Notes to Self

on the creative importance of scribbles, voice memos, random notebooks, and having spaces to unravel

I was teaching a workshop recently and someone asked about how to keep up with writing (or any creative practice) when you’re also juggling a full-time job, family, friendships, caregiving, and other big responsibilities.

I wrote my memoir Forces of Nature while I was working a high-stress corporate job and parenting young children. A writing routine felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. My creative practice had to fit into the margins of life. I longed for spacious days where I could sink into a project for hours without interruption. But I knew if I waited for those openings to appear on my schedule, I’d never finish the book.

I told the workshop that sometimes you have to cobble it together. You have to steal time whenever you can. I always have something with me — a notebook, a legal pad, the notes app in my phone — so I can quickly capture a thought, an idea, a sentence, a question I want to research. “It’s messy,” I said, “all those pieces of paper and thought fragments, but you need to funnel them somehow.”

Some of my best writing happens in fifteen-minute increments, handwritten in a notebook, or using voice-to-text on my phone. Granted, it doesn’t LOOK like my best writing. It looks like scribbles: weird, disjointed, stream-of-consciousness that probably makes no sense to anyone but me.

I recently came across this in a notebook from 2022:

That note, a seed of an idea, eventually became this essay I published in 2023.

Here are a few random thoughts and ideas I captured this week:

It was not the kind of convenience store where teenagers drank tallboys wrapped in paper bags out in the parking lot.

‘I’m here’ « the profound comfort in those two words

Kids don’t have to hide from their shadow selves. They haven’t met them yet.

Strangle the pathway (verbs that foreshadow)

The internal myth: something the mc thinks is true about the world or herself but is really false. How do I prove her wrong?

Who’s to say dreams happen while we’re asleep? Maybe that’s reality and daytime is for dreaming.

I also write things like this, mostly to get the inner critic out of my head:

Slow it down there! more tension!

Check for continuity on birth years, parents, fire, and newspaper clippings

Remember the callbacks/rhyming action

Is this horseshit? Maybe. Keep going.

I have to put these thoughts down, set them aside. Otherwise they get in the way of the actual writing.

Any creative practice feels even harder now with the state of the world, the horrific news cycle, our ever-shortening attention spans. I feel like I’m battling not just procrastination and time management, career vs. domesticity, but also an ever-growing sense of existential dread.

On the bright side? After years of dreaming about it, I finally found a little writing studio that I’m renting a couple days per week (at least through this summer while they kids are off school). I realized just how much I need space to work and to funnel ideas and to unravel a bit. The best work is actually in the unraveling, the mess, the scraps of paper, the random thoughts I text to a friend.

This space is a privilege, but the act of writing for me is not. It’s foundational. It’s at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs. Biologically, neurologically, creativity plays a vital role in human ability to adapt and evolve. In other words, just when I think I’m too stressed or overwhelmed to create something, that’s when I need creativity the most.

If that’s you too, grab a notebook or Post-It or cocktail napkin. Write it all down.

Want to meet in person?

Join me in person at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver! There are a few spots left in my Lit Fest craft seminars June 6th and June 13th.

September 4-7, 2025: Rediscover your creative self. Join artist/therapist Laurel Justice and me for the 3-day “Rewild & Reset” retreat in beautiful Lake City, Colorado. We’ll write, play with art supplies, drink good coffee, feel all the feels, and remind each other why creativity matters. This isn’t about being productive or making something polished. It’s about getting quiet enough (and maybe laughing hard enough) to hear that small, tender voice inside that remembers who you are.