Deep Winter
Reflections from my first writing residency.
Note: This newsletter was originally published in 2023, before I revamped Eloquent Inkblot in 2025. I’ve left it here for posterity, and in the hopes that you enjoy it.
Dearest friend,
I'm spending this weekend at a writing residency called Deep Winter, and the weather is behaving nicely. The world is snow-encrusted and frigid, and the bare tree branches, which I so loved as a child, are doing that delightful creaky thing in the wind. I’m sequestered in a little cottage, swaddled in a sweater, sipping chai tea, and eating my favorite dinner.
What better place to come and be away from it all?
And yet, as I settle in here at the Hundredth Hill, I’m acutely aware that this is less about “getting away” than it is about digging in. Tearing out. Poking and prodding and gouging and ripping and reordering and resettling and rewilding.
You get it.
I’m here to interrogate myself, and, more importantly, my book. A year ago tomorrow, I officially stepped away from my full time job to spend as much time as possible working on my novel, Wispweed. While my freelance endeavors have been more successful and more enjoyable than I could have fathomed when I made that terrifying decision last year, I haven’t spent as much time on Wispweed as I thought I would. Perhaps that’s predictable.
In some ways, I think it’s because I genuinely didn’t have the time to sit down every day and write like I so desperately wanted to. (Who knew! Starting your own business is hard work!) In other ways, I think I was just stuck. Fear, and self-doubt, and an unwillingness to do the work that really matters with this story have held me back more than a few times since last January.
I’ve struggled regularly to give myself “permission” to choose writing over other, seemingly more important tasks. I’ve struggled with feelings of loneliness as I try to envelop myself in and make sense of a fictional world that no one knows anything about but me. And, above all, I’ve hesitated to dive into the themes that are so integral to my book, because I don’t want to think too hard about what gave me the inspiration to write it. I don’t want to think about people who have gone, choices I’ve made, things I’ve lost. I don’t want to think about what I willingly gave up in order to be who I wanted to be. And I don’t want to work through grief and anger and all of life’s big ‘What If’ questions. I want to be happy. I want to settle into this perfect life I’ve built with my favorite people. I want to focus on that.
I know there will be many writing projects that won’t require so much of me, but Wispweed is different. Maybe that’s why it’s the first book I’ve gotten to this point with. Maybe that’s why I know that, one way or another, I’m going to finish it. In any event, I find it significant that, unexpectedly, I find myself sitting here almost exactly a year after I pledged myself to finishing this book, staring it dead in the face.
This weekend, I hope to finish a round of edits on my last fifty pages before sitting down to do a plot overhaul of Part 2. Implementing that plan will probably take me the rest of the weekend—and I’ll be surprised if I get done—but I’m confident I can make significant progress . . . if I can stay focused. Which, so far so good. The hardest part, I know, will be not bowing under the pressure to create something perfect and profound. As I’ve said so many times, I know my job isn’t to write the best book ever written. It’s to write something that’s true.
In 2022, I reread the Wayfarer Redemption series by Sara Douglass for the first time in nearly a decade. It was a treat to revisit a favorite series from my childhood (Mom, you really should have been monitoring my books better. I had no business reading those), and to appreciate all the weird, quirky things that Douglass incorporated into her story. Even now, I can sometimes make little sense of the story’s aesthetic, and the second half of the series (which was originally published as two trilogies before being combined for the American market) is drastically different from the first.
On this read, I realized that one thing I love about Douglass is that she didn’t “preach” in her writing. Many of her characters are delightful and loathsome in practically the same breath, and all of them are deeply flawed, problematic, and sometimes difficult to love. It’s a far cry from a lot of what I see in other series, where it seems like the point is to take away some greater moral lesson or to convince the reader to see the world the way the author does. Douglass’ writing seems to me to say, “That’s what happened. Take it or leave it.” She doesn’t come across as overly concerned with whether or not you “like” it.
For my non-writer friends: They say that there are two types of writers: plotters, who meticulously write down every aspect of their story before they write it, and pantsers, who fly by the seat of their pants and let the story write itself as it goes along. Well, I’d like to posit that the secret third kind of writer is the preacher, and the best preacher I have ever read is Sarah J. Maas. Every one of her books screams, “You will believe me and agree with me, or so help me god, I will just keep writing books until you do!”
Don’t get me wrong, I eat that shit up. It’s fabulous. It’s deeply emotionally investing. It allows her to create a deep sense of in-world morality, and as she explores what makes someone a good person in her books, she’s able to build up this convincing and lovable “found family” that you, the reader, would literally die for.
The majority of the work Maas does in her character building is, in my opinion, figuring out how to convince you who you should like, who you should hate, and why you should feel that way. It works for her. I have loved her books and hurled them against walls in equal measure, and isn’t that what every good author aspires to?
It makes sense, because this philosophy aligns with one of the main reasons I enjoy writing in the first place. I was thinking about this a lot last Saturday, and as I sat and reflected, I wrote in my journal, “One of the reasons I write is so that I can pretend that relationships are infallible, and grieve the ways in which they are not.”
No one is perfect—none of us are even perfectly likable—and I have struggled with that for . . . well . . . always. But my two favorite authors, who I laughed with and cried with and envied the careers of in 2022, have offered me two ends of a very wide spectrum. I would like it if Wispweed settled somewhere in the middle, and it’s this that I’m focusing on as I do my rewrite of Part 2. How do I share my main character Vanya’s journey without giving in to my preacher tendencies so completely that I freeze up for fear of no one liking her? I can’t write every page of this story wondering if everyone is going to hate it. This is for me.
When I was a little bookish child, devouring novels at the speed of light because I understood characters in books better than I understood real flesh and blood people, I would often read the author’s acknowledgements by my favorite writers, marveling at their revelations into the writing process. A childhood favorite, A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (much more age appropriate, good job, Mom), had an acknowledgements section that I returned to more than once. (I am aware that this is odd behavior.) I don’t have the book on me here at the Hundredth Hill and I’m too lazy to Google it, so you’ll have to forgive my lack of the complete quote, but Bray refers to the period of writing where she most doubted herself as “the perpetual night of the ‘I suck’ abyss.” I think I’ve beaten the abyss. I’m prepared for this book to be whatever it will be.
All of this long rambling nonsense is to say that Deep Winter is going pretty well so far. I’m settled in, clearly writing, and enjoying the peace and quiet—no shade to my beloveds back home. I’ve burned my tongue, dropped two (2) tortellinis on my foot, eaten a lot of crunchy snacks, and taken some photos to share. And, for once, I have done the hardest thing of all, which is decide that my writing is very important. Here’s to another year of Wispweed. May she hurry up and be done already.
More soon,
Sophie