1000 Words of Summer 2026 - Day 11

Write for those who can't.

I handed the reins of the store over to artist Brooke Pickett and she made a bunch of fun color variations for the 1000 Words merch. Check them all out in the store.

Also, we are still trying to cross that finish line on our fundraising goals. Subscribe, venmo or read more about it here.

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Hi friends.

Today we write 1000 words. Because you’re writing for those people who can’t.

I send a letter about this every year but it’s always worth mentioning. If you’re reading this in a safe environment and have access to the supplies you need to write, pens, paper, a notebook, a computer, you are fortunate. If you have had access to information, education, books, and support in your life, you are privileged. A stable internet connection. The lights on overhead. If you have time. The goddamn wherewithal, whatever that might mean for you, is an exceptional gift. And if you have the freedom of speech, you should not take it for granted.

Think about the idea of solidarity today as you work your way through those 1000 words. Think about writing today simply because you’re lucky you can.

I’m so thrilled to have this next contributing writer as a part of 1000 Words this year. Stefan Block is an old, dear friend who is the author of four books and has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, GRANTA and more. He is also co-owner of Skate Time, a beloved local roller rink, should you find yourself in Upstate New York.

When I met him when he was a baby writer with a big, exciting debut, The Story of Forgetting, which was published when he was just 26 years old. He was gifted, fun, well-traveled, open-minded and erudite. His work was characterized by a deeply poetic and sensitive literary quality—a true pleasure to read. He has been a great friend to me over the years, a thoughtful correspondent and reader of my work, and I have watched him grow into a great human being. I am always happy to see his face.

And then, after all this time, how exciting it was to see his debut memoir Homeschooled, become a Read with Jenna pick and land on the New York Times bestseller list. I could not recommend this book more to parents, educators, those of you trying to write memoir, or anyone just looking for a compelling, beautifully written story.

He has asked that his donation go to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. Today he graciously talks to us about those ups and downs of his writing career and how the downs enabled a certain kind of freedom.

“You’ve heard it before: a writer must live with rejection. That’s generally the first piece of advice the publishing world hands to aspiring writers, and I don’t think I’ve met an author who would disagree. Still, the way this advice arrives is often wrapped in the glow of later success. Stephen King’s Carrie received thirty rejections from publishers, and it wouldn’t exist at all as a book had his wife not saved it from the trashcan where he’d dumped it in frustration. Jack London supposedly received six hundred rejection letters before publishing his first short story!

What these stories can seem to imply is that once you are on the other side of rejection —once you get a big yes from a big publisher— you will either be past the rejection stage or safely beyond its worst sting. But rejection that comes after success is its own kind of agony, and it’s one that most of us will face at some point. Maybe you already have.

Actually, for me, rejection mostly came later. I got lucky young — I’ve since wondered if in fact my age was part of why I got so lucky— but after selling my first novel well at twenty-four, a different reality set in. I got dropped by one publisher, then another. There were also some victories along the way, but by my late thirties I was hard at work on my fourth novel, and felt acutely the financial pressures of having two young children, and a writing career that appeared mostly on the wane. It seemed to me that if I couldn’t find a publisher this time, then I might actually have arrived to the end of my writing life.

But what to do with that worry? All I could really do, I felt, was to ask myself the questions that I believe any writer should. Are you writing the book that only you could write? Are you writing the book you would most want to read? Are you writing what you must, what Colm Toibin calls, ‘the stuff that won’t go away’? Are you, as Anne Enright advises, writing the book you would still have to write even ‘if you had a terminal disease’? Or, to push the point even further, are you writing ‘posthumously,; as Jefferey Eugenides advises, unworried about current literary fashions and focusing instead on what the already-dead you would have wished he’d left behind?

I tried to believe my answer to all was yes, and I worked on that novel for years, through revision after meticulous revision. And yet, in the end, I could not find a publisher for it. I was nearly forty now, and this failure set off a glum season of reckoning. I spent a month or two wondering what else to do with the second half of my working life.

But while pondering this question, and accepting its logic into my heart, I also had another thought: if I’m no longer a writer, if I’ve already called it quits, then maybe that frees me up — as a writer! To have failed out seemed to me just then like the closest to Eugenides’s advice I might ever come.

Now that my career was over, the only possible reason to still write was because writing felt essential, even if it would never be published. Which meant that I could just write whatever I wanted. I could actually write the book I wished I’d written before I quit, the one that scared me most, and which I knew I might never find the courage to publish anyway. A memoir, based on a pile of childhood memories I’d been jotting down since my mother died.

Expecting nothing, but feeling unhinged when I couldn’t write something each day, I began work on my memoir in mostly ashamed secrecy, typing away in those hours when I should have been working on my job for money, or sleeping. At no point along this journey would I have guessed that this manuscript would turn out to be what it has, a book that has surely found many more readers than all my others combined.

I believe now that it took my acceptance that I’d failed out to finally rid myself fully of worries about whether my book would sell, to stop trying to anticipate what readers might want from me, and to just write the book I truly needed to write—which, I guess, turned out to be precisely what readers wanted from me.

But I know this isn’t the end of the story, because I’ve learned that’s not how an author’s career works. Surely further failures are down the road, or maybe just around the corner. It would be disingenuous to say that we should receive these failures gratefully for what they have to teach us, but if they are indeed inevitable, we might at least try to appreciate the way that these setbacks remind us (sometimes repeatedly) of our answer to the most important question, the one that is behind why we started to write in the first place: do I really have to write, no matter what? In some ways, of course, a ‘yes’ is a hard life sentence, but once failure shows you the answer to that question, you can start again, trying to answer all the others.”

Write today—no matter what.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer from May 30-June 12, and, year-round, a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.