Posted by Athena Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/07/the-big-idea-april-davila/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61477
The action of writing does not require artistry, but the artistry of writing requires action. That action being sitting down and actually doing it, even if it is hard. Writing coach April Dávila is here today to introduce some new methods that are sure to get you focused and motivated so that you can, as her book is titled, Sit Write Here.
APRIL DÁVILA:
What Chopping Onions Taught Me About Writing
As a writing coach, I’ve spent the last several years working to convince writers that we can do hard things (like finish a novel) without all the agonizing. My conviction on this point stems from an experience I had many years ago with a big pile of onions, which sounds odd, I know, but allow me to explain.
In 2009, I attended my first week-long silent meditation retreat. The only respite from the unending quiet was a daily talk given by the instructors. One afternoon, the lecture was about how mindfulness can help us discern between pain and suffering and I was not getting it. Pain and suffering. One follows the other like day follows night. To be in pain is to suffer. I suffer when I’m in pain. End of story.
After the talk, I walked down to the kitchen for work duty. Every attendee at the retreat had a chore, and I’d volunteered, along with five other silent meditators, to help chop vegetables for dinner. The head cook poured out a box of onions and told us to start dicing.
I wasn’t done cutting the first onion when my eyes began to sting. As I started in on the second onion, tears streamed down my face. The woman beside me sniffled. The man across the table turned away, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. Pretty soon I could hardly see. My eyes burned and the discomfort edged into real pain, and yet I found myself giggling at the absurdity of us all standing there crying over our cutting boards.
One by one, the other choppers started to chuckle too. We stood there with tears streaming down our faces, laughing and turning away to catch our breath, to blink away the sting, to try and compose ourselves. With no success.
Then it struck me: the pain was real. My eyes genuinely hurt. But I was not suffering. I was, in fact, having fun.
Had I been in a different, less aware state of mind, I might have spun up a story about how I’m just not cut out for kitchen work. The tears could have confirmed that it was too hard, too painful. I might have quit. Instead, I kept right on dicing, tittering with my fellow yogis as we tried to cut onions we could barely see.
As a writer, I think about those onions a lot.
Because here’s the thing about writing: it is genuinely hard. And here’s the real kicker: writing only gets more challenging as you get better at it. Before I cared about diction and imagery and precision of language, I could slap together any few thousand words on instinct and call it a story.
These days I take the time to whittle away at ideas until the words on the page actually say what I mean. That requires deep focus, real effort, and sitting with a lot of uncertainty. It’s hard, and (especially when difficult feedback or rejection comes into the picture, as it inevitably will for all writers) it can even be painful.
You can tell yourself that the pain is a sign that you’re just not cut out to be a writer, that it’s too hard and maybe you should quit. You can bow down to that little voice in your head saying you’re not a real writer, this is going nowhere, you should be doing something useful. Or you can recognize those thoughts as your brain’s natural response to discomfort, then carry on and keep writing.
Learning to observe your thoughts without getting hijacked by them (which is essentially what meditation trains you to do) is tremendously helpful when it comes to sitting with a difficult scene, quieting the inner critic long enough to get a first draft down, and recognizing the difference between “I’m stuck” and “I’m anxious about what people will think if I put this idea on the page.”
My book, Sit Write Here, is a practical guide to using mindfulness meditation to write more and suffer less. Not to write more easily (necessarily) but to stop adding unnecessary anguish on top of an already demanding craft. In each chapter I pair a meditation practice with a stage in the writing process, from getting the first draft done, to surfing the waves of accolades and criticisms.
If you’ve ever struggled with writer’s block, if you tend to beat yourself up for not writing more, or if you want to write more compelling prose in fewer drafts, this book is for you. Agonizing over our writing is a habit. And like all habits, it can be changed.
You can do this hard, beautiful thing. Probably without crying.
Though if onions are involved, all bets are off.
Sit Write Here: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Author’s socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/07/the-big-idea-april-davila/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=61477
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