The Tap-Dancing Books
What gets you writing?
Hi friends.
A quick point of business: I’ll be editing my novel in December, working directly with notes from my editor, and spending a month or two on getting this next (and hopefully final) draft right. I’ll be writing about the process here a bit, but would anyone else be working on their edits at the same time? I’m trying to decide if I would start a specific thread on substack (or resurrecting the slack if there’s enough people) for check-ins. Leaving comments open below today, so let me know if that’s of interest to you.
OK! Hello from week 2 of my residency where I’ve been sleeping through the night, every night. I don’t really remember the last time that happened. A friend of mine told me once that she used the first 5 days of her residency to sleep 14 hours a day and I completely get it. Just to relax for a second has been so great.
Also I’ve just been reading a ton and writing a little bit every day. Some days I just bike or walk around and look at shit for a while. I highly recommend just looking at shit when you get the chance.
Truly the thing I am doing the most is reading. Which made me think of a question for you all.
I posted this note the other day about reading before writing that people seemed to appreciate:
So for the weekend, I’m wondering if you can share your instant get-yourself-writing books? I just read the new Maria Semple novel (it comes out next year) and it triggered a lot of thinking because Maria’s such a dynamic, energetic, and hilarious writer who likes to think about big ideas, too. So while Go Gentle isn’t available yet, Maria’s earlier novel, Where’d You Go Bernadette is, and I would always recommend that as an energizing text. Reading it is like watching someone tap dance beautifully and effortlessly—it almost makes you feel like you could dance that way yourself.
What’s your book you’d recommend to get a friend inspired to write? Or, alternately, what’s the one action you take (maybe it’s just coffee!) that gets your ass in gear?
Have a good weekend!
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.
OK the people have spoken! I will send a letter out when I start doing edits and that can be our check-in thread for the month. (1000 Words of Edits?)
I recently saw Colm Tóibín speak, and the person who introduced him mentioned his use of silence in his books. I’m reading Long Island right now, and noticing how true that is, and using that as a bit of a prompt. I am very action-oriented when I write, and now I’m trying out adding silent moments in some scenes. In his books the silences can stretch on for paragraphs of a character’s internal experience, and I’m enthralled by how skillfully he does that. I think the books that most often inspire me to get writing are the ones that show a particular angle of a writing skill that I would like to hone.