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Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado's Writing Routine:
Carmen Maria Machado's Writing Routine:
"I always write with coffee or seltzer water on hand. I like to be dressed—that is, not in my pajamas. And I need my desk to be relatively neat and clean, or I need to be in a relatively neat and clean room. (In other words, if there’s paper or clothes or dirty dishes everywhere, I can’t focus.) And sometimes I need to switch locations, get out of my element—head to a coffee shop or my office or a residency or even, say, a hotel. There’s something about being in a controlled environment with specific aesthetic stimuli around you that can really jumpstart some magic."
"I write for myself. I try not to think too hard about my audience—I think that’s a recipe for stopping a project in its tracks. It’s very easy to get shut down by perceived expectations. Plus, how do I know who’s going to respond to my writing? This isn’t to say that I don’t love my readers. When people respond to my work, it’s exciting and amazing and humbling. But that’s not why I do it. It’s just a bonus.
To turn it around a bit: The writers whose work I love weren’t writing for me in particular. They might be delighted by my readership, or puzzled or indifferent or enraged. All of those things are okay. Because once they put their work into the world, it became, in its own little way, mine. And that’s incredible, right? That we can be touched, moved, excited, provoked by a text whose author is removed from us in every way, even by time, language, or death. So you can’t get hung up too much on audience. There’s simply no way to catalogue or write for the sheer width and breadth of your potential readership. You have to just write."
Her Body and Other Parties, 2017
Read Jan 2022
In The Dream House, 2019
Read June 2023
Why I Chose Carmen Maria Machado:
Why I Chose Carmen Maria Machado:
Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties was the first book of short stories that was not hit or miss for me. Her writing, though sometimes transcending and fitting into many different genres, from horror, to fantasy, to realistic fiction, pulls a reader in for every single story. When it came time to read her memoir, In the Dream House, I had high expectations, which were quickly exceeded. The memoir explores an abusive relationship that Machado was in, which also was her first queer relationship. Machado took many risks in the memoir, writing in second-person and having the book split into chapters that each explore a different narrative trope. The memoir is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read, and it amazes me how she was able to turn such a traumatic experience into such an impactful and emotional story.
Machado’s writing can be dense. In In the Dream House, she often references statistics and historical examples of what she is discussing. She is not afraid to take the reader on a journey, and the reader learns to trust that she will always bring them back to the story at hand. Her honesty is commendable and her words come to life on the page, whether she is writing fiction or from her own experiences, and a reader is bound to learn from reading her work.
Passage from Carmen Maria Machado's Writing:
Passage from Carmen Maria Machado's Writing:
"We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go" (Machado, In the Dream House).
Writing Data:
Writing Data:
9
9
how I felt about the quality of my writing over the course of the four days, out of a possible maximum of 15 points
664
664
average words written per day
30.1
30.1
average minutes spent writing per day
How the Experiment Went
How the Experiment Went
This week was the first of the five I’ve completed so far where I was unable to fully complete the writing routine all four days. On the Wednesday of this week, my roommates and I were all surprised by water falling in buckets from the ceiling of our apartment. Our apartment is two floors, one of which is on the ground floor and the other in the basement, and the unit above us had had a pipe burst, causing water to leak into our apartment at a comically fast rate. It was a wild turn of events, and not how I’d expected the day to go, but it was also something that, as soon as the flooding was all cleared up and maintenance had arrived, instantly became funny to all of us. Moral of the story: I was not able to follow Carmen Maria Machado’s advice on Wednesday, as my writing was done in many sporadic bursts in between moving locations, from a public coffee shop when we evacuated our apartment, to my bed when my desk became a place to put all of the things in the water danger zone, to the floor of my room. I had expected for something unexpected like this to happen at some point, but I guess it stands as a reminder that the ideal writing routine can’t be followed every single day, but that persevering and writing anyway is always an option!
Of the three days where I followed the routine, I worked at my desk at home for two of them and the Law Library for the third. I have always been a believer that writing in a spot that feels put-together will make me more focused, but I hadn’t ever thought about the fact that being dressed for the day, as opposed to being in sweatpants or pajamas, could affect the quality of my writing or my focus. I found that, overall, I did enjoy following Machado’s writing routine, and it allowed me to feel like I was doing a job while I did my daily writing, as opposed to just making something up in a Google Doc. I guess you could say it made me feel like a real writer. However, I did find it a little bit tedious to change and clean up my desk entirely before sitting down to write, especially on the days this week when I found myself excited to get started. Because of this frustration, my daily ratings come to a total of 9 (out of a maximum of 15) out of the 3 days that I followed this routine. Funnily enough, my rating on Wednesday, a 4, was higher than any of the other three days this week. Just goes to show that having a perfect writing environment, while it can be helpful, doesn’t guarantee that one will like their writing more than on another day.
To the left is my data for this experiment, leaving out my data for Wednesday. Over the course of the three days, typed 6.7 pages on my computer, with an average of 664 words per day. I worked an average of 30.1 minutes per day. Overall, I enjoyed this writing routine, but I felt that I am someone who relies on more of a mindset reset before writing, as opposed to a physical reset achieved by getting my environment completely ‘ready’ for writing. However, I definitely see the benefit of limiting distraction by cleaning up one’s desk/writing space before embarking upon their daily pages.
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