No. 15 Heart Breaker Feature: Jenna-Marie Warnecke

The No. 15 Heart Breaker issue explores love and loss and everything in between. Jenna-Marie Warnecke wrote “Dance Slow” for the issue and we had the pleasure of interviewing her.

Can you first tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from/what do you do?

I grew up in Arizona, but I'm a city girl at heart, and have lived in both Paris and New York. I'm currently in NYC.

How did you get into writing?

I was a total book nerd as a child - I spent many recesses and lunch breaks in my own nook in the school library - and loved making up stories about strangers. I made my first attempt at a novel when I was about 14, and I wish to God I still had that half-formed thing! My mom was a high school English Lit teacher, so I'm sure that helped. I remember that, when I was around thirteen years old, I wrote a poem that she treated very seriously. Her encouragement of it seemed different than if you were just trying to be nice to a kid, and, whether that was true or not, it gave me the confidence to think that writing was something I might be good at.

What is your favorite thing to write about?

I find myself writing most often about people who finally get what they want most in the world and then deeply regret it, or are deeply disappointed by it. I find there is a lot of room for both comedy and tragedy there. I'm also drawn to female characters who find agency through trauma, as well as eccentric aunts, misunderstood sluts, and general weirdos.

What is it like being a TV Writer?

It's really fun to take what I know from writing fiction and being a video editor and marry the two - how to deeply develop a character as well as how to make sure a situation will read quickly onscreen. I've always written my stories from a visual standpoint, so writing for the screen was a natural next branch on my tree.

What inspired your piece featured in Heart Breaker, "Dance Slow"?

It actually came from a pretty vague prompt to write a short story about summer. When I thought of summer, my main feeling was just of how visceral the season is, how aware we become of sensations and flavors and smells, how "in the body" we feel when days are hot and long and languid. I wanted to capture that feeling, so I traced the story from body part to body part. Also, in the summer I always feel this melancholy sense of ephemerality, an obligation to be outside, to make the most of the days, to stay out late simply because the weather feels good and it won't feel good forever. I think there is something heartbreaking in that, too. So that gave me a secondary goal to craft the story around what these body parts are and feel like right now, but also what they will become in the future, and how we can feel what seems like endless love in the moment but how it can all be destroyed with time. The story really clicked for me when I changed the title from the very boring "Slow Dance" to "Dance Slow" because that gave it some power. It became a directive, a warning not to rush into the future, because you don't know what unspeakably sad things wait for you there.

What does the term "Heart Breaker" mean to you?

In French they call it a "heart butcher," which seems a more accurate term for the cruel and vicious thing we mean when we call someone a heartbreaker. But that's what we're risking when we enter into love, isn't it? Any kind of love, a friendship or romantic relationship or having children or accepting a dream job or meeting our heroes. We are risking sadness, rejection, and disappointment for the possibility of joy; we're taking off the cage of our ribs and saying, Here, take it. Do what you will. We're trusting the other party to be tender with our tender selves. And sometimes they can't.

How has the pandemic affected your writing?

At first I had a big burst of productivity - the first thing I did was write a truly atrocious novel draft - but I think I was just trying to justify my existence and fill the hours. I was really afraid to be bored. And it worked in that regard, but in the second half of 2020 I really suffered from a dearth of ideas. I just felt totally juiceless, I think because creative people need newness and spontaneity and encounters to stimulate our minds, and, stuck inside, the richness of life has disappeared. The texture of every day just became so terribly smooth and dull, and it fogs your creative abilities.

My attention span also suffered tremendously as I got stuck in a social media and news loop the more intense everything became, pretty much through January. I've only recently been able to rebuild my focus and work little by little on new projects again... but that feels good. I have a feeling that, as the world begins to open up again, there will be an explosion of creative work around the world, as 1) we will finally be able to put a boundary around our trauma to begin to process it, and 2) we will be stimulated once again by a world we're able to engage with.

What advice would you give to writers with writer's block?

If you're working on a project, I would say to try three things: 1) Just write a few lines to get you to the next part, and rewrite the crappy stuff later. 2) Get up and do something else - take a walk, do your dishes. Get out of your head and activate what Maya Angelou calls your "little mind" instead of your "big mind." 3) Work on a different section of your project, or a different project altogether. Once, while working on a novel, I had such a bad case of writer's block that I wrote an entire TV pilot just to avoid working on the novel.

If you're not on a project, and you're just feeling juiceless, don't fret. It will come back. It always does. Make some terrible art or play an instrument or sing; just do something with a different part of your brain. Your writing brain probably needs to rest.

Any writing plans for the future?

Yes, I'm working on a few projects now and also starting to write audio essays. We're lucky to live in an age where there are so many ways to tell stories.

Follow Jenna along on her Twitter @JennaWarnecke and on her website!