A Holiday Wish

For you to be exactly where you need to be.

Hi friends.

I got my edits back, and now I’m in it again, in the story of this novel, in this world I managed to somehow create the last year or so. Now all I can do is sit down every day and hope to connect with my work. Wherever, whenever the ideas strike me.

Wish me luck.

As I have said before: we can write anywhere. On a subway, in a park, in the sunny corner of a cafe, in a dim nook in a library, at your desk in your office on your lunch break. We don’t need to have a space in our home, although it can be helpful. But what we need more than anything perhaps is a feeling of aloneness in our minds.

I am reminded of a line from one of my favorite collections of poetry, Absolute Solitude by Dulce María Loynaz:

“The world gave me many things, but the only thing I ever kept was absolute solitude.”

We must tell ourselves: You are here now, in this story, on this page.

I write sometimes outside the scene, just to say hello to the characters. To remember what the street outside their home looks like, the chipped paint on the front porch. How knuckles sound rapping on that front door. I ramp up an approach to the room until I am finally in it, unquestionably face-to-face with these people I have invented.

Alone, but with them.

And when I’m there, I work to stay in the room as long as I can. Nowhere else to be but here, I tell myself. This is your job. Everything else falls away outside that moment.

Eventually I find myself walking toward the edge of the room. Maybe I’m exiting via the back door or I’ve cracked open the window or perhaps the walls just collapse. But for the time I have been in there, I’ve been documenting the experience.

And then I look up and I’m back in the real world again.

Here is a thing I wish for you this holiday season and for all of next year: The opportunity to write, because you deserve it, you deserve to write. I wish for you the time and space. I want you to have that room, whatever it looks like for you. I want you to feel full and connected with your writer self. I want you to be able to find your way to the page whenever you need it.

Happy Holidays,

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.