It’s that time again: time to make your commitments to your writing for the coming month. Join us!
Welcome to the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group!
Leave a comment 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.)
It’s that time again: time to make your commitments to your writing for the coming month. Join us!
Welcome to the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group!
Leave a comment 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.)
Do you lead an unremarkable life? Great! Use that to connect with readers!
I spent a lot of time in Scotland this year, for family reasons.
Any time I could, I went outside: to walk in the woods – swinging my arms carefully to avoid the tall, triangle-leafed stinging nettles or stooping to squeeze between my fingers the low-growing wild garlic.
On other days I was magnetically drawn to the coastline – making my way over the dunes or rocks, through the powdery, dry sand that shifts underfoot, to the glistening ridges of packed sand beyond the high-tide line of stranded bladderwort seaweed.
Crouch down above the high-tide line to dig your fingers into the sand and you’ll first feel the warm, granular top layer, that seems soft and forgiving, only to quickly encounter a harder layer of cool, damp sand, resisting you. Dig closer to the water line and the wet sand will flow in and close around your wrist, like it wants you to stay.
The Writer’s Lens
Consider the last line of the previous paragraph. Is the landscape I wrote about friendly? Or is its grip sinister?
If this was a story, you’d have to keep reading to find out.
As a writer it’s almost impossible to write about any experience without it turning into a metaphor for something else. We can’t help ourselves.
And that’s exactly what I want you to remember this week.
Writing Is About Creating Connections
Sometimes “Writing” seems like an ambitious and complicated aspiration.
Do I have anything important to say? Who am I to ask people to listen to my words? Who’s going to care about my characters’ trivial adventures when the whole world is [gestures vaguely] like this?!
It’s important to remember that most people don’t have big, grand adventures every day. Or often.
Even if your characters are getting into dramatic scrapes in worlds we’ll never visit, the moments when your readers connect with them, will be the ones we recognize from this life: the moments of connection; the flash of nostalgia; the smell of a long-lost comfort food.
If you want to connect with readers, give them tiny, everyday experiences they can relate to. The more specific, the better.
Stand The Test of Time
Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 short story “Girl”, is a list of advice on how to be a woman. But not just any woman.
Through the details Kincaid choses, the reader is invited to make assumptions about who is speaking–from their gender to their age, to the geographical location:
“Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap…This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease…this is how you grow okra–far from the house because okra tree harbors red ants…”
But it’s not just a list of instructions. They, along with the occasional editorial comment, add up to a larger story in which the older woman imparts warnings and advice and leaves the reader with questions: Does the speaker want the ‘girl’ to be the kind of ‘good girl’ who just does what people tell her? What exactly does the last line of the story mean?
It’s a short pieces that ignores all the ‘rules’ about story structure, and yet people are still sharing it, 43 years later.
What We Notice
I believe “Girl”’s lasting popularity has a lot to do with the specificity of the details in this story. They are what make it stand out. They are what root it in a particular place and a particular voice.
So don’t feel you need to aim to create something grandiose, pregnant with “capital-M-Meaning’.
Just focus on telling a story that feels like it’s happening somewhere specific, with moments your readers can enter.
And you do that by focusing on the small, everyday, universal details:
The smell of the tea roses on the bush by the bench where you sat with someone you loved;
The slow shuffle down a hospital corridor, repeated so often, you’ve memorized the posters on the wall: “Join the Rock Choir: Thursday evenings in the parish hall” “We buy second-hand mobility devices–call for a quote”;
The texture of the sand on the beach, where the wind off the ocean whips away your tears before you have to explain them to anyone…
Don’t worry about what your ‘point’ is; what grand lesson readers must draw from your writing.
Focus on the tiny moments, the delicate sensations, that make up a life, and the story will emerge.
You’re a writer.
Write first.
Figure out what you’re trying to say, in the process.
Keep writing,
Julie
P. S. Need more practice turning everyday moments into key scenes in your stories? Consider the StoryAWeek newsletter: 52 weekly lessons and writing prompts.Find out more.
To Do Now
It’s nto too late: join us in StoryADay November. Sign up here
It’s that time again: time to make your commitments to your writing for the coming month. Join us!
Welcome to the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group!
Leave a comment 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.)
Write with us this month, even if–especially if–it means you risk falling flat on your face….
Have you thought about joining the StoryADay Challenge but were too worried that you’d make a fool of yourself if you tried?
What if your writing is bad?
What if you can’t write every day?
What if you don’t finish your stories?
What’s the point?
What if you fail?
What is the point in setting yourself up for so many opportunities to fail?
OK, let’s dig in.
1 – Let it be bad
I’m not saying you should aim to write terrible stories, but what I have learned, in 15+ years of taking on this challenge is this: a bad writing day has yet to kill me.
Don’t attempt to edit or polish what you write, the day you write it. Let it be ‘finished’, not ‘polished’.
The key is to show up even when you don’t want to. Sometimes that will result in a bad writing day. Sometimes it’ll result in a good writing day. And there’s really no way to know what kind of writing day you’re about to have. So show up.
Promise me that you won’t show your writing to anyone during the challenge. This allows you the freedom to write whatever comes. We must allow for the possibility that our writing will be imperfect, if we’re ever to get to a point where we write something halfway decent.
Success Secret: Use software like IAWriter or CalmlyWriter.com/online in ‘focus’ mode, which will ‘grey-out’ everything but the paragraph/sentence you are working on, so you’re not as tempted to edit as you go. Alternative: try dictating your story into your phone or a text-to-speech software (Google Docs has one and your phone’s Notes app probably does, too).
2 – Make Your Own Rules
I say ‘StoryADay’ – and if you can swing it, it will absolutely bust through all the lies you are telling yourself about how much/often you are able to come up with an idea, and reduce it to practice.
But…
I long ago discovered that I hate writing every day during this challenge.
Seriously. I always take a day off every week during the challenge. Because otherwise I’m miserable. I made it a personal rule (I take Sundays off).
Some years I have encouraged people to rewrite their own rules after every 7 days of writing, to take into account what they have learned.
Make rules that will push you to write more than you would have otherwise. Make rules about what ‘every day’ looks like; about what ‘a story’ is; about what ‘finished’ means; and about how often you’re allowed to change the rules during the challenge (I do recommend that you only allow rules tweaks at the end of each week, or every other week…)
And if you are a person for whom streaks are extremely motivating, take that into consideration too. Commit to writing a story every day, even if some days that means you’re writing a 6 word story or 6000 words of stream-of-consciousness experimental babble.
Success Secret: Don’t go it alone. Come over to the blog each day and check in with the StoryADay community, in the blog comments, to let us know how it’s going.
3 – Practice, Don’t Chase Perfection
I always recommend trying to put some kind of ending on your story every day. It feels good. I trains your brain to push through the messy middle and not just chase the next shiny idea.
But that doesn’t mean the story needs to be complete or polished. There may be parts that don’t make sense, or that can be expanded, or where you have written “[history’s most romantic kiss goes here but I don’t feel like writing that today]”.
But do Future-You a favor and put some kind of ending on the story while it’s still ‘hot’, and you still have a sense of what you want it to be about.
(I come back to StoryADay Challenge drafts all the time when I’m looking for my next short story to polish and send out into the world. It really helps when there’s a substantial story there, no matter how imperfect!)
Success Secret: Use the energy of the community to keep you going, when the novelty has worn off. Come to the blog every day and comment on how your challenge is going, and cheer on the other people who are participating. Humans are social creatures (yes, even the introverts) and we’re not meant to do big things alone. So don’t try! Join us.
4 – 13 Reasons to Try
I’m asking you to write fast, messy drafts and move on every day. Why bother?
It proves to your inner editor that you can write whether or not you’re inspired when you sit down
It proves to you that you can write today, even if you felt like the world’s worst writer, yesterday
It makes you more decisive (in your everyday life as well as your writing). Writing is all about stage-managing every choice in your fictional world and for your characters. You have to get good at making decisions, and quickly!
It allows you to try out voice, personas, genres, forms and random ideas that you could never justify the time for, if every idea had to turn into a finished product. Sometimes these experimental wanderings reveal a new voice or genre that you can happily spend years with, after the challenge (it happens!).
It reminds you that you are a writer, that you have some aptitude with words, and that you deserve to make time in your life for writing.
It reminds you of how it feels to be a writer (who is writing).
It makes you think deeply about issues and people. This means you are more compassionate and creative when it comes to problem-solving in the rest of your life.
You are easier to live with when you take some time to do the thing that makes you feel most like you. (Trust me. My husband just came home from his office and commented on how happy I seem, today. Guess what I’ve been doing this afternoon? Yup, writing!)
It gets you off social media, and gives you space to decide where your attention goes, today.
It allows you to do some ‘deep work’, which changes the way your brain works, creating more space for brilliance.
It changes the way time flows for you. An hour spent writing in your story world feels very different from an hour spent scrolling short videos on random topics.
People love it when they hear you’re a writer (When new people meet me and my husband, what are they more excited about: the fact that he designed two drugs that are on the market and making people more healthy, or that I’m a writer? It’s ok, he’s not bitter…). It doesn’t matter if you have a best-selling book or if you’re ‘just a writer’. It inspires people to think about what they could be doing, if they would just let themselves…
You’ll regret it if you put it off, any longer. We don’t have an infinite amount of time in this existence. Let’s have some fun with what we have!
Success Secret: Celebrate every tiny triumph. Opened your laptop? Triumph! Read the prompt? Triumph! Wrote some words? Oh my goodness, you’re heroic. Celebrate every step on the road to a prolific writing habit with a literal pat on your own back, a dance party in the kitchen, or anything else that makes you smile and triggers the reward-circuits in your brain. Do it immediately and often, and create those reward-pathways that make your brain whisper: hey, isn’t it time to get back to your writing?
5 – What if you don’t even try?
Failure is how we learn.
If you can’t fail, you can’t get better, and you’ll spend your whole life envious of people who seem ‘luckier’ than you.
If you can’t face failing, you’re going to be stuck–and very sad–for the rest of your life.
Failures provide useful data:
You might think that you love writing at midnight only to discover that your 52-year old self cannot work the way your 25-year old self did. Good data. Now you can work on finding a time that does work. Why not start experimenting, tomorrow?
You might think you love writing romance only to discover that you there’s a dark-thriller writer inside, longing to break free and slash things.
You might think that you can write 5,000 words every day because you did that one time, in a caffeine-fueled deadline-driven binge. Discovering that you can ‘only’ manage 300 words in a single session before your brain turns off, is useful, and allows you to schedule three 20-minute sessions tomorrow and be delighted by your 900 word story, instead of being disappointed you ‘only’ wrote a flash fiction piece.
Success Secret: Treat everything as an experiment.
So grab your lab coat from the coat rack, put on your safety specs, and join me in the Creativity Lab, for StoryADay November.
Adventure beckons.
Discoveries await.
Join us!
Keep writing,
Julie
To Do Now
Decide now, that you’ll join us in StoryADay November. Sign up here
Leave a comment below, confessing your remaining fears (and let me reassure you)
And I’ll see you in the comments, next month!
P. S. Want more support, including daily writing sprints, monthly discussions, workshops, Critique Week and more? Consider joining us in the StoryADay Superstars.Find out more…
You are not a machine. Start living like a human, again.
Lately I’ve been binge-watching televisions series that I’ve watched before. And those shows are a, sci-fi and b, romance. And I’m not sorry.
And I don’t think you should be, either.
Whether you are taking time to write or to consume fiction or art or music…you are building a stronger, more resourceful and more resilient human–and how can that ever be anything but a good thing?
Time to Create
It’s October, and I bet you’ve noticed how busy the end of the year becomes. So much so that it can be hard to find time for creative activities that feed your soul…like your writing.
My invitation to you is to take some time today, to plan islands of calm, to make space for creation, over the next couple of months.
My ‘rules’ for StoryADay are that you attempt to start and finish a story each day that you write, during the challenge.
But I do encourage you to define what ‘each day’ means, for you.
Writing a new story every single day of the month is tough. And it might be more than you need, to boost your creativity and to get you excited about writing again.
Set your own rules
Want to write three days a week? Five days? One? Great! Make that a rule.
Then come to the site, pick a prompt from that week, that sparks your interest, and commit to finishing what you start that day, even if it’s bad, sketchy, has massive gaps, or feels like nonsense.
Most importantly, come back on the next day that you designated, and write a new story.
The point is to keep going, even if you’re disappointed in (or excited about) the previous story.
Build a stack of sketches, drafts, imperfect and incomplete stories, that you can draw on throughout the year, any time you want to write.
Improve Your Chances of Having a Good Writing Day
The only way to feel successful at this writing gig is to prove to yourself that all is NOT lost, if you had a bad writing day last time you sat down to write.
The more you write, the more you’ll discover how little relation there is between our effort and the quality of the output. Some days writing is easy and brilliant, some days you work really hard and hate what you wrote.
Since we can’t predict how our writing day will go, the key is to keep writing anyway.
More writing days is the ONLY way to guarantee more good writing days.
To Do Now
Decide now, that you’ll join us in StoryADay November. Sign up here
P. S. Want more support, including daily writing sprints, monthly discussions, workshops, Critique Week and more? Consider joining us in the StoryADay Superstars.Find out more…
Find out more about the StoryADay
Superstars
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.
