Writing is my pleasure, my compulsion, and an important way for me to communicate with the world. I’m not recommending that you adopt my writing process; it’s a bit erratic. Nor am I touting it as some stellar method of producing major literary work. I’m only describing a way I’ve found to meld writing and farming together. 

I’m “retired.” However, I live on a 66-acre farm, which is not retiring. We raise grass-fed beef. Though ours is only a small herd, it still involves calving, castrating calves, feeding hay, and keeping the pasture green in the summer by moving irrigation pipes every day. 

In between chores, I try to handwrite or key in raw story ideas while they are swimming in my head. While I unload hay bales from the pick-up to the feeding ring, I ruminate. I get those first ill-formed thoughts on paper, then try to link them into a coherent skeleton of an idea. I might have an hour if I’m lucky. Then the irrigation pipe needs to be moved. The familiar ritual allows me brain space to think about using similes and metaphors to avoid sounding shallow and dull.

Following the pipe moving each morning, it’s time to harvest what has ripened overnight in our vegetable garden. Today this will include tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, poblano peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, snow peas, and jalapenos. When I open the garden gate there is a furious flapping of stubby wings as quail fly out helter-skelter from under protective rows of corn stalks. The male sentry tsktsktsks rapidly in alarm without taking a breath. I am worried that I may be inducing tiny quail heart attacks. While I’m picking, my mind wanders. I’m trying to recall if the story I’m writing references all five senses. It’s so much easier to recognize this when I am outside engaging all of mine.

I munch on snow peas and beans; they snap satisfyingly as I bite into them. The fresh smell of tomato vines intoxicates me as I pluck the scarlet orbs. Anna’s hummingbird chic chicks with delight in the cilantro blossoms. Kneeling in the soil I hunt for cucumbers hiding underneath prickly vines but hesitate slightly before reaching in to give garter snakes a chance to squiggle away. An hour later, after I’ve watered the garden, sorted and stored the produce, I sit down at my computer for 20 minutes to note ideas that need fleshing out. These snippets are always typed in bold and in parentheses so I can easily locate and quickly return to them (the next time I have 20 minutes).

My husband arrives home with a gift of 50 pounds of Asian pears from our friend’s orchard. They need to be sorted, peeled, sliced, and put in the food dryer before they rot. I love the idea of eating fruit in the winter that tastes of sweet summer.

When I have a short break from farm work, I read what I’ve written so far. Have I started my story with action that hooks the reader? I realize I haven’t. But then a practical distraction: we are without clean work clothes and I can’t smell like manure at book group. I separate the jeans and t-shirts that have cow poop on them from the delicates and throw a load in the laundry.

Now, back to my review. Have I used alliteration? Hyperbole? Onomatopoeia? An allusion? Personification? Have I merely described a situation and not made it into a story? This list of questions is not a set formula, but more of a reminder to myself. With farming it is clear when the job is finished. With writing, rarely. It’s difficult to know when to stop,

It’s my turn to host book group this week so the farmstead has to be mowed – an hour and a half on the riding mower. Nothing small or quick happens on this farm. Our book discussion will take place on the deck because I haven’t had time to clean the house. I hose the dust from the deck and set the outdoor dining table. My book group believes it’s good to break bread together, so dinner is expected, plus the host is required to do research about the author and lead the discussion. I would be happy with a book club that just meets for wine and dessert…

This week I will also host my writing critique group. They believe dessert is sufficient, thank goodness, so I make oatmeal cookies. I accidently burn the raisins while they’re on the stove ‘plumping’ in their own juices, because I’m also trying to talk to my sister on the phone and pay bills. I’m enamored with the idea of multi-tasking, but practicing it sometimes just doesn’t work out. 

I’m writing a story for a local newspaper and it’s due in five days. I can’t find an ending; it’s flabby; it’s not pertinent to the story; and it doesn’t sing. I give it to my husband to read and say, “Help. Where is the thread? What is the purpose of this article?” A reader’s perspective can be so helpful. And, just like that, his advice allows me to tie a bow on it and be done.

The next day, we must deal with tomato harvest. We have 150 pounds of paste tomatoes that need to be canned into ketchup, diced tomatoes and marinara sauce. Standing in the kitchen doing rote work provides ample time to think about different ways to phrase sentences. If I come up with a winner I try to remember it until I can run upstairs to my computer.

I am composing another essay about how I have more time to be present in the moment since retirement. I feel a bit hypocritical writing the story, since it can only be completed in half hour bursts of writing before I’m interrupted by the next chore. But during those focused periods I’m completely present in the moment.

The agenda for the following day: three hours of mowing a pasture for thistle control. Driving our John Deere tractor with a pull-behind bat-wing mower is largely a mindless task and allows me time to ruminate on how to finish the present-in-the-moment story. Endings tend to elude me, but today I’m back at the computer for an hour of finish work. I hit send on three stories which I’ve matched to appropriate magazines. I feel a shiver of anticipation that someone, somewhere, might say yes.

For those of you trying to fit writing into busy schedules, do the math. Three twenty-minute snippets of time add up to an hour of writing each day. An hour of writing each day adds up to seven hours each week. In order to make those hours productive, however, you have to be thinking about writing when you’re not writing, so you’re ready to write the minute your fanny hits the chair. 

Sit down. Open up the notebook. You can do this. 

Cynthia Pappas lives with her husband on a farm on the McKenzie River in Oregon. She is the author of two memoirs – Homespun and Gather. Her essays have appeared in Best Essays Northwest, Oregon Quarterly, The Eugene Register-Guard, Threads, MaryJane’sFarm, Farm & Ranch Living, and Groundwaters. When she is not farming or gardening, she is writing, binge reading, or planning her next culinary travel adventure.

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When I first arrived in Beijing in the mid-2000s, armed with a press secretary’s résumé and a head full of Capitol Hill talking points, I thought I understood how stories worked. I believed narratives were tools to shape opinions, arguments to be won. But China, in its relentless, humming complexity, had other plans. It was in a cramped, smog-cloaked alleyway near the Bookworm bookstore—a place I’d later immortalize in my memoir Beijing Bound—that I learned the hardest lesson of my writing life: sometimes, the most powerful stories aren’t the ones you tell, but the ones you finally learn to hear.

 

This revelation didn’t come easily. Like many Westerners in China at the time, I initially treated my surroundings as a backdrop for my own “adventure.” I scribbled observations about bustling markets and cryptic Communist Party slogans, convinced I was documenting something profound. But my early drafts rang hollow. Editors rejected them with polite variations of “It’s all surface, no soul.” Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project—until a rainy afternoon in Ningbo changed everything.

 

I’d traveled to the port city for a factory visit. Over endless cups of bitter Longjing tea, Mr. Li, a man whose hands bore the calluses of China’s economic miracle, began recounting his life. Not in the bullet points I’d expected—exports, GDP, supply chains—but in fragments of memory: his father’s starvation during the Great Leap Forward, his daughter’s obsession with Taylor Swift, the way he’d bribed local officials with Kentucky Fried Chicken in the 1990s (“Colonel Sanders opened more doors than Marx,” he joked). As he spoke, I realized I’d been writing about China all wrong. My lens had been political, transactional. His story was about hunger—not just for food, but for connection, for a place in a world changing faster than any one life could track.

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My family occasionally prays down by the Mississippi River with the Nibi walkers, a group of Indigenous women and water-tenders. Water is life, so we plant our feet in the sand and offer thanks. One morning, the Anishinaabe elder Sharon Day translated her prayer for us: “Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou, have pity on us.” At her feet was a quilt, a copper bowl of river water, a shell cupping burnt sage. Behind her the river eddied and flowed. “All of creation existed without us,” she explained, “and will exist after us. We are dependent on creation. We’re dependent on the web of life. It is not dependent on us.” Humans are mighty, yes, but also small and helpless, and remembering this is good. 

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Before writing for teens, I worked with them as a high school educator. Though I left teaching to focus on raising a family, the guiding principles I relied on as a teacher continue to inform my approach to writing and editing for young adults: authenticity, respect, and hope.

Before we get into specifics, a quick reminder: while young adult literature is popular among college students and older adults, teens are your target audience. If you’re writing or editing a YA novel, they should be top of mind. Growing teens face physical, mental, social, and emotional changes that can often feel confusing and overwhelming. Teens’ schedules are also increasingly busy, as is the very real pressure to perform - a pressure that’s only increased with the advent of social media.

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I was born in the city but grew up in the country where I discovered that words could take me beyond my five senses. That insight began on a hike in the woods with my father. We had stopped to watch bees buzzing around wildflower along the trail. I knew the bees were gathering honey but wondered what else was going on. When we got home, my curiosity led me to a library where I discovered it wasn't a one-way affair. Those flowers were gathering pollen from the bees. It was fun to watch bees buzzing from flower to flower, but it was reading words in a book that transformed my watching into understanding. Bees do things to flowers, flowers do things to bees, and words do things to me, so I want to do things with words.

Now, with the years piled on top of each other like pages in a book, I'm more aware of why I write and why it matters. Some reasons are personal and some are public, but they all stem from my desire to do something with words. And knowing the reasons helps me identify my intended readers and how I can reach them. Each of my reasons has a different audience—me when the reason is personal and others when the reason is public.

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I am the introvert; she, the extrovert. She is your friend as soon as you meet her. We were born across the globe from one another, me in a city among gray buildings, she surrounded by nature. I grew up through the storm of a communist-born dictatorship, that of Ceaușescu in Romania, and she experienced the childhood freedom in the States. Yet we had so much in common, my mother-in-law and me. We both loved to explore. We just started from different places; me from the inside of myself, she from the outside of herself, and we rescued each other from the limbo of wanting to write a message to the world and the fear that it may not be good enough for anyone to care about it. 

Rhona (my mother-in-law) is a caregiver,She feels stuck at home sometimes, as her mother can’t leave her bed anymore, so she finds refuge in her happy childhood stories. When she shared them with her friend, a primary school teacher, Rhona noticed that she may not be the only one who would relish her past adventures.  Once she started writing, the stories practically wrote themselves. The hurdle came afterwards, when no one seemed interested in reading them. She did not know what to do for a long while until she saw something I posted on my blog, and felt inspired, recognizing  a fellow writer. And yet, it still took several years until she dared show me these stories. She was not worried about rejection as much as she was about asking too much. She loves her son, her first-born, and until it came to challenging her core values manifested through a voting choice, she had always tiptoed around us, always worried she may upset the balance - but she couldn’t change her identity just for my sake.

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Several times a day, I find myself at a loss for words. Meaning gets caught unformed behind my teeth, or I puzzle through an avalanche of sounds whose hidden significance refuses to emerge. 

I’m in this fix because in midlife I moved to a place where I’d never learned the language, trailing after my German-speaking Swiss husband and hoping for the best. As an American in Switzerland, I’m a one-language person in a land where everyone else seems comfortable with least three or four. For as long as I could remember, English had been my superpower. Now I’ve lost that strength and had to start over, inarticulate as a newborn. 

In an earlier stage of life, working in editing and communications, I was proud of my knack for correct spelling, my wide vocabulary, my ability to fine-tune manuscripts to better express what their authors wanted to say. I’d been on a quest for perfection in words; these days, when I open my mouth to speak, I can be happy if I come up with any words at all. 

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One of my most helpful writing practices is not writing at all—rather, setting the pen (or keyboard) aside and doing handwork. Some writers knit, some carve wood, some paint, some throw pots. I coil pine-needle baskets.

First, I must leave my writer's desk and go outdoors. I head for a park or forest in search of long-needle pines, then gather a sack of dry brown needles from beneath the trees. Ponderosas are best, and since there are few near my home, I am always on the lookout to find them—yes, like keeping an ear out for a ‘just-right’ word, a good line, a story concept. Sometimes you find them where you least expect them. A neighbor’s yard. An empty lot. 

I take the needles home, remove the debris, wash them and set them out to dry. I study the needles' conditions, their lengths and colors, and begin to imagine a basket design. I liken this to sorting ideas before writing—so many notes, fragments of ideas, bits and pieces, thoughts to sort out.

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Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” 

This always made perfect sense to me. And when I  taught high school English, the students would erupt in debate when I would introduce this book.  

If it’s not true, it’s not true!

If you say it’s true, and it’s not, then that’s lying. 

It’s black and white. 

But here’s the thing: It’s anything but black and white. Our society embraces binary thinking: Pick a side, it’s either this or that, etc. And the enigma is our society simultaneously loves coaching one another on “speaking your truth.” 

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When I see my teenage sons lounging in front of the TV, I sometimes marvel at how much the experience of watching television has changed in one generation. At the risk of sounding like the world’s youngest curmudgeon, they have it much easier than I did.

When I returned home, I discovered that my own doctor was on a month-long vacation. I could only see a doctor who was unknown to me. She examined me, took my history of this situation, and concluded that I had something called Polymyalgia Rheumatica. She put me on Prednisone. Later, I saw a specialist who said I had Arthritis, but the treatment was the same. 

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Once, after participating in a panel discussion on sexuality and faith at a local university, I was approached by a student with the usual request to sign her copy of my book. But when she handed it over, I was shocked. The soft-cover bristled with post-it notes. Pages were dog-eared, the text striped with fluorescent highlighter, the margins crammed with handwriting, and the cover ripped. She might have run over it with her car.

 I certainly didn’t receive training in my two MFA programs on how to wait or hope for a warm human response. “How to not check your Submittable account twenty times a day” wasn’t in the curriculum. It’s something we endure privately during the boom-and-bust periods of our careers. What I've come to realize is that I don’t have writer’s block; I have reader’s block. To clarify, I don’t mean a failure to reach an audience. Readers’  blocks don't correlate with the number of published titles or level of acclaim. Just as writer’s blocks are caused by mindless mishandling of the present moment at the desk, reader’s blocks are glitches in our mindset after work is ready for publication. 

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More than a year ago, I found myself, a professional writer, stuck. 

I’d been stuck before. Definitely after my first book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, foreword by Gloria Steinem. Random House sent me all over the country to talk about the book, especially about the harrowing experiences with pre-Roe illegal abortions that people I interviewed like Whoopi Goldberg and Rita Moreno had. It was a heady time, but when it was over, I crashed. 

I didn’t get stuck after my second book, which came out 10 years later, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. I still had more to say about the Church. I had occasionally gotten stuck at other times on other particularly demanding projects, but it had been a long time since I felt stuck like this.

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With alacrity, I read Hank Phillippi Ryan’s essay Paying It Forward, one of the stories in  In Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers: 101 Motivational Stories for Writers – Budding or Bestselling – from Books to Blogs. This well-known mystery author made points that resonated with me. 

First, she emphasized how it was mere grit and persistence that landed her a job as a TV reporter at age 25, with no experience or real qualifications for the job. She found a mentor. Walt, a veteran photographer, showed her what to do. Within three weeks of following his instructions, she felt confident about her reportage.  Grateful, she vowed to pay it forward, which meant that if she could ever help newbies or wannabe writers, she would. Ergo, Hank helped a young girl Sally, an intern. Sally confided she wanted to be a producer someday. In her spare time, Sally composed a book. She got that book published. Well, Hank wanted to be a novelist, too. Sally ended up mentoring her. Roles reversed.

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I’m lying in bed, curled in a ball, whispering to my ankle under the covers. More specifically, I’m whispering to my new Apple Watch. It’s 2AM, the time when the best ideas come. I must capture them before they dissipate into the ether. 

We writers are used to a flurry of inspiration arriving in the middle of the night. We receive the Muses’ whispers in that twilight state so well that creatives like Thomas Edison covet it. To take advantage, he would nap with balls in his hands — when the balls fell, he’d hear them, wake, and immediately jot notes while the ideas were fresh in his head. 

Historically, we writers struggle to take notes in the night. Turning on a light might wake anyone with whom we share the room. Leaving the room abandons any hope of retaining the inspiration. My strategy involved grabbing the inevitable paper and pen on my nightstand and scribbling keywords while blinded by the dark. Within moments, the thought would be jumbled by consciousness. 

How, then, did this paper-and-pen writer end up whispering to an Apple Watch on her ankle?

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As a writer living in a small town, you sometimes feel you don't have much of a contribution to make to community life. No, not as a person—every resident has that opportunity—as a writer. If you were a painter, you could paint the firehouse. If you were a plumber, you could fix the old furnace in the school. But what’s a writer to do?

For many years, I was a writer in a small town; actually, in a poor and tiny northern Vermont village. A calamity there made me think about the role of the write.

Small-town calamities are the worst kind. Whether it’s fire or flood or frantic parents desperately searching for a bone-marrow donor for their daughter, you either know the people involved or your next-door neighbor does. If you were born there, you're probably related to them. In a small town, all tragedy is personal.

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What do you do when faced with a nasty bout of writer’s block? What do you do when all those fabulous phrases, adorable adverbs, and perky paragraphs just dry up like that once-red geranium sitting on my kitchen windowsill? But unlike the care of the geranium that I admit to neglecting, I’ve nurtured my muse: I read good literature, studied writers’ websites, journaled, poured over guideline pages.

Still, my muse Bob is gone. Perhaps he left me for a younger writer. That often happens to women in my age group. That’s right - maybe Bob wanted a TROPHY writer. Someone who’s flashier, someone who’s fancier, someone who TikToks! Maybe someone who’s writing true crime novels or podcasts. Those seem to be all the rage nowadays. I gave my muse the best years of my life only to be left at the curb like a bag of nonrecyclable packing peanuts! He didn’t even think about the ‘progeny’ he left behind - all those articles and stories we sweated over late at night. I thought we shared something meaningful. The times we laughed together over pieces we finally completed after weeks of sweating over them, cried together over heartless form rejection emails. I know I won’t get any consideration, any compensation from Bob. Maybe he’ll send a few crumbs here and there, like a particularly snappy phrase or a germ of an idea at dawn, while I hover between wakefulness and sleep, it becoming only a vague, nagging itch the next morning on fully waking.  

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Twenty-two years ago, I spent the first few weeks of my daughter’s life carefully following the advice given to nursing mothers in the hospital: no pacifiers, no bottles, feed on demand. Add to that the advice of parenting books: no co-sleeping, nothing plush in the crib, put the baby on their backs to sleep. It all added up to no fun, no sleep, and lots of crying (for all parties involved). 

A year later, I was pregnant again. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by the work I knew was ahead of me. But, with a year of parenting behind me, I also felt I knew what to expect. 

“This time,” I thought, “I’ll know what I’m doing.” Surely, it’d be easier the second time around, right? No. 

But…   

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This past March, I pulled off something many indie authors dream of: I paid my mortgage with the month's royalties. Yet I wasn't filled with joy. I didn't feel proud of my accomplishments, my work. Worries digging away in my head undermined the pride I deserved to feel.

When I returned home, I discovered that my own doctor was on a month-long vacation. I could only see a doctor who was unknown to me. She examined me, took my history of this situation, and concluded that I had something called Polymyalgia Rheumatica. She put me on Prednisone. Later, I saw a specialist who said I had Arthritis, but the treatment was the same. 

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Okay, so where’s the truth? You’ve been sitting there pounding out word after word of what makes sense to you, but it seems like just another string of words that almost anyone could write. Have you ever considered that you may be writing from everyone else’s truth and not your own? Truth is an elusive little devil that can whack the serifs right off your words, blindside and pummel all those well-intended phrases and words that claim to come from honesty but are actually other people’s thoughts and ideas disguised as your own. Why not make them your own?

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After a newspaper article appeared about my first published book and I received an invitation from a local school to speak to kids about literacy,  I realized that I would have to transition from the proverbial shy writer to charismatic speaker. 

No pressure. 

From the guy that was comfortable in the shadows to someone who would eventually speak at writer’s conferences, schools, and libraries throughout the US, no one would have ever told me the transition would come as easily as it did. 

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