On Knowing What You Know

It's harder than it looks.

A reminder that we’re doing a Mini 1000 this weekend, January 17-19. It is FREE and very fun and a good way to start the year. Let’s all generate some new work together!

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Hi friends.

Good morning and solidarity with our Minneapolis friends. We are thinking about you in New Orleans.

As I recently mentioned, I put together about fifteen hours of workshops for the seminar last week. The development of these workshops was both invigorating and super annoying. (That’s why they call it work, baby!) But I wanted to push myself to do it so then I would have these classes in my back pocket to teach in the future. Sometimes we have to generate work outside of our comfort zone to build something new for ourselves. These are facts.

Also I wanted to figure out which specific subject matter I felt comfortable talking about in public. I am determined to spend the rest of my life on this planet being a productive part of my community. But if I was going to do this, filling blocks of time with something I thought would be educational or inspiring, I had to respect my own boundaries.

And finally, I wanted to know what I know. Like I wanted to sit down and capture at least a partial array of thoughts and experiences from the last two decades about some specific components of writing, in this case how to write about our origin stories in both memoir and autobiographical fiction. It’s important to be able to talk about your areas of expertise and also just to know your skill set in general.

And as I’m typing this I’m realizing how corporate this sounds! (Skill set, gross.) In general I try to be much more about vibes when I write to you, but I guess every once in a while you have to be a grown up. And I think this is a nice way to start the new year, assessing where you’re at, what your strongest suits are, what you want to exploit for your creative self moving forward into 2026.

So today I’m just going to suggest to everyone to make a list of things you know about this world, and also the things you’re best at as a writer and creative person. Like if you are funny or good at dialogue, write it down. And if you are an expert baker, write that shit down, too. What do you know that’s most useful for you as a writer? What can you lean on without question? What do you know that you know?

I’ll see you this weekend over at the Mini 100. I’m ready to write in 2026, aren’t you?

Sending love,

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.