All The Moving Parts

If you live in New Orleans, my book launch for A Reason to See You Again will be on September 22, and I will be in conversation with one of the best, funniest, and most brilliant writers on the planet: Patricia Lockwood. (!!!) It’s her first time coming to New Orleans, so let’s show her some love. Tickets are here. It is going to be FUN.

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Hi friends.

Mid-August, and it’s getting real wild out there.

Yesterday morning on my walk I saw a man passed out between a fancy vintage car and the curb, really snuggled in there. Some neighbors had called 911 because they thought he had overdosed. But actually he was just some party kid (I judged him solely on his animal print silk shirt and Timothée Chalamet curls) who had decided to pass out there.

Finally a police officer poked him and when he rose he grabbed his car keys from the ground—that was his car he had decided to sleep next to—and a cigarette he had left on the roof of the car. He walked off down the street, lighting the cigarette and immediately checking his texts. It was actually quite elegant in execution. He was suddenly just another moving part of the early morning New Orleans tapestry.

The police officer yelled after him not to drive but when I came back from my walk a half hour later, that car was gone.

Then last night I went to an art opening in a gallery space nestled in a rickety old house and it was a wonderful show in a swimming pool and we were all happy to be outside and watch these women swimming in crazy colorful visuals but then after it was over, part of the porch we were standing on collapsed. No one got hurt but I did think for a second: why not just stay home for the rest of August?

But early this morning there was a nice breeze and it made me feel like I could live again, or at least make it through the rest of this summer. I took a walk down by the river and had a nice think about nothing in particular. I watched as one perfect line of dialogue popped up out of nowhere in my brain. I felt grateful for the moment, when a helpful sound emerged from the quiet. More than anything I appreciated the way my creative portal operates. If I treat it well, it will reward me the simplest of pleasures: an idea.

Anyway I’m closing in on 25,000 clean words on the novel, with maybe another 15,000 words that are messy and still need to be massaged. My agent read it this week and liked it and gave me some notes that were easy enough to fix. I’ve really enjoyed playing around with it, and also our conversation inadvertently triggered thinking about some bigger structural moments in the future, and that has been pretty fun to daydream about, too.

One of the things we talked about me tweaking was the characterization of my first-person protagonist. I thought I had her completely down, and I do. But when I started writing this book I wrote the latter part of the book first. (I did not know I was writing the latter part at the time; I thought I was writing the beginning.) And now the part that I’ve been working on this summer is actually the first part of the book. So I dove into that subconsciously thinking this character was all set and good to go. But actually she wasn’t! I needed to pull some later characterization into the front of the book so the reader could know who she is when they meet her for the first time.

Phew!

It was a helpful reminder that books are just a bunch of moving parts and that any part of the timeline can be surfaced at any moment if it makes sense to do so and if it feels true and real and authentic.

With that, I wish you good luck and clear-headed thinking with your work this week. And hey, if you’re feeling like you want to give future you a nice little surprise, why not pre-order my novel today?

Jami

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