Day 11 of #1000wordsofsummer 2022

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you are seeking perspective on your life. Whether you are writing fiction or poetry or creative nonfiction or your master’s thesis or a screenplay or a daily diary entry collecting your thoughts from the day, writing 1000 words, engaging in this kind of project, one that asks us to show up every day for something, offers us the chance to contemplate something bigger than just the words on the page.

Taking on challenges like these reflect ourselves back at us. It’s just not about doing the work but what the work means to us. It’s not just about finding the time to do it in our schedule but taking a look at what our schedule is actually comprised of in the first place. It’s not just about calling upon our discipline but considering other moments in our lives where we have either failed or succeeded to have discipline and how we can draw on those moments to finish the task at hand. It’s not just about telling the story but figuring out why it’s so goddamn important to tell it in the first place.

What I want for you now is to make your art. What I hope for you in the future is that you continue to make it.

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Some housekeeping:

Someone in the slack asked when the slack closes and the answer is: end of June. If you’ve been chatting with someone, maybe now would be a good time to ask them if they’re interested in being your accountability partner.

T-shirts are available through end of day Friday, June 17.

If you are a teacher and want a free paid subscription, I am making comments open for everyone today, and you can tell me who you are and leave your request in there.

If you live in New Orleans (or nearby, or really anywhere, if you feel like traveling), there is a closing party for #1000wordsofsummer at Anna’s, a very good bar. Details here. Thank you to Third Lantern Lit for organizing it!

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Today’s guest author is Alex Chee, who wrote one of the best books about being a writer I have ever read. He is a wise and curious man, a good and supportive friend, and he will read the hell out of your tarot cards. This summer he is teaching a class on writing personal essays which looks pretty amazing and coincidentally he edited this year’s The Best American Essays which you can pre-order here. He has requested his charitable donation go to Black and Pink.

Alex talks to us today about K-dramas and figuring out how to get unstuck:

“At some point in the last few years I began going into the basement and walking on my treadmill in an attempt to approximate the amount of walking I might do in a hypothetical given day. This was before COVID. I had moved to a small rural Vermont town where it is actually a little dangerous to walk on the roads in winter — there are no sidewalks in this town — and my husband got us a free treadmill from a friend who did not have my husband's patience for fixing things. When I started these walks, I looked for long television shows on the advice of a friend, at least 40 minutes to an hour, and after watching a fairly tedious series of superhero shows, discovered K-dramas were perfect for this task. 

The part of my brain that analyzes narratives kicked in while I was watching “All of Us Are Dead,” a zombie romantic dramedy set in a high school in South Korea, following a group of students abandoned to their deaths by authorities intent on making other ‘more important’ rescues around them. The show was pleasurable for the way it defied what I knew to be the tedium of the American ‘A Story B Story C Story’ structure lines that leave us with a story that feels unwieldy, more like it is fulfilling a formula or an actor's contract than telling a coherent story. And I thought once again about what a relief it is to read and watch stories away from traditional American formulas, if only to see something different. Like Colette's novels, for example, which wear plot triangles for earrings and don't care about your ‘rising action.’ Other ways of telling stories exist. 

In “All of Us Are Dead,” a boy is bullied to the point of suicide and revived by his father, a science teacher at the school, who creates a zombie formula to do so, and sets him loose to take his revenge on the kids and teachers who made his life a living hell. But that story is told slowly over the whole season, as the show tells us stories about the other kids: the boy whose mom has made him the face of her new fried chicken restaurant, and who will appear a few episodes later, zombified, in the apron with his face on it, screaming for his blood; his friend from childhood who is in love with him but exasperated by his seeming inability to figure that out, and turns her attention to another handsome young man, the two of them competing for her attention in escalating zombie rescues; the class president no one speaks to because she seems so ethereal and above everyone, transformed into an unlikely hero after she is bitten; the archer being lectured by her coach on how she has no future since she failed to make the national team as the zombies surround the team bus, and who, arrow by arrow, makes a future her coach won't live to see; the girl bullied by the same bullies who drove the science teacher's son to suicide, preparing to leap from the school roof to her death but stopped as the windows below her explode with zombies jumping to the ground. 

There's an anthology of stories in this show, probably A through K, to be honest, because there's also the stories of a policeman, a government official, and the father of the girl with two boys competing for her, an emergency services officer determined to save her even though the government has given up on the school. 

How does this relate to getting out your 1000 words a day? Well, at some point in every writer's education you will run into formulas and you may see your story doesn't fit, and you may try to force it to fit, and you'll need to find a structure that does work. You may experience the problem as writer's block, when in fact you may just need to explode your idea of what a story is or can be. And during that time you may be watching, say, lots of K-dramas, or rom-coms, or obsessively reading or watching something else to escape the feeling of being stuck. And what I would tell you is that the structure you may need may be in the stories you see as a way of escaping--that they may actually be the escape route. And that your unconscious may be yelling at you in the way it knows how, saying ‘this is the structure, right there.’”

Today is a perfect day to listen to your unconscious.

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.