My Words of Summer
As a new writer, I just recently discovered #1000WordsofSummer, the literary movement launched by author Jami Attenberg in 2018. In the six years since it began, the movement has grown to include thousands of participants, daily motivational emails, and a companion book. (I have no affiliation, but if you’d like to order the book from my local independent bookstore, Books Are Magic, you can do so here.)
On its face, the goal of #1000WordsofSummer seemed pretty simple—write 1000 words every day for the first two weeks of June. According to Jami’s weekly newsletter, Craft Talk, your 1000 words don’t have to be “good,” and you don’t have to make progress on a specific project. You don’t even have to try to “create” anything; the 1000 words can be used for a journal entry. All you have to do is get 1000 words written in whatever way you choose.
And yet, I struggled with what it meant to “write” 1000 words a day. Did it mean just typing enough onto the page that the word count read 1000? Did it mean stringing 1000 words together in such a way that you actually said something? Or did it mean even more, like stringing those 1000 words together in such a way that you said something meaningful? Or funny? Or lyrical?
I haven’t had a chance to read Jami’s book yet, but from her emails and the inspirational messages she forwarded from other authors, I suspect she’d say that it doesn’t matter what approach you choose as long as you stick with it. As long as you get those first 500 words down, then write 500 more. Because you committed to #1000WordsofSummer and for those two weeks, 500 words isn’t enough. You need to get to 1000. You need to sit in a chair and not look at Instagram or answer a text or clean your kitchen. You need to produce.
Full disclosure: I didn’t quite make 14,000 words this time around. A long-planned trip got me off track for a few days, so I didn’t quite achieve the designated goal. Hopefully, I’ll make it next year. In the meantime, it’s back to that chair. Not for 1000 words every day forever. But maybe for just a little while longer.