Claim Your Territory

Hi friends.

I can’t even tell you how distracted I have been by life since I last wrote you, like it’s been impossible to claim my time and space to get my writing work done. But on the other hand it has been nice to spend time with people and, of course, I have other kinds of work I have to do, too. But still, I wanted to be in the middle of falling in love with something new. That’s the best place to be.

I have been able to squeeze in a few hundred words here and there and I have done a lot of thinking, and I had the general sense that there was some sort of forward motion to my book, that there were all these ideas floating around. And I had a good morning with my notebook in the hotel room in Virginia, where I made a few decisions about where I wanted to go with the new novel, and I even had a few short conversations about it with people this weekend. I had hoped that when I got home on Saturday night, I would have a clear head to assess where I was at with my work.

A path forward, that’s all we are looking for in this creative life. Once we see that, we can let everything fly.

But the travel demons conspired against me, and I shan’t bore you with the details but just to say I had 24 hours of travel and I didn’t get home till Sunday morning so my brain was toast, and I was bumming, missing my brain, feeling scattered, wishing I could have all the elements in one place again. I took the dog for a walk so he could see his best dog friend, a big husky named Ziggy, and later I haphazardly unpacked and looked at the stack of mail and tossed it aside and then I put on some makeup just so I could look in the mirror and like myself for a second, and then I glanced at the backyard and realized I had been missing that, too, so I trimmed some things and just walked around and paid attention to everything in the earth for a second.

And then Katy and I went to see some Tennessee Williams one-act plays at a theater in the neighborhood. They were the early versions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie” and I honestly didn’t enjoy them but I did enjoy thinking about how everyone has an early version of their work (and, frankly, themselves) that sucks, which is the stage I’m in now (the work part, hopefully not the myself part.) And I was like, it’s OK, you’ll be OK, because you have to start somewhere, you just have to fucking start.

When the plays were over, Katy and I sat quietly for a while in the empty theater, and I told her all my ideas for the book, like really all of them at last, because they are currently scattered across multiple journals and 10,000 words in a few Word documents and also throughout my body, brain, soul, spirit, and memory, and just saying it all out loud in a row to someone helped, it really helped. I said, “This is the starting point, anyway. This is what I’ll try to do and then go from there,” and she nodded because she gets it because she is a writer, too, and sometimes we just need people to nod and say, “Yes, I get it and that all sounds good.”

And then I woke up this morning early and I said to myself, “You gotta write it all down on one piece of paper so that you’ve put a stake in the ground. Stop fucking around.” So I wrote it on a piece of paper, and I pinned it to the wall.

I am not actually a “notes-on-the-wall” person. I am a “keep it in your notebook and in your brain and then put it on the page” person. But sometimes you just have to claim your territory. You have to force yourself to look at the contents of your brain in a visual, out-loud format. I wrote down the characters and their stakes, tragedies and challenges. I wrote down a few North Star ideas I could write to at the end of the book or at least in the far-off future of the story. I wrote down the two most important themes I wanted to explore. And then I wrote down the working title of the book.

OK. Let’s go.

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.