Each morning, inside a weathered blue cottage, I write through imposter syndrome until I reach 2,000 words—and stop needing anyone to see the stillness as anything but depth.
Sometimes I don’t want to break the surface for air. It’s lovely below, hidden away, watching the sun shimmer across the water as the waves ripple. Submerged in the depths of my draft is where I feel most at home.
Here’s what it actually feels like when I open my draft: the cursor blinks, always asking, “Are you ready, CM?” It’s never automatic. Ego insists there’s no way; in flipping hell, I’ll meet my 2K goat, let alone make the chapter coherent enough to keep the story moving. Imposter syndrome hits hard every morning. It’s the sole reason I began. The writing doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to exist, so one day it can become a perfect reflection of what my characters are trying to say.
My desk is a laptop stand perched across a queen-size bed in a robin’s-egg-blue cottage that’s seen better decades. The paint peels beside the window, and the floor creaks in two spots I’ve learned to avoid. None of that matters once I go under. I lean back against the pillows, steady the laptop on my knees, and disappear into water only I can see.
It’s seen better decades. The paint peels by the window. The floor creaks in two places I’ve learned to avoid. None of that matters once I go under. I prop myself against the pillows, balance the laptop on my knees, and disappear into water only I can see.
Down here, I don’t feel a draft slipping through the gap in the window frame or hear the cottage creak as old houses do. I move through scenes like a diver through a reef—slow and deliberate, knowing one wrong kick could cloud the water. I chase a character down a hallway she hasn’t walked yet. I untangle a timeline that makes sense only to me. I hold my breath through a plot hole until I find the air pocket that will fix it.
From the outside, none of this is visible. Anyone looking through my window sees a woman propped against pillows in a crooked little house, her fingers still, her gaze elsewhere. They don’t see me building a bridge between two timelines or deciding whether a character deserves forgiveness. They see someone lying still in a bed in a falling-down cottage and read it as a woman doing nothing with her afternoon. I read it in depth.
People can watch me lie against those pillows for four hours and swear I did nothing, because nothing moved. They can’t see the sentence I rewrote nine times or the two paragraphs I drowned so a better one could breathe. I used to apologize for it—surfacing too quickly, breathless, trying to explain where I’d been and why I looked gone, propped up in bed in the middle of the day as if I had nowhere better to be. Now I let myself stay under longer.
There’s a particular kind of quiet beneath the surface—not quite silence, but a hum. Down there, the characters talk to each other, and the plot rearranges itself while I’m not looking. The cottage can keep peeling, and the floor can keep creaking. None of it reaches me down here.
I don’t mind staying down here in a paint-chipped blue cottage, on a bed that doubles as my writing chair, arguing with my ego each morning until the words win. I’ve stopped needing anyone on shore to understand what the waves look like from below.
I wonder, though, whether everyone has their own version of quiet. What does your kind of quiet look like, and has anyone ever mistaken it for doing nothing?
–C.M. Seybolt
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