Tuesdays with Ari: My Accountability Partner

My friend, Ari, and I meet once a week over Zoom to write together. We used to write together in the library on the campus of the University where we met. We started our Zoom writing sessions after graduation, when Ari moved to the East Coast.  Wherever we’ve written together, it has carved out a time and space for me to write, and it’s been one of the most helpful things to get me writing.

When I’m writing with Ari, I have accountability, which is so helpful for me. My biggest struggle with writing is to sit down and start: to choose the piece that I will work on, to open the document or the notebook, and to sit down and stay there with the project. Now, I have to do something. It gives me space to be a bit creative—if I’m not interested in working on current projects, it’s an opportunity to play around with new ideas. I can’t really get up and leave, because I don’t want to disrupt Ari if they’re in writing flow. And even if I think, this isn’t the right time, the writing won’t be good, I still have to do it, so I do.

We’ve had the same routine, more or less, for years: we catch up for as long as we need to catch up. Then one of us will say, “So, should we try to do some writing?” Usually, we say yes. When one of us is ready to give up, or when we have to go to our next appointment, we will take ten minutes to talk about what we wrote. This part is also terribly important. It would be pretty easy to waste this writing time on the Internet., I don’t want to admit, at the end of our session, that I did not write—so I have to write something.

Writing is often described as lonely. It doesn’t have to be! Share your work, share your time, and enjoy the process. You want to write for a reason. Remember that.