Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode 24
Ask Me Anything: "How Do You Know When Your Story is "Finished?" with Lisa Cooper Ellison
Katie Rouse is a marketing manager, poet, and freelance writer who explores faith, doubt, and deconstruction. I met Katie in 2023, while she was taking my Camp Structure course. At the time, she was working to find the right structure for her memoir about deconstructing her faith while serving as a missionary in India. During our class, I watched her work come alive as I got to know more about her and her story. She’s published pieces in Missive Mag, Hyssop+ Laurel and the Unmooring. To learn more about Katie, and to subscribe to her newsletter, please see the show notes.
Katie has just finished her structure draft. During this season-ending Ask Me Anything episode, we explore what it looks like to let a manuscript rest so your ideas can marinate before working on late-stage revisions. Before we get to our conversation, I have a few questions for you. How do you know it’s time to let a manuscript rest? Do you resist doing so? What fears do you face? What have you done to cope with them? If you’ve let your manuscript rest, what tells you it’s time to pick it back up? I hope you’ll ponder these questions as you listen along. Now let’s get to my interview with Katie Rouse.
Lisa [0:00]
Well, hello there, Katie. I am so glad that you are here today on the podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Writing Your Resilience Podcast. You have a question that you're going to ask. Yeah. So, tell me what you'd like me to know, so that we can have a conversation that’s supportive to you.
Katie [0:19]
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Lisa. I love this adventure that you're on. I love that I've been with you as a student for over a year now and have been able to glean your resilience. And so, this is the perfect podcast for you. So, I am finishing up the story draft of my memoir. And my question is, how do I let go and rest after finishing this draft this week? And what might that rest look like, both as a writer and as just a human? And my well-being?
Lisa [0:57]
This is such a great question, I think for all writers, but especially if you're writing a tough story. Because I'm just going to speak for myself as a trauma survivor. Rest is a four-letter word that I never, ever want to say. It is so hard because my nervous system is not wired for it. And so, I don't want to read into your experience. But I do want to just say that we have to think about rest in multiple ways. So, before we can rest, we must create a sense of completion. So that's job number one. And it helps if you know in advance what complete looks like. And if you're in the middle of a draft, like the story draft, that's just the draft where you're trying to figure out what this story is, it’s not done yet. You're just trying to get to what we would call the narrative arc. Finding the good enough completion point, the good enough resting point for yourself is important. And that's going to happen to both in your body, right? There's going to be some sort of settling to say, like, yes, this is complete. And you're going to have done enough work on the page to feel like you can let it go. Because you know, this is the most important piece: not everything will get done. I work with lots and lots of writers who are like, "Shit, I've got all these extra comments and this other thing that I could do, and do I revise this one part of the draft?" My answer is no. You don't have to do all those things. When you think about your draft, where do you think you are? And what does your completion point look like?
Katie [2:35]
Yeah, I'm definitely feeling that settling happening. I know there's more. I know I've got to go deeper with one section. And I also know I'm not doing that now. Not doing that yet. And so, I made a list for myself of like, here are a few scenes, I went through all the comments, all the notes, and I said, these are the scenes that keep popping up that people want to know. And so, I've just done a little bit of work this week to get those scenes out. I have one or two more that I'm like, those are the ones I want to do. And then I have two or three more that I'm going to put on a different spreadsheet to do later. And that's bringing me that sense of completeness in my soul of like, we've done enough, right? And we've done what we wanted to get done before we took this break. And the arc is there, you know where it needs to be tweaked and altered. But you don't have to do it now. That is beautiful. Really comforting.
Lisa [3:36]
Yeah. So, you've made a list in advance of the things that you're going to work on later versus what you're going to do now. And I hear you talking to yourself in a certain way. Is there a mantra you use or a certain phrase that you say to yourself repeatedly to remind yourself that all you must do is complete at a good enough level?
Katie [3:59]
Yeah, I think it's just I am enough. Or it's I am enough, not that the work has to be enough. Like, yes, I've got it on my screen here. I am enough. And everything I can and can't do will not change that. And that's what I have to hold on to because if I start thinking about the to-dos, I start to lose that sense of enoughness. But when—and I learned this from you—coming back to that good enough feeling inside myself, not necessarily on the sentence level of each chapter or the scene level of each section, you know?
Lisa [4:37]
Yeah, absolutely. We must feel like we're enough and recognize that our drafts are in flux. They're evolving, and that's okay. And you're doing this work beautifully. And that's step one: like, what does completion look like? And then how do we do it? And then you have to complete. And I often say, one of the things you should do is create some sort of ritual. And that ritual could involve lighting a candle and listing all the things that are accomplishments for this draft, all the things that you want to say goodbye to. We had different rituals we did in our class, right, where we had water in a container, and then we kept pouring it out to show the things that we were filling up for what's to come. So, I think having some sort of ritual is helpful. And having a concrete, tangible thing you can touch that is a measure of how far you've come. And so, I often tell people print out a copy of your manuscript. You can even go to a local printer and create a bound copy. Having something that you can touch and feel and that looks like a book—right, that's why I suggest going to a printer—that looks like a book reinforces that sense of completion inside yourself. Later, when you come back to it, you've got this draft that you can open up and read front to back, or back to front, whatever you want to do. But you have something that you can work on later that you can hold on to and put on your bookshelf. And I say put it on your bookshelf because that signals to the brain and to the body that we're done. And so, you know, that's about completion. And then there's rest. And when we think about rest, there are three areas that you want to work on. So, you want to think about your mind, your body, and your writing process. And that's important because your writing process has had a certain level of intensity, a certain rhythm to it. And you may change that. That doesn't mean you're not going to write, but there are things you're going to do in a different way. So, you know, resting your body is going to look like just general good self-care practices, getting enough sleep, exercising and moving your body in whatever way feels good to you, being out in the sun to get that vitamin D, going in nature. In fact, you may want to take part of your writing time, especially if you've been spending a lot of writing time on a manuscript, to take part of that and just go walk in nature. Because that's going to serve not just your body, but also your mind and your writing process because you're opening yourself up to possibilities. So, I think that's one piece, is resting the body. And then the next part is going to be resting the mind. And that can be really challenging when we first let something go because there's going to be a part of us that's like, "But we got this idea, we got this or that." So, one of the ways that you can do that, and you've already started doing it beautifully, is to create a spreadsheet or a notebook or someplace where you put all your ideas. Because I don't know why this happens, but as soon as you rest, all these ideas are going to flood you. They just will, that's the way it works. But if you can just write those down in a journal and do something else, that can really help. And then you think about your process. And for some people, rest doesn't look like stillness. For some people, rest looks like, "I'm going to start working on another project because I know where I want to go next." And if I'm focusing on that, it allows this other thing that I was working on to marinate. So, you could have another project. You could be journaling. Sometimes journaling is a great way to do that. Or you could, you know, try to come up with a bunch of writing exercises or writing prompts. There are a lot of different ways that you can do that. But you want to figure out how do you want to shift your writing practice in such a way that you're not losing your writing practice, your creativity is still there, but it looks different so that you don't have that intensity. So, I'm going to stop there and ask you if you have any questions, because one of the other things you asked in my little interview that I have before we get started is, "Okay, and how do you know when to come back? And what does that look like?" Yeah, so what do you think about this issue of rest?
Katie [9:04]
Yeah, I think I had not thought about my writing process as much as a place of rest. So, I've thought about the books I want to read while I'm resting and like using when I would normally switch my writing gears, like using that time to go read. But I do have another project, a poetry project that's just like spinning around in my brain. And it's like, "Okay, yeah, like shifting your practice to that." But making it look different, I think will be a nice challenge to figure out how to shift gears in practice.
Lisa [9:42]
Yeah, and I love that you mentioned reading because I didn't even talk about that. I hadn't written it down as something to discuss. But yes, reading is another way, you know, if you were doing a whole lot of writing and a whole lot of revising, you could just spend your writing time reading if you wanted to. You don't even have to read within your genre, just read for pleasure, whatever it is that fills you up. But I love this idea of having not just a different project, but a project in a different genre, because it's going to work different muscles. Because the goal before you get back to your project is to have forgotten pretty much everything that you've done, which is easier than you think. Because when you forget, then you have a chance to come at it with fresh eyes, and you're going to see so many things. And that is a way to self-edit so that you don't necessarily have to rely on beta readers. I mean, you're going to have a time when you want to, but you'd be surprised at how much you can get done on your own, just from having rest.
Katie [10:42]
Right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Lisa [10:44]
So that leads to the last part of your question, which is, how the hell do I know when it's time to come back? So, there are some general guidelines around, you know, one to three months as a starting point, just let it go for that period of time. And what I tell people is, go ahead and put it in your calendar, put a reminder, so that you come back to it. Don't just think like, okay, you know, one to three months, we're just going to forget about it for a while. No, put a start date back in your calendar, and it's a tentative start date, because what you might find is that when you get to that point, some part of you still says, "No, it's not time." And that's happened to me before. And it's hard because for me, I want to get started right away. And I've had times where my project had to marinate for six months or nine months. And one of the things you have to watch for in this part, and this is one of the reasons why rest can be so terrifying to writers, is the fear that if I let it go, I'll never come back to it. And it's going to be just one more thing that sits on my bookshelf or it sits in my computer, or, you know, it's just never going to get done. So, when you think about this idea of rest, are there any fears that are coming up? Where you're like, oh, yeah, that's a pain point or a fear point for me that might make this difficult?
Katie [12:11]
Yeah, I think what comes up for me is the fear of coming back to it and to say it in, like, the meanest part of my brain's voice. It's all wrong, or I come back to it, and I think it's the worst. That's the fear that comes up. That kind of harsh criticism part of me that's like, I'm ready to decimate this. And it's like, no, I don't want that. Yeah,
Lisa [12:36]
And I think honoring that, that is a common fear and a common thing that does happen. Because this has happened to me with every draft. And I've talked to so many writers, and they're like, oh, yeah, that's what happens to me. When you get back to your work, whether it's the next draft or you're starting a new project, there can be this panicky feeling like I don't know how to do this. And so, when we feel that fear of not knowing how, then we become hypercritical, because you know, what fear does is fear creates control inside us. Fear is actually a mechanism we use to control. Well, control is actually a mechanism of fear. But you know, one of the ways that we control is through criticism, because if we criticize the work, then no one else can criticize it. It kind of serves as a shield. So, begin to think now, what is the gentleness you can bring to that process and know what your MO is, right? Because we all have our own ways of being critical. Write down what those triggers are for you, and what it looks like when you're being that way. So that when it happens, you can just be like, ah, there it is. Thank you. And then you can say, you know, is there a part of me that needs something? Is there a part of me that needs something to make this process safe? Because, you know, there's the process of getting back to it. And, for some writers, the shame of feeling like I'm not ready to do it, and I feel like I should be able to, and that's about the messages of the world. Because you know, you're going to come to this next draft, as all writers do. And it may be a yes when it's time to come back, or for others, it might be not yet. And for some people, it's going to be maybe never, or that the length of time this needs to marinate is long. That could be because whatever that question was that you were wrestling with initially has been answered. Or it could just be that the story is still continuing, and there's more to life. There's more living that must happen for this to be ready to be looked at again, or it could just be that you're not emotionally ready. And that's happened to me before, where I just knew, like, things were going on in my life, or shoot, it’s summertime, and I'm writing about being a survivor of suicide loss. And I don't want to go there in the middle of the summer when I want to be happy. So, there's lots of different reasons why that can happen. You want to honor that and know that it is something that many writers go through. And it is okay.
Katie [15:23]
That's comforting.
Lisa [15:27]
Well, what would you like to say as we wrap up?
Katie [15:31]
Just thank you so much. I think I needed to be reminded how common some of these questions and answers are, and how we're not alone in the process of finding the things that are hard and are good and are our pain points and are our celebration points. So, it's helpful.
Lisa [15:56]
You are definitely not alone. And you are definitely enough. And I can just say, because I have read many excerpts of your story, that it is beautifully written, and it is going to serve so many people when it's ready. But most importantly, I really hope it serves you in whatever way it's supposed to.
Katie [16:20]
Yeah, absolutely. I believe that.
Lisa [16:24]
Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It is an honor to have you here. And I look forward to seeing where all of this goes.
Katie [16:32]
Thank you so much, Lisa!
