on creative devotion & showing up to the work

creativity is a practice

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ICYMI

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What is devotion?

Attention, per Mary Oliver. Attention offered consistently. What is consistency? Showing up to something regularly enough to maintain the relationship or practice.

Take the gardener. You lay down mulch. You plant. You water. You weed or prune. You hope, and perhaps even pray, for good weather conditions, and voila, you have tomatoes. Or something. Tending the land is a practice that, allowing for the weather, has predictable-enough results. When you plant a tomato, you expect to grow a tomato. You know what a ripe tomato looks like, feels like. You know what such a juicy tomato, sliced for summer sandwiches, should smell and taste like. If you plant tomato seeds, you won’t just suddenly get cucumbers.

Creative devotion is a bit different.

You lay down the mulch of inspiration, making Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists and taking yourself on artist dates. You plant, and actually attempt to write something. You show up consistently, perhaps once or twice a week or even every night, to check in with the project: to scribble notes or write a scene. You prune the idea: more of this, less of that. You hope, and perhaps even pray, for good environmental conditions: that you or a loved one are spared the kind of crisis that would demand all of your attention and resources.

And… voila, the book you expected? Eh. Perhaps. But more often than not, at least in my experience, what you grow looks very different from what you first plant.

Creative devotion is a finicky thing. There isn’t a set growing cycle, like for tomatoes, which the internet tells me take anywhere from 60 to 100 days to reach their fullest potential. Stories, poems, books, screenplays, albums, paintings, tarot decks: there is no average expectation for how long such things “should” take, nor how long they can take. Let alone what they grow to be.

The gardener shows up to and can tell how well the growing season is going by where the plants are in their figurative cycle. The writer shows up and simply hopes that maybe, maybe this is something that is becoming something greater.

If I’ve learned anything about creative work, it’s that development is not linear.

Excitement and production followed by a long period of digestion and composting. Research, and more research. Trying this, and then that.

Take my current novel-in-progress. The idea came to me title first, hitting me in the body in the weeks following the publication of my first book, a memoir called Heretic. This, alone, is notable: the memoir had taken up all the space in my body — physical and psychic — and there was not room for anything else until it was in the world. And once it was in the world, a new idea came. Not just a fleeting “what if I wrote about that” (something I’ve said about the Cloisters, my favorite French Revolution writer, so many things). But a full body of an idea that landed in me with the kind of gravitational pull and inner knowing that said: I have to do this.

And so I started writing my way into the story. However strong an idea is, books don’t come fully formed. Every book teaches you how to write it. I immediately had the voice of one character, but others quickly came forward. The story developed a shape that intimidated me — it was the kind of book I loved to read, but I hadn’t written fiction in more than a decade, and never anything this structurally complicated. I wrote in fits and starts that first year — a year which also saw several floods in our then-apartment, the stressful few months of talking with housing lawyers and almost taking our landlord to court, and a subsequent move to our current residence. (Environment matters!) There were weeks of attention for the book, and then weeks of nothing.

All said and done, that first year (winter 2022 to winter 2023), I wrote about 40,000 words. Having concretely landed on the main characters and enough of the structure, I proceeded to scrap everything and start from scratch.

Timeline wise, we are up to early 2024. When the year started — fresh notebook in hand with a New Year, New Draft mindset — my aim was to have a finished draft of the book by summer. But the writing was slow, so slow, and by the time July arrived, all I had to show was 20,000 words and a hysterectomy. Followed by a slow recovery and then a guest Visiting Writer position at my alma mater which entirely ate up the summer and fall. No matter, I thought. I’ll do NaNo! Cue the election, and Meg’s and my suddenly moved-up wedding planning, and the desperate search for a wedding dress (I will not apologize for worrying about the dress, I have Venus in the first, fashion is important!).

It would have been very, very easy to give up the book last year. But I didn’t. Not because I stubbornly made myself try to write every day (literally LOL — as I said, I got about 20k written on that new draft I’d had such high hopes for) but because, even when unable to literally write, I tended the relationship I had built with the book. I knew the Spirit of the book wasn’t going anywhere, that the book’s own Ancestors were very much present in my life and that all I had to do was talk to them, and the book would stay. I have talked before about tending a book altar, a practice I actively, well, practice. I’ve kept an altar for this book since summer 2023, when we moved into this new apartment. I light candles on it and talk to the spirits of the book every day.

I have learned that much comes (and develops) in the silence. I have trusted that, even in periods of not writing these last years, the book has churned in me, a wave in the mind (as Virginia Woolf once wrote), ready to dislodge once the Right Rhythm was found.

I started 2025 committed to finishing this book. My health and life had stabilized as much as was going to happen in this moment, and if not now, then when? But I wrote in fits and starts, frustrated with my seeming inability to maintain a consistent pace week over week, even as I scribbled notes and did substantive research and thought through the plot and major turning points every time I was in the shower (I always play my character playlists in the shower).

Even understanding the structure, and the two main characters, I struggled to land on the right POV for each of them. Years ago, I wrote the book in first person, but that wasn’t right. I then spent a few years working in close third, or third limited, which was right for one of the main characters but not the other — of course, the one whose story needed to be written first. Finally, earlier this year, a few things happened concurrently. I started reading a historical fantasy (the genre I’m working in) that used third omniscient at the same time a friend in my writers’ group shared that she had started rewriting her WIP in omniscient and was experiencing genuine breakthroughs. I lit up at that writers’ group meetup, buzzy with anticipation, literally saying I think that’s what I need to do. It’s only been a few months, but writing in omniscient has completely changed the experience of writing the book. At last, structure and POV and narrative distance have come together.

For those counting, I first began this project in November 2022. It is now April 2025, and I am once again back in Act I — but with more momentum than ever. I recently wrote in Notes,

Consistent attention is not consistent production, because Story doesn’t (usually) work like that. Linear expectations cannot be put on creativity: work X hours a day or week or month, get Y in return. Stories are alive, expanding and changing and deepening in the subconscious. All we can do is tend, and tend, and tend, in the hopes that eventually, a new bud springs forth.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: talent has precious little to do with artists who actually finish work and artists who don’t.

Showing up — stubbornly, devotedly — is the only thing that makes a difference.

The tomato plants might take a while, but we will see them through — even if we discover other things in the garden in the meantime.

And so, I’d like to invite you to Show Up with me in the first coworking container of the year: Showing Up to the Work: 6 Weeks to a Viable Draft, Spring 2025 session.

We’ll write together 3 days a week (Tu, Wed, Thurs) for 2 hours a day (11a-1p Eastern), for 6 weeks, May 6th through June 12th. The group offers a gentle accountability and an open-genre framework that embraces the input required for projects as much as the output.

Here’s what past cohorts have had to say about Showing Up:

“It was magic to join this group of writers. I came away from these six weeks with exactly what the session's full title named: a viable draft.” — Sarah

“This container created a generative space that spilled out into every part of my life.” — Laura

“Non-judgmental, supportive, creative, and kind, Jeanna is a highly capable steward and keeper of the flame for the writing process. Being in community with other writers and being able to have a laugh or receive some gentle encouragement to go easy on the days that just weren't going well has been wonderful medicine.” — Elizabeth

“I was able to finish a complete outline and initial synopsis for my entire book over a month before I thought I'd have it done. I'm in such better shape preparing for the next stage of this project because I participated in this container, and I can't wait for us to have another round!” — Shelley

P.S. Tomatoes were the plant that just WANTED to come through as this example, and so after writing this, I looked up what planet they were associated with. Mars. They’re associated with Mars. The planet of work ethic and DOING and so quite literally showing up.

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