30: Take Time

Writers block and how good work takes time.

In January, my friend Vedvanti texted me about Writer’s block.

Writer’s block is a frequent and often badly-timed visitor. Writer’s block and I live close to each other — inconveniently so. We have lunch together on most days. Writer’s block starts every essay for me.

When I publish essays, it’s not obvious how much time I spend struggling to write them.

But say what you will about Writer’s Block, she does eventually leave me alone, if only for a few moments, so that I can write.

I believe this is what Vedvanti wanted to know when she reached out to me in January this year.

How do I get Writer’s Block to give me space?

How do I get over the hurdles she lays out?

In Vedvanti’s words,

What do you do when you get stuck at writing and nothing makes sense and there is no link you can justify or connection to make?

What do I do indeed?

---

In March, my friend Jill gave a presentation on audio storytelling to a class of college students, breaking down how she made this documentary for the BBC World Service. In preparation, she did a dry run with me.

If you don’t already do it, I cannot recommend this exercise enough. Before your actual presentation, walk someone (who hasn’t been involved in creating it) through your talking points. See what questions they have, what seems boring or confusing, and what resonates most.

In Jill’s presentation, this slide on Time struck me the most.

With presentations (and stories, too), you want to leave your audience on a powerful note. You want to give them something to think about. This slide on Time did that excellently for me. I have spent most of this year thinking about Time.

Jill’s documentary focused on sexual violence in the DRC. It’s a heavy subject and one that’s been covered in the news (quite a lot) to the extent of saturation. The scary thing about fast journalism is how mechanic it can feel sometimes. With stories like the one Jill covered, it’s easy to focus on elements that spark a reaction: following a trail of pain, finding a traumatic story, and telling it in excruciating—and sometimes unnecessary—detail to shock listeners.

While Jill was making this documentary, we had many conversations and I often heard her pause to ask herself critical questions. Doing that — slowing down your reporting so you can ask yourself questions — takes time.

In this slide, Jill makes the case for taking time when we make stories. She asks us to take time to think, to listen, to reflect and to do the work. Because our work takes time.

---

In January, my friend Vedvanti texted me asking how I overcame Writer’s Block. Here’s what I said to her in reply.

I wait a lot. There's just a lot of waiting. But I am doing other things usually, not just sitting in front of my computer. My writing process is waiting, writing, waiting, rewriting

As many long-time readers can attest to, the essays in this newsletter take a very long time to come. That’s because they take a very long time to write. I spend a lot of that time waiting. Waiting is a huge part of my writing process.

Here’s the thing about writing, the thing about life, it just takes time.

In case you are new here. My name is Mo Isu. I am an audio producer based in Lagos, Nigeria. I am currently attempting to build a career in audio storytelling and art. This newsletter features personal essays about this journey.

You are reading issue 30

What does it mean to take time?

It is not lost on me that waiting is not a universal winning strategy. Over the past year of writing this newsletter, I’ve published only five essays. Yet, the number of subscribers has doubled from 3,300 to 6,600. This isn’t typical—generally, inconsistency isn’t so richly rewarded

Waiting doesn’t work for most people or most kinds of work. So as I make my case for taking time, I must also clarify that it doesn’t always mean waiting. I will talk about two things.

With these essays, I do wait—but, as I mentioned in my response to Vedvanti, I don’t wait in front of my computer expecting inspiration and material to hit me all at once on one magical night.

I wait by noticing when something new and interesting comes to me. I make notes, a lot of notes. Essays, especially this year, spend many months in my drafts stacking up notes. This draft, for example, began in January after my first conversation with Vedvanti. Since then, I’ve continued having conversation after conversation about the role time plays in our lives."

When I say that writing, for me, is mostly waiting, what I mean is that it involves making countless notes on how I feel about a topic, and on the points I want to make but haven’t yet figured out how to express. I make these notes until eventually, I pick (usually by instinct) a moment to tie it all together.

Eventually, there comes a day when I sit down to write a full draft because, deep down, I feel like I have everything I need. Yes, sometimes, I start a draft and barely get halfway through the introduction before stopping. But, more often than not, this is how I write. I’ve found that writing this way helps me avoid writer’s block. Writer’s block tends to manifest most strongly as inertia—the difficulty of starting when you're staring at a blank page with a blinking cursor, unsure of what to say. The way I write, I rarely find myself in that position.

This is one way that taking time can look.

If this were my prescription for you, I’d say: don’t try to write it all at once. Take the time you need to gather your thoughts so that, when you do sit down to write, everything is already there. All that’s left is to arrange the pieces of the puzzle.

Courtesy Bourbon and chimes on Pinterest

Here’s the other thing I think about when I think about taking time.

There is a pressure to rush through the process of making something good. I often find myself in conversations about timelines, pushing back against the ambition to produce a story in just one or two weeks. To me, that’s a crazy proposition. In my last essay, I talk about care, and I struggle to see how much care you can give to any part of the process if you have only 2 weeks.

Even when I first started this work, I didn’t make stories in two weeks. Even when I was working on a project with a weekly release schedule alongside production, I still didn’t create a story in just two weeks.

To who it may concern, two weeks is crazy!

I think many of us need to get used to the idea that making good work takes time. Writing—sitting down, thinking, choosing your words, and arranging them to say exactly what you want to say in a way that resonates with your audience—takes time. On top of that, there’s editing, the process of refining and improving your work, which is usually an iterative one, that also takes time.

For the audio story I’m currently producing, I’m on the second rewrite of the script. With each draft, two editors review and provide feedback. They did the same thing to my three outline drafts before this. To get to this point, I’ve conducted no fewer than 10 interviews, and recorded over 10 hours of tape. I’ve listened to every one of those hours, carefully selecting quotes to include in the story. Along the way, I spent a significant amount of time researching and speaking to many people before finding the right character. All this for a 20 minutes long podcast episode.

Good work takes time. That’s its nature. I feel like we need to remember this. We, the people that make good work, and the people that expect good work from us need to offer that grace to the process. We should learn to give good work the time it needs - the time it demands.

---

One more tip for Writer’s Block

When Vedvanti reached out to ask about writer’s block, it was because her work didn’t allow her the luxury of time.

So I shared with her what I do when I need to make progress but can’t seem to find a way forward on my own: I seek help.

I talk to people.

This shows up in my writing style. You hear me say a lot that something revealed itself to me in conversation because it often does. Sometimes it’s something someone else said; other times, it’s the way I express an idea to another person that sparks an insight. Sometimes, it happens when someone asks me an unexpected question.

Just a good conversation can get my mind ready for work. What shows up in a conversation usually illustrates to me what I care about.

But guess what, even conversations take time, you can’t run away from that little bit of advice.

Take time.

Bonus

Julian Shapiro (who I respect greatly) has this free-to-read guide on writing well. On the very last page, he says a few things about writing that I found were very useful articulations for what I try to do with my essays. Here are some of those things.

• For aspiring writers: Your ultimate goal isn't building a writing habit. It's falling so in love with interesting ideas that you can’t help but tell the world about them. Writing is the medium—not the objective.

• Don't wait for an idea to be fully formed before writing. You write to think through the idea. The act of writing compels your brain to connect the dots.

• Avoid guessing what readers want. Instead, be a proxy: Selfishly entertain and surprise yourself, and you'll entertain and surprise many of them too.

• Your writing is intriguing once the average reader effortlessly makes it to the end. A hook, peak, and satisfying ending are your trifecta of intrigue.

Of all his points, the one below is the one that stayed with me the longest. It’s the one that’s helped me find peace with publishing so sparsely.

No writer can generate profound insights on a fixed schedule.

I find that writers who post frequently (say, twice weekly) are rarely worth reading consistently. I read for insights. And no writer can generate profound insights on a fixed schedule. I aggregate writers who publish sporadically. When they post, they truly have something to say.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't write a lot. You should get your practice in. I'm just telling you how I personally seek content.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end.

Support

Not a subscriber yet? Please subscribe, I only pop up in your inbox when I have something really important to say.

Did this resonate deeply with you? Please share with a friend or on your social media timelines.

I spend less time writing essays because I am spending so much time trying to earn a living. Supporting me by buying me a coffee goes a long way in buying me time to work on this newsletter. This essay was sponsored by the supporters that have bought me coffee this year.

This essay would not exist without the help of Vedvanti, Jill, Hamda, Treasure and Oluwatosin.