When All Else Fails, Burn It Down

My writing advice for myself, anyway.

Hi friends.

I am still messing around with this essay I have been writing all month. I showed a draft of it to two readers because I knew it wasn’t working and they agreed with me. Both had suggestions, and I listened to them because I wasn’t able to see around what I had already written. I was on draft 6 or 7. What I had was refined but it was just wrong. I was in a Hail Mary type of situation.

So I tried their suggested approaches, which were reasonable and smart. But I still sort of felt like I was repeatedly running up and hurling myself against a brick wall that I needed to be climbing over. Then this weekend it occurred to me that instead of running into the wall and trying to scale it, I should probably just burn it down. I needed to write the darkest, bloodiest, most freewheeling version of this story first, the version I wouldn’t want anyone else to read but that I knew was the absolute dirtiest, gutsiest truth. And then I could fix it all up later, figure out what I was willing to share and what I wasn’t. Write the worst version to get to the best version, I told myself.

I gave it a shot. It wasn’t an explosion but I had lit a small flame.

Then this morning I was reading Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace and I saw this:

I don’t know exactly why that was the trigger I needed to get to the next place or maybe I was already on my way there, fueled by the feedback and the myriad drafts and also the just living of my fucking life for fifty plus years and also things take time, they just do. But anyway I whizzed through a thousand new words this morning and all of a sudden a solid new draft appeared. So we are getting somewhere, all inspired by this simple idea: When all else fails, burn it down.

By the way I turned my novel in this weekend after finishing the out-loud draft, and I’ll get another round back by the end of the month. It’s pretty close although deep-down in my heart I know there are a few more good sentences left to write. I mean I am talking about a handful! But there’s definitely a few ideas that have been left to simmer for the month of February.

I am excited to land this plane, though, and the plane of this essay, and then the plane of doing my taxes. Because when it is all done, I get to return to the next novel which I started last year. It has been waiting for me all this time.

I continue to be obsessed with writing, how about you?

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.