WTL Issue 001 | June 18, 2025

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Getting Words on the Page (Even When Everything Feels Urgent)

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Lessons from the Long Haul

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

The wooden school desktop is cool and smooth, allowing my forearm to slide as my No. 2 pencil scratches words across lined paper. Words that become sentences. Sentences that become paragraphs. Paragraphs that multiply, punctuated by stick figures and tree-lined landscapes. The bang of neighbor desks slamming shut as fellow third grade students stow or retrieve their own writing implements and sheets of clean, unmarked paper.

Click, click, clack. Click, click, click, click.

My aunt gave me a typewriter when I was in middle school after I authored my grandfather's life story and it was published in the Anchorage Daily News just after he died. The keys were black with white lettering and required an extra bit of strength to push down completely. I'd tap away on it in the basement of our house, which stayed cooler on hot summer days. The case was blue fabric-covered and light enough to easily carry from room to room—from the basement to the desk in the living room.

This was well before computers lived in every household or mobile phones rested in everyone's hands. Having my own mechanical typewriter felt like holding a special kind of power.

What surprised me about my career is how much writing it involved. This might be true for you as well. Maybe you write for the joy of creating stories. Or maybe you have that climate response plan or community engagement report that gets pushed to tomorrow (and the next day) as you respond to all the stuff that feels more urgent—the phone calls, the emails, the meetings that multiply like those paragraphs on my childhood desk.

Here's the thing: You have to make time for the big stuff. The work that requires deeper focus and longer blocks of uninterrupted thinking.

Sitting down to write is still sometimes a struggle. I don't know anyone who hasn't felt the weight of a blank page, the frustration of ideas that refuse to cooperate.

Yet writing is something you can do almost anywhere—you only need your mind and something to capture whatever emerges.

Nothing is truer than this advice from Anne Lamott. Writing is about getting that messy first draft on the page—especially the writing that moves climate work forward.

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Field-Tested: A Writing Practice for Climate Leaders

How do you get words on the page when everything feels urgent? I've found it's less about the actual writing and more about what you do before you sit down and how you build the practice into your days.

Before you write:

• Schedule regular writing blocks on your calendar—daily or weekly, whatever feels sustainable
• Try different times of day to discover when your mind is most generative
• The evening before, identify what you want to focus on during your writing time

Get a good night's sleep (this matters more than you think)

During your writing block:

• Start with a 10-minute timed free write using pen and paper—this clears mental clutter and helps you discover what wants attention
• If you get stuck, try out Julia Cameron's morning pages technique: keep your pen moving for the entire time, following whatever emerges
• Move into focused writing sprints: 25-50 minutes of deep work with 5-10 minute breaks
• Aim for 2-3 total hours when possible, but even one focused hour makes a difference

Two prompts I return to again and again:

1. What is the most important thing people need to know about this topic? Why does it matter right now?
2. With reference to a specific moment or image, describe the concrete details using all your senses—what do you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste?

The second prompt works especially well for community engagement plans or reports. Starting with sensory details grounds abstract concepts in lived experience.

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Signals & Shifts

Writing as climate resilience: Nikayla Jefferson explores how writing can help process climate emotions and build resilience in this recent piece for Yale Climate Connections (February 24, 2025). Nikayla reminds us that putting words to our climate experiences—the anxiety, the hope, the overwhelm—creates space for understanding and growth in this work.

The reading side of the equation: Two books moving to the top of my pile: You Are Here, a collection of poetry edited by Ada Limón that explores our relationship with place and belonging, and Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, which weaves Indigenous storytelling with contemporary memoir. Both offer different ways of seeing our relationship with the natural world—essential reading for anyone doing climate work.

Question for reflection: What story about your climate work needs to be written? What would change if you made time for that writing this week?

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Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.

Nikoosh

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Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.

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