Day 10 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you wanted to take a risk in your life.

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you are an intellectually adventurous person, and you wanted to take a risk in your life. You needed to see if writing these words was even possible, for the first time, perhaps, or maybe once again. When you approach your work today, think back to why you started this in the first place. What were you trying to learn about yourself? What were you trying to prove to yourself? Channel that energy today. Remember how you took a big leap to even be here. You decided you would do this. Why? And then write your way through those 1000 words.

My writing prompt for the morning is the vision of these abandoned party centerpieces I saw at 6 AM yesterday.

Longtime readers of this site will recognize Claire Cameron’s name because she is one of my first readers and one of my favorite people in the world. She is also an absurdly talented writer, writing compellingly and with great compassion about the environment, nature, literature and more for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. (Here is a letter of recommendation she wrote just last week in The New York Times Magazine.) I learn from her writing all the time.

Her most recent novel, The Last Neanderthal, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and has been published in eleven countries. Her second novel, The Bear, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. And I cannot recommend her new memoir, How to Survive a Bear Attack, enough. It has been a national bestseller in Canada for months now.

Claire has asked that her donation go to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, and she writes to us this morning about finding magic in your process:

“Do you ever have those days when your writing feels uninspired?

This happened to me a few weeks ago. On page 15 of my novel-in-progress, I had set a wildfire. Now it was getting closer to the house and a stranger had just shown up on foot—he approached from the woods, not the road. With all this going on, why did the writing feel flat?

My pages needed a little magic. To explain how I found it, I have to go back.

When I was young, at bedtime my dad told me the story of Beowulf. An epic poem, one of the earliest written examples of Old English, Beowulf is dated from around AD 1000. The hero, Beowulf, fights three monsters, each one more terrifying than the one that came before.

My dad’s version of Beowulf had everything: shining swords, brave acts, fierce battles, and gold cups. Of the three monsters, I loved the first, Grendel, the most. He was an outcast prone to bouts of jealous rage. In their first battle, Beowulf ripped off Grendel’s arm and pinned it above the door in the mead hall. Grendel’s mother had to go and get it back for him.

I remember my dad explaining the idea of a kenning in Beowulf. A kenning is a description, usually two words, that stand in for a noun. For example, whale-road means ocean.

When my dad told me about kennings, I immediately understood their magic. Whale and road—these two words don't have a direct connection, but when brought together, a new relationship can be unlocked. When one word lends meaning to the other, they can shift your perspective.

This is the trick to a kenning: You have to let them work their magic.

When I think of the ocean as a whale-road, I’m no longer a person on the shore looking out over the water. I’m in the depths of the ocean, opening my eyes in the brine, moving through a cold channel as the kelp sways. The two words combine to become less like a label and more like an orientation—a new way of seeing.

A few of my favorite kennings: A bracelet is an arm-serpent. An eye is an eyelash-moon. A life is a day-count.

Back to my novel-in-progress, I had set the wildfire, the stranger approached, and it was all flat. To figure out what to do, I started by writing a list of kennings. They had a vague connection to the scene (I used a few of my favorites, but there are lists of kennings online, or sometimes I write new ones.)

Fire is wind’s brother. Before the house starts to burn, I decided to focus on the sound of the wind. If it’s closely related to fire—they are brothers—the characteristics of the wind in the days leading up to ignition might be a warning. How much did the wind know? By thinking through the relationship between the two, the fire in my pages started to burn with more life.

I kept going. If the chest is the thought-land, maybe my main character feels a greater range of things than she is conscious about. Does she intuit something true, a prior relationship to the stranger? Every answer she needs lies between her ribs—but does she trust that feeling in her chest? The kenning gave me ideas to play with. I found tensions inside her.

While I don’t write kennings into my manuscript, I use them to bring a fresh slant, or perspective, to my words. They cast a spell. When my work is flat, it’s often because I’m pressing to hit a word count or goal. I forget the point of writing: To enjoy it.

That’s the true magic of kennings. They remind me that I love sitting down to write and working with words. I remember to play.

While you are writing today, I hope the idea of kennings, or using them, will send a little magic your way.”

Here’s to a little magic today.

Jami

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