- I do have time to write every day. I really do.
- I have time to write every day, and do my job and cook dinner and play with the cats and be a halfway decent wife and a very good mother.
- Formats and structures are far more inspiring to me than topics.
- I need 6-10 ideas to sift through and reject before I commit to one.
- If I can generate 42-70 ideas per week that seem reasonable to try to write about, there really should be no reason to ever feel blocked as a writer.
- Carrie Gelson is the reader I picture when I’m writing.
- I’m still terrible at titling my posts.
- Endings are always the trickiest part of a piece, but 31 days of practice finding the ending has helped me get there more quickly.
- The best part of slicing really is the community. It’s great to do the writing, but the community is what inspires me to join this challenge.
- Comments matter. They don’t need to be long. Sometimes an “I really felt this” is all the writer needs to feel heard and keep going.
- I wish I could consistently publish in the morning—both to have it checked off my list for the day and to receive more comments.
- Most pieces need considerable percolation time. For a short piece, maybe a few hours; for a longer piece, maybe a few days.
- I like to have several potential slices I’m working on at once, adding here and there until I get a piece ready for publication.
- I always feel like I’m cheating when I write a “Currently” post even though they’re one of my favorites to read on other blogs.
- Part of my story as a writer is that I periodically have to relearn everything I know about writing.
- Losing my way and finding it again is simply part of my writing process.
- When I write daily, I trust the writing will be there.
- But at the same time, “there is nothing more deadening to creativity than the grim determination to write” (Abigail Thomas).
- Writing is sometimes the only part of my day when I feel fully present and fully engaged.
- The more I write, the less I feel like I understand the process of writing.
- The pressure of publishing every day means less play in my notebook.
- I like to read a few slices before I start writing.
- I am most productive first thing in the morning, but it’s rarely the time I choose to write.
- When I am focused on writing to a particular format or structure, the sentence-level writing matters far less to me. The perfectionist in me finds posts with special formats or structures especially conducive to quick publication.
- Sometimes I can’t start working on my piece until I write about all the things swarming around my head that are getting in the way of starting work on my piece.
- I am a slow writer. There was one post that took ten minutes from conception to publication (that was a great day!). For the rest, I usually had at least one potential idea before I sat down to write, and then I budgeted an hour for writing. That was rarely enough to revise and find the ending.
- What for me is a slapped-together post has still been reworked, revised, rethought, rewritten multiple times.
- I think a lot about how each piece gets written and try to reflect on my process, but how all of this works is often still a mystery.
- There is something essentially unknowable about how we write. There is something magical and mysterious and unpredictable and unpindownable and most definitely unteachable about doing this.
- I understand how to write not by talking about it or thinking about it but by doing it.
- “I live better when I slice.” I copied these words in my notebook at the beginning of the month, and now I don’t know whose words they are. I’ve checked all my favorite blogs, and I can’t find the quotation, and I’m so sorry not to attribute those words to their owner. But I have thought of them often this month. Yes. I live better when I slice.
the dirigible plum 
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