The Art of Being A Full-Time Writer

with New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg

“The Art of” is a series where I talk to interesting people in creative fields about what they do and how they do it. Today’s interview is with Jami Attenberg. She’s the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including The Middlesteins, All Grown Up and a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. She’s also the creator of the annual online group writing accountability project #1000wordsofsummer, which inspired the recently published USA Today bestseller 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Earlier this year, I produced a show about her craft book for 1A where Jami joined writers Isaac Fitzgerald and Deesha Philyaw to talk about how to actually write a book! Her tenth book, publishing September 24, 2024, is A Reason to See You Again. She lives in New Orleans. You can find her online regularly at Craft Talk. This interview was conducted over email <3

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HB: At this point, you've been writing for several decades, and your 10th book is coming out this month. So much of writing success is rooted in the resolve to keep going. How have you written through the moments you felt totally done with being a writer?

JA: I just don't know if I've ever felt truly done with being a writer. It's the thing I decided to go all in on in my life and I've never been able to find something else I wanted to do as much—or even really at all. At my core, even if I'm having a bad writing day, or I've gotten a bad review, or I've gotten any kind of rejection, I still know this is the thing I'm waking up to do every day. My creative self is really my identity, so to reject it would be the same as rejecting myself. I think once I understood that, then everything got a lot easier in terms of being motivated to write, even as the career of being a writer has gotten more challenging in general as time has gone on.

HB: Wisdom can sometimes come from weird places. What's the weirdest or most surprising lesson you've learned about writing?

JA: I don't know if I have a superlative here, but I'm always surprised again and again by how all writers—and our issues—are basically the same more or less. I shall illustrate by example: This spring I kept writing new beginnings for the book I am writing now, and I had done this for a month or two, and it was driving me nuts. I emailed Meg Wolitzer because she knows everything about writing and always knows what to say. And one of the things she told me was that re-starting the beginning of a book was actually quite common and it was just part of the process. It made me feel better about what was happening, and soon enough the real beginning of the book emerged. 

Then Elif Batuman recently wrote about her struggle to find the beginning of her book and I thought: I am not alone in this. Not that I wish anyone the struggle to find the beginning—or any kind of struggle with their writing—but it was a relief to find that this is a universal challenge, one that is usually resolved by time.

HB: I understand that you're a full-time writer which, for many writers, is the dream! How did you eventually manage to "quit your day job"?

JA: Well, first I wrote three novels that did not allow me to quit my day job and in fact I got myself into significant debt. But you have to start somewhere. It wasn't until my fourth book, which was a bestseller and which opened up all kinds of new doors for me, that I was able to quit taking office jobs. I was able to get more teaching and speaking gigs because of that book, and also I sold it in a bunch of foreign languages, too. But I was definitely not an overnight success story, and it took me six or seven years of hustling, doing any freelance copywriting gig I could find, for example, while I would write my books on the side. It was challenging. But I really wanted it.

I'll add it was strange to be in corporate America with no ambitions within my 9-5 existence, and sometimes I wondered what was wrong with me. Because I did not feel like a lazy person and in fact I would prefer to be working than not. But it was just that I was not at the correct job for me. And I just needed to write my way toward the right one.

Jami’s tenth book, A Reason to See You Again, is out September 24, 2024!!!