[WILF] Virginia Woolf & Creative Snacking
|
Welcome to What I Learned From… a newsletter that offers short essays, resources, and reading suggestions to help writers and essayists improve their writing craft. It's nice to see you here! If someone forwarded you this email because they love your writing, you can subscribe here. Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes “When you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.” — Chinese Saying What I Learned From …I’ve got one hand in the cereal box, and the other is holding a deadline. Sometime around midnight (long past dinner, not yet morning) I’ll sometimes find myself standing in the kitchen, lit only by the glow of the refrigerator. My laptop hums on the other side of the room, still open to a blinking cursor. The cat watches with lazy judgment. I’m not particularly hungry, but I am about to eat an entire bowl of Reese’s Puffs cereal. This is not a health ritual. This is not a productivity hack. This is deadline food. I used to feel guilty about this part of my process. Until I learned that Virginia Woolf wrote her essays over buns and tea. In her diaries and letters, Woolf often described her ideal writing environment: a clean desk, a quiet room, and always, some sort of snack. She wrote that “a good dinner” was necessary to writing a good book, and in A Room of One’s Own, she famously noted, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Food, for Woolf, was not just fuel, it was part of her creative process. A nibble to pace her thoughts. A sip to punctuate a sentence. It was the pleasure, a ritual, and her rhythm. She wasn’t the only one. Writers across time—Colette with her morning baguettes, Murakami and his spaghetti dinners, Maya Angelou’s red wine and sherry—have always wrapped their routines in quiet sustenance. So maybe I’m not unhinged for eating Reese’s Puffs in a looping haze while whispering “just finish the damn paragraph.” Maybe I’m participating in a very specific lineage of creative survival. Woolf had her buns and tea; I’ve got my peanut butter chaos and Alanis Morissette humming in the background. One bowl becomes two. Occasionally three. I stand in the kitchen like a sugar-fueled goblin, peanut-butter-chocolate smeared on my keyboard, bargaining with myself to write 300 more words. Crunch. Type. Sip. Think. Bite. Delete. Rewrite. It works. Not because the cereal is magic…but because the ritual is. Midnight snacks are like a metronome. A signal to your body and brain that you’re still going. You’re still trying. You’re allowed to comfort yourself, even if the rest of the world is asleep. It’s a small thing, yes, but creativity is made of small things. And sometimes a spoonful of cereal is the quiet agreement you make with yourself to keep showing up on the page. Woolf knew that. She didn’t romanticize the starving artist; she fed her mind, her body, and her sentences. She knew that creativity doesn’t bloom under deprivation. It needs delight. It needs pause. It needs snacks. It blooms under the glow of the fridge light. So now, when I reach for the cereal box at midnight, I no longer have to feel ridiculous. I can feel like I’m keeping a sacred writing tradition alive. Spoon in one hand. Deadline in the other. Still writing. (Obviously the peace sign is implied.) Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t. If you're feeling snacky…this week’s essay is brought to you by deadline cereal and creative survival. If you’re in the mood to work on something of your own, I’ve got a few quiet offers open: short-term editing and coaching options to help you get unstuck, shape your work, or finally hit “send.” No push, no pressure. Just leaving the fridge door open (that won’t run up the electric too much, will it?!) 👉 Flash Sale: Writing Help With a Short Fuse Thought Threads …For when you want to tug at the edges of your own thinking.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Dinner was the usual kind of dinner; but it is odd how, with all my prejudices, I feel that a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One can’t think properly, or write properly, without something solid to go on. A crust of bread is the scaffolding on which the whole edifice of thought is built.” — Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Nacket [NACK-ett] (n.) — A Scots word for a small snack eaten between meals, especially late at night or during work. First noted in the 18th century, it likely stems from the Scots knack (to make a sharp, cracking noise). Unverified etymology, but deliciously apt. A nacket isn’t a meal. It’s the handful of cereal dumped directly into your mouth at midnight. The cold slice of pizza folded like a love letter to productivity. The kind of thing you eat with your fingers. Sorta synonyms: nibble, nosh, goblin fuel Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. PayOnce — Sick of all the subscriptions to do anything these days? This is a listing of pay once apps that might help you save money! The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. If I pick up and look at every single book in here, maybe I’ll find the key? ‘Til next time ~ Elisa P.S. Real talk: this week knocked me sideways, and I’ve got to sell a few offers to stay afloat (and, y’know, buy more deadline cereal). If you’ve been meaning to get some editing or coaching help, now’s a very good time. 🥣 |