Hi friends. I am quiet all day long, usually. Living in my head. I don’t talk on the phone a lot. I don’t have to. No one is really looking for me, or if they are, they can find me on a screen. I have a few friends who don’t care about screens. They like to talk-talk. And I find I do, too, when they reach out to me. Then I remember the sound of my own voice. Sometimes I don’t even know how I feel about something at all until I’m in the midst of a conversation. I am always in the process of figuring something out.
"Sometimes it seems like half our job is just figuring out what our process is and then respecting it." I feel that—I'm in my 20s and trying so very hard to figure it out for myself. It's very encouraging to hear how others have discovered their processes.
Jami, you are the definition of a writer. You breathe and exhale words. As you make your way through days and weeks, pages or pixels, you leave behind new overlapping worlds of sensations. When I read you I almost don't care about the story but about how your words make me feel.
I am a writer myself, only I come from another continent. Therefore my reset has to do with language. I have moved here a few years back and my adoptive country has been transforming me into a new kind of speaker, reader, and I haven't yet found out what kind of writer. Things have settled down for me after the move and myriad of changes my life went through and I am now about to "jump off that bridge and build my wings on my way down" and dive into my next writing project which has been slowly simmering on the back burner for a while. Yet my brain is confused by the dual-language going back and forth that I am made to believe I no longer speak either languages well enough to tell a new story. So, if I were to hit reset, I might hit it thinking of my future here, my new language, and a new chapter in my writing journey.
Thank you for this, Jami! I have been writing a memoir for more than a decade, based on a piece that Susan Orlean picked for Best American Essays. I’ve written and revised (and re-set) many times; only now do I feel that I’ve found the book in the manuscript. I wanted it to be a big lesbian love story, but it turns out it wanted to be something else. So I’ve kinda accepted that. Will see if my agent does. 💕
Wow, this bit in particular was so helpful and heartening to read:
"I could still process a particular kind of frustration and transform it into something new by giving it this more stabilized universe. It made it so the book was sellable, publishable in the mainstream literary market, which was important to me at the time for my professional and creative purposes, and still is."
I'm going through this exact process right now, after my agent gave me similar feedback. I was calling it a "maybe" instead of a "no," but I like thinking of it as a reset! I had to take a good long break before diving back in, but after some time away, I can see all the places where it can be a better, stronger book. Even though I'm desperately impatient to publish, I'm grateful for the opportunity to get it just right.
I so appreciate this passage in relation to the process of revision:
...what happens when we write when we’re angry, which was my initial impulse when writing this book. Nothing wrong with writing when you’re angry! But is it enough to hinge an entire book on anger and frustration? Eventually things have to shift. Eventually characters have to come into their own in the world you’ve created.
Anger can light the fuse, and there may be a necessity to write about things that one should be angry about, but anger should not be about revenge either...because my pen will only poison myself.
Thanks for sharing about your experience! I'm still very early in my writing journey, and excited to soak up whatever other published writers have to share.
As for hitting reset on a project - YES. My first shot at writing a book (or much writing in general in my adult life) was about 75k words. But total crap. The whole time I knew I had no idea what I was doing, and I struggled to pull the idea out of my head onto the page. When I go back to trying to write that book again, it will likely be a total re-write.
In coding (where I've spent much of my professional life, though now I've been just managing for almost the past decade), there is always a reset. Or as we call it, a refactor. I suppose refactoring is still preserving much of the original work - at least the output usually is the same if not improved. But the details of the code, sometimes the language or the format, are completely redone/rewritten.
I wrote a short story a few months back that I ended up leaving to ferment in my google drive folders because the main scene I wanted to write, that bit that sparked the fire, fell really flat. I tried reworking it but it ended up sounded like some cheap dinner table gossip that didn't seem to make anyone feel anything. It was only until recently when I talked about this idea with a friend who gave some imput and shared some suggestions on how I could re-shape this scene from being the climax into a hook for an introduction and write to the future of the story (ie, what happens after this scene, rather framing the story with the immediate before and after) that I saw how I could bring this back to life and shape it into something workable.
I was hoping you'd have some advice! In 2021 I completed a full manuscript of my novel that I thought was good enough to share with beta readers. Based on their feedback and my later rereading, I decided to pull out an entire major character and storyline, and replace it with something closer to what I wanted this book to be about. Over a year after starting this process, I still feel like there are so many holes in my manuscript and have been struggling to fill them in. It's like starting over with a new book but with all the mid-project mess. I keep going back and forth, outlining and writing, but I haven't made a lot of progress.
In this right now with a few things creatively. And it also resonates personally, as someone who has had fertility struggles. It makes you think a lot about what you’re willing to tolerate in terms of the process and journey, when the destination is not guaranteed. What acts of creativity have intrinsic worth? What would you do even if you knew it might never “work out” in a tangible sense? What does it mean to create in service of Flow vs. Ego?
It also reminds me of Anne Lamott saying, “That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
The question to me, when I look back on re-sets, is -- what part of my soul needed the tea ceremony I just finished? And now that it’s had the ceremony -- what else, if anything, does that part of my soul still have to say?
I wrote a novella and not long after found a publisher, signed a contract, bingo...but then the publisher backed out, fear of litigation she said, and publishing costs rocketing....I had some interest, then more rejections...now I'm just sitting with this text I stand by and thinking about where to go next and what my lesson might be....
I've absolutely had to rewrite a book - and it STILL sucked, which is why I'm ultimately glad it never made it to shelves. I recently tried to rewrite an old pilot and realized the material just doesn't appeal to me anymore. But certain things are worth tackling again and trying in a new way. Thanks for your honesty and clarity around this - as an author, I find it reassuring.
In 2020, I hit reset on my current work-in-progress, a novel that I'd worked on off and on since 2007. I never finished a first draft; I wrote the beginning and the end, and got stuck on the middle. I thought I was just stuck with this vague writer's block, but my blocks are never truly vague. There's always something specific going on (or not going on), and in this case, there was a lot of growing as a writer and as a person that I needed to do in order to have the awareness I needed to diagnosis the problem. And the problem was two-fold: 1) my main character didn't really want anything, so there was no story, and 2) my main character was 92% me, so she would only do things that I would do in her situation, and her values were my values, all of which meant there was no story. So the first thing I had to do was make her her own person with values different from my own. From there, that freed her up to want things I don't want and to make decisions I wouldn't make. Now I had a story. I had this aha moment and reset in 2020, 13 years after first starting this novel. It's never too late!
"Sometimes it seems like half our job is just figuring out what our process is and then respecting it." I feel that—I'm in my 20s and trying so very hard to figure it out for myself. It's very encouraging to hear how others have discovered their processes.
thankyou! this is such a great post ❤️
Jami, you are the definition of a writer. You breathe and exhale words. As you make your way through days and weeks, pages or pixels, you leave behind new overlapping worlds of sensations. When I read you I almost don't care about the story but about how your words make me feel.
I am a writer myself, only I come from another continent. Therefore my reset has to do with language. I have moved here a few years back and my adoptive country has been transforming me into a new kind of speaker, reader, and I haven't yet found out what kind of writer. Things have settled down for me after the move and myriad of changes my life went through and I am now about to "jump off that bridge and build my wings on my way down" and dive into my next writing project which has been slowly simmering on the back burner for a while. Yet my brain is confused by the dual-language going back and forth that I am made to believe I no longer speak either languages well enough to tell a new story. So, if I were to hit reset, I might hit it thinking of my future here, my new language, and a new chapter in my writing journey.
Thank you for this, Jami! I have been writing a memoir for more than a decade, based on a piece that Susan Orlean picked for Best American Essays. I’ve written and revised (and re-set) many times; only now do I feel that I’ve found the book in the manuscript. I wanted it to be a big lesbian love story, but it turns out it wanted to be something else. So I’ve kinda accepted that. Will see if my agent does. 💕
Wow, this bit in particular was so helpful and heartening to read:
"I could still process a particular kind of frustration and transform it into something new by giving it this more stabilized universe. It made it so the book was sellable, publishable in the mainstream literary market, which was important to me at the time for my professional and creative purposes, and still is."
I'm going through this exact process right now, after my agent gave me similar feedback. I was calling it a "maybe" instead of a "no," but I like thinking of it as a reset! I had to take a good long break before diving back in, but after some time away, I can see all the places where it can be a better, stronger book. Even though I'm desperately impatient to publish, I'm grateful for the opportunity to get it just right.
I so appreciate this passage in relation to the process of revision:
...what happens when we write when we’re angry, which was my initial impulse when writing this book. Nothing wrong with writing when you’re angry! But is it enough to hinge an entire book on anger and frustration? Eventually things have to shift. Eventually characters have to come into their own in the world you’ve created.
Anger can light the fuse, and there may be a necessity to write about things that one should be angry about, but anger should not be about revenge either...because my pen will only poison myself.
Thank you for sharing. I'm embarking on a (another) rewrite of my 3rd novel, and this was just the encouragement and affirmation that I needed.
I need to hit reset on a novel. We’re on a break until I’m ready to come at it and solve the problems.
Thanks for the insights about your writing practice.
Thanks for sharing about your experience! I'm still very early in my writing journey, and excited to soak up whatever other published writers have to share.
As for hitting reset on a project - YES. My first shot at writing a book (or much writing in general in my adult life) was about 75k words. But total crap. The whole time I knew I had no idea what I was doing, and I struggled to pull the idea out of my head onto the page. When I go back to trying to write that book again, it will likely be a total re-write.
In coding (where I've spent much of my professional life, though now I've been just managing for almost the past decade), there is always a reset. Or as we call it, a refactor. I suppose refactoring is still preserving much of the original work - at least the output usually is the same if not improved. But the details of the code, sometimes the language or the format, are completely redone/rewritten.
I wrote a short story a few months back that I ended up leaving to ferment in my google drive folders because the main scene I wanted to write, that bit that sparked the fire, fell really flat. I tried reworking it but it ended up sounded like some cheap dinner table gossip that didn't seem to make anyone feel anything. It was only until recently when I talked about this idea with a friend who gave some imput and shared some suggestions on how I could re-shape this scene from being the climax into a hook for an introduction and write to the future of the story (ie, what happens after this scene, rather framing the story with the immediate before and after) that I saw how I could bring this back to life and shape it into something workable.
I was hoping you'd have some advice! In 2021 I completed a full manuscript of my novel that I thought was good enough to share with beta readers. Based on their feedback and my later rereading, I decided to pull out an entire major character and storyline, and replace it with something closer to what I wanted this book to be about. Over a year after starting this process, I still feel like there are so many holes in my manuscript and have been struggling to fill them in. It's like starting over with a new book but with all the mid-project mess. I keep going back and forth, outlining and writing, but I haven't made a lot of progress.
In this right now with a few things creatively. And it also resonates personally, as someone who has had fertility struggles. It makes you think a lot about what you’re willing to tolerate in terms of the process and journey, when the destination is not guaranteed. What acts of creativity have intrinsic worth? What would you do even if you knew it might never “work out” in a tangible sense? What does it mean to create in service of Flow vs. Ego?
It also reminds me of Anne Lamott saying, “That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”
The question to me, when I look back on re-sets, is -- what part of my soul needed the tea ceremony I just finished? And now that it’s had the ceremony -- what else, if anything, does that part of my soul still have to say?
I wrote a novella and not long after found a publisher, signed a contract, bingo...but then the publisher backed out, fear of litigation she said, and publishing costs rocketing....I had some interest, then more rejections...now I'm just sitting with this text I stand by and thinking about where to go next and what my lesson might be....
I've absolutely had to rewrite a book - and it STILL sucked, which is why I'm ultimately glad it never made it to shelves. I recently tried to rewrite an old pilot and realized the material just doesn't appeal to me anymore. But certain things are worth tackling again and trying in a new way. Thanks for your honesty and clarity around this - as an author, I find it reassuring.
Thank you so much for this, Jami! xo
In 2020, I hit reset on my current work-in-progress, a novel that I'd worked on off and on since 2007. I never finished a first draft; I wrote the beginning and the end, and got stuck on the middle. I thought I was just stuck with this vague writer's block, but my blocks are never truly vague. There's always something specific going on (or not going on), and in this case, there was a lot of growing as a writer and as a person that I needed to do in order to have the awareness I needed to diagnosis the problem. And the problem was two-fold: 1) my main character didn't really want anything, so there was no story, and 2) my main character was 92% me, so she would only do things that I would do in her situation, and her values were my values, all of which meant there was no story. So the first thing I had to do was make her her own person with values different from my own. From there, that freed her up to want things I don't want and to make decisions I wouldn't make. Now I had a story. I had this aha moment and reset in 2020, 13 years after first starting this novel. It's never too late!