Day 9 of #1000wordsofsummer 2023

If you’re just joining us, yes, you can start today and catch up. Here are the archives where you can find the first week of letters, and here’s an FAQ. 100% of this month’s donations go to charity so please consider subscribing.

---

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because even when it feels impossible, deep down you know you’re doing something good for yourself. I know that it’s hard. This is an extremely intense writing project. Each time you show up on the page and push through, though, it is something positive you are doing for yourself. Because you are challenging yourself. You are driving yourself. Testing your brain to see if it is still alive and present and capable. Every day, with those 1000 words.

And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m always happy to remember that my brain is still working. I want to use it while I still can. I want to explore it and exploit it and squeeze everything I can out of it. What a blessing our brains are! Don’t waste them for a moment.

Today’s contributing writer is Julia May Jonas, author of the bestselling, juicy, funny, sharp-witted Vladimir, which The New York Times called, “cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining,” and NPR called “a damn good time.” She also wrote the play, “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” which debuted last year at LCT3. She is an extremely talented human being.

I met Julia last year in Austin at the Texas Book Festival, in the basement of the State Capitol Building. I had read Vladimir already and loved the hell out of it. I didn’t know what she looked like, though. I just saw someone wearing a cool coat, this long denim duster, that I really wished I owned (although could I pull it off? I don’t know!), and so I walked up to the person who owned this thing that I wanted, and I complimented her on it, and then shortly I was complimenting her on her book, too, and after that we exchanged numbers, and then we became friends, but really only text friends, as I haven’t seen her since Texas, and who knows when we’ll see each other again? Still, I think it’s something real. And I hope I see her again sooner rather than later. And when we meet, I hope she wears the coat.

You can buy Julia’s book at Greenlight Bookstore. She asked that her charitable donation go to the Legal Defense Fund.

Today she is talking to us about pacing:

“Often when I am frustrated with my writing, I find it is because I am having an issue with pace. Which always makes me think about running.

I used to hate running. I did it as a form of punishment. I would put on fast, heart-wrenching music and push myself, my internal monologue adopting the style of someone who used phrases like, “pain is fear leaving the body.” I believed running was about getting stoked and staying stoked and flagellating oneself with mental whips when one felt less than stoked. I was never consistent. I would do it for a couple of days, then stop, then start again a month later, then stop again. I would look at other sleek and spry runners and tell myself that if I would only stop being so lazy, I could be like them.

I began running regularly and consistently during the pandemic, when it became the only way I could escape my family and small apartment. And in the quiet of my run—I didn’t want to listen to music, I was desperate to hear no noise—I realized that when I most wanted to stop, to throw the towel in and just walk home, it was because I was running too fast.

I began to observe what was happening. When I wasn’t connecting to my natural speed it showed up as tension in the body—I would be leaning forward, my face furrowed, my ass clenched. I would be calling myself names, recriminating myself for my lack of effort, as if I wasn’t out there running! And when I enjoyed it, it was because I was upright, centered, relaxed—allowing my pace to be what it was, allowing others to pass me. When I was going at the correct speed (embarrassingly slow—as in walkers passed me) I could see my thoughts and feelings come at me with a little more clarity and calm and compassion. And when I was compassionate, I wasn’t in conflict with myself, and I wasn’t miserable. And because I wasn’t miserable, my runs (jogs, trots, shuffles) became more and more consistent.

In my work as a playwright and theater director, there is a very commonly used note I will sometimes give actors if a scene is not working. The note is that the actor is playing the end. That means they are ahead of the moment to moment work—they are already angry although the fight hasn’t started, already devastated although the truth has not been revealed.  They have already decided on the outcome of the scene. They are not letting themselves listen and discover and be surprised by their fellow performers, and the result is canned and tedious work that neither the actors or the audience enjoys.

Obviously (I hope), I am also talking about writing. When I find my writing goes poorly, when I don’t want to sit down, when I allow myself to be easily distracted, it is because I am disconnected from my natural internal meter. It is because I am hunched over, tense, brow scrunched, desperate to pop out the number of words I have prescribed. It is because rather than being inside the process of the writing, I want it to be over. I’m thinking about the book being done rather than allowing myself the pleasure of discovery. I’m playing the end of the novel or play or story, leaning beyond the moment I’m currently writing.

Yes, yes, writing is about showing up, about placing one word after another, not worrying if it feels good or not, no hope, no fear. Yes, it is often about reaching that word count, about powering through that moment or scene. Yes, it is, as Joyce Carol Oates says, about finishing.

However I’ve come to realize that the only approach that works for me is embodied, gentle and very patient. It involves reconnecting to my breath, staring into space, closing my eyes, adjusting my posture. It involves letting the pace be what it needs to be.

So maybe as an experiment, you write with some attention on your internal metronome, noting when you get ahead of yourself, noting when you’re thinking about the work being done. And if it’s available, slow yourself down. You might be able to notice the itch that approaches when you want to check your phone. You might begin to appreciate the pleasure of your fingers moving over the keys, or the ink traveling over the page. You might have a surprising new idea. And then you might want, really and truly, to write again.”

Here’s to the pleasure of your fingers.

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.