Day 12 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because maybe you want to write something as a kind of offering to the world. As in: these are my smarts, these are my ideas, these are my feelings, this is my sense of humor, this is my pain and how I recovered from it (or are maybe still recovering), these are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, this is what inspires me and maybe it will inspire you, this is what I know to be fucking true. This is what I have to offer and this is how I offer it: through these 1000 words.

We talk a lot about what we gain from writing with this project, and that’s important, but can you think about what you’re offering with your work today?

A few notes before we get to the contributing writer today:

-I know that some of you have come in late and also some of you like to do an extra two weeks (or more!) of this project since you have now developed some momentum. I wish that I could keep the slack open year round but then that would be my job and I already have a job which is writing books. So the slack will remain open through Sunday, June 30, and then it will close until next year. If you are looking for continued support or camaraderie, I highly recommend trying to connect with a few people on the slack to see if you can create your own little side group out of it. People have been doing this for years and I have heard many success stories.

-The last #1000wordsofsummer letter will come this Friday. Then I will disappear for a week (or so) because frankly my hands hurt from all the typing I have done and also my brain needs a break too. Then we will resume regularly scheduled programming here, which, if you are a new subscriber, is generally a free weekly email from me talking about all different kinds of stages of the writing process, and trying to encourage you along the way. I possibly will do a Mini 1000 this fall but if I do it, it would have to be around Labor Day weekend, which, is that fun for anyone or just me? We will see.

-I will gently remind you this is a fundraiser. The big ticket item is sponsoring a Scholastic Book Fair for an entire school in New Orleans. (Here are pictures from last year’s book fair and I defy you not to feel good looking at them.) We are just 2k short of our goal, and there are 40,000 of you left with free subscriptions out there. I know we can do this. If you can spare a few, please consider doing so.

One of the great pleasures of running this project is asking talented people who are committed to their work to contribute a letter, and then getting to think about—and then write about—why I admire them. It was very fun to think about why I asked Rachel Khong to do it because I have some very specific and pleasing thoughts about her.

For a long time Rachel ran this incredible co-working space in San Francisco called The Ruby, which is powered by a collective of Bay Area women and nonbinary writers and artists. Sometimes when visiting authors passed through town, all weary and exhausted from life on the road, she let some of us sleep there, in this upstairs room, which was like a little writer’s studio, with a comfortable bed and a patio and all the cool books you would ever want to read, and when you rose and were ready to embrace the day, you opened the door and downstairs there would be all these nice, smart people working on interesting projects. I like to think the energy from that space, all those people making things they loved and supporting each other, filtered into me while I slept—I always slept really well there.

I’d like to thank Rachel for inviting me into The Ruby and giving me a calm yet inspiring place to sleep surrounded by so much good energy. It was a place to collect strength before I headed out again into the world.

I’d also like to thank Rachel for writing two brilliant books that I deeply enjoyed reading. The first, Goodbye, Vitamin, which was so dark, funny, fresh, and moving, won the California Book Award for First Fiction Then there is the New York Times bestselling Real Americans, which came out in late April, and was selected for The Today Show book club. The Los Angeles Times called Real Americans, “A…masterful, shape-shifting novel about multiracial identity.” It is an epic and important piece of writing and I highly recommend it.

She toured really hard for that book and I hope she had some nice places to sleep along the way.

She has asked that her donation go to Community Partners International and you can order her book through Skylight Books. Today she talks about the pace of writing:

“Writing isn’t a race, though it can feel like it. Lately I’ve been thinking about speed. My second book was recently published, seven years after my debut novel. This past month, I’ve had to talk a lot about writing said book. But I’ve found it impossible to capture and describe what it was actually like. ‘Years’ is so easy to say and to type. But those years were made of days, hours, minutes—countless moments of discouragement, a compounding feeling of failure. The process isn’t exactly a tellable story.

What is the process? For me, it’s those hours and years; it’s filling notebooks, it’s daydreaming on long walks. It’s wearing holes into my sweatpants. It’s setting my timer. It’s cutting my fingernails. It’s the pendulum of feeling frustrated and feeling ecstatic. It’s all the just-okay days in between. Writing can be messy; writing can be uncomfortable. As a society, we prefer tidy narratives of success to the muck in the middle.

But here’s a secret that writers get to be in on: The messy middle is a fascinating place to be. It’s where we get to be in dialogue with ourselves. It’s where we get to learn what obsesses us and what moves us. It’s where we get to push up against our limits, and attempt to reach beyond them. It’s where we get to experiment, in privacy. At times, that messiness can feel unpleasant, but I promise it isn’t permanent. All you have to do is keep working, keep being curious. There’s a distinct satisfaction that comes with doing something difficult—reaching for an insight, or turn of phrase, or plot point that’s just out of reach, and eventually reaching it. Nothing compares. What an incredible privilege writing is: that we get to explore what interests and enthralls us, and try to do it a little bit better every day.

We are steeped in capitalist conditioning that wants us to believe that having a book to sell is the most important thing. Of course it wants us to believe that; that’s how capitalism sustains itself. Social media invites us to compare, to wonder if everyone is writing better and faster than we are. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. It doesn’t actually matter. I’m interested in divesting from conditioned ‘values’ like hustle, overwork, speed. ‘Move fast and break things’ is the order of the day, but in writing we can move slow and put things, slowly, together. What kind of writing is produced when we are interested in patience, gentleness, courage, humility?

If you’re in the messy middle, and things are hard, and you can’t see a way out, I want you to know that you are not alone. I’m at the beginning of a new project, so I’m right there with you. But I have faith in the process. I have faith in myself, and I have faith in you. Write what you need to, and write at your own pace, whether that's fast or slow. I was an inchworm in a highway tunnel, and everyone seemed like a convertible, speeding past me. But the thing about inching is that it moves you forward, too. Inch by inch is how, eventually, you reach the light.”

Good luck with this twelfth day of #1000wordsofsummer. You’re almost home.

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.