Day 6 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because doing your own work is important to you.

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because doing your own work—writing your own words, inventing your own stories, tackling your own ideas—is important to you. You recognize all the good it can do for your brain and your heart and your soul. No shortcuts or cheating, no reliance on technology. Just executing your ideas to the fullest and seeing the places it can take you personally and creatively. Where will you take yourself today with your 1000 words?

It’s the sixth day of #1000wordsofsummer. Yesterday I saw some of you marveling in the slack and on social media that suddenly you had five thousand words out of nowhere. That’s a lot of words! That’s a chapter. That’s an essay. That’s the introduction to a book. And you wrote them. You conjured them up out of thin air. Congratulations.

I just wanted to send a huge thanks to everyone who has donated to the fundraiser so far. (Either via subscription or venmo.) It really means a lot to me to see people supporting this project. Every year I dream big with all kinds of goals for this project, but none of it can happen without you. So thank you.

Today’s contributor is an old friend: Ada Calhoun. I can’t even remember how or when I met Ada, only that she is part of my New York era, and she seems to me quintessentially of that city, and not just because she wrote a seminal book on legendary St. Mark’s Place. I remember having coffee with her in cafes in Williamsburg that no longer exist. She was a real working writer, a former crime reporter for the New York Post, who was developing a non-fiction book as well as becoming a ghostwriter. We were both so busy trying to survive, all the time. Somehow we both still have.

The New York Times called her memoir Also a Poet, “A big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul." She’s also anonymously collaborated on thirty (!) major nonfiction books in the past dozen years. Most recently, she is the author of Crush: A Novel, hailed on the Today Show as the month's Best Romance and praised by the Washington Post for its "whirlwind of desire and possibility." Former #1000wordsofsummer contributor Emma Straub said of it, “This novel made me feel dizzy and I loved every second.” You can buy it here.

Ada has asked that her contribution go to the New York Public Library. Today she writes to us about why it’s important to have confidence in your work:

“Someone once told me that whenever Julia Child burned or oversalted a dish, she put it down in front of her guests with the words, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever made.’

When I’ve taught memoir, that is what I tell my students to do as soon as they start making excuses for why their work isn’t as good as they want it to be. (‘I didn’t get to finish… ‘I have a cold…’ ‘I could have done better…’)

In the course of a weeklong class, this becomes a reliable joke. Someone begins to share by saying, ‘This isn’t very good because I ran out of time and…’ Someone clears their throat, and then the reader says, ‘Right. So this is the best thing I’ve ever written.’ Reliable laugh from the room.

That’s the thing, though: it is the best thing. Maybe it’s also the worst—but it exists! Doing something immediately sets you apart from those who bluster about how they have the world’s greatest book inside them. To them, we can offer the perfect line from Walt Whitman: ‘Why don’t you let it out then?’

If you wrote something, you did let it out! As long as you’re writing, you’re in the game. Theodore Roosevelt put it best in 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Maybe what you’ve done isn’t as close to what you envision as it will be tomorrow, or on draft five, but the point is that as long as you’re writing you’re in it. And as long as you’re in it, you are in the same boat as every other writer. Some writers have published books or won acclaim or made money from their work and some haven’t, but most of those twists of fate hinge on forces beyond anyone’s control. What is in our power is writing something and then setting it down in front of other people without apology.”

Hope you’re writing strong 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.