Day 10 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

If you’re just joining us now, Day 1 of this project starts here, and you can access all the archives here. Here is a FAQ. There is also a slack.

This year I published a companion book to this project containing the words of 54 contributing writers and it is wonderful and helpful. You can buy it anywhere books are sold.

This project is also a fundraiser! We are three thousand dollars away from our goal. Please consider subscribing.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because words can help us bridge a gap between ourselves and the rest of the world. Be it peers or family members or strangers on the internet. Even if you’re just writing these words in a journal, never meant to be seen, it can help you become a better communicator in your life. And you sense this, you know this, and you want this. By writing these 1000 words you are creating an opportunity for yourself. You are opening up the possibility for connection.

Day 10, if you can believe it. How’s it going for you? Can I tell you how it’s going for me? I’m actually really loving what I’m writing, and that honestly does not happen for me every year. Jennine’s letter really hit me, and it helped me to just go into writing knowing I could throw it all away. And that really freed up a lot of space in me to try new things. It’s such a mess but there’s a throughline, a definite beating heart, and I’m working out a lot by writing it. It feels good to write these words. Who knows what will happen with them? I’m just glad I took the time to write them.

Today’s contributing writer is Bobby Finger. Bobby is probably best known as the co-creator and host of the Who? Weekly podcast aka the most perfect pop culture podcast ever. He is a keen observer of all things Nancy Meyers, and has also written for New York, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Jezebel, where he was a contributing writer for three years. He is also, for what it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot to me, a kind person, and a true fan of culture, of film and music and literature. He is someone who believes in the quality of things, and I think that translates to all his work.

Because don’t sleep on his fiction, baby. I am always excited to see what he is up to next. This week, I have been reading his new book, Four Squares. I find it extremely charming and funny but also very bittersweet and moving, which is how I felt about his first novel, The Old Place. I think you would like it if you are, say, a Laurie Colwin fan. People called it, “A charming, heartwarming novel,” and Booklist said, “Finger’s dialogue is exquisite, and his characters are unforgettable…it’s is a readable and cinematic tribute to queer love and friendship.”

It comes out a week from tomorrow and it is a perfect summer read and you can pre-order it from his local bookshop and get a signed copy. He has asked that his donation go to SAGE. Today Bobby writes to us about trusting ourselves:

“I love book covers. I love admiring them, rolling my eyes at them, and noticing the seasonal trends as they rotate across the tables of all my favorite bookstores. The pinks fade into blues, the blues into oranges, the text from small to big, from big to even bigger. But something I never really thought about until publishing my first book is how little I actually know about them. Who designs them? Who decides what they look like? Why do they make those decisions in the first place? Words can be artfully translated into images in countless ways via a skillset I do not have; there are storytellers who tell stories, and then there are storytellers who tell the stories of the stories. 

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a cover for my first novel. It was a color I hadn’t anticipated, in a style I never could have imagined, and with a typeface I’d never seen before. It had been designed by a wildly talented designer who read my words and translated them to something visual—something urgent and arresting. When asked for feedback, I frantically emailed my agent. How do I respond? What am I allowed to say? ‘You can say anything you want,’ she told me, dryly. ‘But just remember that they don’t have to listen.’ I had to trust them to do their work to the best of their ability, just as I’d been trusted to do the same.

It’s easy to get distracted by—or even enamored with—everyone else’s job in the publishing world, especially when you’re struggling with your own. Daydreaming about covers instead of writing what inspires them, wondering if your idea is marketable when you’ve only got an outline, fearing a cruel edit months before the draft is even due—all of that is a trap, and I say this as someone who is constantly ensnared in it. The only way out, I’ve found, is through your own work; it’s in the peculiar writing routine that’s productive for you and no one else (I will never be a morning writer, and that’s fine), the completion of paragraph you’re so proud of that it almost excuses you from missing your word count goal for the day, the following week’s realization that the paragraph you once loved is actually pretty fucking terrible, and the unparalleled satisfaction that arrives when you’ve finished something that you started. Long before covers and editors (or even agents) get into the mix, the writing is the work.

My first draft of The Old Place wasn’t a novel at all, but a screenplay, one I wrote and rewrote until sending it to a generous friend who said succinctly upon finishing, ‘Don’t you think this should be a novel?’ It was a question that only I could answer, as it was a story that was only mine to tell. What the cover should ultimately look like is, frankly, none of my business. In what form should the story be told? What structure should the story take? How should the prose be written? These are the questions I can answer, and the questions I should always prioritize. The words are our thing, and if you’re lucky, they come a thousand at a time. 

The point is this: over the past few years I’ve learned that this whole ridiculous and wonderful ordeal comes down to trust. Trust in the many-pronged process of traveling from completed manuscript to bookstore, of course, but before any of that, before anyone else gets their hands in the mix, it’s trust in yourself. Trust that not only you have a story worth telling, but the ability to write it all down. And if you’re reading this, then trust me. You’ve got both.”

Today is a good day to trust yourself.

Jami

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