you a couple of minutes here, but I would really recommend sharing some of your resources in the chat because other people in the class may not have thought of a resource that you've listed, but they may have the same resource available to them. So yeah, let's just have a couple of minutes here to start building a list of what your resources are and create a resource inventory.

    Okay. I'm seeing some great resources being shared in the chat. And I'm just going to move on. But feel free to, of course, keep adding to your list of resources as you come across some. So after kind of evaluating these elements, I'm going to share what I call the productivity equation.

    So productivity is a really touchy word for me, and I don't love it because it has a lot of weird politicians. But what I mean by productivity here is having the time to do things that are related to your writing, including dreaming. So yes, productivity does include dreaming about your writing or dreaming about your about your subjects that you're writing about, or watching hundreds of hours of Soul Train that is productivity as well.

    So the productivity equation that I have come up with is considering your limitations, plus assessing your resources, plus looking at things you need to get done to reach your goals and builds of writing practice. So all three of these big elements are what kind of make up, how we can build our writing practice.

    And I'm going to keep going and talk a little bit more about the more detailed elements of the productivity equation and how we can think about it when we are trying to build our writing practice.

    So earlier I mentioned keeping track of how you spend your time and. I would like us to think about strategies for reevaluating the time that we do have. So I may have. You may have heard me talk about this in other places or you may have heard this saying a lot of productivity experts like this share this concept that we all have the same hours in the day as the others say. Okay, well, that's a nice thought, but it's not particularly true, depending on how many resources we have, how much energy we have, etc., etc., etc.. Like we are so different from what Beyonce has in terms of the time in our day.

    So here are some thoughts for reevaluating the hours in your day that you have. The first one is that you don't always need to increase your hours of work to be productive. You just need to stick to a either day today, I'm writing practice as small of. Small elements and it does not have to be every day either. I do not write every day. There are whole weeks in which I don't write. So just to kind of think about the fact that we don't need to increase our hours of work.

    And the second thought or strategy that I want to bring up is consider leveraging the hours that you do have to make them more productive using a variety of strategies. So in looking at your resources, for example, if your resource is relationships, you can barter with the people that you are friends with or related to, etc. for help. Somebody in the chat mentioned earlier bartering with people for help. And I think that's a really important resource that we don't always take advantage of.

    If your resource is money, you can hire an expert for help instead of doing everything yourself. If your resource is community, you can see what community is online and also can offer support and advice. And I'm a member of a co-working space here in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Ruby. There is a spreadsheet where members can share with each other the things that they're willing to help people with or share with people, etc. And it's a really nice way to kind of think about the community that I'm in and how we can all help each other, which I think is something that we don't think about enough in this very individualistic society that we live in.

    For number three. You can also try to decrease the number of hours the challenges take up. So, you know, for me, I spend quite, quite a bit of my day of just lying in bed listening to audiobooks and podcasts because my body can only do so much before it starts to kind of start wearing down.

    Elizabeth. Well, I really like this point that you brought up, and I would like to address it at some point. So I'm just trying to remember it so I can say talk about this later. But so a big part of my pie chart from the day is taken up by just look, it looks like I'm not doing anything right. I'm lying in bed. My eyes are closed. I'm listening to a podcast or like an audio book or whatever. But is there any way that I can kind of make that wedge of the pie chart smaller? There are a number of things that I can do that I don't necessarily take advantage of. So, for example. And I was about to say, like, this is going to sound silly, but it only. I think that's an element of it too, is that we think of the things that help us sound silly. We don't do them because they feel like shameful things.

    So for me, I can make the wedge of my pie chart lying or lying down and just kind of resting my body. I could think that was a little bit smaller. If I use the hammock outside. So right now is summer and the weather is often quite nice. And being in a hammock is actually more kind of restful and invigorating for my physical body than lying in a dark room, which I do most of the time. So that's just an example of a way that I personally can decrease the number of hours that my challenges take up. This is another way that our resources can be really useful because I know that when I am not feeling well, I cannot remember all of the resources that I have available.

    And finally, by looking at these things, you could kind of see the spaces in your kind of hour by hour days that might be good places to create a writing practice. And by that I mean like the elements that, that make up what writing is.

    However, and this is could be an entire class by itself. One of the most difficult things about living with difficulties and challenges, especially chronic illness and mental illness, is how unpredictable our bodies and minds can be. I think one thing that I really came up against when they first started developing a lot of chronic illnesses is that it's just really hard to make plans like you might plan. You know, I'm going to go have lunch with a friend or I am going to write for an hour at 3:00. But it's so hard to make plans and stick to them because our bodies and minds are constantly challenging us.

    So I like to use my planner, which is right now a Hobonichi to write down what I'm able to do while I'm doing it. So writing these things down helps me to have data points for the future because my body and mind are always changing. I've learned that I can usually—I'm sharing things that I have learned about my challenges just as examples that yours will vary. So I've learned that I can usually do about two events in a day. So this is an increase for one event over the years. And what counts as an event for me? A phone call is an event. Definitely teaching this class is an event going or reading is an event. Having a meal with a friend is an event. So I have to figure it out. Over the years that durance is basically what I can do in a day. And if I kind of if I exceed that, I'm beginning to do things about my body or I'm just going to have to deal with the fact that I'm going to be wrecked for a day or two afterward.

    I learned that I needed an hour or at the very least, half an hour of buffer time where I can lie down and rest between events. You may also need buffer time. But often I feel like when we're living with limitations, we look at other people who need that buffer time and think, I can just kind of cram all these things into my day. And then we realize, no, we need this kind of recuperation time.

    So I also write down the time of day at which I take my medications because I might need to adjust those times in order to be able to do a nighttime reading. And about a couple of days ago I did that with Great Insurance and it was at 6:00. And so I needed to readjust when I took certain medications so that I could be able to do this event, this particularly special event that I wanted to do. Or I might have needed to adjust what I did last night so that I could wake up at a certain time to get ready for this class. So those are just some examples.

    I also use a color coding system in my monthly spread to note what days are special, especially tests in which are exceptionally strong. There is not always a pattern to these things, but when there are such as feeling more fatigued or anxious right around the start of my period, it's good to know what they are. So I. I would love. So normally what I would do is I would ask you to share in the chat with some methods you use are to work with unpredictability in your life. But we're kind of running low on time. So if we'll talk about the Discord group that we have later. But I would love if if I can see you all in the Discord group where you can share things like how we cope with unpredictability in our lives, especially when living with limitations.

    So I have one really big thing to talk about that has been helpful to me. So this is what my therapist, Chris Quinn, has called Option Two, which is, I think, a really big thing to think about when you're living with limitations and chronic illnesses. So when you're not feeling well, when you're not doing well. At times like that, there are two options. So option one, you can keep pushing to try and fix your day. So you try harder and harder and you keep thinking like, come on, body like, do do this thing. Come on. You watch your work kind of piling up, you get more frustrated, etc..

    And what option two is and I've been spending years trying to live with option two so it's not easy but option two is that you can do it now by it I mean the components of your writing practice. You can do it and get on with things as best as you can, accepting that the work isn't going to be as good as it would be if you were completely unformed in your brain and if you were feeling amazing physically. If you weren't dealing with anxiety, if you were dealing with a totally distillations, if you were, you know, having these difficulties and challenges.

    And sure, things might be perfect, but I find that often I can tend to wait for perfect circumstances in order to do things like write or draft or research. So in those times, I choose option two. It's no more fun, but at least it's distracting. And it can be more satisfying because I have approached my writing for the day. So often I ask myself, and you might want to ask yourself, are you waiting until you feel well enough to do what you need to do so often? For me, the answer is yes. But if you have a long term illness, you can't guarantee you'll know when you feel well enough again. So on days like that, my option is to be grumpy about it and then rush to catch up with work later, or just to do the best I can as I am now. So that's called choosing option two for me.

    Being aware that I'm working at a reduced capacity, knowing that everything is about a million times harder when I'm feeling this way and being really painfully in touch with the idea that if I felt better, I could do this properly. Sorry for all the air quotes, but I feel like when we live with limitations or chronic illness, often there are a lot of imaginary concepts. So I just want to clarify here the things I just listed.

    But just to clarify, I'm not talking about pushing through the pain. Is that to me, that's a horrible idea. I'm not talking about productivity and pressure and ignoring what your body is trying to tell you. I'm not talking about an acute illness or even a minor flare up or resting care will help your body and your systems. When stopping is allowing your body to repair and heal.

    I'm talking about these times when you're feeling a little, when the symptoms are acting out, but you can kind of do things with those symptoms of limiting factors. So using the productivity equation, using your goals and resources and using option two, you can then begin to create space for a writing practice where you may have previously felt overwhelmed by your limitations and.

    Okay. So, yeah. I hope you found this helpful. These are all things that I've used to creative writing practice. And if you put in the time to create yours and you're feeling enthusiastic about learning more about nonfiction writing in particular, you may be interested in learning about the Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, which is currently open for registration, and I'm going to talk about that later. But I'm going to have a little bit of time for Q&A right now. And let's see. What is going on in the Q&A.

    All right. Okay. So Carmen asks, "Is it okay to have multiple desired objectives for one goal, or is it recommended to have one desired objective for one writing goal?" It's terrific to have multiple desired objectives. I think it actually is maybe better in some ways to have multiple desired objectives because they can all kind of spur you on and encourage you. Sometimes a desired objective will not seem as appealing one day as it might on another day. So in that case, you can kind of look at the other desired objectives you have.

    Court has asked. "Any suggestions on how to do tasks such as reaching out to people for someone with moderate mental illness, such as social anxiety, low self esteem, extreme fear of rejection. Etc.." Yes. And so that's that's really a major hurdle. And the question also includes assume that you're already there. So, yes, I really recommend therapy. I'm a big fan of therapy. But in terms of suggestions on how to reach out to people when you're dealing with mental illness. This is where I think the concept of workarounds can be the most helpful for me. Different people are going to have different workarounds when they're facing a difficult task. So in this case, the difficult task may be reaching out to a person to get help with something.

    So for example. I'm just I'm just trying to come up with an example because I don't know about your specific situation, but when I am experiencing psychosis and my sister in law will often create frozen meals and bring them to my home so that I can have stuff to eat, which is incredibly kind and wonderful. But during those times when I'm dealing with a psychotic episode, I'm not really in the right frame of mind to, like, be drafting an email. Like "Dear Claudia, I was wondering if you could please"...like that. That is a big hurdle to get over or like even to pick up the phone and have a phone call or text her. So what I can do as a workaround is to when I'm feeling in a in a better space, when I'm not experiencing a psychotic episode or a flare up, I can reach out to her and say, okay, if I am experiencing a psychotic episode, and it would be really helpful for me to be able to get some frozen meals from you. And would you be okay if I just sent you an emoji? And then we could just come up with an emoji? That would be the code for that. And so if I'm feeling poorly enough to require help in that way, I just send the emoji and I have to think about writing an entire email, etc.. So that's one example. So I think has for a lot of things coming up with workarounds is the best alternative and everybody's workarounds will vary. My earbuds just made a noise telling me that they're running out of batteries, so I'm actually going to switch to the computer and I hope that works that.

    All right. So somebody else. So Capella says, "I am publishing a mental health memoir about serious mental illness. What things did you find when you published your memoir that you'd be willing to share when dealing with the writing world and the public?" That is a good question, but I think I might skip this one because it's not super relevant for building a writing practice by that it's something that if you bring it up in the discord group, I might be able to address. So thank you for that. Let's see. Same with a few of these other questions that are not super relevant to this actual topic.

    Rachel asks, "How do you get yourself to enact option two? What do you tell yourself as motivation?" So I think everybody kind of has different ways to get themselves to enact option to. I used to have a really when I was first starting to try and get into using option two, I actually had a big sign in my room that I made that said "Pick option two." So that was just one thing that I did. It's going to vary, though. Your mileage may vary.

    "What are your favorite planners and organization tricks?" Wow. Okay. So I could go on forever about stuff like this. But right now, one of my favorite planner tricks is to do things like put big, major events into my planner and then to also make a little highlight before and after the event to top to give buffer time.

    All right. So. I am not going to be able to answer all of the questions again. I highly recommend joining the Discord groups that you can share ideas and ask questions in the community. It's a really lovely community. Yeah. Chloe, if you could please drop the link and it'll also be in the follow up email.

    So like I said, I'm excited. Shape Writing Academy is currently open for registration. If you have no interest in this three month program, feel free to hop off the call now. I'm so grateful to you for spending time with us. It's been really lovely to have this group in the chat and I'm just going to start talking about the unexpected Shape Riding Academy in case you might find that useful.

    So there's the link to the discord. And I'm just going to go on into talking about the Academy, which is something that I'm incredibly excited about and will be open for registration for a little less than two weeks.

    So what is the Unexpected Shape Rating Academy? It's a rating academy for the ambitious unheard. And I would love it if you could join us in the academy. We work through the three phases of writing your nonfiction books in a simplified and structured way over a three month period. You don't have to be writing a book. You can also be focusing on writing essays or shorter pieces, or just getting ready to figure out what writing looks like for you. So we go through pre writing, writing and publication, and we have academy guests teachers as well.

    And so as well as visiting guest teachers, we include Karen Madden and Leslie Jamison in this coming cohort. You also get access to a panel of editors and agents who really care about bringing marginalized voices to their publishing houses so that you can ask questions about the publication process.

    Inside the membership site. There are a number of really cool things. There is the Discord community for us to stay in touch with throughout our three months together is the space to discuss workshops and make connections, self and self-promote. This is a different disparate group than the one that I was talking about earlier and then the members. This group is a very specific group just for Academy members, and they're also co-writing sessions. Writing alone can be lonely, so the co-writing sessions can be used for researching, jotting down ideas, talking with fellow classmates in the chat, or just sitting there and working on a current writing project, while other people are also in their little zoom windows. To make things easier. There's also a shared calendar. You can sign up for the Academy calendar through Google Calendar. And that just makes sure that you're updated on when the things are taking place. Some of the other scholarships available for the academy. Yes, there are. Carly Cushion has been so generous and donated to track these spots which I'll talk about in a moment for the Academy.

    So there is a link on the academy website and expected shaped academy.com. There's a link at the top. This is scholarships. So if you click on that, it'll tell you how to apply for a scholarship. Finally, there's this thing called box or office hours. We use an app called Boxer, which is like a walkie talkie app, a voice memos, walkie talkie app. And during the office hours, I can chat with you back and forth with voice messages about whatever questions you might have. So anybody in the academy can leave messages for me during those office hours, and you could just like talk to me and we can talk about whatever you're working on. I love the box or office hours, and I think they're pretty fun.

    And you can try to do it via a track or you can do it with track B. So track A includes these things. Classes per month. The lectures published authors, the panel decorating sessions, the box or office hours, and the disparate community. And that's if you pick track A and then track B is all that other stuff plus monthly feedback on your writing from respective writing coaches. And we try really hard to match you with a writing coach whose work you are aligned with. And so we have like a whole kind of stable of writing coaches that you can pick from. But if you don't see anybody that you like, we can find one for you.

    Joanna asks, "Do you expect another academy after August or October?" Yes, we will have one in the beginning of next year so you can join us then if you like.

    Somebody asks "Would you recommend doing this if you're already in a grad program?" There are members of the Academy right now who are in an MFA program. So I think that if you are interested in having a supplement that it could be really good to have because at least in my experience in my MFA program, the things that I was learning in my classes and workshops as an MFA student were very different from what I'm teaching in the academy. I, for example, like my MFA program, didn't teach me anything about publication, which the entire third month of the academy is about. Like that's that's thrilling. That's really nice benefit. Also, I feel like my MFA program did not address self-care and like the emotional aspects of being a writer and writing about trauma, etc. And that is also stuff we cover in the academy. So it really depends. Like if you're in an MFA program and you're like, Hey, everything's great, I love my MFA program, this is all I need then no worries. Like that's fine, but I know that if I could go back in time, if I could go back in time and I was in my MFA program and I had this available to me, I would love this as a supplement.

    The weekly time commitment. It varies, I would say probably. So There's definitely about a 1.5 hour class every week and then just as much time as you want to spend on the other stuff. So some people are really deeply involved in the Discord community, and so that takes up time. Other people do not. And so the Discord stuff, so they just ignore that and then the less time is taken up. So I think beside the classes, everything else just takes up as much time as you allow it to take up, if that makes sense.

    The writer interviews are not available without doing the whole program, but. But if you have taken the if you have been in the academy before, you are able to purchase the interviews, all the cards. Also, if you ever have questions, feel free to email Chloe at Chloe at as Bay Window Club and she will give you the answers to your questions.

    So if you've answered yes to any of these questions, this might be the community for you. Do you want to write a nonfiction book based on your experience or expertise? Do you want to become a prolific public speaker and thought leader in your industry? Do you want to have a voice and represent people like you in the mainstream publishing world? She answered yes to any of these questions, or one or more and just might be the academy for you. So, yeah, I'm so grateful to have you here. Part of my big mission is to get people from marginalized communities published, to get our voices heard. And I think that great things happen when representation is happening in the publishing world and on our bookshelves. Diversity, representation and the stories that you all have to share are wildly important.

    I don't know if many of you read my second book, The Schizophrenias, but I know that through my experience, having written a book about a very stigmatized, serious mental illness has opened a lot of conversations and it really helps people. To to kind of compliment myself. But I know that your work will do the same and your work can do the same. So it would be my honor to have you join me on this adventure. Registration closes in just a few weeks, and we start on August 9th. So thank you so much for being here. It is so great to have had this time with you. You can join the academy by going to an expected shape writing academy to come and stay in touch. Thank you so much. And to have any final words for us.

    Chloe: I don't think so. This was a lovely class. I thoroughly enjoyed the chat and I will include everything that I possibly can remember and the follow up email. I know a lot of people were wanting to connect, so I want to make that a priority. So you can expect that later today or if I'm super quick, later today or tomorrow morning. And thank you all for being here. It was really, really wonderful to have you.

    Esmé: Yeah, like I did, of course, is great if you join the academy. And I really hope that if I interest you, that you'll be able to. But also, I just want to emphasize that I want these conversations to continue and to do it for the people who can't do the academy for whatever reason. I saw in the chat so many great things going on with exchanges of information and people making connections. So I want that to keep happening. All right. Thank you all so much. I'm so grateful for you and I hope you have a great day. Bye.

Esme Wang
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