A few weeks ago I posted about how I’ve been struggling trying to catch my stride as a writer for the past several months. I received some excellent advice in the comments, which not only made me feel better (thank you! I really needed that!)  but also gave me some thoughts on what I might do to try to keep writing, even if I don’t feel, for whatever reason, that I can produce anything publishable right now.

So since then, I’ve been writing letters to my unborn daughter. It’s amazing how quickly this project opened me up and pulled me out of my slump. Since I started these letters two weeks ago, I’ve written 34 pages and still have plenty more to say. To give myself more practice writing a book length work (and so that it will be engaging enough that my daughter will actually want to read it!), I’m writing it in the style of an epistolary memoir and plan to revise it extensively after I finish a full draft. My goal is to have a complete draft done by the time my daughter is born in September.

This project has made me feel like a writer again, brimming with words I just have to get onto the page. I’ve once again recaptured that fantastic feeling of having my head half in a writing project throughout the day. Even when I’m not writing—I’ll be washing the dishes or doing laundry or lathering my hair in the shower—and some idea will come to me that I simply have to include: I should tell her about the time . . . I should talk to her about . . . I should share with her my experiences with . . .

I think part of the reason I’m so excited about this project is because it feels important. Anything else that I’ve tried to work on lately has raised the question, “What’s the point?” Because publishing a book was so anticlimactic. Because the novel I poured five years of my life into still languishes, unpublished, in a file on my computer. Because even the things I’ve published, hardly anyone will ever read. Because, now that I’m pregnant, I realize there are other things in life that are way more important than my career as a writer.

But this project feels, to me, like it matters. Once I started working on it, I was overcome with the feeling that my daughter has a right to know these things, that she needs to know these things. I want her to know me not just as her mom but as a human being, and I want her to know that she is not alone, that if she inherits my depression, my social anxiety, if she struggles with her feelings about religion, if she finds herself wondering why she doesn’t seem to belong anywhere, I want her to know that I understand, that I’ve been through it too, that I will do my best to help her along the way.

And so this project feels more important and meaningful to me than anything I ever wrote with the end goal of publication. And because this isn’t something I’m writing to publish, it’s very low stakes, which is probably another reason why it so easily opened that blocked writing passage in my mind. Maybe part of it, too, is that I’m doing something completely different from any type of writing I’ve ever seriously done—outside of a few assignments I’ve been given over the years, I’ve never attempted to write creative nonfiction—and perhaps just switching gears so completely knocked something loose in my mind. Whatever the reason, I’m writing again without having to force it, and it feels good. It feels damn good.