Review: Sit. Write. Here. by April Dávila

◉ Book Review

Writing is hard. It requires some mixture of concentration, skill, knowledge, inspiration, time, and taste—all of which may be in short supply during any given writing session. When the mixture is just right, you feel like you are plugged into a creativity socket, getting back even more energy than you are expending. When the mixture is off, you feel like you are slogging through a cold, muddy field while carrying a giant pack of rocks on your back.

April Dávila’s Sit. Write. Here.: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less is the newest in a long line of books that promise to show writers how to achieve blissful flow and avoid the bogs of despair. This is a popular subgenre of writing craft books—probably because the pain is so real and the solutions so elusive—and I’ve reviewed many of them, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. What sets Dávila’s book apart is her narrow focus on mindfulness and her well-crafted collection of exercises intended to help you put her teachings into practice.

Throughout the book, Dávila—who is both a published novelist and a certified mindfulness instructor—makes a persuasive case for why mindfulness as a practice can be especially beneficial for writers. As she points out, we are living in a time when our attention is more scattered than ever before. Mindfulness is a way to keep the distractions at bay while also gathering the loose threads of ideas blowing around in our brains so we can weave them into words. And mindfulness can even improve our writing skills by helping us see more deeply into our characters, explore emotions and conflict more thoroughly, and evaluate our work more clearly. I’ve written frequently about the importance of interiority as a tool; mindfulness gives you more access to your own interiority, and a model for exploring the inner lives of your characters.

In the first chapter, Dávila introduces the practice of insight meditation, which asks you to establish an anchor for your thoughts. The anchor itself doesn’t matter; what matters is that you have a calm spot to redirect your thoughts when they drift. After your meditation session is finished and you are ready to begin a writing session, the writing itself becomes your new anchor. You’ve just practiced gently redirecting your thoughts back to your anchor; now you get to use the same technique to stay focused on your words. And just as with meditation or any other practice, the promise is that you will become better and better at it over time.

For many writers, the most helpful chapter in the book will be the one on writer’s block. Dávila begins her discussion of the topic by reframing the problem: You are not blocked, you are stuck. Right away, the word choice suggests a different level of problem; it’s easier to get unstuck than to get unblocked. Once again, mindfulness can help you notice and understand what’s going on in your brain. When you have more information about why you might be stuck, you’ll find better solutions for getting unstuck than just hectoring yourself to do better.

Dávila notes that the root cause of writing resistance is often your inner critic, who can show up in many different guises. One of them is perfectionism, which might block any writing at all or keep you stuck in a loop of polishing every sentence as you go. As Dávila points out, writing and editing engage different parts of your brain, so when you try to do both at once you are multitasking—something that has been proven time and time again to be bad for productivity. However, you don’t need to permanently ban your inner critic. In a later chapter on mental models, Dávila shows you how to welcome your inner critic back into your work to give constructive feedback during the self-editing phase after you’ve finished drafting.

Dávila concludes the book with a chapter on equanimity, an especially valuable skill for writers trying to sustain a creative practice in an industry that is changing rapidly. One strategy she recommends is to find community through a writing group, which I think is excellent advice. In fact, Dávila’s book itself would be the perfect vehicle for a group activity, working through the six key practices over the course of six weeks. The exercises are, I think, best done as solo activities, but coming together as a group to report on results will help you stick with the program and learn from the experiences of others. Many writing groups choose to work through Julia Cameron’s 1992 book The Artist’s Way together (and that’s how I myself first read it), but I think Sit. Write. Here. is a better choice. Dávila’s examples and outlook feel fresher and more attuned to our current world, and her collection of exercises and practices are more coherent and more focused on results. (Read my review of Cameron’s book if you want to hear more about its flaws, or you can listen to this very honest and entertaining episode of the Words to Write By podcast.)

I will admit that I’ve never been patient enough to try meditation outside of the yoga studio, but Dávila’s book welcomes beginners and I plan to give it a try. Over the last year, I’ve been experimenting with giving myself stimulus-free thinking time after I noticed how many of my best ideas come to me in the shower. Now I will sometimes replicate shower time by using a drive or a walk to think through a manuscript I’m working on or a piece I’m trying to write. If I’m doing something that occupies my body but not my brain, and I turn off other stimuli like podcasts or music, the thoughts will simply appear. Trying meditation feels like a natural extension.

If you try the practices, either solo or with a group, I’d love to hear how it goes—drop me a line or leave a comment. You can buy the book on Bookshop.org and sample a few of the meditation practices on Dávila’s website.*

* Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher. No one paid for or approved this review. Bookshop.org links are affiliate links — I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

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