The Small Gifts

Hi friends.

This weekend we were visited once again by the most absurdly perfect spring weather, and I went out for nice long walks so that I could smell the blooming jasmine twisted in thick piles on fences and utility poles and front porches. A mess of jasmine, but in its midst a singular gift. You can count on that scent. I don’t mean to be so romantic about the world when there’s a lot that’s bad right now (always, forever), but I had no choice but to walk these streets and smell these smells with a stupid grin on my face because sometimes the earth offers itself to us for loving and we must accept what we are given. And also this is one reason why I live here, in this city, for the moments of jasmine. It would be foolish not to smell it. It would be like rejecting a brilliant idea just because it seems like it might take some work. Because soon it will be summer and hot and all I will smell is sweat and sunblock. Take the jasmine while you can get it. Take a walk at sunset when you have the time.

Last night, after dinner, I walked all the way to the end of the Marigny, which is the next neighborhood over from mine. Just keep walking, I thought. You’ll know when to turn around. And then finally I did, I turned, when the sun began to sink. Then I stopped by a bar where I thought friends of mine might be playing pool, and they were, and I appreciated that I had known they would be there without even asking, texting, tracking. Another thing I could count on.

I stopped and shot the shit for a while. One of my friends and I reflected on the room at that moment. There was a long wooden wrap-around bar and high ceilings and big windows that face the west. At that time of day the sun was just pouring in there. My friend had been coming to that spot and playing pool for a long time, years and years, and he said “That’s one of the reasons I love it here, the light. As long as there’s this pool table and that bar and that light, I’ll keep coming here.” I could see he was telling the truth. Not just that he believed it but that it was real, it would happen. I could picture him there many years in the future.

Then it was a little darker when I left the bar, but I could still see the green everywhere, growing, clawing, scaling. I thought about the pile of words I’ve been generating on the new novel, and how I know they’re a mess and I had given myself permission to make them a mess. Every once in a while I write a book that comes out clean or at least far tighter on a first draft. But this is not one of those times because I have too many other things going on right now. I am writing this letter, for example, every week to you, and also the other one, and I have to write a master class and a new talk yet this month, and so the fiction to me almost feels a relief because it doesn’t have to be anything other than a working document.

I wonder if my perfectionist friends out there can see how giving yourself that kind of permission as a gift. The first draft is the one thing that does not have to be right in your life. It only has to exist.

I walked past the turnoff to my house, unwilling to go home quite yet. I passed by a restaurant where a friend worked. She’s leaving us soon; she’s going to school out west. She came out into the street, and we hugged and I thought: Oh, this is one of the last times I’ll hug her outside this restaurant. I would always be picturing her there even though she’d never be there again. She was happy to be leaving. See you later, New Orleans. Sometimes people feel that way about leaving this town. They just have to get the fuck out. That’s how I was when I left New York. I hope I never have to feel that way again. I would just like to be here, if I can be. As long as there’s jasmine.

And then I was nearly home. I thought again about the draft, that I had probably generated enough messiness for a while, and it was time to go through it all, and see what I could make of it. It was time to tidy it up, shape it into a readable form, and start to set the stage for whatever might happen next in the book. How did I know it was time? How do you know when you find a place to call home? How do you know when it’s time to leave somewhere forever? Instinct, experience, the sense that my energy had shifted. This gut feeling that I couldn’t write anything new until I could see what I had in my hands already.

So I shall tidy it up for a while this spring. I shall see what fifteen thousand words means. Maybe it will become twenty thousand in the end. (Or maybe ten!) But I shall turn off that particular faucet for the next six weeks and smooth and massage and manipulate and tidy and maneuver all these words into a new order. I will look for the small gifts in these words, and I will try to turn them into something bigger.

Are there any small gifts hiding in your work right now? Can you see the beauty waiting to be found in the imperfections?

Jami

p.s. This week’s donation went to Med Global.

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.