Lauren Rile Smith
Be Your Own Secretary (With A Little Help)
Anyone who has worked for a very small business knows the score: there are more roles than human beings on your team.
You get asked, “What does your marketing director need to know before the launch?” and answer, “I’ll have her be in touch by Monday,” knowing that you will actually be the person writing that email… even if you sign it with with a different name so you appear more impressive to the client, like a cat puffing itself up to intimidate predators.
As a writer, you are the smallest possible creative business. This is both freeing—no one else calls the shots! Work springs unfiltered from the depths of your soul!—and overwhelming. There are a lot more roles than human beings on your team!
Writing is usually a lonely endeavor. Whether holed up in your garret scribbling by candle-light or making bullet-point notes on your phone while cooking dinner for noisy kids, you are the entire chain of production—from original spark to final product. (Often, writers must also be responsible for the less creative parts of running a micro-business, too, like advertising and distribution. Once again, you are your own marketer!)
As a writer who is also a busy working parent and runs another creative side business (I’m a trapeze performer and coach!), I find it essential to divide labor between parts of myself, and technology can help. This means that when a sentence leaps into my head while I’m between work meetings or pushing my child in the stroller, I send myself a quick note via email, knowing that my next-morning self will sit down at my desk to comb those random ideas into tidy prose. (Sometimes this is more successful than others. Occasionally I’d need to credit autocorrect as a co-author on whatever inscrutable inspiration I received.)
My favorite version of this recently is to record voice memos on my iPhone, especially if I’m alone on a long walk or running errands in the car. I’ll start meditating out loud on a problem or question in my current short-story project, and somehow the somatic duet of my voice working aloud and my body being carried along in space, uncorks a fluidity that’s harder to capture when I’m sitting at my desk. Plot twists and character nuances unfurl as I ramble freely. I tag the voice recording with the name of my story so I can find it later. Then, without effort from me, my phone’s current operating system transcribes the entire note, and I can paste the transcript in the “notes” section of my current story project. These transcriptions are just good enough that I can skim or keyword search for the idea, and often I am delightfully surprised by the gifts I find there.
Most of us read and write in silence, and process our writing projects fully in the trance of eyeballs and fingertips; our conversational speech and our literary composition have different flavors. Speaking a sentence out loud taps into a different part of your brain than writing it down. When you mingle these two voices (literal and metaphorical) you can double the power of your writing team. It’s almost like having a co-worker who agrees with you, but has their own spin on shared ideas. Almost. Now tell your marketing director to get to work.
Lauren Rile Smith is Cleaver’s Founding Co-Editor and a queer disabled writer, editor, and performing artist who finds electric connection with bodies in motion and words on paper. She is the founder of the contemporary circus company Tangle Movement Arts, has served as Assistant Editor of the American Poetry Review, and works as the Rare Materials Specialist at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in publications including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stirring, Skanky Possum, Xconnect, and Vocabula Review. Learn more about her: https://rilesmith.neocities.org.
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