Embracing Seasons of White Space—How to Prepare
Several years ago, I started craving something I began to call white space. I wanted to pull back, simplify, and have less to do. It started, oddly, after going through something really hard.
When our dog got sick in the spring of 2023, we spent two very stressful weeks doing everything we could to save her. I’d been navigating a lot of stress and grief during her diagnosis, and all the care decisions we needed to make. True to form, my low hanging fruit was the next podcast episode I’d planned to record. All that simply had to wait. After coming up for air, I completed the post-it note exercise I talk about in Episode 18 of the podcast, and also my book. It always helps give me clarity on where to focus, which is one of the things that led me to my first summer of white space.
White space is an essential tool in our writing life.
Think about a poem. When lines run together to form a paragraph, or a prose poem, the meaning will land differently versus if you made intentional line breaks to slow the reader down and emphasize certain words or ideas. If you use stanzas, that naturally creates added white space between chunks of text, and it’s a place to pause. It’s also a strategic choice.
What I’m circling around is this: the conscious decision to bring more of something into our life, or in this case, to actually remove things to create more space to let creativity flow more freely.
One of the first questions I asked myself was where my white space lived during the day. I certainly have a sense of structure to my days but I have a bit of flexibility within the constraints that exist. However, when I started thinking more deeply about white space, I realized there weren’t many pockets in my day that actually had white space.
Even in moments when I’m taking a break for lunch, instead of sitting outside with my thoughts, I might watch another episode of Selling Sunset on Netflix. Physically, my brain is resting from what I may have been working on earlier, but I’m still being stimulated in some way as opposed to listening to the birds and feeling the wind on my face. And that’s also true even if you’re reading or doing some other relaxing activity—there’s still a small amount of stimulation there. I don’t think we should all stop watching our favorite shows, but what I noticed in my own life is that I wasn’t giving my brain a lot of downtime or solitude.
I started slowly with a couple of experiments where I decided to take a walk without my earbuds. Walking is usually a great time for me to catch up on podcasts, but almost like magic, when I removed the inputs, I had a couple of ideas on my walk—it might have been a line of poetry or something I wanted to share the newsletter or just a connection being made. It’s similar to when you take a shower, for instance, a lot of people report getting ideas during that time because just like taking a walk without listening to a podcast, or when you’re cooking, that often happens to me, your brain is enjoying that downtime and working in a different way. It can solve problems and create new ideas because it has the space and time it needs. It’s also not distracted by a screen.
4 Steps to Prepare for White Space
How can we do this? What does white space look like, or what can it look like? This is when I’m going to invite you to do a thought experiment of your own, and offer a few ways to move forward if this is something that sounds good to you right now.
I see the search for white space as playing out in four segments.
The first part of this process is simply noticing and naming. Acknowledging the craving you might have. The desire you’re feeling. The curiosity around what it might look like if you let go of certain expectations, or set a project aside for a couple of months, or gave yourself permission to read only the books you want to read. Your particular desires might not match mine exactly, but deep inside somewhere there’s a longing, and a knowing.
The second step is setting intentions. This doesn’t need to be formal. Just take a little time to journal or think about what you’re looking for. When I first did this, I was looking for freedom of choice. By removing a small group of things from my calendar—like closing my paid newsletter, wrapping up a workshop I was teaching, and finishing up working with book coaching clients—I could redirect my brain space to feeling into what I might want to do at any given moment. It might look like going to the backyard and reading in the hammock after lunch. It might look like typing up some poems that have been sitting in a notebook for two years. It might mean getting ideas for future podcast episodes. But nothing was forced. I simply saw where the space took me and pondered possibilities that weren’t there before.
The third step is actually clearing the space. I use a metaphor in my book, WILD WORDS, about weeding the garden, and I feel like it’s appropriate here too. This is when you pause, remove, reprioritize. You might want to make a list of everything you’re doing. Look at where you’re putting your creative energy. Look at your calendar and see what’s on it in a week and start getting curious and asking what needs to stay, what can go. What can be paused temporarily? What can be paused permanently? You are weeding the garden of your creative life (and possibly your personal life) to keep those garden beds healthy, to make room for new seeds.
I do want to say here that the clearing out process can take some time. Especially if you’re being really thoughtful with it, it might take a month or two to really put everything in place, and that’s ok. I was doing this ahead of summer, but you might be listening at another time of year, and searching for white space can happen anytime. This period leading up to the white space—the clearing—can feel somewhat administrative. There can be tasks that need completing before you can fully step away. You might need to speak with people to get support in various ways. Getting all your ducks in a row can take some effort, but it’s worth it.
Maybe you’ll need to delete the social media apps from your phone. Maybe you’ll want to fill up your library holds list so you have a running stream of great reads to look forward to. Maybe you’ll print out the manuscript you’re working on, three hole punch it, and tuck it away in a folder, organized and ready for when you pick it up again. Maybe your bookshelves, or your loose papers, need to be better organized. Think about some of the tasks that are specific to your situation right now that will help give more breathing room.
Like me, you will most likely still have household responsibilities—maybe you have kids, or you support an aging parent. Maybe you have a job that you can’t just quit for the summer because you want more time to yourself. But you can spend five minutes on your yoga mat every day just breathing. You can go on a walk for 10 minutes. You can pick up a book instead of picking up your phone. You can delete your social media apps, or create parameters around them that prioritizes your time offline instead of online.
The final step is circling back to noticing. Once you’ve created that space, give yourself the time to sink into it. Enjoy it. Embrace it. And keep those senses up. Check in with yourself to see how you’re feeling. Is there any resistance? If you stopped using social media, for example, do you miss it? Do you feel liberated? Because your brain should have a bit more downtime, reflection will hopefully feel natural during this period, so I encourage you to notice your feelings and how the space ultimately serves you.
On the topic of resistance, claiming white space in your writing life can sometimes feel scary or difficult at first, especially if it’s a new practice. This is important to name because culturally, we’re not typically supported to prioritize ourselves, to pull back, to dare to not fit the mold of productivity that’s been modeled to us.
Productivity and doing and this feeling that we need to constantly be producing things—this isn’t the way nature works. Nature rests. It’s literally built into the earth’s ecosystem to have periods of rest and repair. But nowadays, productivity can be understood as a way to control the uncontrollable, to feel like we’ve earned our worthiness. But if you’re willing to interrupt that, even a little bit, by listening to your intuition that might be craving something different, you can let your presence be enough.
I recently listened to an episode of the Needy podcast with Mara Glatzel where she shared a bit about her experience launching a book. A lot of the conversation was about expansion and contraction, and how contraction inevitably follows periods of expansion. It’s a natural ebb and flow we experience, though it isn’t always named and nurtured. Towards the end of that episode she said this great line: Permission loves company.
“There’s value in saying out loud, this is what I’m doing. What you allow yourself and how you allow yourself that thing… sparks that resonance and that reverberation of permission that expands out from you. And what you allow yourself people then see as a model of possibility for what they might allow themselves. And the more that we are able to expand out in that way, the more permission we all are able to give ourselves. But that begins with these conversations of, what’s not coming easily right now, and why? And what judgements do I have about that?”
This is an incredible reminder for me and for all of us that our choices create a ripple effect. And I’m saying out loud that white space is necessary. White space is required to sustain us on the writer’s path. I want it for me, and I want it for you.
If anything in this episode resonated, even a little bit, consider this your invitation to join me in searching for white space in your creative life. It’s ok to contract, to surrender, to do less, to take something off your plate, to put your manuscript in a drawer, to scribble in a journal without a plan for what those words will become. You’re worth it, and your creative life needs it.
