In Need of Some Writing Inspo? Here’s 10 Weeks of Advice

We’ve been hosting Writers’ Room for over two months now, and one of the best parts about it is the advice we include at the top of each session. Here’s a compilation of what we’ve shared so far.

Illustration by Julie Benbassat/Narratively archive

When we launched Narratively Academy a few months ago, Writers’ Room — a virtual space where we work on our own writing in community with one another — was one of the offerings I was most excited about. I love having a dedicated time and space to write, and I find having to show up for others, being held accountable in that way, always helps give me the extra push I need to get to it. As part of Writers’ Room, we’ve been sharing advice each week — a nugget of wisdom that has stuck with us for a long time or something we just happened to come across that week that spoke to us. Now that we’ve been doing this for a minute, we wanted to bring you the first 10 weeks of advice we’ve shared all in one dedicated post — in case you’ve missed a bunch, haven’t made it to a session yet, or might just need a whole lot of inspiration at once (been there!). With that, find some goodies below that we hope inspire!

Week 1:

“Go where the energy is.” —Cris Beam

Cris shared this in a workshop I was lucky enough to take with her years ago — I love it so much, I even shared it on this site once before — and it’s truly the advice I come back to most. We often sit down to write with a particular piece in mind, but it’s not always the thing we feel like working on at that moment. Rather than trudge through it anyway — just because we feel like we should — Cris’ advice gives us permission to dive into the piece we actually feel motivated to work on that day/month/year. And the thing is, this approach almost always helps you to produce better work.

Week 2:

“What is the ‘why’ of your work here? What is it that you’re really trying to do and communicate to your reader?” —

Roxane Gay

Since sharing this advice (that I found via this class excerpt), I have used it so many times: when editing writers’ essays, when responding to pitches, when thinking through my own writing! It’s the kind of advice that sounds obvious on the surface — surely you know what you’re trying to say when you sit down to write an essay — but often the truth is that you don’t exactly. Not at first anyway. Using these questions as your North Star throughout the writing process can really help clarify things and keep you on the right track.

Week 3:

“It’s essential for me to understand where I am in the writing process with a particular work. Am I getting ready to write — doing research, scribbling notes, assembling the bits and pieces I’ve written? Am I writing a first draft — trying to get my work into a provisional order? Revising or deepening a draft? Ordering a work? Completing it? Polishing a piece, readying it for an audience? Unless I know where I am in the process I expect too much too soon.” —Louise DeSalvo

This is from DeSalvo’s book The Art of Slow Writing, a favorite that was gifted to me by my writing soulmate, Katie Abbondanza. Like so much of the advice featured here, this bit from DeSalvo feels so liberating. I am often guilty — and I’m sure I’m not alone — of sitting down with a kernel of an idea for something and expecting to have finished the whole piece just a few hours later. Of course, somewhere deep down, I know better, but it’s helpful to be reminded of this by such a wonderful writer.