The Brevity Blog

By Heidi Croot

My mother was my first editor. Having wangled me into writing a weekly column about my high school doings for our village newspaper, she would sit at the kitchen table with her jubilant red pen and pore over my first drafts. The column soon devolved into passionless sports scores.

Those kitchen-table sessions taught me to see revision as punishment, to brace for evidence of what I’d done wrong—a tendency that would follow me into my long career in corporate communications, where a certain amount of creativity could sneak through, but where keeping it professional and crisp was the best way to thrive in that rarefied stratosphere.

One day, feeling complacent in my quiet office at the midpoint of my twelve years with a company that operated more than 200 long-term care facilities across Canada, I arranged to spend a week working with frontline nursing home employees in a distant town. I thought the hands-on experience would help me better understand the challenges faced by the people I believed I truly worked for: not so much the corner-office executives, but the facility managers, and through them, the frail and elderly people who lived in those homes.

I asked not to be spared.

During that hauntingly intense time, I sorted parades of socks and helped scour the commercial kitchen. Working alongside care staff, I snapped on incontinence briefs, lifted breasts into bras, and helped clean a weeping resident who’d had two bouts of diarrhea. I assisted in the tub room, lifted spoons to mouths, and comforted residents abandoned by their family or in the grip of cognitive impairment so complete they could do nothing for themselves.

At week’s end, my husband picked me up. I couldn’t speak on the long drive home. He poured me a glass of wine, and I cried in his arms.

A few days later, I wrote the first draft of “In Your Shoes,” an open letter to my company’s thousands of staff, explaining what I’d done and why.  

That first draft was written by corporate Croot.

But corporate Croot had not reckoned with the emotions she was feeling—some of which evoked my beloved grandfather who’d spent his entire life on a quest for the elusive pot of gold and who, in the first tragedy of my young life, had fallen to Alzheimer’s. My week in the trenches had given me a glimpse of what it must have been like for society’s heroes and heroines to care for him.

My sadness would not fit into the corporate mould. I needed to talk to someone, but the emotions were too big. I turned to my journal, always a dependable listener but not my usual go-to place to solve corporate-writing dilemmas.

No, the draft letter told me, it’s not as simple as telling staff “thanks for what you do.”

I put down my red pen and began asking questions in the margins. Each answer walked me down a staircase, and I soon found myself revising the open letter not with an eye to corporate conformity, but out of tenderness and truth.

I closed my letter with “dignity,” a term that appeared often in the company’s Commitment to Residents.

“I’m able to demand respect for my dignity. It comes from the inside out. But for many residents, dignity more often comes from the outside in. Through hundreds of daily acts of caring, you are the keepers of residents’ dignity, and they depend on you for it. You do this through your incredible imagination and compassion, your ability to see them for who they were and more important, who they would wish to be now.”

A vice president questioned why I’d made the letter personal. But it wasn’t about me. It was a mirror I was holding up to staff. Thankfully, the CEO understood the emotional intent and cleared a flight path for “In Your Shoes.” Gratitude soared in from across the country—a binder’s worth of letters, notes and transcribed telephone calls.

We feel seen.

I’ve come to realize that early drafts are our earlier selves—raw, hopeful, reaching for something they can’t yet name. First drafts aren’t failures. They’re attempts. They’re invitations.

Neither is revision punishment for what I got wrong; it’s a conversation across time. A conversation with who I was when I first set the words down. Journalling taught me attunement. When I engage with those pages, I hear the searching, the confusion, the flashes of clarity and the empathy I missed in the moment. My journal is the place to practice curiosity and excavate layers I didn’t even know were there.

That’s the voice revision needs most: the curious, unguarded, authentic one we use when no one is watching. Now, when I return to a draft, I don’t arrive with a red pen. I arrive with a question: What were you trying to tell me? And the work deepens the more I’m willing to listen.

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Heidi Croot is a Brevity Blog editor.

By Maria B. Olujic

Earlier this year, I had an essay published in The Brevity Blog about the role of pause in my writing—how stepping back from my memoir allowed something deeper to emerge. When the piece was accepted, I felt pride and relief, and a quieter clarity.

Around the same time, my father turned ninety. He still works ten-hour days outside—building, repairing, planting, constructing. I didn’t suddenly become aware of my own mortality or feel the pressure of time running out. But seeing him move so vigorously into his tenth decade made me ask: How do I want to spend the rest of my years? Until that moment, I thought of myself as someone trying to become a writer. I’d finished a memoir draft, agonized over it, and revised it again, and again. My gut told me the manuscript was almost ready, but still falling short.

Then, when that pause essay was published, something foundational shifted in me. For the first time, I wasn’t waiting to become a writer—I began living as one. It wasn’t permission; permission is too small a word. It was recognition: the creative part of me I had long shut down returned with a clearer voice asking to be taken seriously. And this time, I listened.

The pause I took didn’t lead to stillness——it created room for me to hear what I had been pushing aside. I realized how strongly I wanted to keep writing, not only the memoir, but about the many other questions, images, and stories orbiting it. The pause didn’t stop me; it set me in motion.

A couple of months later, I attended a writers’ retreat led by Allison K Williams. By then, I had sent my memoir to a developmental editor and was waiting for their feedback. During the retreat, Allison said: While your memoir is with your editor—write. Write essays. Write small pieces. Write op-eds. Send them everywhere. I went home and began writing short pieces immediately, including an op-ed that got declined. I didn’t yet have the stamina or structure for that form, but these early attempts showed me that my creative nonfiction writing could move in many directions. Allison’s advice took root in me—like a seed that already knew how to grow.

I took themes from my memoir—war, migration, grief, language, spiritual bewilderment—and let them lead me into the smaller form. Not chapters, not revisions, not the architecture of a book, but essays that allowed me to explore these ideas.

Each piece called to the next.

I didn’t strategize. I didn’t craft a plan. I followed the currents tugging at me from within: writing about the myths I grew up with, my memories of the war, and the small moments of tenderness that had shaped me.

To my surprise, the pieces began to land: AGNI, The Common, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, 100 Word Story, and other journals I once considered out of reach.

Then came the OpEd Project Fellowship.  The project—a national effort to amplify underrepresented voices—supports people across professions in bringing their ideas into the public conversation through publishing opinion pieces. When I applied for the followship, I did so with a steadier voice. I was accepted and I kept writing.

More essays. More acceptances. More invitations to write.

In the past, writing had always felt like pushing—straining to shape the memoir into something whole, something finished. These smaller pieces felt different. It felt like breathing. I realized I didn’t have to force the story forward; I could simply tell the truth of my lived experience. The pieces didn’t require perfection. They required presence.

Dinty W. Moore talks about “the invisible magnetic river”—a current beneath the surface of our work that pulls everything toward the central emotional truth. But I’ve come to believe the river doesn’t just carry the writing. It carries the writer too—pulling our real work out of us when we stop trying to control the flow, guiding us back to the self who already knows the way.

I spent years writing toward legitimacy and a finished manuscript. But the pause piece, my father’s vitality, Allison’s invitation, and those early acceptances all nudged me toward a different orientation.

I stopped writing toward something.

I started writing from something.

From my breath.

From my body.

From my memory.

From the place in me that already knew.

What surfaced were images and threads that kept returning—an icon, a lake, a flicker of folklore, a fragment of language—each one asking to be explored on its own terms. My work was to follow them, to excavate what they held, and give each its own shape. The river flows, but the writer paddles.

Writing still required effort. But it began to flow when I stopped resisting the pull. The pause taught me to stop holding my breath, because even in stillness, breath remains. What followed—the essays, the publications, the fellowship—rose from what had been there all along.

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Maria B. Olujic is an anthropologist and writer whose work explores gendered violence, inherited silence, and the stories held by land and language. Her work appears in AGNI, The Common, Lit Hub, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and 100 Word Story. Her memoir, Fields of Lavender, Rivers of Fire, about war, womanhood, and witnessing, is in its final stages of revision. Find her on Instagram @MariaOlujic.