Day 11 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. Note: The slack will be closed for the year starting July 1.

This year I published a companion book to this project containing the words of 54 contributing writers and it is wonderful and helpful. “The Today Show” recommended it! Go on, treat yourself to a little inspiration.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you don’t want to waste another second wondering if you could have. There was that thing you wished you could start (or finish) writing someday. Or all that time you wanted to spend with your thoughts figuring some shit out. Well, you can, you’re doing it right now. You’re already here. It’s day 11 and if you’ve made it this far then you’re almost done. You’ve already actually succeeded. You just have to make it a little further. And I am here to tell you that you absolutely can make it to the end. I know it. I’ve seen it happen. This is our seventh year. I’ve been watching you all succeed for a long time. You got this.

Now let’s go write. One thousand words, right now.

In September, my tenth book—my eighth work of fiction—comes out. It’s been five years since I’ve had a novel out. I am nervous and excited for you to read it. You can pre-order it anywhere but if you pre-order it here I will personalize it for you. In honor of #1000wordsofsummer, my literary publisher Ecco is doing an instagram sweepstakes giveaway of the galley, which is a very nice thing for them to do. (They are wonderful people over there at Ecco.) Click away to enter.

Today’s contributor, Jane Marie, is someone who has had her fingers in so many cool projects over the years. She is a former producer of “This American Life,” hosted the podcasts “The Dream” (so deeply fascinating!) and “DTR” and has appeared in Jezebel, Cosmopolitan, The Toast, and more. She’s also won Peabody, Emmy, and Webby awards and was a co-editor of The Hairpin (RIP), which we all loved so much a long time ago.

She is, most recently, the author of Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans which is a super riveting look at multilevel marketing schemes and how they profit off the American working class. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it, “an urgent and riveting exposé.” Here she is talking about it on “The Daily Show.”

I was interested in Jane’s thoughts on writing because she has written, edited, and presented so many kinds of things, some that are meant to be read, some that are meant to be heard, some that are meant to be watched. She understands different kinds of storytelling. She also has a willingness to evolve her career in different formats while still staying true to her own voice and the stories she wants to tell. She seems like a real dynamo!

Jane Marie has asked for her donation go to CASA of LA. Here she is on the “chaos piles” of writing:

“I started my career as an editor for some of the best writers in the world. As a producer at ‘This American Life,’ I helped our contributors shape their stories for the radio, usually taking a draft written for the page and rejiggering it to sound more ‘talky.’ Also getting rid of the stuff that was too complicated for a listener to keep in their head while driving: long flashbacks, beautiful alliterative sentences that sound totally stupid out loud, descriptions of characters that have nothing to do with the part of the story we’re telling (often we would excerpt something from a book). When I became a writer myself, I had to learn to put all that stuff back in, and it was very hard at first, which is why I started out blogging instead of writing books.

When I began doing my own writing, I was still making radio so my process was very auditory. I hear the words, I ruminate on them for hours or days or weeks until the right paragraph comes together in my head and then I write it down. If it’s the correct beginning, I can usually keep going. This ‘method,’ I felt at the time, sucked. It made me distracted, sleepless, and inefficient. So I read The Artist’s Way and other books about writing in an effort to become a ‘real’ writer, imagining you all wake up, have coffee, go to your writing studio, sit down and start banging on keys. (Later I found out that was only John Updike and like Danielle Steele, probably.)

At the heart of it, I’m a rule follower so I figured with enough effort I could become a disciplined author…I also worried a TON about writing correctly. But I like starting sentences with ‘but,’ especially run on sentences that aren’t concise and feel like a breathless child recounting a trip to an amusement park and feature nonsense words from rap lyrics such as ‘brrrrr’ which is probably very outdated now that no one cares that much about Gucci Mane, even though his wife is one of the most beautiful women in the world. That sort of shit. I tried to change, and I hated it and felt bored by my own work, so I gave up and decided to amuse myself instead.

Writing still feels like creating a bunch of chaos piles in my head and then barfing them out every few weeks, and that’s OK. Not ideal, as I’d much rather have the coffee and the desk and maybe a bird to keep me company at my writing cabin in the woods, but that wasn’t who my parents built. They built this person who as an elementary school student completely froze when asked to fill up a page with a story on the spot. I usually got as far as ‘Once upon a time…’ before opting for the F. I now call myself a writer and sometimes make a little bit of money doing it, which my 10-year-old self would think is complete bullshit. I like surprising her.”

Here’s to surprising ourselves 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 twitter and instagram.