Day 5 of the Mini 1000

Hi friends.

Today we are going to write 1000 words. Because we have invented a universe, and we need to do it justice. We created it, so let’s tell this story straight. We’re going to close our eyes, put ourselves in the world of our project. Knock on some doors. Ask some tough questions. Sneak some snapshots when no one’s looking. Eavesdrop in a crowded room. Record some voices, take some notes. We won’t leave until we have all the information we need. Until we know enough to write those 1000 words. And then with care and precision, we will share what we have learned.

Today we are fortunate to have some thoughts from National Book Award finalist Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth, which The New York Times called, “A nearly flawless novel.” A donation will be made to the charity of Julia’s choice, the Crime Victims Treatment Center. Here is Julia on her journey to find her way to the right new book:

“I don’t know how to write a book. Part of me is ashamed to tell you that, after spending so much time wishing it weren’t the case. In June 2018, I came to my first #1000wordsofsummer assuring myself I could just fire one out: I had a novel set to be published, another in a drawer, a third fully outlined. I believed I knew how to do this thing. I was wrong. That first morning, Jami’s kick-off newsletter arrived in my inbox: ‘Today is the day you will write one thousand words.’ Okay, I told myself, okay, okay, let’s go. You have everything lined up to write—now write. Eight hours later, I sent an email of my own to a friend: ‘i'm at 300 so far, what a painful slog.’

I spent those weeks—that whole year—shriveled up over how badly the writing was going. The pacing was off, the voice was repulsive. Some days, worried about my inability to meaningfully proceed, I would scribble scenes in a notebook, my hand holding the pen so tight that my wrist would cramp at the end. By spring of 2019, I had perhaps a hundred pages, every sentence of which was anxious, rambling, overthought. Of the story arc I’d outlined, they barely got to the inciting incident. They were a disaster. You can make them work, I told myself. Just try harder. The 2019 #1000wordsofsummer would be the perfect opportunity to get this project on track. Wasn’t that so? Write it. Just write it. Write the fucking book. The first email came in and I looked at my manuscript and thought, well, no, I don’t know how. That year went by while I pored over my first scribbled pages, hoping to figure them out. Summer 2020 rolled past, and I was in the exact same place.

This isn’t how we want our writing days to go. We wish for the words to come easily. We wish for clarity. For discipline. For the capability to know exactly what we need to do and then to do it. We wish for only the pleasure of writing and never the pain. To write a first draft so clean it feels like the fourth; to put down a scene perfectly, with no cuts or additions to make later; to take ourselves from beginning to end of a project with no wandering, no wondering, no doubt.

But the thousand-words-a-day exercise exposes the uselessness of such wishes. It sees us struggle in our writing, get stuck, fall short. Summer after summer, year after year, I tallied up my too-many-times-rewritten words and felt completely lost.

We want (I want) to imagine a task like this thousand-word one as a road race, where the path is marked, the finish line is known to us, and every step drives us forward in the direction we wish to go. But writing may take us on a windier path. We anticipate traveling a paved loop and end up covered with scratches in the bramble-filled woods. And in that dim unknown, when you understand at last you don’t have a clue how to get to where you’re going and when you fear you will never be able to figure it out, you have to surrender to the essential wildness of the work.

The story—the novel, the memoir, the essay, the article, the treatise, the dissertation, the experimental text, the unclassifiable art piece—will resist our efforts to control it. It will take us deep into the woods, butt us up against obstacles, double back on itself, undo things. It will travel inefficiently, it will resist our assurances. It will be a painful slog at times. Still, no matter what, we are going the right way as long as we are tracking our story, that weird, beloved guide.

Three months ago, I finally sent my novel’s anxious pages to my writing group, agent, and editor. Then, in response to their good feedback, I threw those pages out. I started over. A different character is narrating. A key detail changed. June arrived again, and Jami’s kick-off email landed in my inbox. I wrote 30,000 new words that month. They are a joy, they are a gift. The story is leading me forward at last.

This writing process isn’t about making a perfect outline or sharpening your pencils properly or scolding yourself sufficiently to make your pages work. It’s something stranger, harder, more wonderful. This is how the writing goes: it upends us. We follow our story and it takes us places we believed we would never see. We get lost for a while, then find ourselves again. In the end, there’s no call to be masters of our craft, perfect first-drafters, geniuses who can fire a whole book out. The blank page doesn’t ask that of us. It only asks that we keep showing up for our story, over and over and over again.

Your writing today may seem a disaster. It may feel horrifyingly far from your vision, entirely out of your control. It may frighten or grieve you. You may feel ashamed. That’s all right. It doesn’t matter. All you need to do is keep going. You are doing the right thing. Get your words, whatever they are, down.

You don’t know? We don’t know. I don’t know how to write a book, but somehow, miraculously, if we keep following it, the book does know how to write itself.”

Have a great writing day. We’re almost to the finish line.

Now write the fucking book.

Jami