Day 11 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you are interested in the timeline of life.

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you are interested in the timeline of life. The past, present, and future: where these phases are distinct, and where they intersect. For yourself, the people in your life, the people you find fascinating, real or fictional alike. Maybe you’re thinking about big ideas about how we should behave over those phases—or how we should have behaved—and what we can learn from it now. How we treat each other. How we assert ourselves in the world. Or maybe you’re thinking about the things that get buried or trapped in us as life moves along. Perhaps you’re interested in the excavation of that past so that you can understand your present or prepare for the future. No better time than now to start understanding. No better time than now to start writing things down. One thousand words, today.

It’s day 11. I hope everything is rolling along for you. Do you have more than ten thousand words written by now? Holy shit, right? That’s a lot of words. Congratulations. I hope you sit with that for a second today.

Here in New Orleans it’s finally hot, like take your dog for a walk and come back a sticky mess hot. Already there are days I’m stuck inside for hours at a time. If we’re lucky we get a little rain in the afternoon. It’s good weather for daydreaming. When I wake up in the morning, I sit in bed for a while, playing with all the characters in my head. And then I’m just drinking coffee all day, listening to music, line editing on the page with my pen. I’m making a mess of everything but I think (I hope) in a good way. I thought yesterday: This is when things get weird. And also: This is when I do the real writing.

Today’s contributing writer is Crystal Hana Kim, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Stone Home (2024), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and If You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Crystal is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Of her writing, superstar Min Jin Lee says, “It is a privilege to read Crystal Hana Kim’s fiction, which both edifies and enlightens.”

I’ve met Crystal only at meals. In person, this spring, at a magical dinner with her and Emma Eisenberg and Rachel Khong, who were all in New Orleans for various literary festivals. Six weeks later I was in New York, and I went to dinner with her and some friends in Brooklyn. Even though we all ate pasta and our bellies were full, we went to a grocery store afterward and bought different kinds of ice cream treats, and then wandered up to a street corner near Grand Army Plaza, where we stood cramming everything into our mouths, all of us gossiping, and I felt happy to be a writer, and to know her, and all of those wonderful people.

Look, if I break bread with you twice, we’re well on the way to friendship. And I guess all of this seems to make even more sense when you consider this gorgeous essay by Crystal on how she creates safety for herself—and her characters—with food. I can’t wait to dine with her again.

Crystal has asked that her donation go to Red Canary Song. Today she speaks to as about assembling and disassembling as part of an artistic practice.

“Last month, I went to see textile artist Élise Peroi’s stunning screened tapestries at a gallery in Brooklyn, NY. The only visitor, I watched the light filter through the warp, overwhelmed by a desire to touch the taut lines, marveling at the painted portals of lush forests, a den of wolves. From a blue-eyed curator, I learned that Peroi painstakingly painted these images onto silk, cut them into thin ribbons, and then wove them back together, forming new shapes and textures. On the subway home, I realized the way Peroi constructs her art is the way I construct my writing—constantly assembling and disassembling until I reach a final form—and felt a new swell of gratification in this synchronicity. Peroi’s structures reminded me of the pleasure in the process.

Maybe you, too, feel a crushing wonder when writing and revising and writing again. I suspect you must, since you are here. How lucky are we to access such depths of sensation and feeling?

I’ve been haunting galleries lately because one of my characters is a textile artist. My characters’ obsessions become mine. Or, glanced at from another angle: my obsessions become my characters’. I’m in that part of the novel-making process where I have to inhabit the narrative world through my senses while I give myself distance from the text. I’ve been attending exhibitions, taking weaving classes, talking to artists.

I could never have gotten to this stage, though, without #1000wordsofsummer. At the beginning of 2024, I had an idea for my third novel and a few scraps of notes, but I kept finding excuses to avoid the most critical part: the writing. That June, I asked my friends Julia Phillips and Taylor Hahn if they’d like to do #1000wordsofsummer together. I knew that if I were accountable to others, I could trick myself out of this non-writing funk. For two weeks, I wrote whenever I could—during my kids’ nap and TV times, in the evening-dark with a glass of wine, on my phone in transit. Every night, we emailed each other our word counts.

Joining the #1000wordsofsummer challenge forced me to shed my usual first-draft delay tactics, to push through that incapacitating fear of the blank page (or screen). Instead, I jumped to the scenes and characters that most excited me, which Matt Bell describes in Refuse to Be Done as ‘writing the islands.’ When the fourteen days were over, I was elated: I had written over 15,000 words! My characters were finally moving around on the page! I could hear their voices, picture their tics, understand their biases!

But most significantly, I felt returned to myself.

I had forgotten, in the fog of a busy year, that writing into the unknown sustains me. Writing is when I feel the most grounded, most attuned to my senses. Maybe that’s how you feel, that you are not you without the writing. If so, this is your cue: get to the page right now, get to your truest self, to that wonder that writing opens inside us.”

Get to the page right now,

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.