Here Is The 5-Step WITD Method This Writer Used To Help Get Her Essay Into the NYT Last Weekend. You Can Use It, Too.

Lit Salon | Creative work is sacred, vulnerable, and alive. It does not grow in the harsh soil of other people’s undisciplined opinions. I teach a better way, and here it is for you to use yourself.

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Good morning, WITDers ❤️

I was thrilled yesterday to get pinged on social media by the writer Amy Stonestrom, whose powerful personal essay was published in The New York Times over the weekend—and who says she used “Jeannine Ouellette’s workshopping method” to help make it happen!

Here is exactly what Amy said:

Over the past six years or so I've been lucky enough to find writing communities both online and in person … Each group works a little differently but in several of them we’ve started to use Jeannine Ouellette's workshopping method which I highly recommend. It's a terrific way to get out of your head and see if things are resonating or making sense. It’s been a total game changer.

In this post, I share a gift link to Amy’s essay along with my detailed, step-by-step craft essay on the exact workshopping method I use and teach—and that Amy’s writing groups are now using, and that you can use for yourself, on your own or with a group.

It’s the method I use when I teach in the synchronous WITD workshop, as I will be doing this fall (stay tuned—that synchronous workshop builds on everything I’ve done so far and I’m so excited).

Amy called this method “Jeannine' Ouellette’s workshopping method” when she kindly tagged me in a post about her NYT essay, which really made my day. She didn’t have to do that. I’d never have known that her writing groups were using my workshopping method (which I have openly shared and am sharing again in this post). But I loved that she tagged me. It was ethical, generous, and wise.

Because here’s the thing about the writing world: it’s small. I have always found it works best when we err as far as we possibly can toward generosity, kindness, honesty, and the ethics of credit where it’s due. To note: Amy’s tagging me inspired my upcoming post on literary citizenship, karma, and why we really should credit each other (hint: it’s not about legalities).

But back to the WITD workshopping method. It’s one I developed personally over the last four years since founding my Writing in the Dark synchronous workshop on Zoom (through which dozens and dozens of pieces have been gone on to be published in esteemed journals and many of those have won nominations and awards).

My method can be your method, too, if you wish to write as a pathway to attention and discovery, not recitation. If you want to write to unearth what you don’t know instead of telling us what already think you know. This method is deeply real, deeply embodied, deeply attentive, and profoundly respectful.

Ultimately, this method is how we write in the dark.

When you read the steps of the WITD workshop method, it’s important to also know the spirit that guides it. Because writing in the dark is more than writing—it’s writing as a way of being in the world, a way of making our lives “particular and real,” a way of paying attention to cross through portals into new dimensions where the world really does “offer itself to our imaginations” and open itself into metaphor and meaning beyond our wildest dreams.¹

To write in the dark is to let language become unfamiliar and even strange again, as it was when we were children, so that we can see the world and ourselves anew.

To “write in the dark”² means embracing playfulness as a “portal to the profound,”³ and adopting John Keats’s invitation into Negative Capability, which means becoming more “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

To write in the dark together is to collectively strive to get as close up to the words—and to the world—as we can, which in turn allows us to get closer up to ourselves and each other.

With that in mind, here’s a gift link to Amy’s New York Times essay and the detailed, 5-step Writing in the Dark workshopping method you can use on your own or with a group to make your writing more alive, more true, more effective, more affecting, and, if you aspire to publish, more publishable.

This method will get you there. It already has for hundreds of other writers.

Below the paywall is:

A gift link to the NYT essay that Amy Stonestrom revised using the WITD workshopping method

A craft essay about the WITD method and a detailed explanation of how to use the method itself.