This month at StoryADay we’re all about Flash Fiction!
Flash fiction is loosely defined as being between 250 and 1200 words long, but it is so much more than that.
The best description of Flash Fiction I’ve ever seen goes like this: Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Make It Flash”
This is literal flash fiction, with the flash of a meteor leaving an impression on the eye of the protagonist.
It also leaves the reader with a flash-bulb impression of the two characters he comes across on the beach.
Every line paints pictures of the scene, cramming vivid scenery into our brains in a very few words: Continue reading “[Reading Room] Meteor by Josh McColough”
Every month we gather here to discuss what we’ve achieved and commit to making more progress in our creative lives in the coming month. We call it our Serious Writer’s Accountability Group or SWAGr, for short! (We’re serious, not sombre!)
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing. Continue reading “SWAGr – Accountability for February 2018”
This month at StoryADay, I’m focusing on Flash Fiction. Be sure to check in regularly and follow me on Twitter.
A novel invites the reader to explore an entire house, down to snooping in the closets; a short story requires that the reader stand outside of an open window to observe what’s going on in a single room; and a short short requires the reader to kneel outside of a locked room and peer in through the keyhole.
Bruce Holland Rogers
(2013-02-25). The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction
Let’s take Bruce at his word.
Imagine you’re looking through a big, old-fashioned keyhole, into a room. Write a story of fewer than 1000 words, about what you can see
Leave a comment below, letting us know how you got on with this prompt, or what ideas it sparked for you.
As we settle into a new year of writing, it’s worth taking a look at our habits and forming an ‘if/then’ contingency plan to keep us working when our plans go awry.
Here’s the companion article to this podcast
Also in this episode, this week’s writing prompt!
Sticking with this month’s theme of Getting You Writing and Breaking Blocks, today’s prompt shares another technique for quieting your inner perfectionist: stealing a story from someone else.
Rewriting a classic story, reworking a story of your own, or just stealing the plot of a folk tale, means there’s one less thing to worry about: plot. Writing this way lets you concentrate on other aspects of your writing:
Rewrite a story (yours or someone else’s)
Starting can be the hardest part of writing a story, so this week I’m giving you an opening line, to break through that block.
I’ve written before about opening lines and how important they are to a story, so don’t think that this opening line has to be your story’s opening line forever. In fact, these Wednesday prompts are designed to get you writing and often result in throwaway tales, rather than works of art, but the point is: you’re writing.
Read more about opening lines here (listen to the podcast version, here).
She had never understood why anyone would want a tattoo.
Feel free too share here, in the comments.
Happy New Year! If you haven’t quite settled into your new routine (or your old routine) yet, and want to get creative, this is the episode for you Continue reading “093 – Getting Creative In The New Year”
Sometimes lowering the stakes for a story can be the best way to make your writing go well.
So let’s play. Let’s be silly. Let’s write a story that can’t possibly be a masterpiece and just, instead, have some fun.
How? I’m going to give you a list of words and you’re going to write a story using them. I’d love it if you’d post your story in the comments, so we can all compare notes.
(Sometimes it’s surprising how much non-terrible writing comes out of this exercise!)
Use these words in your short-short story: die, ago, seat, time, imagining, even, making, league, sacrifices, rose
(These words were all drawn at random from The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan, which just happened to be lying near my desk.)
Go!
Happy New Year!
Here’s your first writing prompt of the year.
Use the title The Cruelest Month and set your timer for 30 minutes. Write a story with a beginning, middle and an end
Every month we gather here to discuss what we’ve achieved and commit to making more progress in our creative lives in the coming month. We call it our Serious Writer’s Accountability Group or SWAGr, for short! (We’re serious, not sombre!)
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.
And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!
Download your SWAGr Tracking Sheet now, to keep track of your commitments this month
****
Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends. )
When I started StoryADay May back in 2010, some of 100 or so people who took part really stuck with me. One was Gabriela Pereira, who had just finished up an MFA and was transitioning from student to working writer. We shared an enthusiasm both for writing and for the hair-brained scheme.
Back then, I was a couple of years ahead of her in the online, community-building, content-marketing , writing-for-pay experience. Now she has soared into the writing world as a leader, a teacher, an inspirer and, in her own words, Chief Instigator at her project: DIY MFA.
This afternoon I tuned in to her latest webinar, sort of as a favor. I’ve heard the talk before, live and in person, and was really just showing in case no one else did. Of course, there were tons of people on the call, loads of questions from attendees, and Gabriela fired people up and sent them away with tools and techniques to make their writing better, as always.
But — it shouldn’t surprise me, but it did — what I hadn’t expected to happen was that I had a breakthrough about my own novel-in-progress, while listening to Gabriela talk. Suddenly, I knew exactly what the turning point at the mid-point of my novel needed to be. More than knowing it, I could *picture* it.
I rushed off to my office and scrawled three pages of notes, opened up Scrivener and started adding scene cards to the second half of my novel’s file. I got super excited, and then realized how much writing I had to do…then chose to see that as exciting too!
Did I mention I’ve heard this talk at least twice before?
Lesson learned: when you find a teacher/mentor/friend whose words you really connect to, stick to them. Revisit their lessons. Re-read their books. Get on webinars and conference calls with them. Ask questions. Go over and over their lessons at different stages of your development and the development of each of your projects.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears, as my old mate the Buddha apparently never said.
If you want to get in on the remaining webinars in Gabriela’s current series, here’s some info:
Perfect Your Plot, Structure Your Story – December 14
Rock Your Revisions – December 21
(Some links on this page—the webinars and the one to Scrivener—are affiliate links, but I never recommend anything I don’t believe in 100%.)
Today I’m encouraging you to write a seasonal story, just not one for this season.
Of course, you can write a Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/New Year/Festivus story if you want, but if you’re thinking about building your portofolio of stories that you might submit to a market soon, your best best is to write 3-6 months ahead. Publications have reading deadlines, lead times and design concerns to wrestle with, so yes, it is time to start thinking about your Mother’s Day stories now!
Write a seasonal story for a publication you enjoy, for a holiday/event six months from now.
Come back and leave a comment to tell me what you wrote about.
Go!
Every month we gather here to discuss what we’ve achieved and commit to making more progress in our creative lives in the coming month. We call it our Serious Writer’s Accountability Group or SWAGr, for short! (We’re serious, not sombre!)
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.
And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!
Download your SWAGr Tracking Sheet now, to keep track of your commitments this month
****
Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends. )
I picked up the collection because I saw it on a ‘recommended reading’, highlighting non-white/non-mainstream voices.
Short story collections are a funny thing. Sometimes the whole collection hangs together and I can’t wait to read the next story. Sometimes I hate most of the stories but find a couple of gems.
This collection is like that. It’s not that any of the stories are badly-written– they’re not–I didn’t much enjoy them, on a first read-through.
Having said that, I was really impressed by the long, roughly 14,000-word story in the middle of this collection, The Provincials.
I also found that the collection, as a whole stayed with me.
More on that later, but for now, let’s look at The Provincials.
The first line of this story does a great job of setting up what is to come in the story,
“I’d been out of the conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died.”
Think about everything we know, from that first line:
That’s a fair amount that we can dig out of 16 words, only one of which is more than five letters long.
This story is about a father and his younger, adult son, Nelson, taking a trip back to the small south-American (?) town where the father grew up, to settle the estate of a distant relative. The father left the town as young man, and moved North, to the city. His elder son has since left the country, for San Francisco, and the younger son, the novel’s protagonist, is expected to join him some day. There are hints, relatively early on that this younger son will not make the big move that his father and brother did,
“Even then I had my doubts, but I would keep believing this for another year or so.”)
They travel south through the country, stopping once in a town that is not his father’s hometown but seems to offer some tastes of what small town life is like in this unnamed country: passion, connection, resentments, grief, love…
When they reach his father’s hometown, the slight awkwardness and disappointed expectations we felt between the young man and his father on their drive is amplified in the awkwardness and resentments between the father and the people of his hometown, and by extension between the son and the people of the town. As readers, we wonder if the father and son will bond, or stay distant and miscommunicative, desperate to escape from each other as well as the town, when their errand is finished.
The story becomes a fascinating reflection on what it means to be part of the more migratory generations, and what it means to stay behind.
At one point, Nelson is sharing information from his older brother’s letters from the USA, and he reflects,
“That statement was contained within one of Francisco’s early dispatches from Oakland, when he was still eagerly trying to understand the place for himself, and not quite able to process many things he saw.”
This was a great reminder to me, as a writer who lives in a place I did not grow up in, that it’s not always a bad thing to have the outsider’s view. That searching for meaning, for understanding, can be a great source of energy in a story.
I love the punchiness of short stories, the way they draw characters in deft sketches. I often get impatient with long short stories, but in this case, it is where this author’s best work is done (at least in this collection).
In this, the longest short story in the collection, we are given a chance to get to know the men in the story (we also get hints of his girlfriend’s personality. There had been few women in the preceding stories and none really qualified as a character. The protagonists had been young, inexperienced, or callous towards women).
In the shorter stories I found myself impatient with, and mostly disliking the protagonists. In The Provincials, I didn’t like start out liking Nelson or his father any more than I liked any of the other protagonists, but at least I got to know them better, which made me more sympathetic towards them.
Alcarón’s writing style benefitted from the roominess of the larger word count. It allowed him to do things like pause in that first village, which provided a satisfying structure to the story when they pause there again, on the way home. It allows him to paint the scenery through the eyes of an outsider—but not an awed tourist. It even allows him to tell part of the story in the form of a mini-play—which makes sense, as the first-person narrator is an aspiring actor.
This story has a strong sense of place (unnamed though it is) that feeds into the character development. At the start of the story, as they leave the city, the narrator observes,
“A few hours south of the capital, the painted slums thinned, and our conversation did too, and we took in the desolate landscape with appreciative silence. Everything was dry: the silt-covered road, the dirty white sand dunes, somehow even the ocean. Every few kilometers, there rose out of this moonscape a billboard for soda or beer or suntan lotion, its colors faded since the previous summer, its edges unglued and flapping in the wind.”
This sets up a lot of the tension between old and new, country and city, the past and the present, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with it.
The story starts and ends outside the capital city, which is nevertheless the focus of a lot of the protagonist’s energy. They travel through a village on the way to the father’s home town and, after their visit. The structure of the story echoes the themes of migration and dislocation, and the ‘nesting’ of locales (everything that happens in one direction, is closed out in the other direction on the way home) feels very neat and satisfying, even as the plot leaves questions open.
This is a great lesson in how you can avoid tying all the character questions up in a too-neat bow, but instead use the structure of the story to create a sense that the story is complete.
Also, I think this story has a last line that works spectacularly well. Read it and see what you think!
I didn’t like the young men who populated this collection. I didn’t enjoy many of their stories, well-written as they were.
But I don’t think that’s always the most important factor in choosing what I read.
People in the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement often talk about the importance of readers being able to find characters like themselves in fiction. I absolutely agree and applaud that. But it’s also important for people like me, secure in the white, Euro-centric tradition, to read outside our own experience.
These characters come from a world that is utterly foreign to me. Their experiences, their lives, their values are different from mine. It wasn’t a laugh-riot, to read about their lives, even though there was humor in these stories.
What is important, however, is that the voices in this collection had something in common with each other. And by visiting their world, over and over, though the various stories, I became aware of life beyond my own experience. I might not like the characters, or their lives, or some of their choices, but I understand them a little, now.
And if I were to meet a guy like this, out in the real world, I might recognize him, just a bit. I would certainly see him as more than whatever he projected on the surface.
And I can’t think of a better reason for people like me to read and promote literature from voices that are different from our own.
Do you read diverse books? Do you read books that you don’t necessarily enjoy? Is it worth your time? Leave a comment:
This week I talk about ways to make your life easier by embracing the idea of decision-making, both in your writing and in your writing practice.
There is still time left this year to meet some of your goals. The question is which ones?
You probably had a list of projects you wanted to write this year, and there are only two possibilities now:
Either way you have a choice to make:where do you focus your time and creative energy for the rest of the year?
“Successful people make decisions quickly and change their minds slowly”
-Napoleon Hill
This certainly seem to be a trait in many of the successful people I know.
“The only bad choice, is making no choice”
-Jeff Walker
I’ve been writing long enough now that I’ve seen people come along who were just starting out when I’d been doing this for a few years, who have overtaken me. Whether it’s the success of their website, or their book publishing, they seem much further along on one or other of the paths I want to take.
I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences. But why does it happen?
Partly, it’s to do with making choices.
Like many writers I tend to over think things. I tend to get stalled by the idea that there is a perfect choice.
We could beat ourselves up about that, but the reality is, as writers we make choices all the time. We need to get comfortable with that, so that our perceptions don’t hold us back.
You choose
Every choice you make is a rejection of every other choice.
Scary!
As a reforming over-thinker and reluctant-decision-maker, I’m here to tell you that, the more you make choices in your writing, the better you become at it.
And in fiction, making choices is always reversible.
Here’s the really important part about choices: you aren’t locked into your choices, but you must review them and adjust your course.
For example, if you decide to kill off a character in your short story, but then find they would have been useful to have around later, you have some choices to make: must you correct the mistake or can you make some other character carry the weight that would have been taken up by the character you killed?
And in your writing life: you decide you’re going to write for two hours before bed every night, but find yourself tired and depleted and unable to create anything worthwhile. Should you continue to do what you think ought to work, or should you review the results of the experiment, decide you’ve learned something useful, and try writing at another time of day?
(Hint: it’s Answer B)
We’re not sculptors, lopping off pieces of marble that ought to have been a nose or an arm. If we accidentally chop off a story arm, we just go back in and add more words!
With words, we can fix everything.
Making choices in your fiction is fantastic practice for making choices on bigger issues.
TASK: Go back to your writing today with a sense of appreciation and gratitude for the fact that your medium is the insubstantial one of words and fiction; and that by making choice in your fiction you get to become better at it.
The art of iteration (i.e. trying things, adjusting and trying the next, tweaked version) is in trying a new thing for long enough to really tell if it’s working, before you analyze and make changes.
Do not make decision on the fly. Do not change your routine or your decisions every day. Give every experiment time to run, then examine it, and change one little thing, and go again.
Think of these experiments as first drafts. My first-draft version of ‘write first’ allow me to check email before I started writing. After I had tried the experiment for a while, I got stuck. The experiment (the first draft) had run its course. The outcome: checking email derailed my fiction writing.
So I edited out ‘check email’, and gave the process another try. It went much better.
The fact that we commit to writing a story every single day in May, means there is no bargaining. There is no question of ‘am I going to write today?” No mental energy is lost on that decision. Instead we StoryADay-ers leap out of bed in a panic, thinking “WHAT am I going to write today?”
With the writing part assumed, we skip straight to making creative choices, and scanning the world for inspiration.
I advocate taking away as many choices as possible from your writing practice.
Making choices saps your willpower. If you spend your day making choices about your writing practice, by the time you sit down at the keyboard, you’re going to be pretty depleted.
Does your day go like this:
I would argue that if your day looks like this, you have depleted your will power so much that it is going to be really hard for you to make all the choices that you need to make in your story world.
Think about Mark Zuckerberg and his omnipresent grey hoodies, or Obama wearing the same blue suit (or multiples thereof) almost every day of his presidency. These people have so many choices to make in the day, the last thing they want to do is waste energy on choosing an outfit.
You have so many choices to make in your story world, the last thing you want to do is worry about reinventing your writing routine every day.
Now, I know not everyone can write first thing in the morning (it’s extremely rare day when I can truly sit down to write without having to deal with other people’s needs first).
But what you can do, is create a protected bubble of time that is for writing. In order to do that, make a deal with yourself that you will write at a specific time every day (or plan ahead for a weeks’ worth of writing days if your schedule is unpredictable).
And then stick to it.
This removes the self-talk about whether you’ll write today, wether you deserve your writing time, and all the bargaining we do with ourselves to ‘buy’ writing time.
I have tried to make it, recently, an absolute that I write fiction first thing in the morning. I’ve tried to make it an absolute that I don’t look at email, Twitter, Facebook, or talk to any more people than absolutely necessary, before meet my fiction word count.
The more that has become a habit, the more my fiction output has grown, and the more my output has grown, the more creative breakthroughs I’ve had and, the better my writing has become.
You may find that you can write best at the end of the day, when everyone has gone to bed and you will have no choices except the ones in your story world.
Just decide when you’ll write, and stick to it for a couple of weeks. Decide if it’s working. Tweak. Try again. Keep writing!
I know we creative types often resist routine and commitment and structure because we’ve been sold this vision of the crazy creative.
We’ve come to believe that routine and structure stifle creativity and innovation, but in fact, routine in your working practices can actually free you up to be more creative in your work.
“Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and to look at what’s happening.”
-Pema Chodron
We can’t build the creative space we need if we’re cramming our writing time into the space between all the will-I/won’t-I choices we put in front of our commitment to our writing.
Learning to get better at making choices and sticking with them is a powerful tool both in your stories, in your writing life, and in your life in general.
(Lesson #357 in how writing makes us better people!)
Make your choices boldly. Stick to your commitments for a period of time. But remember that, as in writing, you can edit your choices later.
What will you choose to work on between now and the end of the year in your writing life? Something in your writing practice? A particular written project? Leave a comment
For all you NaNo novelists out there, deep in the belly of a fast-written novel, I have a suggestion for a way to revitalize your writing and your excitement about your project.
For everyone (else?) I talk about regrouping: it’s November: There’s still time to rescue some of your writing goals for this year, and set yourself up for a successful writing year in 2018.
LINKS:
The StoryADay Serious Writers’ Accountability Group (SWAGr) – http://bit.ly/2zPC6l1
Austin Kleon – a sample newsletter – http://bit.ly/2meYazT
Every month we gather here to discuss what we’ve achieved and commit to making more progress in our creative lives in the coming month. We call it our Serious Writer’s Accountability Group or SWAGr, for short! (We’re serious, not sombre!)
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.
And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!
Download your SWAGr Tracking Sheet now, to keep track of your commitments this month
****
Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends. )
Writing the first line of your story is tough. Opening lines must:
So, how do you make your first line reflect all these things?
Let’s look at some examples.
Read more and sign up to get the extra case studies:
Mastering The Magic of Opening Lines
Opening lines are hard to write because they have to do so much:
That’s why I advocate writing the first lines last—or at least tweaking them after you’ve finished the story, when you know what it’s about.
So, how do you make your first line reflect all these things?
Let’s look at some examples. Continue reading “Mastering The Magic of Opening Lines”
A few days ago, I commented on a Twitter post about a hot-button issue. I don’t normally do that, but I thought I was making a neutral, expanding-the-argument kind of comment.
You can tell where this is going can’t you?
Yeah.
Someone read my comment and assumed I was saying something I wasn’t; pigeon-holed me as someone from the completely different end of the ideological spectrum; and proceeded to make snarky, personal comments every time I tried to defuse the situation.
I had that hot-and-sweaty, blood-pounding-in-my-face, pit-in-my-stomach sensation we all remember so well from the injustices of being a misunderstood 12-year-old. I wasted hours constructing careful answers and psyching myself up to open up my Twitter feed, wondering if I would find an olive branch or a minefield.
It wasn’t fun.
It sucked all the creativity out of my day.
It was such a waste of time.
And the irony of it was, I had, that very morning, reposted Austin Kleon’s advice not to pick fights with strangers on social media!
Find an issue that you COULD have a fight with someone about on social media and instead, write a story.
I promise you that, if you write a story instead of picking a fight with a stranger on social media, you’ll have a better day than I did last week 😉
I’m currently fascinated by a short story experiment being run by Penguin Random House.
They’re running a series called “The Season of Stories“. You subscribe, and they send you a story every week.
But that’s not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that they serialize the story.
Every day, Monday-Thursday, you receive part of a story.
It’s how short stories were read in publications back at the start of the golden age of short story writing, and it’s something we’ve moved away from. Instead of making them bite-sized treats, we sell short stories by weight, packaged into collections. Then we try to sell them to readers who have been trained on novels.
(No wonder short story collections don’t sell well!)
With a novel, you, the reader, carve out some time to plunge yourself into a story world, allow yourself to be pulled along by cliffhangers, spend time getting to know the characters.
Short stories aren’t like that.
Readers, in general, don’t know what to do with a short story collection, but anyone can open their email and read a quarter of a story. Especially one that has been well-crafted.
Today I want you to practice crafting a story that will keep bringing a reader back for more.
Stories naturally break into four parts: inciting incident, rising action, midpoint shift, then climax/conclusion/resolution. Each part must end with a kicker that leaves the reader wanting more (yes, even the end).
Write a story that can be read in four parts. Focus on creating mini-cliffhangers at each quarter point.
Now, go and write your story.
Come back and tell me how it went!
Every month we gather here to discuss what we’ve achieved and commit to making more progress in our creative lives in the coming month. We call it our Serious Writer’s Accountability Group or SWAGr, for short! (We’re serious, not sombre!)
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing. Continue reading “SWAGr – Accountability for October 2017”
In This Week’s Podcast
Writing Prompts [1:44] https://storyaday.org/stadasep17-04/
What To Do If It’s Getting Harder To Write [4:08]
Book Review: Windy Lynn Harris’s Writing and Selling Short Stories and Personal Essays [6:08]
How’s Your SWAGr? [12:18]
Come and leave a comment or question at the blog: https://storyaday.org/stadasep17-04/
And listen next week for more information about an upcoming critique opportunity.
Subscribe Now:iTunes | Android | RSS
Past Episodes
Use these prompts any way you wish. Change genders, change tenses, quote them, or not. Or, ignore them altogether and use your own story sparks.
Continue reading “Five Last Prompts for StoryADay September 2017 – Week 4”
Normally my Tuesday Reading Room posts review a short story I’ve read, but I’m breaking with tradition this week to tell you about a fabulous — and much needed — new book, Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays, by Windy Lynn Harris, a writer and the founder of Marketing Coach for Creative Writers.
A Handbook For Today’s WriterWindy Lynn Harris knows the industry and she knows the craft of short fiction and essay-writing. She breaks it all down for you, and this book gives you confidence to enter today’s writing market. Continue reading “[Reading Room] Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays by Windy Lynn Harris”
This week I give you five story starter prompts and an excitable sermon on not quitting. Enjoy!
The Prompts [0:52]
Progress Report [1:46]
Don’t Quit (with bonus Cassini shout out) [3:36]
Checklist and Feedback info [12:38]
You can find the prompts online here: https://storyaday.org/stadasep17-03/
You can find the checklist for StoryADay Sep17 here: http://bitly.com/2fkPe5M
You can take the survey (with last week’s checklist clutched in your hot little hand) here: goo.gl/forms/O8fHSMfWAlDbrtBw2
And you can always make your public commitment to your writing at the first of the month at https://storyaday.org
Use these prompts any way you wish. Change genders, change tenses, quote them, or not. Or, ignore them altogether and use your own story sparks.
Continue reading “Five More Prompts for StoryADay September 2017 – Week 3”
It’s Week 2 of StoryADay September 2017 and I’m back with five prompts for you.
IN THIS EPISODE
The Prompts [1:16]
Connecting With Other Writers [6:46]
The Checklist and a Survey [12:44]
Warm Wishes for your Writing [15:33]
LINKS
The Survey: goo.gl/forms/O8fHSMfWAlDbrtBw2
Use these prompts any way you wish. Change genders, change tenses, quote them, or not. Or, ignore them altogether and use your own story sparks.
Continue reading “Five More Prompts For StoryADay September 2017 – Week 2”
The only qualification to be a ‘Superstar” is a desire to write and support your fellow writers.
A supportive group of committed writers, who meet virtually, support each other’s efforts, and inspire each other.
Registration for 2024 open now-June 8, 2024
The only qualification to be a ‘Superstar” is a desire to write and support your fellow writers.
A supportive group of committed writers, who meet virtually, support each other’s efforts, and inspire each other.
Registration for 2024 open now-June 8, 2024
A 6-part journey through the short story.
Starts July 28, 2023
