Day 7 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

If you live in New Orleans, I will be hosting a happy hour write-along at Low Point Coffee this Saturday from 5-7 PM.

If you’re just joining us now, Day 1 of this project starts here, and you can access all the archives here. Here is a FAQ. Also, there is a slack where you can connect with other writers.

There is a companion book to this project containing the words of 54 contributing writers and it is wonderful and helpful. You can buy it anywhere books are sold.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you have an incredible story you are dying to tell, and it feels urgent that you tell it, as if you need to cut it from your body like a careful surgeon. and the only way to do that is with these 1000 words. Otherwise the story just sits in you for the rest of your life. Quiet and present and waiting. But it wants it to be free. You want it to be free. You want to be free of it, maybe. And you can make all that happen that with these 1000 words.

Day 7. Halfway there.

Today’s contributing writer is the absolutely delightful Charlie Jane Anders, who I met in San Francisco at her long-running reading series Writers With Drinks, which she invited to do a few times early in my career. It meant a lot to me to do a cool reading series in a city I didn’t live in and had few friends. But that’s just like her, to be opening up doors to fellow writers. She is a connector of people, which is a wonderful thing to be.

She is also an award-winning author of all kinds of things, including the popular “Unstoppable” YA series, comic books, short story collections, and adult novels, such as the extremely imaginative and funny All the Birds in the Sky, which the LA Times called, “an instant sci-fi classic.” She is currently the SFF book reviewer for the Washington Post, has her own newsletter, and her Ted Talk has been viewed more than a million times which I honestly find super impressive. She is a witty, imaginative, ground-breaking writer who is tirelessly productive. Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer winner calls her, “This generation’s Le Guin.”

Charlie Jane has also written her own creativity book, Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories, which won a Hugo Award in 2022, and you can get personalized copies of it from Green Apple Books. She has asked her donation go to the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin. Today, she shares her thoughts on an important part of her writing process: talking to herself.

“I talk to myself way too much. In the shower, on the street. At home, my cat Marcus Aurelius is accustomed to serving as plausible deniability, since I can pretend I can speak to him instead of myself. (Or if I'm in Golden Gate Park, I'll usually have a long confab with the bison in the Bison Paddock.) But out on the street, apart from those moments when I'm hugging a tree — in which case, clearly I'm conversing with the tree — I have no stunt interlocutor to obscure the fact that I'm carrying on a dialogue, out loud, with nobody.

Here's the thing: chattering to myself is the core of my writing practice. I believe I only became moderately good at writing when I learned the right way to talk some sense into myself. I always say that one of the benefits of creative writing is that you get to hear your own voice more clearly, but in my case it's literally true. My audible soliloquy makes me a better writer, but also being a writer also makes me ask myself better questions. Everybody wins (except for all the people on the sidewalk who have to listen to me sassing myself.)

A huge part of my writing process involves taking a very long walk and worrying at whatever snag my current work in progress has gotten into. Some of this is just a matter of raising basic questions like: what do my characters know, or think they know, at this stage of the story? What do they think is about to happen, and what do they hope will happen? But also, What am I hoping to get out of this situation I've gone to so much trouble to set up? How is this part of the story going to pay off, thematically and/or emotionally? Am I still telling the story I set out to tell? I'm a big fan of intentionality, and over the years I've found that interrogating myself is the only way to get to the purest version of a story.

On some occasions—if I am trying to find the perfect version of a scene and inspiration finally strikes—I'll sometimes act out the scene, out loud, doing the voices and everything. That's only happened in public a couple times, however.

Listen, I think a willingness to be ridiculous and borderline antisocial is sometimes a helpful quality for a writer to have. But when I hold a tête-a-tête with myself, it's honestly a means to an end. My problem is that I tend to hold out on myself—deep down, somewhere, I know what this story is meant to be, and why I'm going to so much trouble to bring it into the world. But I don't tend to cough up this information until I've given myself the third degree. My writer brain is secretive by nature, or maybe the good stuff is just buried way too deep. (This is also why I zone out and stare into space in cafes.)

But the longer I've carried on this practice, the more I feel as though I've started to reach an understanding with myself. As time goes by, I'm learning more about my own quirks and helpful brainfarts. A low-key therapeutic practice, I figure. So let bystanders stare: I'm going to keep up the running (walking) commentary. After all, my writing has come a long way since I stopped giving myself the silent treatment.”

I’m leaving the comments open today in case you want to share any unusual writing rituals or practices.

Good luck 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.