Day 2 of #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you are trying to figure out what you know.

Just joining us? Here’s an FAQ, and here’s a little bit about me. We are fundraising for a dozen charities this year as well as our annual sponsorship of a Scholastic Book Fair for a school in New Orleans. Subscribe here, or you can also just venmo me a buck or two. It all goes toward the cause.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you are trying to figure out what you know. Your wisdom, experience, and growth. It isn’t always accessible. You must dig deep to get at the truth. Excavate it. Drag it up to the surface that is the blank page, dust it off, and see what was in you all this time. Maybe it’s not even for other people to read. Maybe it’s just for you. Maybe you’re just trying to put a stake in the ground: Here is what I have learned in this life. Here is the knowledge I have earned. Here are some of the best and most interesting parts of me. One thousand words of it at a time.

How was everyone’s first day? I loved seeing y’all on the slack (current invite link here) and all over the internet. You’re doing great. Now you just have to do it thirteen more times. Thirteen is nothing. And just think what you’ll have when you’re done with it all. A beautiful pile of words.

A note: Kristen Arnett and I did a livestream kickoff yesterday which you can watch here. There will be another one at the midpoint next Saturday with Alexander Chee.

Today commences our letters from our generous contributing writers. First up to bat is Karen Russell, who is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and, most recently, The Antidote, which Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah called, “An absolute wonder.” (For more on it, check out this stunning review in The New York Times by Victor LaValle.)

Amongst her many accolades, Karen is a Guggenheim Fellow, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Fellow which means she is a literal genius. I will always think fondly of her a brilliant baby writer—her first book, the incredible treasure St. Lucy’s Home for Girls came out when she was twenty-five years old. I remember meeting her for the first time at a reading in New York, so spunky and full of life, always with a little hustle in her step, and full of easy laughs even though she was already on her way to becoming one of the most celebrated writers in America. She is still that way, after all this time. As it turns out, it was not youth that buoyed her, so much as an incredible spirit.

She has asked that her donation go to a GoFundMe that will benefit the Pawnee Digital Archive and the Pawnee Nation College. Here's Karen on what she calls “Goals Magic”:

“For the past several weeks I’ve been on the road, promoting my novel. During the Q & As, kind people often ask smart and genuine questions about my writing routine, and I answer them with aspirational lies. The truth is that I haven’t been able to write much at all in 2025. Giving writing advice when I’m not actively writing myself can feel both fraudulent and hilarious to me; I’m like a guy lolling on a yoga mat covered in pizza crusts and tiny tequila bottles, shouting out fitness advice. I don’t think this period of not-writing will be indefinite, but I also now know better than to wait for an intervention from the Muse. So I’ll be committing to 1000 Words of Summer with you, and I’m grateful for a chance to share my own belated, related epiphany: goals are magic.

For most of my life, writing has been deeply private work. To call it a “process” can feel misleadingly orderly and linear to me; in my experience, it often feels more like a dream tsunami, followed by months or years of a massive beach clean-up: shell-collecting and collating, selection and curation, revision and reinterpretation. It’s obsessive, iterative, joyful, deranging work. After graduate school, I did my best writing at night, and I wouldn’t share a draft with anyone until it had a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Writing felt blissfully my own, free from the scrutiny that inflected so much of life. Friends of mine met to workshop their stories and novels; they created regular deadlines and benchmarks; they were an audience not only for each other’s books in progress, but for each other’s goals and intentions.

Like so much good advice, this all made sense to me—for other people. I was not willing to share a dream in utero, and I certainly could not imagine regularly sharing news of a story’s progress (or lack thereof). Some ancient combination of self-protection and shame kept me from wanting to let anybody too close to what was happening on my desktop.

But then several years ago, during the pandemic, a friend of mine—who also happens to be one of the most brilliant and disciplined writers I know—asked me if I’d like to share writing goals with her every week. I don’t remember the exact words she used, only her tone. She asked about my stalled book with extraordinary delicacy, the way the best doctors know how to make their gloved inquiries during an examination, confirming a diagnosis without causing undue pain. Then she shared this RX:

‘Don’t say you’re going to write a novel. Say you’re going to write two paragraphs of a novel. One chapter of a novel. Tell me your goals starting this Monday, and let me know if you meet them on Fridays. Even if you don’t meet them, text me. Stay honest. Try again. We can share our goals once a week, and our progress.’

Every week! I said yes, figuring I’d do it once and then throw down a block of dry ice and vanish into the fog.

But here’s the magical part of Goals Magic: we’ve now been exchanging Monday goals for almost two years. We mostly do meet these goals. It’s too easy for me to break a promise I make in secret to myself, particularly when it’s foredoomed by its outrageous scale on a nebulous timeline (i.e. my goal is to write a novel). But articulating a small, definite goal (‘I will write the challenging scene by the river’) to a person who I respect has often vaulted me over the many hurdles that can make it hard to sit down and put words in a row.

My friend intimidates me, and I mean that as a compliment. I often found myself scrambling to meet a goal because I’d made the commitment not just to myself but to her. I think this is key: find someone who you love and admire, someone to whom you really matter, someone who can both cheer you on and also kick your ass and (lovingly) call you on your bullshit. I know it really mattered to my friend that I finish my book. It matters to me that she meets her weekly goals. We are sincerely overjoyed by each other’s incremental, steady progress. There’s no shaming on our thread, but we do check in with curiosity whenever some unmet goal keeps rolling down the calendar like a lost bowling ball.

‘Velleity’ is a word I learned recently, a hauntingly perfect word for those days and nights (and I’ve had many of them) when the desire to write feels like a low-grade headache, or gray skies without rain. Velleity is ‘volition in the weakest form.’ A wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action. The wish to write can stain every minute of a life without ever solidifying into real words on paper. The practice of weekly accountability has been a powerful tool for us during those times when, as my friend says, ‘The wanting is the work.’

We discovered something in that first year of sharing goals: if we didn’t put writing at the top of our list, it didn’t happen. Our kids would get fed and cleaned and clothed and cared for regardless; student manuscripts were read and thoughtfully annotated; everybody got to their appointments; the laundry did its grim somersaults; commitments to other people and organization were kept. Making writing the #1 goal doesn’t mean we neglect our beloveds or starve our pets. It’s more like a tense shift, a phase change—turning up the gas-blue flame under a pot, heating water to a rolling boil. Moving from ‘I wish I could finish this’ to ‘I will write 1000 words today.’”

Good luck out there 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 bluesky and instagram.