Day 4 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you must give your ideas a home.

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 annually sponsoring 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 an observer, an eavesdropper, a collector of thoughts, phrases, images. All those little scribbled or typed notes. You see everything. Obsessively. Everywhere. You are someone who pays attention to every last detail and you need a place to put what you see. On the page, on your screen. A home for all your visions of the world. You must give your ideas a place to land. You must! One thousand words at a time.

Day 4 and things are cooking, right? Torrey’s letter from yesterday got a fun shout-out in New York, where it was called “essential reading for all writers.” You’re all doing so great in the slack—it is thrilling to watch you show up every day and share your progress. In terms of fundraising, we’ve still got about 10k left to go, so if you haven’t yet, don’t be shy, drop a few in the bucket.

As for me, I woke up at 2 AM and decided to write a new ending for my book. So that’s what’s up in this little house in New Orleans.

Wish me luck.

Today’s contributing writer is literary treasure Susan Choi (she was called “a major world writer” in The New York Times yesterday), who has a new novel called Flashlight out TODAY. It contains some of the most masterful sentences I have ever read in my life. Tonight she launches her book tonight at the Center for Fiction where she will be in conversation with superstar Sarah Thankam Matthews, who wrote one of my favorite #1000wordsofsummer letters in 2023. I asked Sarah to say a few words about Flashlight, which she graciously sent me.

“Probably my favorite new novel of the year so far, Flashlight is a lushly intelligent, gripping, character-driven novel that spans decades and continents with fleet-footed skill. I went about my entire day reading it one-handed as I walked to the laundromat, boarded the bus, watered my garden plot, etc, resentfully parting with it for meetings and whatnot. I turned its final page at 4:30 am and said ‘wow’ to my empty living room. It’s rare to find a contemporary literary work that so hauntingly captures what it is to be history’s object, the way it can act on you, an ordinary person, with brute force and inconsistent mercy.”

Susan is also the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She resides in Brooklyn, a place one must live if you have won all these awards.

Susan has asked that her donation go to PEN America. Her letter today is, I think, some kind of magic trick.

“For years I’ve been at that age where I need multiple kinds of corrective lenses and still can’t see. I wear bifocal contacts but still need drugstore readers on top of them to read anything that isn’t in 16-point font. In the evenings after I take out my contacts and put on my glasses – also progressives, and like the contacts purchased after endless trial and error – I still can’t read a book unless I perch the glasses at the very end of my nose and skew them sideways a little, which looks as ridiculous as it sounds. And distance vision is pretty much off the table because lenses strong enough to let me see that far overcorrect me so much for the midrange that I walk into walls. I’d given up on distance vision entirely until the day I discovered, by accident, that if I sort of tuck my chin, and stare hard out of what feels like the ‘top’ of my eyes, the faraway comes into view! But only if I’m maintaining that laughable posture/expression, and only if the rest of my field of vision has sort of melted away.

I used the trick not long ago when I saw Paul Mescal in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ – I could either be in the weird chin-tuck state of hypnosis, seeing Paul’s face (and, um, shoulders and torso) with exquisite clarity – or I could be in a more normal state in which I could see the whole stage and all the actors, but no one in detail. Making all my weird facial contortions so I could see Paul, I was really grateful to be sitting in the dark.

Why am I telling you this? Because for me at least, writing is also like this. It’s like getting into a very awkward posture, and creating a really unnatural focus, and still only seeing one small bit at a time. Yet somehow, an entirety comes to exist. I’m never sure, floundering along with just one bit of the whole in focus, how there’s ever going to be a whole, but it happens. What makes it happen is the literal work, the putting of literal words together, sentence after sentence.

Unfortunately there isn’t a direct correspondence between the literal words being assembled, and the rate at which the thing comes to exist. Untold quantities of the words – sometimes the majority of them – are destined never to be part of the thing. They might not even stick around for an instant. A lot of words in this short message I’m writing to you have materialized and dematerialized while I’ve been sitting here and you’ll never know what they were – even I’ve already forgotten. But the simple, often-impossible, awkward and tiring and thrilling activity of putting words together, again and again in infinite ways, is what’s bringing the thing into being.

At the same time, though, the thing is already there. That’s why my crappy vision, and all the clumsy tools and tricks I use to see this piece and that piece, remind me of writing. I know Paul Mescal is up there in his sleeveless t-shirt and his lopsided grin. I’m not creating Paul with my mind. Little proof as there is for it, the thing you are bringing into existence, currently at a rate of 1000 words a day, is also already there. You’re also not creating it with your mind, because your mind already contains it.

That’s why you can tell when you’ve had a good day and when you’ve had a bad one – because the thing is already there, being brought into focus. That’s why the bad days are just as important as the good ones – because they’re teaching you how to see better. That’s why you have to keep tucking your chin, or balancing your glasses sort of sideways at the end of your nose, or putting your drugstore readers on top of your expensive contacts, by which I metaphorically mean, that’s why you have to keep putting words together, whether at your current sprinting rate or, later, at a slightly more sustainable rate. You’re bringing into full view a thing that is already there, if for the moment only glimpsed from this angle or that, still partially submerged, still cast in shadow. It might not be visible yet, but when you’re finished, it will be visible to everyone.”

Good luck today with bringing your words into full view.

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.