The Breakthrough

What I want for you.

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Hi friends.

I had a big breakthrough on my writing this week. I can’t tell you the specific context, because it’s related to the plot of the book, and please god, let me hold onto my secrets a little bit longer. But I can tell you it was inspired by a conversation I had at a literary event last weekend in Chicago, and it was about someone else’s book, not mine. I took that conversation all the way home with me back to New Orleans, where I sat with it for a while, feeling full of ideas.

The next day, I read some of that author’s book, and I wrote in my journal about it, and then I went for a walk, and I got a strong coffee, and I drank it on the way home, and then I sat down at my desk, and right then, three days from the original conversation, I had a huge breakthrough. And I knew immediately that I would return to that breakthrough in my revisions, that it would reverberate through the work I had done even a year ago, and that a new framework had been created for the book. So I knew it was not just a breakthrough for a particular scene, but a breakthrough for the entire story. Wow, what a conversation, I thought. What a book they wrote.

But it wasn’t just about that conversation and the book. Because everything I had been writing up to that point, all the research, the entire process of the past year, even, yes, all the many mistakes I’d made, all of it was important and relevant, and I had worked hard to even know what my book was about in the first place so I could ask the right questions when I finally met this person.

Equally important, I had to understand I did not yet know everything about my book, the plot, the narrator, the surrounding world, the themes I needed to explore. I had to be ready to engage. I had to be open to asking for help.

And finally, I had to be willing to even put myself out there in the world, away from home; to be at this literary event, in this space, at that time. I had to have decided to take the risk (because sometimes it feels that way, even to leave the house, like a risk, but in this case I had to get on a plane, too) to be there, to see what I could see, and learn what I could learn.

Everything adds up. It’s never just one thing. It’s a conversation, but it’s a conversation on a pile of ideas we build and climb. And it’s also another person’s pile of ideas, and earned wisdom, and talent, and gaze. And somewhere in the middle we meet.

The first thing I thought after I had finished the chapter was: Now share this. And I don’t mean the words that I had written, although yes, I hope to share those someday with anyone who might care to read them. But what what I really wanted was to just share the experience of this joy of figuring something out. I want this for all of you. I hope you have it sometime soon. A new breakthrough just for you.

Have you had any breakthroughs lately?

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.