Back-to-School Brain by Sarah E. Burr

Every September, without fail, I feel the urge to go “back to school.” This is somewhat inconvenient considering I graduated from college many, many years ago and have absolutely no plans to return, but there is something about this time of year that flips a switch in my brain. Maybe it’s the first hint of cooler air after a long summer, or seeing school buses back on the roads, or walking through stores overflowing with notebooks, planners, pens, and all those pristine supplies waiting to be put to good use. Whatever the reason, September has always felt much more like a fresh start to me than January. January comes with all the pressure of resolutions and dramatic declarations about changing your life, while September feels quieter and more practical. It’s a time to take a deep breath, look at where I am, figure out where I’d like to go next, and start deciding how to get there.

Of course, because I apparently still have the heart of a student, this also means I want new school supplies. Granted, my “school supplies” look a little different these days. Instead of folders, binders, and freshly sharpened pencils, I find myself eyeing new gadgets, software, notebooks, keyboards, apps, and anything else that might make my writing life easier. I love experimenting with tools that promise to help me stay organized, focused, or productive. Sometimes they become permanent parts of my routine, and sometimes they quietly disappear into the digital equivalent of the junk drawer, never to be opened again. Still, I enjoy trying them, and there is something about September that makes me especially willing to reconsider the way I work and give myself permission to approach things differently.

This year, my shiny new writing tool is dictation. I’ve thought about experimenting with dictation for quite some time, but I always found reasons to put it off because I am so accustomed to composing at a keyboard. Writing has always been a quiet activity for me, with my thoughts traveling from my brain through my fingers and onto the screen, and the idea of speaking those thoughts aloud felt strange. Then August happened, and I found myself struggling to write in a way I haven’t experienced in quite some time. The ideas weren’t necessarily gone, but getting them from my brain onto the page felt harder than it should have. I would sit down to work and stare at my document, trying to summon the energy needed to make my characters funny, charming, clever, and entertaining. As someone who writes cozy mysteries, that’s kind of an important part of the job.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it increasingly difficult lately to separate creativity from everything happening in the world around us. There is so much noise, uncertainty, anger, and sadness competing for our attention, and some days, sitting down to invent a whimsical small town, a quirky suspect, or a playful exchange between characters can feel almost surreal. Writing something lighthearted requires a certain amount of emotional energy, and lately, that energy hasn’t always been readily available to me. I think part of my problem was that I had also begun overthinking every sentence before it ever reached the page. I would type a few words, stop, reconsider them, delete something, rewrite it, second-guess myself, and slowly grind to a halt. The more I struggled, the more self-conscious I became about the struggle itself, which, as any writer knows, is not exactly a recipe for productivity.

That is where dictation has surprised me. When I start talking, I have to keep moving. There is less opportunity to stare down a sentence before it has even had a chance to exist, and suddenly writing feels less like wrestling with a blank Word document and more like having a conversation with it. I can hear my characters speaking more clearly. I can talk through a scene, explain to myself what needs to happen next, and occasionally stumble into the answer while I’m still rambling through the problem. There is something wonderfully organic about that process, especially when I’ve spent so much time lately feeling as though I needed to force creativity into existence. Speaking the story aloud seems to bypass some of that pressure and allows me to play with the scene before I start worrying about whether every word is exactly right.

Is the resulting prose perfect? Absolutely not. Sometimes my dictation software misunderstands me. Sometimes I wander off on a tangent. Sometimes I say a sentence aloud and immediately realize that no human being should ever be subjected to reading it. But I can fix those things later, and that may be the greatest gift this experiment has given me. The words do not have to be perfect when they first arrive. They simply have to arrive. After a month when getting any meaningful number of words onto the page felt like a monumental task, having something there to revise feels like a victory. I am still very much in the experimental phase, and I have no idea whether dictation will completely transform the way I write, become something I use only for certain scenes, or eventually join the collection of abandoned productivity tools I was once convinced would change my life. For now, though, I am enjoying it, and more importantly, I am writing again.

That may be the real reason I love my imaginary back-to-school season so much. September gives me permission to begin again without pretending everything before it was a failure. A new semester does not erase the previous one. You simply take what you learned, gather your supplies, adjust your approach, and move forward. That is what I am trying to do with my writing this fall. I am looking at the habits that stopped serving me, experimenting with new tools, setting fresh goals without punishing myself for the ones I didn’t accomplish over the summer, and, most importantly, trying to rediscover some of the joy that brought me to storytelling in the first place. My September-school-supply list may look a little different these days. There are no textbooks or class schedules waiting for me, but there is a microphone, a blinking cursor, and me talking rather enthusiastically to my computer about fictional murder. If that gets me excited about writing again, I think it deserves an A.