Day 3 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

Yes, you can start today, and still catch up. Day 1 is here.

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There is a FAQ which will hopefully answer all your questions about this project.

There is a slack where you can connect with other writers.

There is a companion book to this project and it is wonderful and helpful.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you love writing. You are passionate about the act. You sap, you. You have shown up here today because you love to spend time on the page, in your head, in your heart. And so you will begin. Now. In this space of loving something. One thousand words today.

I love writing, too. It warms me up inside. Even if I’m writing about the sad stuff or the hard stuff or just simply complicated matters. I never walk away from it feeling cold. I know that what I’ve done for myself that day—at the very least—is expressed a specific kind of commitment and appreciation for myself and my needs. When I’ve written those words, I’ve tended to myself for the day. I hope you can tend to yourself today, too.

Today’s contributing author is the wise and witty Jennine Capó Crucet. She was a twitter friend first, but then we have met at literary festivals, sat down to meals, and clicked. One of the good people you meet along the way, if you’re lucky. I just checked our texts, and they are all about dogs, eating and reading. These are the three basic tenets of friendship for me. We will meet again, Jennine Capó Crucet.

She’s also a wildly talented writer, the award-winning author of four books, including the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, the story collection How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, and My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education. Here’s a wonderful interview with her on All Things Considered, a great entry point into the particular specialness of Jennine.

Most recently she is the author of Say Hello To My Little Friend, an absolutely dazzling and unique novel about Cuban exiles, whales, Miami, and secrets from the past. In The Atlantic, David Ulin wrote, “The miracle is not that Say Hello to My Little Friend works, so much as that it enlarges our sense of the possible, recalling the vanity of human aspiration not through a lens of ridicule but through one of empathy.”

Jennine has chosen World Central Kitchen for her charitable donation, and signed copies of her new novel are available at Community Bookstore. She talks to us today about the power of writing things just to throw them away.

“The last time I participated in #1000wordsofsummer was when I was writing my way through my recently-published novel. Every word I wrote during those two weeks ended up in the trash. (Or, more accurately, filed away on my computer in a folder I call ‘The Crisper.’) And that year, that was kind of the point.

A couple days in, I realized what was happening: I was very intentionally making a mess, knowingly going in a very wrong direction, just for fun. I kept at it, because that was the promise I’d made when I signed up, and because I was now strangely committed to spending the rest of the time engaging in a safe sort of sabotage. 

For two weeks, I played, writing with a reckless abandon, knowing full well that my goal was to go as wildly off course as I could. Most days I felt like the Swedish Chef from The Muppets, sing-talking to myself while throwing ingredients around and calling that cooking. Sometimes I made myself laugh so hard that my dog would come over and sit on my feet, which is her way of telling me to calm down. But every day, I came back for more, and I remembered why Baby-Jennine ever started writing in the first place: because it made me feel good. 

In the end, I absolutely needed to get those 1000 words a day out of me to make space for whatever the novel really wanted to be. A couple of the (wrong) choices I’d made during my daily smorgasbords allowed for some revelations about the book’s structure to emerge—revelations that fueled the next couple years (!!!) of writing. 

And weirdly, those long-abandoned pages introduced a random character named Tim, who doesn’t appear at all in the finished book. But the marvelous editor who eventually acquired the book is named Tim, and he looks exactly like the Swedish Chef (okay, that last detail isn’t true, but I’d bet the Swedish Chef is his favorite Muppet). I like to think the wacky writing from that summer predicted him somehow.

Synchronicities like this have led me to think of #1000wordsofsummer as a kind of spell you’re casting to protect and guide the future you. You’re proving something to yourself during this time—something you don’t yet understand about yourself or your project or your process—and you might not discover what that something is until later, maybe even way later. The playfulness I practiced over those two weeks shook something loose for me when it came to how I was approaching the writing of that book. It gave me a kind of permission I hadn’t realized I’d revoked from myself. I hope you can use this time—this commitment to yourself and your writing—to discover exactly what you need to keep going.”

Good luck shaking something loose today.

Jami

I’m also on twitter and instagram.