Day 8 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you love a damn challenge.

If you’re just joining us this weekend, here’s an FAQ. We are fundraising for a dozen charities this year as well as sponsoring an annual 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 love a damn challenge. You want to see what you're capable of accomplishing. And this project is not easy. Showing up for yourself for two weeks straight and making yourself do real work every single day, no matter what—that shit’s hard. But what's harder is ignoring the call of being a writer. What's harder is not taking care of that part of yourself. What’s harder is just sitting still. Never knowing. And that’s why you’ve chosen to be here, writing these 1000 words. Today.

Welcome to the second week of #1000wordsofsummer.

I don’t know why exactly, but I woke up this morning thinking the words, “Play your own game.” This has been an occasional refrain over the course of my career. That I can’t worry about what anyone else is doing. I can only write my own words, do my best work, see what comes out of me when I make the effort. Trends come and go, but great art is timeless, and so is the satisfaction that comes with making it. I will swear forever that the actual writing is the best part of this kind of life. I hope you thoroughly enjoy your time today.

Some housekeeping: Today my friend Alexander Chee is going to join me for a brief live chat. This will happen at 9 AM CST on Substack. (If you miss it, it will live forever in the Craft Talk archives alongside years and years of letters from me.) And if you’re looking for the most current invite to the slack, here it is.

In February of 2020 I flew out to Los Angeles on a mission: an actual vacation. I had published seven books by then, and had noticed I was always traveling for work and meeting different writers along the way that I liked, but never actually spending any quality time with them. I had decided I would try to work on relationships in my life, have more fully realized friendships. I had a slew of nice dinners that week, and one of them was with Jade Chang, a talented novelist I had met before and admired.

Then it was March 2020, and I haven’t seen her in person since. Just on screens. But I’m glad I made the effort. It’s worth it to connect with other writers. And, as it turns out, she’s really someone worth knowing. Warm, bright, funny as hell, and supportive of people around her. I’m so happy she’s joining us today.

Jade’s debut novel, the bestselling The Wangs vs. the World was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and Amazon, was optioned by Hulu, and has been published in twelve countries. She is also a film and TV writer and has written and voiced non-fiction audio projects, including You’ve Already Changed Your Life. Her journalism and essays have appeared in LA Times Image Magazine, The NY Times Magazine, The Best American Food Writing, and others. Jade’s new novel, What a Time to Be Alive, comes out this fall, and I cannot wait to read it. (Pre-order here!)

She has asked that her donation go to PCRF. Here she is, talking about how to trick yourself into writing.

“Every writer has their own brand of desperation. I rarely wrestle with self-doubt or perfectionism. I don't get mired in rewrites, I love to outline, and I always, always, have a million ideas for any character detail or plot turn. You might think I sound annoyingly lucky, but here's the thing: My deeply adolescent drive to rebel against deadlines and assignments is so strong that it extends even to the ones I give myself. I am the target of my own oppositional defiant disorder.

I used to say I was a slow writer, but I've come to realize I'm a writer of average speed plagued by long bouts of nothingness, during which I sit—sometimes in front of a closed laptop—and actively Not Write. In those periods I feel no internal churn, no anxiety about not getting anything done—that creeping dread comes later in the day, when I'm tallying all my wasted lives. In the moment, I actually feel a sort of meditative calm, paired with the dumb satisfaction of pointless revolt.

Over the years, I've found a few ways to trick my brain: working with a friend, working with a slow beer (i.e. a beer I drink very slowly, just enough for the illusion of enjoyment), and, sometimes, suddenly flinging the laptop open to jolt myself into a different state of mind.

Working on this second book, I discovered one more trick. Mid-2022, when I was feeling true despair over ever finishing another novel, I ended another fruitless writing session by typing, ‘A Diary of Not Writing’ atop a blank document, and following that with a chronicle of all the nothing I had done that day. The thing is, there's a lot to say about not writing. That first entry covered two overlapping conversations I'd been eavesdropping on, the politics of a clean keyboard, a passing dog that looked like a Doberman in a raccoon suit, and, finally, some thoughts on what I should have been writing that day.

I didn't make an entry at the end of every writing session, thank god. But whenever I spent more time gazing into the middle distance than at the screen, I found myself opening my 'Diary' doc, pouring out a few hundred easy words about the day and, inevitably, detailing a section in the novel I should have worked on instead. To be clear, a diary entry never once led immediately to a productive writing session. Instead, it turned out to be a way to integrate those bouts of blankness into my writing practice, easing my later-in-the-day despair and giving me a living document of the time I spent floating in my own brain. Before this I'd never kept a journal, but now I recommend it to you. If you share my brand of illogical rebellion, you too might find that a Diary of Not Writing somehow acts as an effective equal and opposite force, existing as a thing just frivolous enough to entice your inner rebel, and just serious enough to be worth a few of your 1000 words.”

Good luck 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.