Day 2 of #1000wordsofsummer 2023

If you’re just joining us, yes you can start today! Here’s the first day’s letter, and here’s an FAQ. 100% of this month’s donations go to charity so please consider subscribing.

If you’re interested, a book version of 1000 WORDS will be published in January 2024.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you need to express something very specifically for yourself, to yourself, and by working your way through this, writing these 1000 words, you’ll put yourself on the path to understanding it. You have a sincere and passionate inquisitiveness about it. That gorgeous jewel of an idea. It’s waiting to shine for you in your 1000 words. Today.

Welcome to the second day of #1000wordsofsummer. I’ve asked 13 incredible authors to contribute their thoughts on writing, process, creativity, productivity and more. Each author will select a charity, and your subscriptions this month will be divided amongst those charities.

Lucky us, we are blessed today with thoughts from the Clint Smith. You can order signed copies of his books directly from his local bookstore, the stellar Loyalty Books. He has selected Voice of the Experienced as his charity.

Clint is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, amongst numerous other awards. He is also the author of two books of poetry, including Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. You can watch him here on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

I recently saw him give a standing room only hometown reading at Baldwin & Company in New Orleans on behalf of his newly released New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground. It was an extremely special night. People were so proud of him, excited for his success. A loving community cheering him on. He was humble, generous and inspiring. It was a thrill to watch it all.

The next day he and I had brunch and I asked him about his origin story as a writer, then begged him to share it here with you all.

Here’s Clint on early drafts of your work (and yourself):

“Growing up I did not think I was going to be a writer. My dream was to be a professional soccer player in Europe, playing for a team like Arsenal under the stadium lights in North London. I was considered a good player in my area, making the All-City and All-State teams in high school. Still, in the context of soccer, it was a small pond. At some point, it became clear that southern Louisiana was not necessarily a hotbed of elite soccer talent preparing kids to compete on the global stage.

I was good enough, however, to get a college soccer scholarship to play at tiny Davidson College in North Carolina, even though when I arrived I largely sat on the bench for four years.  I came to have what amounted to an 18-year-old’s existential crisis, in which the thing that had been central to my identity over the course of my life, was something that I wasn’t really good at anymore. I was fortunate, however, to be at a small liberal arts school that encouraged student-athletes to figure out who they were off the field.

In the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I had an internship in New York City, and on one Friday night my friend, Marianna, asked me if I wanted to join her at the Nuyorican Poets Café, a legendary poetry spot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I had never heard of the Nuyorican, and frankly was more interested in going to see ‘Mission Impossible 2.’ But Marianna convinced me to join her, ensuring me that Tom Cruise would still be there tomorrow, and we hopped on the train heading downtown.

At the Nuyorican there was a DJ playing old school hip-hop, a bartender serving drinks, and a group of people doing the electric slide in the back of the room. This was unlike any poetry reading I was familiar with. That night, I experienced poetry in a way I never had. The way the poems lived—not just on the page—but in people’s bodies, in their movements, in their breath as they read their work aloud. I had never been so viscerally moved by art as I had been that night. I left the venue saying to myself, I still don’t really know what this thing is, but I want to do it.

I went back to Davidson that semester, and got permission, and financial support, from the school to start a new poetry club. We would meet on Sunday nights on the top floor of our main academic building, and we’d read poems, watch poems, write poems, and share poems. We basically cosplayed ‘Dead Poets Society.’ It was a blast. This is when writing became a consistent part of my life. This is when I was able to get a clearer sense of who I was beyond the field. It made literature feel like something I could be a part of, as a participant and not just a reader.

I say all of this, in part, because ten years later, when I sat down to write How the Word Is Passed, the lessons of my time as an athlete helped me navigate the process. I probably spent a year and a half writing 40,000 words that never ended up anywhere in the book or even the book proposal. I wrote 3 different versions of what I thought would be the first chapter of the book, getting a bit closer each time, but knowing as I finished them, that these early drafts were not meant to be part of the book I was trying to write. Ultimately, all that writing unlocked something, and I finally wrote a draft of the first chapter of the story I had been trying to get to the entire time.

But I had to write those 40,000 words to get to those first words of what would become the book. There is this idea that when one sits down to write, all of the ideas and language and structure should be there, and that if it’s not, you aren’t meant to be a writer. But that simply isn’t true. I think of writing in the same way I think of practicing for a sport. You can’t just show up to the field on game day and expect to be ready to play. You have to put in hours and hours and hours of work in practice, in spaces most people will never see, in order to prepare you to perform well in the game.

Writing a book is the same thing. You don’t just sit down to write the book and have it all automatically pouring out of you. Sometimes you have to spend a lot of time writing things that people will never see, but it is that writing—that process on thinking, exploring, and excavating on the page—that makes it possible to find the language you will ultimately have in your book.

Don’t be discouraged by early drafts that you ultimately don’t use. Those drafts are a necessary part of the process. They are practice. And with each draft you are getting closer to where you need to be. Keep going.”

Keep going,

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.