Reasons to Commit to It

Curiosity and tenderness, for starters.

Hi friends.

Been pep-talking myself to get through this stage of the draft. Walking around thinking about timelines and character motivations. Skimming my notes again and again. Reading poetry early in the morning just to make my brain pop. I also found a small, square-shaped, brand-new sketchbook which I had forgotten I bought. The thrill of an untouched notebook! I started making drawings of my characters and writing little phrases next to them, and then just writing whatever I wanted with no particular focus at all. Anything to get the brain humming.

Yesterday, I wrote:

Just keep writing it, just keep working the tender flesh of this book. The answers will show up.

Then I started thinking about you, as I often do. Where you all are at with your own work. All the possibilities. Why you’re signed up to receive this letter from me. And why you might want to participate in #1000wordsofsummer, which starts in 25 days.

I put myself in the heads of people I know and also in the heads of people I have never met before. I imagined what it might be like to want to write something different than what I am writing now. I pictured all the different stages of being a writer. I thought about—and this part was the easiest of all, because I am often in this place—what it was like to want to shift your life.

Maybe you’re just trying to find your way into writing after a long time away from it or maybe it’s the very first time you’ve ever tried to write. Either way, these are early days for finding your voice, your interests, what you might want to write. Your seedling stage. All you want to do is poke around in the dirt and see what you can find out about yourself.

You can find out a lot, showing up every day on the page for a while.

Maybe you’re halfway through a project and you’re in the process of stabilizing yourself, corralling your personal literary forces, trying to channel the early momentum and transform it into something new.

What would writing for fourteen days straight mean for that momentum?

Maybe you’ve been working on a project for a long time. A year, maybe longer. You’re settled in, you’ve committed to it. There is nothing between you and the finish line but fresh air, and all you can hear is the sound of your own voice propelling you to completion.

Two weeks could get you there, or pretty damn close.

Or maybe you would just prefer to write about anything other than the thing you’ve been working on, or your reality, or reality in general. Maybe you just want to be taken far away from right now for a while. I understand this.

Whatever the reason, please consider joining us. It starts May 31 and runs through June 13. I know you’ll get a lot out of it.

There are more details coming soon. But this is just a message from me to you, right now, encouraging you to think about committing to this moment in time. This is about a tenderness for your work. This is about believing in and being curious about yourself. I hope you’ll think about participating.

Sending love,

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.