The Year We Did Something

Some end-of-year musings.

Hi friends.

I am loathe to talk about what’s happening in the world too often when I write to you because I like for us to be here in a creative bubble together, but I am absolutely heartbroken this morning about the loss of Rob Reiner. For someone I’ve never met before, he sure did have an impact on how I felt about the world. How I felt about comedy, how I felt about performance, how I felt about walking in New York, how I felt about food, road trips, rock-and-roll, how I felt about love. May his memory be a blessing.

I’m having big end-of-year thoughts, just trying to collect them all in a helpful way rather than be scattershot or self-critical about what I did or didn’t accomplish in 2025. (Love to be neurotic always! But this is, I think, how most writers are.) I always want more for myself, want to do better if I can, produce more writing, but also create interesting projects for people to enjoy. But also I know that often this creative life is just about an accrual of experiences and knowledge we need to build to the bigger inspiration. And sometimes it’s simply about writing the wrong sentences to get to the right ones.

It’s trickier when we’re our own boss, or we’re relying on ourselves to tame or harness our creativity. When we’re the person creating our own deadlines. But so what if we didn’t finish all that we wanted to this year? Everything we are building now can lead to something pristine and shining in the future. Not to mention that if we are regularly writing, we are always developing our skills.

Being someone who regularly writes is a big fucking deal.

So when we think of this year and all that we’ve done, let’s include how we showed up for ourselves this time around. I invite you to think about the good sentences you wrote, maybe even take the time to look through some of your work this year. And to think about other people’s sentences you read, consumed, received, put in your brain, let them nestle there and expand and grow into whole new ideas.

As for me, I did my job, I think, even if the job isn’t always as fruitful as we would like. But I read a bunch of books, I taught some workshops, I visited some cool places, I hosted some readings, and I had good, smart conversations with other writers and readers. And I wrote a lot of wrong sentences until I got to some of the right ones.

Next year, maybe there will be more right ones.

Just now I re-read what I wrote above and then it occurred to me I had left something out—1000 Words of Summer. To me it feels separate because it’s not something I do single-handedly; it’s the result of contributions from a lovely group of people, not to mention all of you who participate and donate money to support good causes. It’s not mine, not solely. It’s all of ours. A thing that we did this year, together. I’m less proud of myself for that and prouder instead of the people who showed up to do it and challenged themselves to participate.

Anyway I promise you, me, us, this was a year we did something.

Stay warm,

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.