Wear Your Life Jacket

How writing keeps you afloat in the rough seas of life

On the US Coast Guard’s website, there’s a whole page dedicated to why and when to wear your life jacket.

(tl;dr: always wear a life jacket if you are on or around water.)

I think our writing is exactly like that life-jacket: something not to be ignored and neglected because when we need it, we NEED it.

How does a life jacket help?

  • By providing buoyancy if you unexpectedly find yourself in the water.
  • By providing buoyancy if you purposely jump into the water to save someone else.
  • By providing buoyancy when you are no longer able to keep yourself afloat due to fatigue, injury, or cold.
  • By providing buoyancy if you are a weak or non-swimmer.

US Coast Guard

Why Wear Your Life Jacket?

No one on a boat hopes to need their life jacket, but the most experienced boaters will always put one on, just in case.

Writing is our life jacket on the rough seas of life.

Writing keeps us buoyant. It keeps our head above water. It keeps our hearts strong.

Public life is often — if you’re paying attention — choppy.

Private life goes through calm spells and then suddenly, out of nowhere: a giant wave threatens to capsize your vessel.

You want to have your life jacket on — your writing practice up and running and ready to sustain you — at all times.

Dealing with the Unexpected

If you find yourself dealing with an unexpectedly challenging moment in life having a writing practice can keep you afloat and steady while everything else is a mess.

It might be journal, or it might be taking some time out to visit your imaginary friends, but either way, it gives you a way to deal with the complexities of being human, and to exert a little control .

Your writing might help you get out of the situation

  • by selling a piece of work that provides much-needed funds,
  • or by helping you examine and analyze the facts that are driving your emotions about your situation. Writing balances heart and head.

Writing keeps your head above the water.

Jumping In To Help Others

If you intentionally wade in to a challenging situation, to advocate for others, or to right an injustice, having your writing skills in tip top shape gives you the tools you need.

When your writing is fluid, you can persuade people

When your writing flows, you can regulate your own responses.

Whether you are penning editorials, or creating fictional worlds that show a better way, you don’t want your writing to be rusty when your moment arrives.

Keeping your writing life jacket on, means you have the ability and confidence to jump in, if someone else needs you.

When You’re Tired

When you get tired or sick and feel you don’t know what to do, knowing that you can write about it (or about something that is absolutely not the ‘it’ that is dragging you down) is a healthy way to keep afloat.

Our writing life jackets keep our hearts strong.

When You’re Still Learning

If you’re not a great writer (yet), developing a consistent practice of playing with words will keep you bobbing along, as the current pulls you closer to your cherished dream of being a writer that you and others admire.

“Which Life Jacket Should I Wear?”

The Coast Guard site has a whole page of information and specs for different types of flotation devices for different people and purposes, with strong recommendations.

But before all of that they start with the simple line:

“The best lifejacket is the one you will wear.”

Likewise with your writing practice.

The best writing practice for you is not the one Stephen King has developed, or that I have developed, or that your favorite author talked about in that article you read, once.

The best writing practice is one you’ll a, do and b, enjoy.

And, like a kid growing out of their Type III PFD Life Vest, you’ll grow beyond whatever writing practice you start with, and that’s OK.

  • There will be times when Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages work great for you and times when you don’t need that practice.
  • There will be seasons where writing after everyone else has gone to bed works, and times when you only have that energy first thing in the day.
  • There will be times when all you can do is journal, and times when fiction surges up powerfully, like a fair weather waterspout

But keep writing.

It’s your life jacket.

What practice will you begin to build, this week, to help your writing serve as your life jacket? Leave a comment and let us know!

No Matter What

A sensible sailor wouldn’t let their kids talk them out of insisting on life jackets, even if the weather looks fair.

Don’t let your inner critic talk you out of writing, even if you’re not sure what purpose this particular piece will serve.

More Resources

People in the StoryADay Superstars group have been having having a lot of success lately working on 100 word stories lately. Want to give them a try? Here’s some instruction and inspiration.

Want to spend 52 weeks getting writing lessons and prompts in your inbox? Sounds like you need to sign up for the StoryAWeek newsletter!

SWAGr for February 2025

It’s that time again: time to make your commitments to your writing for the coming month. Join us!

Welcome to the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group!

Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.

(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)

Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? 

And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!

Download your SWAGr Tracking Sheet now, to keep track of your commitments this month

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Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months

  • Finish first draft of story and write 3 articles for my school paper. – Courtney
  • Write on seven days this month – Clare
  • Extend my reading and to read with a ‘writers eye’- Wendy
  • write 10,000 words – Mary Lou

 So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below

(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends!)

What We Crave

“In a digital world saturated with technicolor brilliance and filtered, unobtainable beauty, modern humans seem unmoored and at sea. We crave stories to tell us who we are.” – Min Jin Lee, Best American Short Stories 2023

When I first logged on to the Internet in 1993, I was thrilled by the possibilities of connection.

When, some time later, I clicked on my first hyperlink (on a page that gloried under the catchy address of something like “74.6.143.25”) I distinctly remember thinking,

“This is exactly how I want life to operate,”

and, at the same time,

“I am in sooooo much trouble.”

Picture me, hunched in front of a mushroom-colored 14-inch monitor, clicking and reading, and clicking and reading, and leaping down the rabbit hole

We Were Warned

That first hyperlink was the start of something that changed the world and I was there for it.

But it turns out I was Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s hat, summoning a wave I couldn’t control.

I was the old woman with the magic porridge pot.

I was King Midas.

We all were.

(It’s 1999, and the distractions have only got shinier! Like my cheeks!)
  • The Sorcerer’s Apprentice thought he wanted power. What he really needed was control.
  • The old woman with the magic porridge pot thought she wanted an endless supply of food. What she needed was ‘enough’.
  • We thought we wanted endless facts, exposure to more people, more ideas. What we need is the wisdom that comes from enough knowledge.

The stories tried to warn us.

Writers Have A Head Start

Yes, we get distracted by the glossy online world sometimes, but writers really do have a huge advantage over other mortals.

We go out of our way to make time to create worlds and characters who wrestle with big human questions:

  • What if I break the rules, just this once?
  • What if I had everything I ever lacked?
  • What if they won’t love me?
  • What’s beyond the fence at the end of the garden?

Believe it or not, most people are rushing through their days NOT staring into space and thinking about these things.

But when they do have time to unwind, they all want to do it with stories: in books, on screens, in song.

Because stories — not facts, not reels, not personality quizzes — tell us who we are.

Your Turn

Make some time for your writing in the next three days.

Use this prompt if you need a nudge.

And please believe me when I say

“You are a writer. Stories are what make us human. Stories keep us safe. Stories show us how to be human. Stories are the way we learn. No matter how ‘big’ or ‘small’ your stories and your subject matter, your stories matter.”

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What’s your biggest distraction from your writing? How did you last conquer it. Leave a comment!

Never, Never Give Up On Your Writing

When a catalogue of disasters struck, one writer used the power of her writer’s group to keep her on track…

Why do you need a writing support group?

Two weeks ago, I chipped the end of the femur where it enters my ankle (4-6 months recovery); my dog split her nail (so it had to be cut back even with the end of the toe); and my daughter’s 10-year relationship ended. (She is far away so I cannot hug her) …

But I kept on writing.

This week I had to cancel two lunches, one supper, a dental appointment and a hair appointment. My husband and I have RSV (respiratory ~something, something~ virus). Mine started with razor blades in my throat and hasn’t really changed. Larry is getting progressively sicker…

But I am still writing every morning.

Then, last night, my two young dogs got into a scuffle with a porcupine (they lost). Larry has been nursing a shoulder injury for months (from when he tripped over the old dog) and in our flurry to get the pups back to the house, into the truck and to the vet, he reinjured his shoulder and I messed up my foot (again).

Daisy had 35 quills and Eddy had 20. They are both doing fine.

And this morning, I still showed up for my writing.

For long time I wrote alone. I would get up in the morning, have coffee and then sit at my desk and write for an hour. I liked it, it worked for me; but the events of the last couple of weeks would have knocked me off my schedule and I would have spent at least a month getting back on track.

A couple of years ago, I tried StoryADay May, then I joined Superstars. (one of the best things I ever did for my writing).

As luck would have it, they had a regularly scheduled writing sprint at the exact time I like to write. (I try to host on Tuesdays.)

So, this morning (Tuesday), when I woke up and my foot was throbbing and the dogs were whining and my husband moaned and coughed on the couch I sipped my first coffee, played a game on my phone, fed the dogs, and refilled my cup.

Then I limped up to my writing desk (12 stairs) and wrote for an hour with the other Superstars.

It was my turn to host and even though I didn’t “want to” I DID want to (if you know what I mean). I knew people would show up “in the squares” and I would be inspired.

So once you have sufficiently felt sorry for me, (because that is really what I was going for) remember:

Never, Never Give Up on Your Writing

(Thank you Superstars ~ you are the bestest)

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Icon on Brenda hugging her dogs

Brenda Rech is happily married with two beautiful daughters, three dogs, two cats and a bird named Amy Farrah Fowler. Her flower gardens are forever at the beginner’s stages as she would rather hike with her husband and dogs or explore her writing. Her favorite breakfast is crispy bacon and strawberry jam on white toast. She is currently working on her first novel and has a monthly newsletter, Thru the Window.

Who Do You Talk To About Writing?

When my fellow writer—let’s call her Amanda—popped onto my Zoom screen, she was hunched in her chair, listless, and slightly cynical.

For months, she’d been trying to work on her novel.

She knew what she had to do.

She knew the scene she wanted to work on.

She had a writer friend she checked in with weekly…and still she was spending her writing time checking email and looking at social media and feeling the self-loathing grow like a thorny hedge, choking out her creativity.

The Heart of the Problem

As we started to talk it became clear to me that the problem wasn’t with her work ethic (she’s worked as a writer for decades) or her identity (“writer” is central to her identity and she has no problem saying it out loud).

The problem was technical: she didn’t know enough about the structure of the story she wanted to tell; about reader expectations; about how to arrange her beautiful writing into a compelling, novel-length story.

And that is a problem that can be fixed.

But it’s hard to fix alone at your desk (or alone inside your brain).

As I asked more questions, and Amanda answered, I watched her sit up straighter, lean in towards the camera—she may have even clapped her hands in glee—as the true problem emerged.

What Happened Next

With the problem diagnosed, it was a snap for us to put together a plan of action to tackle it.

She’s ready to write, again.

Better than that, she’s excited to write again.

She was so happy she called me a genius.

Not A Genius

I’m (probably) not a genius.

But I am a coach.

I study and practice storytelling all day long.

And I ask really good questions.

Your Turn

  • If you’re stuck on your writing, and you don’t understand why
  • If you’re making progress slower than you’d like
  • If you don’t know what the next step is, for you

Do you have someone you can talk to about your writing, and who asks excellent questions?

Leave a comment and let me know