How to Motivate Yourself to Write When No One Else Will: A Q&A With Bestselling Author Jami Attenberg
Her '1,000 Words' movement has galvanized writers around the globe. The prolific novelist—and judge for our 2024 Memoir Prize!—talks about being an inspirational cheerleader for writers.
Has there ever been a better time to believe in the power of the pep talk? Currently on my nightstand (in addition to the novel I’m reading, a few next-reads, plus this mango-shaped lotion I’m obsessed with) are two hardcovers that serve as motivational pick-me-ups. I took Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning, Gnight! Little Pep Talks for Me & You out of the library in, err, early November, and it’s been grounding to read before I start my day or right before I go to bed; and Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 Words, which has been there for even longer, is a book I dip into whenever I need a writerly atta girl, a push to keep going, or sometimes (many times), the assurance that if I’m having the kind of day, week, month, where I’m not as productive as I’d like to be, that’s fine too.
In 2018, Jami, already well-known for her complex and vivid novels (she’s written seven!), birthed what became an extremely popular literary movement, #1000WordsofSummer, inspiring writers, and herself, to write and be creative consistently. As a result came the 1,000 Words book and Jami’s unofficial role as head cheerleader for writers everywhere. It’s not just her prolificity and motivational words that inspire me, but also the stories of failure and career lows she shares with brutal honesty in her weekly newsletter and in her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home; of keeping going despite some close-to-dire circumstances, of always having fight left in her. In honor of Jami being this year’s Narratively Memoir Prize guest judge (submit for the chance to have her read your work!), I sat down with her to talk about the trickier parts of writing memoir, what she does to stay focused, her next nonfiction project and more. Naturally, she couldn’t help but throw in some encouraging gems along the way.
Jesse: You’re very productive — you’ve published 10 books, you come out with a new one every few years, and you’ve pretty much made a brand out of being creatively driven. What’s the hardest part of sticking to it no matter what?
Jami: The hardest part is that you don’t really get to stop and think as much as you’d like. You have these periods of time in which you’re evaluating and assessing and figuring out what works for you, and then you have to just move ahead full-steam, and you don’t know how long that steam is going to last for. It’s also important to respect yourself when you do need that time and to not be like, “I have to keep going. I can’t stop working.” If your body or your mind or the actual product on the page is telling you, “Wait, you need to stop for a second and evaluate what’s working and what’s not working for you,” you have to listen to it.
Jesse: We published this piece recently about how to avoid being constantly interrupted, so I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. You’re pretty active on social media and you have your newsletter and your books. How do you manage it all? Do you only work on one thing at a time? Do you hide your phone in the other room when you’re writing?
Jami: If I want to get good work done, then I’m not online. I’m working from 5 or 6 in the morning until about 11 or 12, not talking to the outside world.
Jesse: What do you read when you work? If you’re working on fiction, do you allow yourself to read other fiction or do you feel worried that it might seep into your own work?
Jami: I tend to read whatever feels good for my brain and gets me inspired. If a book is really hot right now, I probably won’t read it for a year or two because there’s too much conversation going on about it and I’ll be hearing it in my head. I want to experience things purely for myself. If something was impacting my writing, I would just stop reading it and pick it up later. You should always feel like you’re reading exactly what you want to read — not because anyone else is telling you you have to read it.
Jesse: You said something in an interview I really related to, that you wrote your memoir because you had some personal stories that didn’t fit in anywhere else but that felt urgent to you. Do you think you’ll write another memoir anytime soon, or was this the singular series of stories you wanted to tell?
Jami: You’re catching me on a day when I’ve been thinking about this. I do have some stuff that I’m writing now nonfiction-wise that definitely does not feel like it’s in a classic essay format. I have a title for it, a vibe for it, and it could be something I would do in a couple of years — I’m always taking little notes for it. Writing my memoir was a really vulnerable experience for me, but I always encourage people to write whatever it is they feel they’re driven to write. If that’s your dream and you feel you must tell this story and you’re prepared to tell this story, then I say do it.
Jesse: Something I always think about when I interview memoirists is, because you’ve now put out this book about yourself, do people feel like they can ask you any personal question they want?
Jami: I had become accustomed to presenting my work as a fiction writer, and with fiction, there’s a wall between you and the audience. When you’re presenting your work as a memoir writer, there is no way to shield yourself, so you need to be prepared for that. And as much as I was prepared for it, and asked so many of my friends who had published memoirs that were really successful about how to prepare, I still found that it was not a great experience for me. Which is why if I did it again, it would have to be on a specific topic. I even found that touring with 1,000 Words, I was able to hide behind the topic of creativity and productivity. If people want to ask me questions about my process, I’m happy to talk about that. I love talking about that stuff! But the other stuff is really hard.
One more thing I’ll say about memoir is that when it comes out, it’s very hard for a memoir to become a huge bestseller unless you’re a celebrity, but memoirs can tend to chug along and keep selling. You may not feel it when your memoir comes out, maybe it gets a couple reviews but you don’t think it’s making that big of an impact. But then it’s two years later and it’s recommended by your local bookstore, or it’s in your local library. So, it’s going to sit there on the shelves for a while, and that’s the magic of books — they get picked up and read at all times.
Jesse: What was the hardest part of writing your memoir before you knew about this hard part?
Jami: Everything’s hard, by the way! From a craft perspective, I wrote much longer than what you see published. I probably wrote an extra 18,000 or 20,000 words, and it was really figuring out what the story of the book was. I just wrote and wrote and wrote and I was like, “Let me just get every single thing down.” And then, it’s one of the only times where I showed a book to my editor and said, “You tell me what you think,” as opposed to me knowing what the book was about. I needed somebody else — I needed a few other people, in fact — to say, “This is what really works in this book.”
Jesse: I was wondering about that, because it’s essays, but it almost feels more like groupings. Did you write the book in sections?
Jami: I laid down a whole bunch of stuff, mostly in chronological order. I knew that there were several threads in the book, and that all of the threads needed to exist, but one of them needed to come forward and take charge of the story, so eventually I was like, “It’s actually about being a writer,” and that was what I felt most comfortable with, and all the other threads fed into that main idea. But I let all of them live for a while and then I got feedback from my editor where she said, “This is the stuff that’s working the best.” Then I did a really big revision on it, and then I think I did one more big revision. There was some material that was maybe a little bit racier or revealing, and I did have conversations with friends where they were like, “Why is this in here? Who is this for, or did you just feel like you were supposed to write it down?” And I think I needed to write some of it down so I could throw it away — but if I hadn’t acknowledged that it existed and was part of the story, the rest of the story wasn’t going to go forward. Sometimes we have to write through things that we’re never going to use, but maybe there’s one good sentence or one good idea or just a feeling we have that we need to acknowledge in order to go forward and write the rest of the story.
Jesse: I really relate to that.
Jami: In the end, ultimately, I looked at this book and said, “You know how to write a novel, so make sure you apply all of your novel-writing skills to this, too. Make sure you don’t shut off those skills just because this is a different genre or because it’s true.”
Jesse: One of the things you wrote about in your book that I really appreciated was being dropped from your publisher after your third book. Your fourth book wound up being a huge success so we know it worked out eventually, but what was that like while you were in it?
Jami: It was super scary. It’s always scary because I don’t have any other job and I don’t have a partner, so it’s scary every single time because you always think, “Is this going to be the time where they don’t ever let me write again?” I mean, I’ll always write, but this is how I make my living. People are always like, “I don’t understand how you’re so productive!” and I’m like, “I don’t have anything else I want to do,” so I write from a place of fear as much as anything else.
We all have complicated feelings about our art and commerce and being received by an audience, and it can really throw you for the loop. And then if you get dropped on top of that you think, “What’s my value?” but hopefully you don’t stick with that feeling for too long and you have some fight in you — which, I always have fight in me. I might need a day or two to recover, but if you want it and it’s important to you and you feel like you have solutions to these problems, then you just have to keep going and fight for it.
Jesse: Why did you feel like it was important to write about it?
Jami: It was never a question in my mind, of course I was going to write about it! I would call it my comeback story — except your entire career is a series of comeback stories. I don’t know anyone who feels safe or secure, who feels like, “I finally got this all figured out and everything’s great.” This is why I always say the best part is the writing part because you can sort of delude yourself into thinking everything’s fine as long as you have an end to write to.
You create your sense of safety and security in the words themselves because sometimes books work and sometimes they don’t. And people should know why they’re doing what they’re doing. That is a thing I say all the time: “Why are you working so hard? Why are you writing these books?” Sometimes it’s “because I feel like I have a story to tell.” Sometimes it’s “because I have raw ambition and I want that for myself as a career,” or, “I want to change my life in this big way,” but there can’t really be any end goal besides the words.
All that said, you should enjoy the moments of success. Selling and publishing your first book — and that success along the way — is the most incredible feeling. It’s definitely all ups and downs and people should be aware of it — but those are also our drinking stories, our battle stories. It should feel invigorating.
Jesse: What are you working on right now?
Jami: I’m working on a novel that I’ve written a third of. I kind of know what’s going to happen in the other two thirds and I’m really intrigued by it. But I have a lot of other matters in my life that I put on hold this year that I’m going to try to take care of before the end of the year, before I can fully commit myself to it. My hope is to have a first draft done by next summer. I think it’s going to be really great. It’s very different from things I’ve written in the past in a lot of ways. It has an interesting structure, a good title, it feels alive — and it’s just impatiently sitting in the corner tapping its foot waiting for me to engage with it again [laughs]. And then this other nonfiction project that I dabble in [the one I talked about earlier]. It’s about aging and family and keeping yourself going. I’m not really a self-helpy person, so I’m always interested in what keeps me going since I essentially just keep myself going.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Inspired? Get your story ready to submit to the 2024 Narratively Memoir Prize, judged by Jami Attenberg!
Jesse Sposato is Narratively’s executive editor. She also writes about social issues, feminism, health, friendship and culture for a variety of outlets. She is currently working on a collection of essays about coming of age in the suburbs.
Yunuen Bonaparte is a photo editor based in Brooklyn. She’s been part of the Narratively family since 2017.
Can't wait to read Jesse's essay collection about growing up in the suburbs