The Possibility of at Least One Tiny Success Every Day

Hi friends.

Good morning from a person who is deeply obsessed with working on her new novel-in-progress project. Soon enough I will have to switch my focus to promoting my forthcoming novel so I’m just cramming in all that I can while I still have enough free brain space.

And there is also this encroaching sense of the world that feels like its own kind of giant, ominous deadline. So we must fight for our time, fight for our right to write, create, make our art. This is a thing that is important to claim for ourselves.

About this novel: I’ve been working on it here and there for the last year but the past few weeks it has all come together a bit more. There have been multiple restarts, which kind of threw me off a little bit while they were happening. But it’s all part of the process, baby. And they all ended up being useful in their own way, because nothing we write is a waste of time, even if we end up throwing it way.

Now I have an understanding of where the book begins. And now it is time to look at the 30,000 words on my laptop and start to see what I have before I dig into the second half of the book.

To be clear here once again: I sell my books on partial proposal, which may not be something of interest or available to you, depending on where you are at in your life or career. But I still think my documentation of this this process may be helpful to you. What applies at 30,000 words can often work for people at 70,000 words, too. It is a bulk of words on a page.

The first thing I did before I started revisions was write a letter to myself about what I think the story is about and what the through lines are. All the points A to B I’ve been interested in all along. I knew what cities I wanted the book to take place in, and I knew what years I wanted the book to span. What if a character is living her life one way at the start of the book and by the end she’s living a completely different kind of life? What if someone does something to her that alters her life and who is that person by the end of the book? How much do the places she live in change over those years? How much does her body change along the way? How is it all connected?

These are the things I’ve been thinking for a while now that I have been consistently returning to when I think/talk about what this book is about. These are the interesting questions I’ve been collecting.

So I wrote those down. I gathered them on the page, and I surrounded myself with them.

Then I wrote down: Don’t freak out. As I go through these 30,000 words I’ve already written, there’s bound to be some fun little nuggets in there. Some interesting ideas or some solid sentences or something that is going to inspire something else. Get excited, don’t be overwhelmed. You’re about to start on a cool new phase of your project.

And now I’m in this phase of reading through and cutting what doesn’t seem to be working. Sometimes I’m throwing it in a document if it’s a nice piece of writing because you never know. If you can believe it, I actually just took something from an old draft of the last novel and put it in this new one. It’s a description of a restaurant that I researched and wrote and loved and never forgot about but it just wasn’t necessary for the novel. Most of the time I never use things again, but it was fun to salvage it for this story.

A final thing I’ve done is have an honest conversation with myself about what I’m capable of accomplishing. I’m committing to making my way through 2,000 words a day—so that’s about two or three weeks worth of work. Now I’m working full time on this, remember—this is my day job. So these numbers may not apply to you. If you’re working at home, you may only get a couple hundred words in and that’s just fine.

The other agreement I made with myself is this: If I get really stuck on a chapter I just move on past it, noting that I will return to it later. I try not to get stuck if I can. A fun thing to realize is that once you know a problem exists, your brain will often chew on it even if you’re not with it on the page. So I try to keep things moving and limber and in the flow.

What I am looking for is the possibility of at least one tiny success every day. And I wish that for you, too.

Do you have any strategies for revising a big pile of messy words?

Hope you have a good Sunday!

Jami

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