1000 Words
Author: Jami Attenberg Category: Books Date Finished: March 19, 2024 Date Read: 2024/03/19 Genre: Art
You can create a sense of isolation in your mind. You can tap into that hunger and desire to make something new. It’s all sitting right there. A pen, some paper, and your brain.
Seasons
Winter: internal and developmental phase. It’s when we ask ourselves questions to develop our baseline creative self.
- How do you view yourself as an artist and writer and creative person in the world?
- What are your desires?
- What do you want to get out of your work?
- What does it mean to you to do work?
- What are the goals?
Winter is the time to be thoughtful, self-interrogative, and centered.
Spring: prepping for our project, assessing what we need to move forward and be as productive as possible.
- Examine distractions
- Notice if we’re talking ourselves out of progress
- How do we get out of our own way?
- How do we plan for the future of our work?
- How do we give ourselves care and thought?
- How do we situate ourselves in the world then set ourselves up to write?
Contemplate productivity and streamlining process. Be strategic, analytical, pragmatic.
Summer: Commit to generating new work (#1000wordsofsummer). Get messy, make mistakes, write into all of it with abandon and see what we create. How do we ride our momentum to the end? Ever so slightly we contend with where this si all going, but mostly we write with pure joy.
Fall: acknowledge need to give ourselves grace. We don’t accomplish work all the time. If we flowed in summer, perhaps now we need to ebb.
- How do we not judge ourselves when we need a break?
- How can we recognize when we need to pause and regroup?
Stop thinking of it as the story of you and instead start thinking of it as the story you have to tell. How can you, in the writing of it, make it interesting?
Life is a series of moments, some bigger, some smaller, and that’s it. Your job is to arrange these moments into a beautiful or captivating or intriguing display. Stop thinking of it as your life. Start thinking of it as a story. Your story will be interesting because of how you tell it.
Look at the work every day even if it’s just for the briefest of time.
Before you can make a priceless vase or a heartfelt novel, you’ve got to make the clay. And you better put on some overalls, because you’re going to get covered with muck. The good news is, you can recycle some of your old ideas. In fact, using the slurry of previous work ages your clay (like fine wine in an oak barrel), making it stronger and more flexible, which greatly increases the chances that your next creation won’t end up in the slip bucket. — Hannah Tinti
Be hard on yourself about finding the time to write—extremely hard—but then be kind to yourself after that. Don’t worry about quality. Just put the time in, day after day… I’m no longer scared to write poorly because the worst feeling is not writing at all. — Michael Weber
Writers love to give advice about writing because they enjoy talking to themselves; all writerly advice is just that, advice to self, appeals for validation, self-mythologizing, self-soothing, all of it necessary if you want to get any work done. — Elizabeth McCracken
Two questions to ask repeatedly:
- Who are you writing this for?
- What do you hope to accomplish with this work?
When you lose your book, it’s not because it’s a flawed book or somehow the wrong book but because no one can sustain continuous ardor for anything (or anyone) for several years. It’s still your book.
The following are not reasons to give up on it: You’re mad at it, it needs tearing apart and putting back together, you get scared of failure, you get scared of success, you can’t stand your own voice, the whole thing is ridiculous, someone didn’t like the part they read, you’re supposed ot have a real job, you can’t remember what you’re doing, this thing is a mess.
Here is the only reason to give up on it: For a sustained period of time (several months) you have absolutely no feeling toward it whatsoever. Even then, don’t delete the file. You never know. — Rebecca Makkai
Receiving Criticism:
- Don’t freak out.
- Read it straight through.
- Contend with the cuts.
With this drive for the next book and the next book and the next book without real consideration for the time it takes to produce art or the distinctiveness of our individual processes or that sometimes the world simply requires one to witness. — Dantiel Moniz
How do you know when a book is done? finishing
Fiction - go around to characters and check in with them, ask if they have anything else to say. Did I take your story as far as it could go? Did you get to where you needed to be in this book?
Memoir - Is there anything left I’m willing to share? Because there’s no way I can cover my entire life, and I’m not going to spill all my secrets. That’s not why I wrote a memoir.
Have all the themes come to fruition? I made lists of the overarching themes and tracked their progress through the book. When each one finally got a check mark next to them, I felt done.