On Synesthetic Time and the Clock of Creativity

Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece (1915) by Hilma af Klint

This week, a book called 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused and Productive All Year Round was published. There are a lot of books about writing that claim to tell you how to write. I haven’t read many of them, although I always steer people towards The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.

But this new book is different. It grew out of a writing community created by the brilliant Jami Attenberg, who has written several novels and an excellent memoir. A few years back, Jami - of her own volition, and for free - started her #1000WordsOfSummer writing series. Every summer, she encouraged aspiring writers - or anyone who writes and has lost their focus - to sign up and agree to write 1000 words a day consistently for several days. The project continued to grow, and Jami began asking writers to contribute advice, which is sent out as a newslette…