Don’t Mind Us, We’re Just Writing Our Way Through It

On life rafts and finding the tone in your book.

Big reminder here that #1000wordsofsummer starts a month from this coming Saturday. If you’re signed up for this newsletter, then you’re signed up for it. The FAQ is coming in two weeks, but now’s a good time to get with your writing buddies and make a plan to commit and support each other. One thousand words a day, for two weeks straight. You can do it, and it’s going to be so much fun.

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Hi friends.

There is too much going on. Too much. But I’m trying to get work done anyway. I’m writing my way through it. I have to, I just have to. The words are absolutely my life raft. I hope they can be there for you, too.

Here’s where I’m at with my novel:

I’ve got about 25,000 words left to edit to get to my messy first draft. I have been circling those 25,000 words all week because I couldn’t crack the first chapter. I had rewritten it four times, each time from a new angle and tone. Then I would dump those words next to each other in the document. It was a mess. But also there was something I liked about each version, so I couldn’t quite throw any of them away yet. Thus, it was a little bit of a trap, too.

Finally, yesterday, I was able to wade through them all to put together a new chapter with threads and ideas from each of the versions, smoothing them all over with a new tone. I did this by asking myself to tell just the simplest version of the story. (“Stop fucking around and just tell it already,” I might have whispered to myself.) And then I just added in my favorite details from each of the other versions.

The tone of it—the stop fucking around and just tell it tone—somehow matched the rest of the book, but also set up a new phase of the story. It was a short chapter, but it did a lot of work.

I want to say the rest of this draft will be easy now. But I think as I go through these original words I generated the past few months, I will find some other traps I have set for myself. Finding that tone was helpful, though. It’s a good guide. The tone can truly be a way in.

My plan is to edit in a way that leaves me with 1,000 clean words a day. But I am truly just making this up as I go along here! Some days I bet I’ll get more done and some days I’ll get less. Every day it very much feels like W-O-R-K.

But I’m just thinking if I can get through all those words by the end of the month I might do something absolutely crazy for #1000wordsofsummer and write a non-fiction proposal. Have I lost my mind? It would be sort of fun to have a novel and a proposal in my pocket to play with in these summer months. It feels sort of risky and fun. I hope I can make this happen. It feels invigorating to think about. And I need that feeling.

Look, I wake up every day keenly aware that the world is a shitshow, but at least I have my words.

And my dog. At least I have my dog.

As for my personal life, I’ll be finishing up some travel here these next few weeks. Tomorrow I’m off to New York tomorrow for two reasons: to celebrate the first birthday of one Lulu Diamond, human child of Jason Diamond, and to meet Maggie Gondelman-Kreizman, dog child of Maris Kreizman and Josh Gondelman.

Also I will see some other wonderful people but I’m keeping my eye on the prize: babies and dogs. A visit to New York is always very centering to me, which might be a weird thing to say because it is such a big, noisy place with a lot of chaotic energy. But there are such great people there, and it is one of the few places on the planet where I really feel seen.

I hope you have a gorgeous weekend.

Jami

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