Day 9 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you want to feel alive.

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.

---

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you want to feel alive. Think about what a good day of writing can do for you spiritually, emotionally. Maybe even in terms of your personal growth. Sometimes it’s not just about creating art but becoming a brighter, more alert and fulfilled version of yourself. There is the version of you waiting to write, and then there is the version of you who has just written. Choose the one that makes you feel great about yourself. Today. With those 1000 words.

If you missed my chat with Alex Chee yesterday, you can watch it here. I miss him. It was good to see his face, even if it was on a screen. This morning I was thinking about how many times I have called him just to say hello and, in the midst of conversation, he has quietly, casually saved my life. If you feel like reading something beautiful today either for inspiration before you write or as a reward for a good day’s work, here’s a greatest hit of his on studying with Annie Dillard. I should mention also he’s teaching two classes soon, one on description and setting and the other on how to write an essay collection. He always has something wise and good and helpful to say, if you are looking for another push this summer.

Another person I don’t get to see as much as I like is our contributor today. Jason Diamond and I have been in a group chat for a long time. I mean, we’ve been friends for a long time, too. Years and years. But I haven’t lived in the same place as him for nine years, so he’s slowly become slotted into this place in my mind where our history revolves around how long we’ve been tapping messages to each other. A specific kind of friendship evolves from that.

Forever, though, he has felt like a brother to me. (A younger brother, I already have a wonderful older brother.) We grew up in the same neck of the woods—in the suburbs of Chicago—consuming the same food, cultural influences, general vibes. We can text each other a picture of an Italian beef sandwich or the interior of a bar lit with Old Style signs or even a prairie landscape and it will trigger a shared sensation. The shorthand of the Chicagoan. So we are each other’s people, and we are friends.

But also we are writer friends. I have watched him grow up and evolve and become the fine, fine writer he is today. He is the author of three non-fiction books: Searching For John Hughes, The Sprawl, and New York Nico's Guide to NYC, and he has written for—I’m calling it—every major publication that has ever existed. (I particularly love his recent writing for Esquire.)

His first novel, Kaplan’s Plot, is coming out this fall, and it so hilarious and smart. Our friend Megan Abbott (who also has a new book coming out in mere weeks!) wrote such a nice blurb about it: “A dazzling fictional debut, Jason Diamond’s Kaplan’s Plot calls to mind both John Irving’s darkly funny tales of family dysfunction and E. L. Doctorow’s evocative dives into the early 20th century American underworld. At the same, Diamond sneaks in deeper truths about family history, generational trauma and a quintessentially Midwestern sense of Jewish identity.” I couldn’t be any prouder than if I had written that book myself.

Jason has chosen Open Books for his donation. I was so delighted to see him writing about how he found his voice today:

“This year is the 20th anniversary of my first byline in a publication. The magazine I wrote the short piece for folded before Barack Obama took office, and I handed in 1000 words for a small front of book profile that ended up getting cut down to 100. I’m pretty sure nothing I gave the editor made much sense, and the only thing of mine that actually remained in the finished piece was a few punchy adverbs I tossed in there. It was crap, but I understood I could get better if I kept working at it.

So that’s what I did: posting for any blog that would have me, writing every review I could write, or even taking little gigs doing copy for weird aughts startups that got millions of dollars because their mission to ‘reinvent the sock’ sounded like a sane investment to some bozo. I started my own blog so I could have room to do whatever I wanted, then I ended up becoming the editor at a few websites that were eventually gobbled up by private equity firms and then shut down. I read as much as I can, and listened to editors and other writers for any little tips on how to get better.

I still do those things, but the difference between then and now is that my voice is also there. That’s a pretty new thing. In fact, I’d say that in the 20 years I’ve felt comfortable telling people that I’m a writer, I’d only felt confident in my voice for about six or seven at the most. And even though I’m proud as hell I wrote three non-fiction books, it wasn’t until I’d found my voice that I was ready to write my first novel.

I’m not trying to knock myself or sound self-deprecating, but all the work I did for those 13 or 14 years was just me trying to find my voice. And the crazy thing I learned when the switch finally happened was that I’d taken things too literally, that it isn’t like there’s some magic quest that you can go on and your writing voice is just there waiting for you if you make it to the X on the map. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: your voice is always there, but it’s waiting for the right time to start communicating with you. You need to give it reason to come out.

Your voice is real. It’s what distinguishes each of us not just from other writers, but from whatever new existential crisis (see: AI) all writers have to contend with. The voice is the writer’s individuality and personality, and opening yourself up so people—often complete strangers—is a terrifying idea. But you have to be patient with it. Keep practicing, continue working, reading, experiencing, and eventually when you sit down to write, it just starts speaking to you. There’s something almost metaphysical about it, like maybe the ancient Greeks weren’t wrong about the Muses influencing us.

I never thought I’d be the type of person who’d even say something like that, but something inside my brain told my hands to type that out and that, my friend, is my voice. We’re cool now. I like what it tells me, but I know to constantly engage with it and keep giving it reason to speak up. If you’ve found your voice, then congrats. If you haven’t and you’ve been trying for months, a couple of years or, in my case, nearly two decades, that’s totally fine. Keep going. Your voice is there and it’s just waiting to tell you what’s on its mind.”

Keep going! Day 9. You got this.

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.