Day 8 of #1000wordsofsummer 2024

If you live in New Orleans, I will be hosting a happy hour write-along at Low Point Coffee TODAY from 5-7 PM.

If you’re just joining us now, Day 1 of this project starts here, and you can access all the archives here. Here is a FAQ. Also, there is a slack where you can connect with other writers.

There is a companion book to this project containing the words of 54 contributing writers and it is wonderful and helpful. You can buy it anywhere books are sold.

This project is also a fundraiser! Please consider subscribing.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because it is important to you to be this Writer version of yourself—to be it, and to see it. To have it be a part of your identity. Whatever being a writer means to you. Today and every day you write your way toward it. One thousand words at a time.

What does it mean to you to be a Writer? We are all taught different visions of it, have different daydreams of it. There are adjectives, like: smart, talented, funny, nerdy, poetic, electric. And there are physical ideas. Maybe you see it as someone serious and busy typing alone at a desk in a dark room, or as someone telling a story on a stage to a rapt and entertained audience, or as someone in a sunny cafe scratching their thoughts down in a notebook or…what? What does it look like for you? What does it feel like? You know it can look like anything, right? You know anyone can be it, right?

For me it means being diligent, composed, focused, and caught up in a vision. Also alternating between feeling like a fucking failure and a beautiful genius all day long. And yes, typing at a desk. Quietly, by myself. Near a window. Wherever I am. That’s it. That’s being a writer. For me. But it can be anything at all and that’s what’s amazing about it.

Because any way you write is the right way.

Welcome to the second week of #1000wordsofsummer. You might be showing up for the first time today, and if so, hi, this is me. But most of the people who are reading this have dug in and committed for days now, and are doing so, so great. Your head is in the game, and you’re all supporting each other so much. And I’m dazzled by all the mini-communities that are forming out of this, on the slack, on zoom, in person, all over the place, all over the world. You have moved me so much this past week. I am so freaking proud of you. Keep going.

When I think of today’s contributing writer, Cristina Henriquez, the word “poise” comes to mind. When I have seen her speak, she has held the room with her careful thinking and stabilizing presence. When I have read her work, I have thought: this is a writer in utter, clear-eyed control. We both published our first books the same year (2006; I’m not old, you’re old) and I remember seeing her read from Come Together, Fall Apart at the NYC Barnes & Noble in Chelsea (RIP, peak B&N), and thinking, “Wow, I really need to work on my act.” And then I read her book and knew I really had some work to do to catch up. She was that good.

Over the years she’s been widely published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal and she has also published two novels, The World In Half and The Book of Unknown Americans, which, amongst other accolades, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year. And now she’s back with The Great Divide, her excellent, epic novel about the creation of the Panama Canal, which took her ten (!) years to complete, and was chosen as the Today Show Book Club pick for the month of March.

Signed copies of Cristina’s books are available at Exile in Bookville and she has asked that her donation go to 826 Chicago. She writes to us today about the importance of staying in the chair.

“I used to have, on an index card that I taped to the wall above my desk, a handwritten sign that said: Just stay in the chair. I had read an interview once with a writer whose name I now cannot recall in which he mentioned this line as a sort of mantra, and it struck me as both pragmatic and sage.

I am old enough that when I began writing, I had a dial-up modem at home and in those rosy pre-instant-internet days, the advice—Just stay in the chair—made a certain amount of sense. Without the myriad distractions and possibilities alike presented by easy access to the internet, there was little to do on a computer but write, and if I could manage simply to stay in the chair, I was bound to do exactly that sooner or later.

But then came Ethernet cables and WiFi, and if you are sitting in front of a computer so-enabled, just staying in the chair might do little to no good in inducing you to actually write. I say ‘might’ on purpose, though. Because sitting in the chair is still the surest position I know from which to start getting the words down. At some point, and not always—because much of writing happens as you are moving through the world, paying attention, riding a bus, waiting in a doctor’s office, standing in a line, reading a book, noticing, noticing, letting thoughts coalesce, letting ideas marinate—but at some point, you have to be still. You have to be still for long enough to let the words come marching forth, all the words you have been accumulating even if you didn’t know they were there. They are waiting for you to be still so that they can move from the recesses of your subconscious up to the fore. And in my experience, the longer you can be still, the louder the words will be and the more clearly you will hear them.

Practically speaking, you could use software to disable the internet for a period of time. You could escape the tyranny of the computer altogether and write with a pen and paper instead (I am partial to these pens and unlined notebooks of any kind). You could also, as I sometimes do the moment I feel like getting up from the chair to find a snack or to stretch my legs, set a timer for 20 minutes and tell yourself that you will stay put for that duration and then you are free to get up, and you may find, as I almost invariably do, that the best sentences happen in those extra 20 minutes and that when the timer rings, the writing is suddenly going so well that you ignore it and keep going, no longer concerned with the time or the snack or whatever else threatened to pull you away.

Of course, those are only suggestions. Everyone has to find their own way. But eventually, if you are still and just stay in the chair, I believe that the words will find you.”

They will, they will.

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 twitter and instagram.