Happy Monday, friends. This week I’m trying to get around to a few writing and domestic projects I’ve been avoiding, before attempting to bake some pies and host my first ever Thanksgiving dinner as a single mom. So it’s fitting that I am coming at you today with a great writing prompt about that thing you’ve been avoiding. This one is by guest author Chloé Caldwell, whose latest book, Trying, is out now. Trying is a poetic, almost impressionistic memoir about fertility, divorce, grief, queerness, and trying to be a person. I loved it.
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Our guest author
In addition to Trying, Chloé Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller, Women (Harper Perennial, 2024), and the books I’ll Tell You In Person (2016), The Red Zone (2022), and Legs Get Led Astray (2012). Chloé’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Cut, The Believer, The Sun, and in half a dozen anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC and Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, Sluts, and So Heavy A Weight. She also runs an accountability group for writers.
Chloé Caldwell on the thing you’re avoiding
As a writing instructor for over a decade now, I’ve begun to recognize a pattern. People usually know what they have to do, and they don’t want to do it. If you avoid the scene or essay or book or sentence you know you need to write, you can stay stuck. I’ve seen a lot of writers be their own worst enemy. Sound familiar? What people need to understand, though, is that it’s those parts we avoid which end up being the parts readers resonate with and remember.
Prompt: Confront the thing