Write Every Day, Not "Some Day"!
What Is Flash Fiction? There are, of course, as many definitions of Flash Fiction as there are writers. Length: The closest point of consensus I could find is that Flash Fiction ought to be not more than 1000 words. (One journal points out that, in China, this fiction is described as a story you [...]
“Where do you get your ideas?” Every established writer has a tale to tell about being asked that question. Some of them lie and tell people they order them from an Idea store. Some wearily answer that they think really hard until the ideas come. Still others joyfully shout that ideas are everywhere, what are you crazy? [...]
After reading the first few lines of “The Door” by E. B. White 1 my immediate feeling was one of outrage: here I am reading a story by the author of a book that has generations of writers in terror of writing something the ‘wrong’ way (The Elements of Style by Strunk & White), and it’s [...]
My nine-year-old son recently volunteered that he hates “I” stories, because you can’t know the main character’s name until someone else says it. I found it interesting that he finds this lack of information about a character annoying. Perhaps I did, at age nine. Now, however, I enjoy the gaps in a short story, in [...]
This week’s story is “Live From The Continuing Explosion”, taken from Perfect Circles, a collection of previously-published short stories by Simon Kewin. (Full disclosure, Simon is a former StoryADay participant and co-founder of Write1Sub1, a year long writing and publishing challenge that I highly recommend you check out. The new collection is available on Kindle [...]
When you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, free and not anxious. -Brenda Ueland “If You Want To Write” Some of my best writing, before I started to concentrate on my fiction again, was done in hand-written letters to my childhood friend, Linda. She is witty and [...]
Intro: What Is Pinterest? Pinterest is a bookmarking site that lets you save images, rather than text links. Find a page (or picture) you like on the web, ‘pin’ it and add one of its images to a visual pinboard Pinterest is also a social network: find interesting images and links based on what friends [...]
I came across this delicious map in an online archive, instantly started thinking about story-writing. Not only do our stories often start out this way (we can see, maybe as far as Cleveland, but beyond that it is terra incognita), but the whole frontier idea is rich with story possibilities. The Prompt Write a story [...]
Step-by-step instructions on how to write every day, not "some day". Lessons, workbooks and timesheets included!
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