Can You Rescue a Writer With 1000 Words?

There was something about 1000 Words that immediately made my palms slick. I opened the cover of Jami Attenberg’s new writing guide—bound with tender, delicious wisdom from fellow authors Lauren Groff, Roxane Gay, Alexander Chee, and literally dozens of others—with the vaguely queasy sensation of a lovesick teenager catching her crush coming down the hallway. Ecstasy! Danger! Already, here I was overwhelmed at the gift: A handful of our culture’s most brilliant literary minds had deigned to encourage me, us, everyone, not only to write, but to put 1000 words on a page every day until those sentences manifested a book. Still, is there anything more effortless than to dream of writing, and blissfully neglect the doing?

It’s true, I already write for a living. What little time is not spent putting words on this website is, all too often, spent fantasizing about—or raining insults upon—those same words. But for several years, I’ve also been writing a book. By the time I set it aside in a fit of exhaustion a couple years back, I’d written 100,000 words of that book, a number I’d completely erased from my memory by the time Attenberg joined me on Zoom in December and asked—oh, by the way!—if I was writing a novel.

“Funny that you’d ask that,” I said, then demurred and sputtered and hemorrhaged excuses until I’d resolved to say, “Yes, I am.” Attenberg asked how far I’d made it in the draft. I answered with the first number that sprang to mind: a respectable 30,000 words. I did not intend to lie. Thirty-thousand simply seemed a realistic expectation of my younger self’s output, and I never would have dreamed I’d written 100,000 and forgotten.

Then, Attenberg told me to keep going. That, in essence, is the thesis of 1000 Words itself, a book born of the author’s own creative questing. A newsletter and writing community she launched in 2018 as an accountability practice (under the hashtag #1000WordsofSummer) quickly took on a life of its own as writers signed up to commit 1,000 words to a page every day of the summer. Attenberg—the bestselling author of seven fiction books, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up, and a memoir—began reaching out to her friends, many of them acclaimed, well-established, and bestselling authors themselves. They contributed letters of encouragement and advice that she disseminated to her newsletter readers, and which she later gathered into this book for a wider audience to appreciate.

There are nuggets of insight in 1000 Words that I’m halfway convinced could rescue me from oblivion, or whatever the novel-drafting equivalent of that wretched limbo might be. But where the book—and Attenberg, by extension—truly triumphs is not through revelatory advice but in simple, earnest insistence: If you want to write, you should. Okay? Good. We’ve agreed. You have permission. Now try. Try again. The words will come if you will them.

I know the dangling carrot of a writing-focused New Year’s resolution is a tempting one, and my first instinct when Attenberg asked after my book was to commit myself to the 1,000 words she recommends…for every day of 2024. (Especially once I’d reopened my Google Doc and discovered a hundred of those thousands blinking back at me. If I could do this without even registering it, surely another, much improved 100,000 wasn’t impossible?)

But what I learned from interviewing Attenberg—a conversation replicated below—was this: It’s not the specific 1,000 words that will rescue a writer from stasis. It’s the belief that those 1,000 words are worth the time, energy, and (let’s be honest) agony it takes to produce them. To create something new is to siphon energy from the other corners of your life, many of which are arguably more important. That’s not an easy exercise to maintain under the best of circumstances, and few writers operate under the best of circumstances. Perhaps that’s why Attenberg insists the practice itself is so precious.

For what it’s worth, I was a fan of Attenberg long before 1000 Words hit shelves this month. But now I can promise—with the encouragement of many authors I’ve never met, and only a faint flutter of arrhythmia—that I’m writing a book.

Below, Attenberg discusses how 1000 Words went from hashtag to publication, and what creative “productivity” means in a culture hellbent on hustling.

When did it become clear to you that this accountability project could be—or perhaps already was—its own book?

It was a year ago last summer. And it was definitely not a thing I wanted to do. I thought, I only want to do it if this book’s going to be helpful, if it felt like it needed to exist, because that’s how I feel about any project that I work on. Is it like a living, breathing entity within these pages? So what I did was, I took all the letters that have ever been written [for the #1000Words newsletter] by all the contributors, and I just dumped them into a document and I read them all.

I felt supercharged at the end of it. I was like, Oh. I think not only does it need to be a book, but it made me feel like I could turn it into a book.

So then how did you go about the curatorial process of placing those letters in a particular order in the book?

[The book] is broken into a structure of four seasons; that was really the breakthrough moment for me. So when I started doing this [for the newsletter], and I would ask different authors to contribute their letters for #1000WordsofSummer, not everybody wanted to talk about being generative—because sometimes you’re just not generative, in terms of putting words on the page.

When I looked at all the letters, they told me what the structure was. I saw that it couldn’t just be summer; [the book] had to be something that you could use year-round. And so there became touchstone letters for me: Dantiel Moniz’s letter, it was the first letter that was really like, “I couldn’t do it this year. I had a lot of things going on in my life this year, but I’m giving myself grace.” We need to hear that we’re not always going to be able to be productive, but there are ways that we can take care of ourselves that will make sure that we’ll be productive in the future.

So the letters, sort of, helped me define the shape of [the book]. Then my editor and my agent definitely encouraged me to put my own voice behind it. So I did do that, and it still ended up feeling fresh for me, talking about these kinds of things.

When you were first starting this project—not the book, but #1000Words itself—when did you start reaching out to writers to contribute these letters?

From the get-go. Because I’ve been doing this for so long—my first book came out in 2006—I have met a lot of writers along the way, and I really treasure their friendships. And everyone has their go-to encouraging thing they want to say. So I reached out to some people almost immediately, and Megan Abbott was the first person to just go, “Yeah, here’s a great first easy encouraging little thing, a paragraph or two to tell us all that we can.” I just think that’s when the internet works at its best—and I still believe that it can—is when we stumble into communities with each other.

There’s been a lot of valid backlash against “productivity culture” in our society. But despite the fact that “being productive” is in the subtitle of this book, it zooms in on a different approach, one more geared toward creativity and humanity than economic output. So I’m curious: As you’ve helmed #1000Words, how have you re-conceptualized what so-called “productivity” means to you?

I think it’s like…there’s something in the book where I talk about why I write. And part of it is, yes, this is how I make my living. But also, I need to do it to satisfy myself creatively. It helps me in terms of my mental health issues. It’s how I communicate with the world. There’s so many aspects to why I think writing is important.

And so that is one of the reasons why the focus of this book is not about getting published. There’s some little bit of backdrop to that: Maybe you had a dream of getting published, and so I would like to encourage you to pursue your dream. But [the book] is definitely not about business matters at all. It’s about doing what you need to do in order to make yourself happy and feel fulfilled. Do you love to write? Then I want you to be able to feel like you can write. And actually do it.

I just know that I feel better when I write, and I want people to feel that same way, too.

I write daily for work, and generally speaking, if I’m writing, I’m having a wonderful time. But there’s this fatigue that does eventually settle in—one that makes even the most exciting ideas more difficult to execute. I recognize that’s a common frustration amongst writers, and goes by a lot of different names. I’ll avoid mentioning the scariest one. How do you energize yourself to write, which, in my mind, is different than inspiring yourself to write?

I’m just trying to think about this, what I do. I mean, I would say definitely reading other people’s books, and when it’s a great book and you get to the end and you’re like, “Wow, they really did it,” it makes me want to really do it. I definitely get inspiration from reading other people’s work, or even going to see a cool movie or something like that, where it just feels like they did justice to the story that they were trying to tell.

“How do you feel the wow?” is what you’re saying. And you’re right, it’s not about getting inspired: Because you can walk down the street and hear a little piece of conversation and get an idea. Just eavesdrop for a while. There’s ideas all around. But you’re not saying that. You’re saying energy. I mean, sometimes I do have to get up and dance around the living room for 15 minutes. It’s like HIIT for your brain.

I would say definitely reading other people’s books: When it’s a great book and you get to the end and you’re like, “Wow, they really did it,” it just makes me want to really do it.

You’ll always find a sentence that you wouldn’t have gotten to if you hadn’t sat down and written it that day. And you write to that sentence and you’re like, “Okay, that’s why I did it.”

Like, “Ah, yeah. Okay. I guess I’ll keep going.”

That beautiful sentence.

That’s one of the things I appreciate about this book: It’s not so much about productivity in that every moment must be fruitful. It’s about making space in your life to do this rich, valuable thing that you might otherwise neglect.

I mean, it’s what I’ve done with my life, for sure. I’ve carved out that life for myself. [Writing] was the thing that made me happiest. After a long time of not feeling good and not knowing why I didn’t feel good, all of a sudden I recognized that I just needed to do this one thing over and over again. It doesn’t solve all your problems. But it helps. It sets you on a path that you can return to again and again.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.