The Questions I Would Ask You

If you’re in the Bronxville, NY area, I’ll be speaking at Sarah Lawrence College this Thursday, October 5, and then in conversation with the great Denne Michele Norris. Details here.

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Hi friends.

Greetings from the Denver airport. I spent the past few days in town consuming all kinds of art, including the opening of a show my friend Miranda Lash curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver called COWBOY. It was a refreshing interrogation of the legend of the American West, featuring work from a number of brilliant artists of color. Also if hot, queer cowboys sound appealing, have I got an art show for you. (Here’s some wonderful coverage of it in W Magazine.) It felt groundbreaking and I was excited to be there. My brain felt full.

Now I’m almost ready to start writing again, pushing toward generating a messy new 20,000 words by the end of the year. Loose, easy, carefree, non-judgmental. Just piling them up. This all starts with a new mini #1000wordsofsummer on October 7. Are you planning on joining me? Listen, no pressure. It’s not always the right time to dive deep like that. Although I am feeling some really good vibes about this session. The energy is there.

I have been feeling lately like I wanted to check in with all of you, to see how your projects are coming along. We’re closing in on 34,000 subscribers now, and that number feels both fun and totally imaginary. It’s enough people to fill a stadium! Not like a Beyonce-sized stadium or anything but definitely a respectable college stadium. A stadium full of writing nerds. I’m sorry but that would be incredibly cute.

Although I prefer to think of you all in your homes, sitting at a comfortable desk wearing an oversized sweater, preparing yourself to work for a few hours. Maybe you’re sighing and looking at your laptop and trying to get yourself psyched up. And maybe I’d call you to see what was with up with that book you’ve been working on all this time. As if I were your accountability partner, and you were mine. And you would say, “Oh thank fucking god you called,” and I would say, “What? Tell me everything.”

So let’s pretend for a moment we’re checking in on each other. Here’s what I would ask you:

How’s your work going? How many words do you have right now? (Honestly any number of words is pretty good.) What do you want to accomplish by the end of the year? And when do you want to be done with this project? Tell me your timeline. The hard facts of it all. Let’s just get that out of the way.

Now how do you feel about what you’re writing? Do you love it, are you proud of it? Are you enjoying it? Good. Remember what you’re feeling at this moment, make a note of it, so you can tap into that feeling sometime in the future.

Alternately, if you’re struggling with your work, I wish you could find a way back to the pleasurable side of it. Can you remember why you started this project in the first place? How excited you were. I hope you can light that fire in you again. Because your voice is important. And I’m proud of you for taking this project on.

Maybe we’d talk about how this time of year can muddy boundaries a bit. Because of, say, the back-to-school moment of fall, the busy-ness of it all. Or just this sense of racing to the finish all the things in your life by the end of the year. Do you need to reconfigure your schedule a bit if you’ve let some boundaries around your writing schedule slide? There’s still time left. There’s still a few months to write. I know you can do it.

Then I might ask you what books or essays you’ve read and enjoyed or felt energized by lately? Is there a book you’ve been consistently recommending? If nothing comes to mind, can you make a plan to pop by your local bookstore for a second? Booksellers love to recommend shit.

Maybe you’d just ask me to recommend something, and I’d tell you what I’ve read lately that I thought was cool: Alone, by Daniel Schreiber, which is this beautiful, deep, fascinating meditation on living a solo existence in Berlin; Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which is a smartly-written memoir about what happens when you are constantly confused with someone who has a polar opposite political identity to you; and Alison by Lizzy Stewart, which is just a gorgeous graphic novel about being a female artist in 1970s London.

I might end this conversation with an invitation for you to focus for a second on all the good work you’ve accomplished this year. Can you track it all and sit with it for a second? Can you give yourself credit for what you have done as opposed to what you haven’t?

Oh buddy, I know you’ve been working hard. I can just tell.

And I would hope you would ask me all the same questions. Tell me I can make it through whatever challenges I’m experiencing lately. Tell me which books you loved lately. Force me to feel a little proud of myself for my successes. So that when we both hung up the phone we would feel mutually energized and motivated. So that when we were done speaking we were ready to write.

I’ll see you all here in a few weeks after I finish the Mini 1000. In the meantime, be good to yourself.

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.