Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. Today, we’re making space for frogging.
I have spent a whole lot of time sitting on the sidelines of one youth event or another, passing the time while my kids pour their heart and souls out on the field, in the ring, or on the stage.
In this particular season of life, I have been knitting at dance competitions.
If you’ve never been to a dance competition, imagine being strapped to a chair in the middle of a night club for tweens, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the general sense of overwhelm I end the weekend with.
Sometimes I can read, but only if the event isn’t completely dark.
Sometimes I can work, but only if I get there early enough to claim one of a handful of outlets that hundreds of bored or busy parents are clamoring for.
Knitting is unplugged.
It’s something I can do in the dark.
It’s rhythmic—no thumping bass required—and textural and soothing. And yes, it ultimately leads to a product, but as a process-knitter, that just feels like a bonus.
What is process-knitting?
The best example comes from a few weekends ago, untold amounts of time into the dance event, a grandmother tapped me on the shoulder to compliment the work I was doing.
In between pauses to watch our respective kiddos perform, we talked over the blaring music about knitting styles and the kinds of projects we like to do.
Only, when she asked about the piece I’d been working on, I had to fish around in my bag to find a rolled-up ball of yarn.
The fingerless gloves that she’d watched me create throughout the day were fully unraveled, back into a ball, ready to be reworked.
I hadn’t loved the way the pattern worked up, and I knew I could improve my increases and thumb gussets if I tried again at least one more time.
Plus, I was not at all mad about having more time with these little balls of yarn to keep me occupied.
We call this “frogging” a project, because when you pull on the strands to undo the stitches, you have to “rip it - rip it - rip it” until you’re ready to move forward again.
I’m telling you all of this because I believe in the power of process-writing.
Yes, it ultimately leads to a “product,” for lack of a better term, but that part is just a bonus.
It’s the intangible benefits of going inward while everything around you is noisy that really makes it worthwhile.
As you go over sections a few more times than expected, the book will probably pick up some structural integrity along the way too.
Even better, the more you work at your book, the better you’ll be in the end.
Yet, no matter how much you believe this to be true in theory, it can still feel horrifying to cut the words you’ve spent untold hours weaving into existence.
This is made worse by melodramatic writing advice like “kill your darlings” making the process of cutting or changing significant portions of text seem unforgivable.
When it’s yarn that were reworking, it’s always interesting to see the horrified look on someone’s face while you happily rip away at what looks like intricate labor, with no regard for the magic that they assume it required to turn loose strings into wearable garments.
But knitters and crocheters? We mostly understand that it’s just part of the gig.
If you can’t make friends with frogging, you might need to find another way to pass the time.
When it comes to your writing, I won’t tell you to ignore that dread feeling in the pit of your stomach when a chunk of text really does have to go.
Sometimes, no matter how satisfying it can feel to brrrrt a project back to square one, you can’t help but see time slipping away with it too.
But I do want you to understand that it’s part of the gig.
More importantly, I want you to understand that it wasn’t magic that got those words to the page in the first place.
Cutting text or starting from scratch or rewriting something significant—those steps sound dreadful because they aren’t actually steps.
Just like half of a pair of fingerless gloves or a thumb gusset or a cable section—“a big cut,” “a new structure,” or “a page-one rewrite” are all outcomes.
Each of them is built from much smaller, step by step, stitch by stitch actions all added up to the visible outcome that looks like magic but most assuredly is not.
My daughter uses an app called Ribblr, which shows each step of every pattern on a short video so that you can see how every single stitch is made.
She learned to crochet by orders of magnitude faster than I learned to knit back before resources like those were available to us. And we’ve both been able to show my grandmother techniques that she never learned in the decades she has on us both.
The more access you have to step by step support, the less you have to worry about the outcome.
You get to enjoy the process, knowing that you’re learning and growing and getting that much more time to hone and enjoy your craft on the way to the next outcome.
You get to smirk back at someone whose jaw is on the ground, then introduce them to the rip-it-rip-it inside joke of it all.
While there’s not exactly a Ribblr for this kind of writing—yet—you can start by seeing your work in smaller steps instead of outcome-based magic.
Give yourself credit for the thinking and talking and reflecting that does not translate to word counts but absolutely does build your project, stitch by stitch.
Remember that unraveled yarn gets reconstructed rather than destroyed, and your darlings can be re-homed and reimagined rather than killed as well.
Hold a beginner’s mindset that happily seeks out solutions the second an instruction feels confusing. If you wouldn’t presume to look at a sweater and know exactly how it should be constructed, why would you look at a book and get frustrated with yourself when some sections are more tangled than others?
Acknowledge that writing is a craft, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be an artisan to participate.
For the record, I now have four total gloves and the first section of a shawl done. Being process-focused doesn’t mean you never get to the product.
But it does cut the overwhelm and make time pass a whole lot better.
Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today. Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing quite yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you're already doing it.
When more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.
And so will I.
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