Get Ready to Do This Thing

#1000wordsofsummer starts June 17

1000 WORDS is going to be a book! Pre-order it here or here.

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Hi friends.

#1000wordsofsummer starts this Saturday, June 17. (Full details here.) This is the last email you’ll get from me before then. If you aren’t interested in getting an email a day from me for two weeks, please unsubscribe and come back here in the fall when things are chill again. All I want is for us to love each other.

If you’re participating, I would recommend spending a few minutes a day leading up to Saturday thinking about what you might want to work on. This might make things a little easier. If you set yourself up for success, you will enter with confidence. I think this is the best approach. Doing what you need to do to help yourself believe in yourself.

Last Friday, my friend Samira messaged me this:

Can you use #1000wordsofsummer to work on your fan fiction project? Yes. Can you use it to write whatever feels like a good day’s work on your poetry collection? Yes. Can you use it to write as many pages of your screenplay as you feel like might be equal to 1000 words a day? Yes. Can you write 1000 words in your journal every day as my mother did last year? Yes.

Can you use it to explore some kind of experimental prose project, one which you have no idea where it’s going but you can feel it deep inside so you need to listen to that part of yourself and figure it out? Yes. Can you use it to edit an existing project even if you’re not generating new material because you are a responsible adult and you know what it means to get down to business? Yes.

Can you (like I’m going to) use it to generate some new scenes in a novel that you’ve been working on for like two years and you can’t even believe that there is more to be written but these scenes were gently suggested to you by your beloved and brilliant editor as worth a shot so I guess we’re doing this again? Yes.

Can you use it to write text messages to your friends? No. Can you use it to write tweets bitching about state or local politics? No. Can you use it to write silly captions on instagram posts? No. But—! you say. No, I say.

If you’re here, you showed up to do this, for real. So let’s get ready to do it.

See you on Saturday.

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. I try to answer comments as best I can, which are open to paid subscribers. One hundred percent of this month’s donations will go to charitable donations. You can subscribe here.