What Happens When We're Busy Doing Something Else
Sometimes an idea comes from nowhere at all.
A reminder that the paperback edition for my latest novel, A Reason to See You Again, is out this week! Buy it in the shops or wherever you buy books online.
Hi friends.
I started writing something new these past few weeks—a novel. I think it’s the thing I’m going to stick with at least through the end of the year to see if I can get anything good out of it. I’m closing in on 10,000 messy words with no sign of stopping soon.
For a long time I thought I was going to work on this non-fiction project next. I had been taking notes and writing longer segments of it and had even started a proposal_new_v1.doc. And it’s not going anywhere. It’s still sitting on my desktop.
But then I found myself sometime this August thinking I wanted to return to fiction again instead of diving into the personal. I wanted to hide in fiction rather than confront my present tense. Does that make me a coward or does that just mean I understand what’s healthy for me? Or maybe it means I am just not ready yet to fully tackle this topic.
All I know is my brain redirected me. I always say write what’s right in front of your face and one morning I woke up with an idea and title right in front of my face. I thought, let’s do that, let’s try that. I was able to outline the structure of it within a week, with more than enough holes in it to be filled that I’d still have plenty of surprises coming my way. I also saw an ending I wanted to write to which is usually a signal for me that an idea is worth pursuing.
I can’t tell you exactly how or where this idea came from. I do know that sometimes when we’re busy doing something else an idea quietly forms all on its own. I would not have said this was the thing that I wanted to write—it feels different than anything that came before it. And yet, when I’ve told my friends who are my closest advisors and witnesses to my regular process, they’ve said that it makes sense.
So I’m giving myself three months to see what I can make of it. I have various responsibilities popping up here and there, with readings, talks, travel, and this newsletter, which may take some time away from being on the page every day. But also I almost always have an hour every morning to handwrite, and I almost always have an hour every morning to type up what I’ve written, so I believe it is possible to accrue words.
It feels like falling in love again. It calms me down to have a new project, a place to put all my energy and feelings and ideas. Maybe it will fail, but then again maybe it’s the greatest idea I’ve ever had: that’s what I always feel when I start writing. All the possibilities.
We begin again. We always begin again.
I’m leaving the comments open today so you all can share with me where you’re at with your own projects. Maybe you’re starting something new, too. Maybe you’ll be writing along with me. Starting now.
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.
I love this so much. This happens to me all the time—the “main” project (that feels right on paper) ends up just being a decoy for my brain to find the “actual” project (that feels right in my soul). Sometimes I think about this as the doodles my brain makes in the margins of my notebook. The doodles always reveal something I didn’t even know I was thinking about.
On a personal note, I’ve been reading Craft Talk for years and this is my first time commenting. Thank you so much for all the love & wisdom you pour into these letters.
I'm working on final edits for my memoir in poems and I keep getting new, but actually very old material trying to push in. I keep asking thesr stories to wait, thinking they must be linked to the next project I'll work on after this book is done. But after reading your note here this morning, I can't help but wonder if what they really want is to be included in this book. (Which isn't at all what you're sharing but somehow resting your thoughts are bringing this up for me) I've thought about it before but it would be so much more work to incorporate it all, and it would take the book into a whole other place and dimension, it's hard to tell if it needs it's own space to breathe, to be it's own weird and wild story. So I guess what's happening while I'm doing something else today is that there's these pieces of these stories I've written, which I call my subconscious dream stories that want attention. And for some reason I'm feeling the need to share that here!