Sometimes All I'm Looking for Is One New Word

Wherever I can get it.

Hi friends.

Still August, still alive.

Been taking walks at sunset, running trivial little errands, reading (The Plot, Owls Do Cry), having happy hour with my small dog in the backyard. Keeping things lean, except when I don’t. Reading the news only once a day, for no more than an hour, alternating fears between global and local, then donating money with abandon.

August, the month where we know who really lives in this city, and who’s just playing at it.

August, the month we try not to drink wine every day and then somehow still end up drinking at least a little wine every day.

August, the month where the mowers blow at dusk.

I’m not a poet now but I used to be one. I gave it up to tell different kinds of stories, or stories in a different kind of way, anyway. I became a prose monster. If I were to be a real poet, I would have to change my focus. I might have to change the way I feel about language.

Reading Owls Do Cry, I was thinking about how Janet Frame is a poet writing a novel. Bending the will of the reader to her language, rhythms, patterns, but once you’re in, you’re in. I thought, “Oh it’s sort of like reading Virginia Woolf,” but of course Frame is her own thing.

Prose writers can be such such desperadoes sometimes. I want everyone to be able to read my work and easily access it and (I hope) enjoy it. Please come over to my house, here’s a glass of wine, some light appetizers, sit down for a while and I’ll tell you a story.

The older I get, the simpler my language becomes. My sentence structures are less complex, too. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is.

Still, sometimes I try to write things like a poet might. I rewrite a paragraph as if a poet were telling the story, describing a character in a new way, obsessing on the lyrical, digging deeper into a certain kind of feeling, leaning into the language, looking for the new lessons to be learned from it. Sometimes it ends up sounding more whimsical, or fantastical, or just simply about the sound a word makes in my head. Even if there’s just one interesting word I can pluck from that exercise, it was worth it. Sometimes that’s all I’m looking for. One new word.

When I showed this to Tricia Lockwood, she said, “For poets, you can have exercises that are like, now write it as a plot, write it as a thriller, write it backwards, write it as a flashback, write it as suspense—all of those things which can be the opposite of what we want to do.”

What are you looking for lately in your writing?

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.