Another one-word prompt for the weekend as we head into the second half of the month.
The Prompt
All
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
We’re half way there! Enough with the writing class style prompts. Today I’m throwing you a simple word prompt. Do what you like with it:
Half
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
I know, I know, I included villains and antagonists in yesterday’s prompt, but today we’re focusing on them.
Pick An Antagonist Type
If you’ve been following along with the prompts this week, you’ll already have worked on a flawed main character and a targeted secondary character. That secondary character may even have been an antagonist (a villain). So why am I talking about them again?
It’s one of those venn diagram things. All villains are antagonists, but not all antagonists are villains.
The antagonistic force in any story is the thing that is stopping the main character for getting what s/he wants or needs. While it might be Count Olaf terrorizing the Beaudelaire children, the antagonistic force might just as easily be Holden Caulfield’s crippling cynicism. Or maybe it’s Norman Bates’ mother.
Start with your main character. What do they want? What can stand in their way?
Make sure that everything you write about your antagonist illustrates something about its relationship to your main character. We don’t have room, in a short story, for sub-plots.
Kristen Lamb has some excellent posts on this topic, if you need a little more reading.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
It is day 13 of StoryADay September and you have almost made it to the halfway point. How’s it going? What challenges are you encountering? What are you learning about your writing habits? Leave a comment, or get in on the discussion in the forums.
Short stories can feature just one main character. You can totally get away with it. But not all the time.
Play With Your Secondary Characters
What is a secondary character? It’s any character who doesn’t matter to the story if you take out the protagonist.
Everything the secondary characters do in this short story should relate to the protagonist in some way:
As you write your story today make sure to include secondary characters and pay attention to everything they do. if they start to wander off-script, into areas that do not directly relate to your protagonist, stop them! (Promise them their own story tomorrow, if you have to!)
Go!
And when you have written your story, comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Now that we’ve played around with perspective for a few days, let’s turn our attention to character.
Of course you want your hero to be heroic and your bad guys to be evil, but don’t forget that one dimensional characters are unrealistic and unsympathetic.
So what’s the solution?
Give Your Character a Flaw
The key to giving your character an interesting flaw is to let the readers see the potential for failure early on.
If your heroine is a devoted mother and that is going to be the thrust of the story, let the readers see her having a moment of resentment, of longing for her former freedom. Raise the stakes by giving her chances to regret that feeling later, when her children are in peril. It’s not who she really is, but it was a very human impulse. Your readers will empathize both with the impulse and the regret.
If your hero is a wise-cracker, hint that there is a serious reason underneath.
The same goes for the evil witch in the office, who makes your main character’s life a misery. If she is all bad, the reader will get bored with her. If she has a hint of a redeeming feature (even if it is that she is hilarious), the readers will have more patience for her necessary appearances in the story.
Just don’t go overboard with this. It’s a short story. A quick hint early on is all you should need to put on the page.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Continuing this week’s theme of POV prompts, here is today’s prompt:
This is probably the least-used of all the points of view and with good reason. It’s not one we’re used to reading because it’s tricky and informal and potentially distracting.
So what is ‘second person’? It’s when the story is told with “you”, where the narrator puts you in the position of the main character.
If you’ve ever played a role-playing game (or a first-person video game) this perspective is going to come a lot easier to you than if you have never read it before. In role-playing games, the games master reads a scenario to the other players, putting them in the scene:
“You walk into the room and know, immediately that something is wrong. There’s a huddled shape in the shadows at the far side of the dim, low-ceilinged space and strange markings on the floor. You turn to leave but the door has slammed shut behind you. There is no handle.”
That’s all very well, but how do you stop a story from reading like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book: a series of descriptions? Well, here’s a passage from Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” that shows you how you can incorporate action, reflection and dialogue into a second person story. In this scene, the main character is in a nightclub.
In the bathroom there are no doors on the stalls, which makes it tough to be discreet. But clearly you are not the only person in here to take on fuel. Lots of sniffling going on in the stalls. the windows are blacked over, and for this you are profoundly grateful.
Hup, two, three, four. The soldiers are back on their feet. They are off and running in formation. Some of them are dancing and you must follow their example.
Just outside the door you spot her: tall, dark and alone, half hidden behind a pillar at the edge of the dance floor. You approach laterally, moving your stuff like a Bad Spade through the slalom of a synthesized conga rhythm. She jumps when you touch her shoulder.
“Dance?”
So yes, it is an unusual written form. It is, however, the way we often talk (“So, say your mother-in-law was coming over and she’s always having a go at you about the state of your bathroom, but her baby boy has never been seen to life a Clorox wipe in his life…”)
No need to be intimidated. Try out the second person and see what it does for your writing, your tone, the storytelling possibilities. Pay attention to how much description and dialogue you use in this form and how much of it seems interior. Is it significantly different from how you usually write?
Have fun with this and…
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
This week’s prompts are all about point of view and narrative voice.
Write a story from the third person limited POV.
“Third Person, Limited” means that, unlike yesterday, your narrator never says “I did this”, rather you talk about “he went to the door”, “He opened it.”
The ‘Limited” part means that all the judgements and assumptions, all internal thoughts are limited to those of the character through whom you are telling the story. No popping out of Dave’s head to jump across the room and tell us what Mandy is thinking as she looks at him. The only thing we’re privy to is what Dave thinks Mandy might be thinking about him.
Within this framework you can still play with the form: your limited persona can be like Nick Carraway, reporting on Jay Gatsby’s life, rather than telling us about his own adventures. You can give your limited persona the ride of her life through a whitewater canyon and let us see it all from her perspective.
Third person limited is great for short stories, because it lets us – the readers – identify with one character, and ground the story somewhere. You don’t have much space in a short story and the last thing you want is to confuse your readers (unless, of course, the whole point of your story is to confuse your readers!). Letting them get to know a character by showing their reactions to events, puts you half way to rooting for (or against) the protagonist.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Continuing this week’s theme of POV prompts, here is today’s prompt:
This is the perspective you know from all the classics (Dickens springs to mind): the author can say anything, pop inside any (or all) character’s heads, travel backwards and forwards in time, insert herself and her own commentary onto the page…
Have some fun with this. Take an episode and tell it from one character’s perspective, then leap into another character’s head and give their read on the situation. Try out your authorial prerogatives and make a comment about what’s going on (think of that moment when a TV character turns to the camera and talks directly to us, the audience).
This can get quite complicated (which is why it works so well for novels) but give it a bash and see what you come up with.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
You’ve done it! You’ve made it to the end of the first week! I hope you’ve met or come close to your goals. But if not, this is the perfect time to sit back and figure out what went ‘wrong’, what you can learn from it and how to press forward.
And now, on to today’s prompt.
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, writing in third-person, or first person, or inside or outside your character’s heads. So this week we’re shaking things up. Ready?
Write A Story Using The First Person Voice
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Pick a spectacular or vivid interior space. Set your story in it, paying attention to the space and how it might shape your narrative.
Tips:
Use a few details of an interior setting in your story today to suggest what’s going on with your characters.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Stories have settings, characters and action. Great! Easy. Let’s get writing!
A-hem. One of the hard parts of writing is getting the pacing of a story correct. You need to slow things down and speed things up in the right places. It may seem counterintuitive but the place to speed up is often in the set up. Readers don’t need a lot of set up. You (and they) can fill in the details as you go along. Again, oddly enough, the place to slow down can be the moment when you reach the action.
Trained by Hollywood as we are, we tend to think of ‘action’ as fast-paced, the bit where the cars come screeching down the hill, the rocket blasts off, the volcano erupts. But in a story, the ‘action’ is simply ‘the stuff the characters do in an effort to get what they want’. When your characters start taking action, that might be a flag for you to slow the reader down, tease the moment, with some details, thoughts, frame-by-frame storyboarding of the scene.
Take a moment, right in the heart of the action of your story, and increase the tension by slowing it wa-a-ay down with granular details.
Some examples:
Take us through every muscle that tenses as the hero prepares to run;
Take us inside a woman’s head for every random thought that flits through it between the words “will you marry me?” and her answer (“Did I leave the iron on? Oh gawd, I cannot believe I thought about that right now. Look, he’s on his knees. He’ll ruin his trousers. Focus, woman! Look at his face. That mole really needs checked out and oh no, this moment has gone on too long. Must answer. Must answer. Should I cry? I don’t think I want to cry, but it seems like the kind of thing I should do. I wish he’d stop staring at me like that…”)
Detail the painstaking preparations the surgical team makes, in silence, before the lifesaving operation.
This might not be the most successful story you ever write, but it’s a worthwhile technique to practice. You might just find a brand new tool to put in your writers’ toolkit.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Write a story that hinges in some way on time: the passage of, warping of, misperception of, freezing of, measurement of, gadgets for tracking, etc.
Hooray! Day 5 and you’re still coming back for more. Hope the writing is going well, but if not, keep plugging away at it. It’ll come. Why not read and comment on someone else’s work to inspire you?
Since this is a time-limited writing challenge I thought it was about time we wrote, well, about time.
Write a story that hinges in some way on time: the passage of, warping of, misperception of, freezing of, measurement of, gadgets for tracking, etc.
If you need a little inspirations on the workings of time and our obsessions with it, try this collection from the British Museum.
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Day 4 and you’re back for more. Good for you!
How’s it going? Don’t forget to check in at the forums or leave a comment on this post when you’ve written today, or if you need a little encouragement.
Today, write a story in which imagination and fanciful stuff like art and interpretation have been outlawed. What kind of implications would that have? Why did they do it?
(What if no-one had had the imagination to see the importance in stopping to take this picture? How would language sound without metaphors? Would we, without history, be doomed to repeat it?)
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Day three and it’s a holiday in the US, my kids go back to school tomorrow and frankly, I think we all deserve an easy day today so…
Write a Twitter length story. 140 characters. That’s it.
(But watch out. It’ll take longer than you think to come up with a real story and then trim it down to 140 characters. Get some inspiration here.)
Go!
And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
You’re back for the second day for writing! Good for you! I’m proud of you.
Today, pick a character (maybe someone from your past, maybe someone you’ve been imagining for years, maybe someone you’ve written about before).
Give that character something to want. It can be as simple as wanting a place to sit down, or as grand as wanting to save the world.
Show us how much they want it, somewhere near the beginning of the story. Make it their guiding principle for every action they take, every word they say throughout the story. See how it shapes everything, and how it frees you from having to explain why they are doing what they are doing, all the time? Nice, eh?
Near the end of the story you’re going to have to decide whether we see your character get what they want, be thwarted, or limp off into the sunset still seeking after it. Show us that scene.
Go!
And when you have written your story log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
Welcome to StoryADay September 2012!! You’ve signed up. I’m so proud of you!
Well, while you are welcome to write whatever the heck you want today, here’s a prompt to help you out in the unlikely event that you can’t even come up with one idea 😉
Write a story set on a Saturday morning in the era during which you were a kid. It doesn’t have to be you (or a kid) in the story, but make your story capture the feel, the colors, the sounds of the time.
Don’t forget to make it a story though: something has to happen, someone has to change; we must see a beginning, a middle and an end.
Go!
And when you have written your story log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.
StoryADay September ’12 starts TOMORROW!
But more about in a minute.
First: I have a gift for you, and a favor to ask.
StoryADay September ’12 starts TOMORROW!
But more about in a minute.
First: I have a gift for you, and a favor to ask.
This will be my fourth StoryADay challenge. I’ve had to get pretty good at side-stepping writers’ block.
Now you can have 60+ of my best techniques for breaking through resistance, in handy ebook form, free until Sunday Sept 2, 2012
The StoryADay.org Guide To Breaking Writers’ Block
You can get your copy FREE until Sunday, Sept 2 just by clicking ‘buy’.
The tips are arranged by section:
You can read the book through once or dip in and out whenever you need a boost.
Honestly, it’s a blatant attempt to rise higher in the Amazon rankings and improve the visibility of my book. Every copy downloaded by you (or someone you tell about it) in the next few days, boosts its sales rankings and helps future, paying readers find it. This, in turn, helps me pay for StoryADay.org and keep it free to you. Oh, and it’s DRM-free, so you should be able to share it between devices freely.
Ebooks are easy and Amazon makes it particularly easy to get your book into the distribution stream. They offer 70% royalties, which was unheard of in the publishing world before they came along. And I love my Kindle.
Also, I’m researching the whole process and writing it up, and will release a report on it a few months from now. You’ll be able to use this report to figure out whether or not it’s worth your time to put together your own ebook (a collection of short stories perhaps?) and how to avoid making mistakes along the way. This report will be free to members of the StoryADay.org Advance Notice List.
You are welcome to download the book and do nothing more. But I would really, really appreciate it if you would consider doing some of the following steps. It really helps.
Get Your Free Copy of the StoryADay.org Guide To Breaking Writers’ Block NOW
Tomorrow. Can that be right? Tomorrow?!
OK, deep breath.
If you’re NOT doing the StoryADay Sept’12 challenge, no need to unsubscribe. This list will not be flooded with daily prompts or chatter about the challenge. You’ll have to get on the Daily Prompt email list or go into the community for all that stuff. You’ll just get a nice, helpful writing-related post now and then, and news about upcoming challenges.
But, even if you’re too busy with other projects, why not goad your writing friends and challenge them to take part? It’s not too late! 😉
If you ARE doing the September Challenge here are a few things you might want to be checking:
And that’s it from me, except to wish you luck, persistence and courage.
See you in the forums?
Keep writing,
Julie
I’m often asked how I write—how, physically, do I write? Pen and paper? Computer? Portable device? Onto my blog?
This is a question you, too, should consider for yourself before you set yourself any kind of writing challenge (like, for example, writing a story a day for a month!)
How will you:
* Write whenever and wherever you get the chance?
* Keep track of everything you’ve written?
* Find a way to work that is comfortable for you?
So should you commit to writing in a notebook? ON a netbook? At your trusty (or flaky) computer?
Honestly, the answer for you (as it is for me) is probably a mixture of all of them. So here are my tips and tricks for:
* Using all the writing technology at your disposal for maximum productivity (without losing your mind)
* Keeping and retrieving your masterpieces for later editing.
The pros and cons to this are pretty straightforward.
* You can get a paper and writing implement pretty much anywhere.
You don’t need batteries, a network.
* Nothing pops up on your page to distract you.
* Editing as you write is difficult. You’re pretty much limited to crossing things out and writing in the margins. Getting to the end of a first draft before editing, should be easier than on a computer.
* You can do it pretty much anywhere (except, perhaps, in the dark.)
* Handwriting fires up areas of your brain that are associated with deep understanding and memory. It is a very different experience from typing.
* You need to have a paper and pen(cil) handy. What if you can’t find your favorite pen? Will you spend so long looking for it that you don’t write?
* Editing after the story is finished is going to require you (probably) to transcribe the story into a computer or write it all out longhand again. Not necessarily a con though, as that can help with the editing process. Definitely a con if your time is severely limited.
* Scraps of paper are easy to lose and hard to find once they’re lost. This is less the case with computer files.
* Set up a system now for retrieving your work later. Some options include:
** only using one notebook (or series of notebooks) for each project. Don’t write a little bit here and a little bit there.
** Designate a StoryADay notebook and carry it everywhere. Only use that blue-covered copybook from Staples that you like, for your novel.
** Using looseleaf paper can be helpful if you write in different places or like to edit on paper. You can get hold of binder-sized paper pretty much anywhere. When you get home, file your stories in one binder, and you should be able to keep track of things. This requires some discipline in promising you’ll always file the stories away but it’ll be worth it three months from now when you try to find them again!
* Find paper that is a joy to write on, if you’re that way inclined. Have a cramped notebook with lines that are too dark or too light or too far apart, and a spine that doesn’t crack open far enough, or pages that are so small that you have to turn them every couple of sentences? This is just one more way to make it easy to skip today’s writing. Make writing a physical pleasure as well as a mental one, by treating yourself to some paper that you love and will want to spend time everyday caressing.
Again, the pros and cons are fairly straightforward:
* You know where it is and how to use it (you do, don’t you?)
* You probably have a decent word processor built right in and, chances are you are very comfortable typing at a decent speed.
* Even if you can’t remember how you decided to organize your file folders last week, you can easily search your computer for errant stories.
* You can easily edit and save multiple versions.
* It is all to easy to get distracted by the Internet
* It is very easy to edit, leading to you fussing with bits you have already written and never moving forwards.
* It is tempting to play around with formatting when you’ve got a nice powerful word processor that you can use to show you exactly how your story will look when set in the format used by Glimmer Train or The New Yorker (not that I’ve ever…oh shut up!).
* Designate a folder for all your fiction writing, another for non-fiction, another for semi-thought-out blog posts. File your work.
* Save often. Seriously I cannot stress this enough. And still you’re going to need to experience the pain of losing a masterpiece before you put this into practice. But Save OFTEN. Train your fingers to mash the ‘ctrl’ and ‘s’ buttons together every paragraph or two. You’ll be glad you did.
* Use the simplest program you can. I use IAWriter when composing (I’m using it now). Use the full-screen mode in your word processor-of-choice.
* Turn off the Internet (Unplug the LAN cable, turn the sound down, turn off wi-fi, whatever you have to do). Do nothing but write when you are writing. No checking email, Facebook or Twitter. Ever.
* Name your files sensibly. You can call them all “StADASept12 The One About The Woman And Her Garden”, “StADaSept12 The Dog In The Ditch” if you think that’s likely to help you remember which is which, and where you put them. If you are writing a series of stories about the same characters always name the file with the same character’s name “Sarah stories – fishing in the creek with Grandma” “Sarah stories – Going to the corner shop”
If you move around a lot and are comfortable with a mobile device (and don’t want to hand write) it probably makes a lot of sense for you to use one of these devices.
* They are with you all the time or easy to move to wherever you are.
* You don’t need good lighting.
* Spellcheck.
* Battery life.
* If they are connected to the Internet you risk getting distracted.
* Comfort. Smaller keyboards and screens can make for a frustrating experience. Though I find them great for writing, less so for editing.
* Version control. If you’re using a mobile device and a desktop you run the risk of having (and working on) different versions of your story at the same time.
* Decide on how you are going to handle version control. If you work both on an mobile device and a desktop, consider saving all your work to Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud or some other remote location (not your computer’s hard drive). This way, you’ll open the same file on either machine. By all means periodically copy all the files to an archive folder on your machine but call it something like ‘archive’ so you don’t get confused about which file is the latest version.
* Pick programs that play well together. I tried using Scrivener on my desktop and iaWriter on my iPad and ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to learn/figure out how to sync the two. (My fault, not theirs, but not something I was willing to spend the time to learn properly during a challenge!). If you have Word or Pages or Scrivener or a simple text program on both your machines, use it. You can always export them to something else when it’s time to edit and submit.
* Get a bluetooth keyboard for your tablet. Yeah, yeah, they have onscreen keyboards and hand-writing recognition and speech-recognition, but a neat little keyboard still trumps all that for most of us.
* If it works for you, consider downloading something like Dragon Dictate which will transcribe your stories. (Way back, the desktop version of this was quite good because I could train it to understand my Scottish-American mongrel accent. The iPhone app version doesn’t seem as versatile, so this doesn’t work for me).
Some people post their stories every day to a blog. They may even write them write in the blog-software window. There are some fairly big (and non-obvious) pros and cons for this one.
* You get to share your work immediately – especially good if you have a writers’ group or a bunch of dedicated readers.
* You can easily find your stories again. Even if your hard drive dies.
* There is a off-the-cuff, relatively uncrafted esthetic to blogging that might help you write with abandon every day.
* Publishing your work on a blog may cause some editors to consider the work ‘previously published’ and render it invalid for inclusion in magazines and competitions.
* Writing in the blog window leaves you at the mercy of your internet connection and the host’s servers. One blip and your whole story can be lost otherwise.
* Consider writing offline and then pasting the content directly into the blog window. Write in a plain text program and then pretty it up once you’re in the blog window.
* Save drafts obsessively as you work on them.
* Use your blog software to set up categories and tags for your stories. That way it’ll be really easy to find all the stories you wrote during StADa Sept ’12, or all the stories your wrote that were autobiographical, or all the fairy stories…
* Consider password-protecting or marking as ‘private’ any entries you think you might rework for submission to magazines or contests. If no-one else can see them, no-one can consider them ‘published’.
So how do YOU write? Have any tips for keeping your writing flowing?
Hollywood is all about the ‘reboot’ these days: taking familiar characters from fairy tales and comics and even TV series, and telling their stories again, in a new way.
It seemed only appropriate to ask you to write a story that features Mnemosyne, Greek titan, mother of the nine muses, and the figure responsible for the telling of all the tales (and committing them to memory) before writing was invented.
“Of the female Titanes they say that Mnemosyne discovered the uses of the power of reason, and that she gave a designation to every object about us by means of the names which we use to express whatever we would and to hold conversation one with another; though there are those who attribute these discoveries to Hermes. And to this goddess is also attributed the power to call things to memory and to remembrance (mneme) which men possess, and it is this power which gave her the name she received.”
-Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 67. 3 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) source
The story also goes that Mnemosyne was the daughter of Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (Sky). It also says that Zeus spent nine consecutive nights with her and nine months later the nine muses were born. Later still, she watched over a pool in the underworld that was named for her. When people arrived in the underworld they would first drink from the waters of the Lethe (Forgetfulness) to forget all that had come before and then drink from the waters of Mnemosyne (Memory) so that he could remember what was to come.
Write a story in which one of your character shares some traits or life experiences with Mnemosyne.
Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook
Some tweets/updates you might use:
Don’t miss my short story: Mnemosyne, Remembered #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-Dc
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is all about the mother of the muses #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-Dc
Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-Dc
See my story – and write your own, today: Mnemosyne Remembered #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-Dc
The point of doing this challenge is to push yourself to do more than you thought you possibly could.
The point is to unleash the flood of creativity that comes when you have to write every day.
The point is not to give you yet another way to fail at a creative endeavor.
So yes, you should set yourself a goal that seems momentous, preposterous, monstrous even. And maybe for you that will be: writing 30 stories in 30 days. But maybe it will mean writing a story on five out of seven days.
The StoryADay Rules say there is one rule, “Write and finish a story every day. That’s it.”
They then promptly go on to talk about all the ways you can add to — or subtract from — that absolute.
I know it’s a bit confusing. It’s my fault. I appreciate rules, but I’m just not very good at being told what to do and I fail to see why I should expect other writers to be any better. Hence…
So, here follows my attempt to make sense of the part where the site says “set your own rules.”
The point of doing this challenge is to push yourself to do more than you thought you possibly could.
The point is to unleash the flood of creativity that comes when you have to write every day.
The point is not to give you yet another way to fail at a creative endeavor.
So yes, you should set yourself a goal that seems momentous, preposterous, monstrous even. And maybe for you that will be: writing 30 stories in 30 days. But maybe it will mean writing a story on five out of seven days. Or limiting yourself to 100 word stories. Or taking Thursday’s off.
If you know that your Saturdays are packed with people and obligations, sun-up to sun-down; or if you have tried the challenge before and noticed that you always failed to finish a story after five days of successes; or if you are a member of a religious group that takes the holy day extremely seriously, don’t torture yourself. Write it into your rules that you get to take certain days off.
And if you haven’t done the challenge before (or if you haven’t written anything for a while) I strongly encourage you to stick to the basic rule: write and finish one story every single day for a month.
I know that sounds ridiculous in itself: surely if you haven’t been writing you should warm up a bit, ease yourself in? No. Sorry. This is not like running a marathon. You’re not going to pull a muscle or ruin your knees.
If you haven’t pushed your short-story writing before, you have no way of knowing what your boundaries are. Only by trying to write a complete story every day for 30 days can you know whether or not you can do it. Or how close you can come. And the effort is its own reward.
If, however, you took part in May, you’ll have a good sense of how much time you could make for writing, and what your goals need to be.
Just be honest with yourself. If you wrote 12 stories in May you might be secretly disappointed in yourself — or you might be thrilled. It all depends on you, and your circumstances. Just set yourself a goal that’s a little more ambitious than whatever you accomplished before and promise yourself you will push and push to get to it.
The second absolute rule you should set yourself is to treat every day as a new day until the end of the month.
No going back to finish yesterday’s story – until next month
No berating yourself for yesterday’s shortcomings
No looking ahead and saying “I’ll never make it!”
Try your utmost to stick to your writing rules today. Forgive the past, and forget the future. Just write today.
Well, first of all, I have a problem with that word: “fail”.
Did you try? Then you didn’t fail. Did you complete a story every day for a month? No? Hmm, well, did you learn something about your style or your voice or your writing method? Did you write more than you wrote the month before (or in any month before. Ever.)?
There may well be days when you fail to finish a story. Forget it. Forgive yourself and move on. You are in pursuit of a great challenge here. Keep after it.
It’s entirely likely that some of your stories are great steaming heaps of passive voiced, prepositionally phrased, tedious prose peopled by heroes who wouldn’t know a plot point if it pointed right at them. Don’t give up on them. Keep writing until you get to the end. Even if you have to kill someone (in fact, that can be kind of fun). Pushing through to the end of a story teaches you so much more than giving up and starting afresh. Finish.
And if it gets to midnight (or whenever you go to bed) and you simply cannot finish today’s story: get some rest. Let it go and vow to start afresh tomorrow.
When the month is over, you can revise what’s worth saving, and learn from what’s not. While the challenge is still running, just keep writing. Strike the word ‘fail’ from your vocabulary. So long as you are writing, you cannot fail. Pat yourself on the back. You wrote. You got complete stories out of your brain — where you didn’t even know they were lurking — and on the page. You are courageous and to be congratulated.
Yes. Absolutely. This is your challenge. I’d rather you adjusted your rules than gave up. Just don’t be too easy on yourself. This is meant to be a, er, challenge!
Set ambitious goals
Try to meet them. At the very least, put some kind of ending on each story.
Be hard on yourself every morning and kind to yourself at the end of every day.
Treat every day as a new challenge (don’t look back!)
Over at Wikipedia, today’s Picture of the Day is At Breakfast by the Danish artist L. A. Ring.
Apart from being quite beautiful, the picture is a study in subtlety. According to the accompanying text, the artist is supposed to have surrounded his model (his wife) with subtle signs of his affection for her.
Write a story in which the objects surrounding your characters reflect how they feel about each other.
1. You should use the prompt in your story (however obliquely you use the ‘want’, it should be there in the character and all their reactions).
2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!
Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook
Some tweets/updates you might use:
Don’t miss my short story: Subtle Signs #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-CW
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is all about subtle signs in the background #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-CW
Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-CW
See my story – and write your own, today: Subtle Signs #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-CW
I came a little late to the stories of Ray Bradbury and that’s probably a good thing. I was much too literal as a teenager and probably wouldn’t have known what to make of his fantastic, thought-provoking, stories with their lyrical language.
When I did discover his writing, of course, I had my mind blown in little controlled explosions by stories like “A Sound of Thunder”, “The Rocket Man” and “The Fog Horn”.
But I hadn’t read any of his stories for years. Now, getting ready to introduce them to my own children, I picked up a collection of his early stories and sat down to read.
The very first story in the collection was “The Fog Horn”, one of my very favorites.
As I started to read, I was a little worried that I had over-romanticized Bradbury’s stories in my memory. Here were two lighthouse-keepers oiling the lamp and chatting in a fairly mundane way about their job. Maybe I wasn’t going to be as transported, at this age, as I was a decade or more ago.
Then the older lighthouse keeper tells the younger a theory he has about how the fog horn was invented.
“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, ‘We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, an being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll made me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'”
The Fog Horn blew.
And that’s just for starters.
The ideas in Bradbury’s stories are wonderful and the worlds are fantastic or sometimes mundane and all of the experiences are deep and human, and the language..ah the language.
You might not love his stories the way I do, but I would recommend reading a few of them if only to see in practice this truth: you should not be afraid to write in your own voice.
Bradbury is often referred to as a science fiction writer because his most famous stories deal with rockets, and Mars and time-travel. Bradbury was writing during the ‘Golden Age’ of speculative fiction and that’s where his stories were being published – in Sci-fi magazines. But he doesn’t try to sound like his peers, nor does he limit himself to descriptions of the cold depths of space, spaceships or alien planets. He writes in an inimitable, poetic style about ideas that fascinate him in words that could only come together in that order, out of his Bradbury brain.
Go you, and do likewise.
StoryADay May is such a success that we’re going to do it all again … in September! Join us for StoryADay Sept’12
For the past three years we’ve been getting together in May to write A Story A Day. It has been some of the most creative, inspiring, productive writing time I’ve ever had and I’m not alone:
“I love this challenge…” – Marta
” I reached most of my goals and learned more about my writing habits.” – Chit
“I have discovered that I do believe in myself as a writer – as cliched as it seems, writing regularly really does make you a writer. So, here’s to discovery…without which I would still be stumbling alone in the dark rather than enjoying the sunshine with my muse.” – Cat
So this year I asked around and discovered that you lot are crazy.
You want to write even more!
So, just for fun, let’s do it all again: in September
Come and write with us this StoryADay September!
The Rules are the same as ever:
Write (and finish) a story a day for a month. That’s it.
The Options:
I’m not giving anyone the option to start a new StoryADay blog for the September challenge. It’s just a matter of administrative time. We’ll see how it goes. If you already have one, feel free to use it. Otherwise, post StADa-related news (and stories if you want) on your own blog and link to your posts in StoryADay’s blog comments and forum posts.
A, You don’t have, but it helps keep you honest. You can sign up at the site (see below) or just announce your participation to your friends.
B, If you want a username for the StoryADay.org community I’m opening up registration again now. A username gets you into the Community area where you can find friends and discuss writing with some other incredibly dedicated writers. It’s a wonderfully supportive community and I recommend signing up (it’s free and optional).
C, I’m going to post a ‘blogroll’ of participants on the front page of the site. If you’d like to be on it (optional) fill in this form. You can add your name to this list even if you don’t have or want a StoryADay username. If you plan to write, you’re in.
I’ll tell you this up-front: I’m an optimist, a romantic. I like my heroes larger than life and my endings to, well, end. I get impatient with stories that are just like life: a little change here and there, but then they just stop and life goes on. I can appreciate stories like that. I can admire them. But I can never love them, or their protagonists.
The title of this Grace Paley story, “Goodbye and Good Luck” was an implicit promise from the author to the reader that this story would have a real change in it, that life wouldn’t just trickle on as before.
This was the first story I’m aware of having read that was written by Grace Paley, so I didn’t know if I could trust her to deliver on that promise, but she did.
Not only does the story have a beginning, a middle and a satisfying end, it has a real character as its protagonist — and I say that not in the literary sense, but in the way your grandmother would have said it: “Oh yeah, that Rosie. She’s a real character!”
Written in the first person though, the character doesn’t seem outsized. That, I thought, was an interesting lesson for writers. Just as your villain never sees himself not as the villain in someone else’s story but the hero of his own, truly remarkable characters don’t see themselves as remarkable. They are just as they are. Telling the story from their perspective is an interesting way of avoiding moralizing or lionizing or any other kind of -izing.
At the start of this story Rose begins to tell her niece Lillie, the story of her life. I was a little adrift at first, trying to figure out who was talking and where and when and why. I didn’t understand the rhythms of her speech or the minutiae of all the things she referred to. But as soon as I relaxed and let the story go, I realized it was useful. My unfamiliarity with the world of the story made it seem more realistically set in its own time and space. The author didn’t need to waste time explaining what “novelty wear” was. It was enough that the character, Rosie, knew. Perhaps even her niece didn’t know but Rose bulldozes on, telling her own story from the past, without stopping to check, and that told me plenty about Rose herself.
Rosie worked for a theater company in the grand era of Yiddish theater and is, herself, a grand storyteller. Soon you forget to wonder why Rose is telling this story to her niece. It pulls you along, capturing the rhythms and sounds, the mores and daily details of another time.
But of course there is a reason for the story. I sensed it coming and hoped I was right and then, there we were at the end of the story, like the end of a satisfying meal.
This story is a great example of how to use character and setting to tell a ‘simple’ story, in which there is little ‘on-screen action’, and how to include details without weighing the story down in acres of description and explanation.
Goodbye and Good Luck, indeed.
The last two blog posts were all about what to do when you don’t feeeeeeel like writing (wah!)
This time I’m on a mission.
Post your biggest writing excuses below (‘not enough time’, ‘my inner editor won’t shut up’, ‘my ideas aren’t original’, ‘my kids are eating me alive!’) and I’ll let my inner drill sergeant loose on them.
Ready to have your go-to writing excuse busted? Post them now:
Here are your September 2012 Participant Badges!
Use them on your websites or where ever you like.
(Right-click to download whichever size you like)
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150 x 59 pixels
I used to get hung up on The Big Idea: having something to say; writing a story that was somehow meaningful.
It wasn’t until I tried to write a story a day for the first time, back in 2010, that I realized: the idea doesn’t come first.
The idea (the theme) often doesn’t come until the end of the story when you suddenly realize what it is your characters have been yapping on about for the past few pages.
The character — what the character wants, what the character doesn’t have, and why — are where the story happens.
1. You should use the prompt in your story (however obliquely you use the ‘want’, it should be there in the character and all their reactions).
2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!
Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook
Some tweets/updates you might use:
Don’t miss my short story: What A Girl Wants #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-zy
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is all about what your character wants #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-zy
Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-zy
See my story – and write your own, today: What Your Character Wants #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-zy
Last week we talked about the importance of writing even when you don’t feel like it. Well, enough theory. This week I bring you seven practical strategies for making it happen.
Goals, rewards and accountability buddies form part of the big picture in this scheme. They are sensible parts of your writing’s career plan. But as for the actual “starting writing” part? That’s when you need to be a bit more tricksy.
Try some of these tricks to shake loose the “sensible”, lose the “logical” and get your brain into that devil-may-care creative zone you need for writing.
I’ve always loved a deadline — as long as it came with a sleepless night between the two of us. But sit down to write knowing I have to have something completed in an hour?! That’s enough to induce a mammoth case of writer’s block (aka panic). Comedian John Cleese talks about this in this fabulous video on creativity (it’s long, but worth watching). He recommends no less than 90 minutes as a window for creative work, asserting that your brain will try to sabotage you for at least the first half hour…It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it does point out the necessity of allowing more time than you might otherwise plan, for creative ventures.
If you’re really having trouble knowing how to get into your story, put all thoughts of readers, editors and publishing out of your head. Instead start writing a letter to your best friend, explaining what this story is going to be about. Write it as if you were describing something that had really happened. You don’t need to finish the letter (or mail it) because the act of writing it out will help you find a way into the actual story, and start writing.
If you usually write on a computer, try turning on the microphone and dictating your story instead (you can transcribe it later). If you usually dictate stories, grab a good pen and some nice paper and write a few paragraphs. If you habitually write on paper, pull up a keyboard. Just the act of writing in a different physical way forces your brain to fire in different ways. You may find yourself “writing” in a different style than usual, or you may simply jump start your writing day. (This will feel awkward. That’s kind of the point. Try it.)
Sitting down is not a natural attitude, in evolutionary terms. Humans are made to be upright, to be walking around. So stand up for a while. Pace the floor, muttering like a mad person about the plot point that has you foxed. If you can swing it, put a plank across the arms of a treadmill and balance your laptop on it (I recommend walking very, very slowly until you get the hang of this). Either way, regular movement-breaks help you write by getting your blood pumping and letting your mind wander. Creativity requires thinking-time as well as working-time.
Some days getting started feels like torture. It feels like a physical impossibility. Put your pen on the paper, put your fingers on the keyboard and just talk. Talk about anything. How hard this is, how much you hate it, what sounds you are hearing outside your window, the feeling of your hair sticking to your neck in the summer heat, anything. Eventually you will relax (and get sick of the navel-gazing, self-absorbed, pity-kitty you have become and start writing the damned story).
Every story has scenes. The bit where we walk in to the characters’ lives. The bit where they are forced to make a decision. The bit when they have a big fight. Take one scene and outline it. Promise yourself that you’ll write this one scene today even if you don’t manage anything else. Figure out who is in the scene, where it takes place, what the characters want, why they can’t have it (yet) and what function the scene plays in the overall scheme of the story (is it a set-up scene? Does it contain the inciting incident? Is it the climax?). Don’t worry about how you’ll write the rest of the story. Outline this one scene. Then write it.
This is the most hippy, nebulous piece of advice I will give and its a bit more ’big picture’ than the other techniques here, but used in conjunction with them it can be extremely powerful. We are a product of our beliefs about ourselves, so let’s make sure we spend some time on the positive ones. Yes, writing is hard. No, we’re not big successes yet. So why do we do this to ourselves? What do we want? Answer this question then spend some time imagining how it will feel when you get there. Use those anticipated good feelings to propel you towards your goal.
Your goal might be as grand as seeing yourself doing book signings and readers to adoring fans. Or it might be as simple as remembering the thrill you always feel when you finish a piece.
And remember, you’re a writer. It is your job to imagine things all the time. If MBA candidates and captains of industry can use this technique, how much more successful will you, a writer, be?
—
What techniques do you use to jump start your work on a day when you don’t feel like writing?
Need more help jump-starting your writing day? Check out the ebook: The StoryADay.org Guide To Breaking Writers’ Block
You love to write, right?
Except when you don’t.
What’s a writer to do on those days when your inner writer is being a cranky toddler, plumping it’s big fat bottom down on the floor, screwing up its face and wailing,
“I dun wanna wri-i-ite!”
Today I bring some tough parenting love for your inner child-writer. Next week: seven practical strategies to jump-start your writing on the days when even The Mommy Voice won’t cut it.
D’ya think the dairy farmer always leaps out of bed before dawn, whistling and praising the winter wind that whips away his breath on the way to the byre? Nope, but you need milk for your coffee, so he drags himself out of bed.
Readers, no, the world needs your stories, so get your fingers on the keyboard.
But Julie, you say, writing is a creative pursuit! How can I be expected to turn out something wonderful if writing feels like work?
In answer I say: how will you turn out something wonderful if you aren’t sitting down every day and learning how to get through the reluctance, the fear, the slog? You don’t have to write something wonderful every. You do, however, have to write. Whether you feel like it or not.
Do whatever it takes to get yourself past the reluctance and into that happy place where the words flow. Stay in your chair until you are happy to be there. Your readers will thank you.
If you are not writing for a steady paycheck and legions of crazed fans, you need another reward structure.
It IS hard to start and finish a story. It IS hard to face the revision process. You DO deserve a reward for putting in the effort – beyond the satisfaction of knowing you did it.
So, set up some incentives for yourself. Be generous, but canny. Your rewards should enhance your creativity rather than take the edge off.
Yes, goals. Set regular goals and meet them.
Any or all of the following – especially when you pair them with the accountability of telling a more-bossy friend about them – can help you break through the barriers on a day when you just don’t want to write:
-a daily word count or ’scene goal’. Commit to write X number of words or complete scenes every day. You will progress, even if you end up revising heavily later.
-a weekly goal can make the whole ’goal’ thing less stressful than a daily goal. Struggling on Tuesday? Make up for it on Wednesday, Thursday AND Friday.
-write down mid-term and long-term goals: “finish three stories this month”, “revise and submit stories to ten markets by October”, “self-publish a story collection in 2013”.
Refer to your list as you sit down to work. Remind yourself it’s not just about the slog or the word-count: you have goals for your writing.
And if one of your goals is “support myself through my writing, full-time” then it’s even more important that you figure out, now, how to write even when you don’t feel like it.
Next week: seven specific techniques for getting yourself in the mood to write even when your inner child-writer is saying “I dun wanna!”.
Then, let me bust your writing excuses. No more excuses!
So tell me, what do YOU do when you don’t feel like writing?
This week’s prompt revolves around taking a very short span of time (impossibly short) and stretching it out over the length of a complete short story.
Quick question before I get onto the prompt. We’re having a discussion on the Advance List about the possibility of doing a bonus StoryADay in September. I’d love it if you could share your level of interest in this poll
[poll id=”2″]
Thanks! Now, on with the prompt!
This week I read a great new novel called Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
I heard the author talking about this. It was a deliberate decision on his part, a challenge to himself to see if he could (with very few exceptions) avoid flashbacks or set-pieces that happened out of the timeline of the book’s one day. He also didn’t want a mystery or huge amount of suspense to pull readers onward. I was so intrigued that I had to get hold of a copy and see how he pulled it off.
Of course, he did it by Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Storytelling in Real Time”
Last month I went to Book Expo America, the big bookselling trade show in NYC. It was the first time I’d been at BEA in a dozen years.
Last time I was there, there was this funky new thing called the Rocker ebook reader, the size of a trade paperback with a big heavy battery and a black-on-gray screen that completely failed to excite anyone at the conference but me. I’m not sure Amazon even had a booth that year.
Fast forward to this year and everyone was walking the floor, smartphones in hand, skirting the vast Amazon presence right in the center of the floor. Added to that the publishers — most of whom didn’t even have email addresses last time — sent out a free ebook containing samples of the most “buzz-worthy” books featured at the convention. I got a copy for my Kindle (sorry, RocketBook. You never made it, but you helped blaze the trail, if its any consolation).
In the BEA Buzz ebook I found a short story called “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars”, by the very buzz-worthy Junot Diaz. It was the first of his stories that I have read and it wont be the last. It’s from a collection called This Is HowYou Lose Hercoming out this year from Riverside Books.
The story takes us inside the head of a young Dominican guy with girl problems. Written in the first person and in the distinctive patois of the young idiot male everywhere, the story is a skillful demonstration of how to tell more than just one person’s story through one person’s voice.
Even though the narrator is clearly the “sucio” his girlfriend suspects he is, Diaz manages to show us, through his character’s voice, that he has the potential to be much more. Without whining, he shows how his struggle to be a good macho young man complicates his attempts to be a good man.
And when Diaz allows his character to go “home” to the Dominican Republic with the girl he’s trying to keep, we see the a very different young man, a natural poet and family guy.
The whole story is a subtle reflection on the difficulty of growing up, fitting in, finding your way, with one foot in two different communities, and in many cultures. But it’s all done with a light hand and extraordinary eloquence.
Look for “This Is How You Lose Her” by Junot Diaz from Riverhead Books in September.
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
![[Write On Wednesday] – What A Girl Wants](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-25-at-3.49.28-PM.png)
