Today I’m recycling an idea from last year’s StoryADay because it was so much fun:
If you don’t want to do Red, you can do a different fairytale. It doesn’t have to be a straight re-telling either, just use it for inspiration if that’s what works for you.
(As always, this prompt is optional.)
Today’s prompt comes from a line in an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet (from The Harp Weavers)
Use the line or a similar image somewhere in your story.
(As always, this prompt is optional.)
This prompt was inspired by Marta Pelrine-Bacon who posted the other day about writing a story about a character she didn’t like. It’s not something we all do often so today: write a story featuring an unsympathetic main character.
Some tips: give your unsympathetic main character something the reader can identify with or find attractive (think Hannibal Lecter who was fantastically clever and insightful; Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor…)
[Update: Dec 2021: coming back to this prompt, 10+ years later, I was pleased to see that I hadn’t actually stolen this method of adjusting your character’s attractiveness from the Writing Excuses podcast, which, three years later would do a great series of episodes on this kind of thing with a very elegant explanation.)
Today our prompt comes from the lovely people at Gamewright Games and from Rory O’Connor who invented Rory’s Story Cubes.
So here is your prompt:
Do with it what you will!
Go!
(Remember: the prompts are purely optional and only intended to help you if you’re stuck.)
It’s May 8 and we’re working through our second weekend already. I’m guessing the shine might have worn off this challenge a little by now and that you could be struggling.
(It’s not easy to come up with a fresh idea every day!)
So today, give yourself a break. Go back and find a story you’ve already written. Now, tell the story from a different character’s perspective.
Try to make the tone of the story totally different: the length of the sentences, the pacing, the rhythm, even the events, if the second person remembers them differently.
Go!
Did you know that May 7 is “Military Spouses’ Day”? Well it is, and we’re all to stop and appreciate what it takes to be a military spouse.
Hey, I know. While you’re thinking about it…why not write a story featuring, if not a military couple, certainly two people who face challenges including but not limited to: separation, relocation, trauma. Or write something with a tangential connection to something military.
There. Broad enough? 😉
Go!
Somewhere in your story, use the line,
(Thanks, Cid!)
Go!
It’s Cinquo De Mayo and everyone loves a party! Except when they don’t.
Parties are a great setting for stories because they bring together people who have no business being in the same room; they put stress on relationships; they often involve booze and a consequent loosening of inhibitions…in other words, all the elements you need for a climactic moment in someone’s life.
Go!
Sorry, but give the sheer weight of all the Star Wars Lego in my house these days, I couldn’t resist.
…and remember, that could just as easily happen between two office cubicles as in a galaxy far, far away.
You could also make a case that Star Wars is just a big family saga — or maybe a romance — so feel free to go with that too.
And if you do go with the Hero Looking For A Quest thing, remember how whiny and unheroic Luke was at the start of those movies? You might want to emulate that and give your hero some room to grow.
Write A Story About Good Vs. Evil
Go!
A lot of short short stories focus on character and twists and surprise, because it’s a great form for exactly those things.
But I don’t want your descriptive muscles to get all flabby.
Why not write a story with a strong sense of place? At some point in the story, imagine you are a tour guide, pointing out the landmarks and notable features of your setting to me, your eager audience.
Be a tour guide to your story’s setting, for the reader
Go!
This is a staple of Sci-Fi and speculative fiction: you’re watching people in Forties garb but discover you’re on a space station populated by aliens who only know humans through one random Bogart movie they’ve intercepted….
But it happens in real life too: a woman thinks she’s in a happy marriage only to come home to empty closets and a note on the kitchen table; you think you’re reading a standard love story only to discover a twist at the end…
Write a story with an element of altered reality.
Go!
Huge thanks to StoryADay-er @cidwrites for today’s prompt.
Cid has created an imaginary book cover at her own StoryADay site, and invites you to use it as a writing prompt.
If the graphic doesn’t work for you, you can still use the prompt by writing a story that contains the line “They said it couldn’t be done.”
Writing prompts are optional, but do leave Cid a comment if you use hers!
Gabriela Pereira is a former StoryADay participant and has spent the past month launching her DIY MFA 2.0, an intensive writing program, all online.
She took some time to tell me about the course and give some great advice for writers about to embark on a big writing jag (know anyone like that?)
She is also hosting a write-in on Sunday May 1. I highly recommend checking out her DIY-MFA site and Facebook page and following her on Twitter.
Tell me about DIY MFA 2.0
The idea behind DIY MFA is to simulate the experience of a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing without actually going to school. DIY MFA has 4 main components: Reading, Writing, Workshops and Community. The original DIY MFA (which took place in September 2010) covered these four topics at length.
DIY MFA 2.0 takes a different approach, focusing mostly on the “writing” part of the equation. The idea in DIY MFA 2.0 is to spark new ideas and create a stash of ideas that writers can go to when they hit the wall or feel a creative drought coming on. There are 4 ways that DIY MFA can help generate new ideas and those are through: character, story, mood and words. Each week in April we focused on one of these areas and explored different writing exercises and techniques with that theme. Ultimately, the goal is to develop methods and tools for generating ideas so that when you need lots of new ideas in a short period of time (like when you’re writing a Story A Day) you have a bunch of concepts already ready and waiting.
How do you make time for writing?
I don’t make time for writing. I steal it. I’m always on the lookout for hidden pockets of time when I can read or write because if I sit around waiting for a huge block of time to land in my lap, I know it will never happen. I live in a city, so for me subways and buses are great places to sneak in some writing. I love my Kindle because I can put a copy of my WIP on it and can edit on the go. I also carry small notebook with me everywhere so that if I’m stuck waiting for an elevator or waiting on a subway platform, I can break out my notebook and jot down a few sentences.
Even with all this time-theft going on, I also try to carve out a few small chunks of time when I do writing “sprints.” In DIY MFA, I’ve asked participants to do at least one sprint per week on Saturdays, but for me these sprints happen whenever I manage to steal a chunk of time long enough that I can call it honest-to-goodness solid writing time. During these precious moments, I’ll practice some stealth writing, where I run to a coffee shop and hide out while I write. Not only am I more efficient if I know I only have a short span of time to write, but the stealth aspect also makes it more exciting (like I’m doing something I shouldn’t… something naughty).
And don’t underestimate the power of the Pomodoro. That adorable little tomato timer app that sits on my desktop has worked wonders for me. If I know I only have 25 minutes to write, I won’t stop to check email or twitter or anything else, I’ll just write. After I’ve finished a couple of rounds of Pomodoro, I’ll treat myself to a short spurt of internet fiddling.
What’s your best advice for someone who’s trying to make writing a priority (again)?
I’m a huge believer in baby steps and I’m not a fan of huge, unmanageable goals because they set writers up to fail. Missing a goal can lead to feelings of “I can’t do this” or “I’m not good enough” which only leads to paralysis, writer’s block and loss of motivation. Of course, lower motivation means the next set of goals becomes even more unmanageable so the cycle just continues. The trick is to break the cycle of negativity and find ways of sparking the motivation when it starts slipping away.
For me, writing isn’t about success vs. failure; it’s about doing. If a writing challenge helps a writer motivate themselves and stay on track, fantastic! But the important thing in my mind is that writers do the work, whether it means meeting a goal within a certain time frame or not. That’s where I think Story-A-Day gets it right: because it’s not just about writing a story every day, it’s about bouncing back on the days when you can’t actually get a story done. It’s about getting ideas down quickly, without judging. It’s about writing it and moving on, leaving the tweaks and edits for some later point.
Ultimately, I think StADa and DIY MFA have similar goals: to help writers rekindle their love of writing and help them develop a sustainable, enriching writing life.
Thanks, Gabriela!
Today’s guest post from Melissa Dinwiddie is a wonderful primer on how to use the StoryADay community to help you become more productive than you ever dreamed. Thanks, Melissa!
Do you know one of the most effective things you can do to get your writing done?
Make yourself accountable.
I don’t know the statistics, but it’s a well known fact that if you want to reach a goal, speaking your commitment — including your deadline — to someone you know will hold you to it makes you dramatically more likely to actually do it.
Accountability is a powerful tool, and there are a number of ways you can integrate it into your writing practice. One of my own secret weapons is an accountability buddy.
At the start of the year I was in a mastermind group (another great accountability tool), assembled with the express purpose of helping each other accomplish one specific goal in the month of January. When that group dissolved, a couple of us decided to keep checking in with each other.
At first our monthly calls started to get a little chatty — understandable enough, since we liked each other and had come to think of each other as friends.
This is an inherent danger in any accountability relationship. The problem, of course, is that chatting does not make for finished projects and completed goals.
Accountability partners have to be vigilant, and must keep coming back to the purpose for their partnership. If you want to chat, set up another date specifically for that. During your accountability check-ins, stick with the agenda: keeping each other on track.
This is exactly what I did at the end of a particularly chatty call. “Before we hang up,” I asked, “what’s your next step?”
My buddy confessed that she had a novel that had been sitting in a drawer for way too long, and what she really wanted was to get it edited and up for sale as a download on her site.
“Aha,” I responded, kicking into coaching mode, “so what’s stopping you?”
I asked her realistically how long she thought the editing would take, and when she said “about four hours,” I suggested (okay, I practically insisted) that she do it this week. In other words, I held out an expectation that I thought was achievable.
With my kick in the butt, she was ready to take on this project that she’d been putting off, so the next step was to set up a check-in schedule that worked for her. She committed to emailing me a progress report every night before going to bed, and set a goal of a 2-3 chapters per day.
Although it turned out four hours was an underestimation, I’m pleased to report that in less than two weeks my buddy had finished editing her entire manuscript and was ready to tackle the production side of getting her novel made into a downloadable ebook format. She swears she never would have gotten there without my help.
Do you think this kind of partnership might work for you? Give it a try! To keep you on track, I recommend sticking with the same structure every time you meet. The following questions are a good jumping off place:
Remember to reserve your chatting for another time, and let me know how it goes!
Artist, Writer and Inspirationalist Melissa Dinwiddie helps creatives (and “wannabe” creatives) to get unstuck, get unpoor, and just plain play bigger. Find her at her blogs, Living A Creative Life and 365 Days of Genius.
Leave a comment with your best tips for boosting productivity and/or working with other people and win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes, a wonderful dice game that doubles as a story-telling tool. Roll the dice and make a story from the extremely cute images on the dice.
Today’s winner will be a random draw, so you get extra entries if you post about StoryADay on your blog, Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else (yes, I’ll give credit for blog posts from yesterday). Just leave me a comment saying where you posted.
Special thanks to Rory O’Connor and the lovely folks at Gamewright Games for donating this prize.
Ack!
There were so many great comments on yesterday’s post about creativity and productivity for writers that I had a hard time choosing a winner.
And in the end I chose two (and am suffering horrible guilt about leaving out all the other people who wrote great comments).
But don’t fret, because you can all enter again to win another copy of Rory’s Story Cubes on the next post, which is all about how to work with an accountability buddy to make your writing life more productive than you ever dreamed.
This next giveaway will be a drawing out of a virtual hat (red), and you can get extra entries for posting about StoryADay in other places. See the Accountability / Writing Buddy post for more details.
Thanks for all your great tips on creativity and productivity.
Brenda said,
1) Go someplace (a mall, a casino, etc.) and people-watch. I try to make up backstory for the people I see.
2) Listen to instrumental music. Classical and Drum music work well, as does the genre aptly called “Trance.”
3) I grab a box of cheap colored pencils and doodle. Sometimes the doodles end up being a creature, or a map of a fantasy land, or a character. I’m not an artist, by any means, but even my second-rate scribbles (lol) can cause a spark that becomes a story.
I think the reason that these 3 usually work for me is that they all have one thing in common: they make writing fun again.
Trina, in confessional-mode, spoke for many of us,
I say I have no time, but if I truly go back and look at how much time I spend on Twitter or surfing the Net, I have plenty of time. Guilty as charged.
MJ gave me a reason to stop feeling guilty for gossiping about strangers,
Myself and my boyfriend stole the idea of sitting in a restaurant and making up stories about the other diners from a movie we watched. It can be a lot of fun and generate a ton of ideas and helps with character development.
Janel had two great points,
I plan on pulling several prompts every night in May.
I’ve just decided that I will write to ease the stress instead of looking at the stress as a writing block.
Dominique’s suggestions were,
I overcome theses moments of writers block by keeping a pen and pencil around to writ down any great thought’s , plot ideas, or character lines. I also Take a trip to the bookstore to look through coffee table books full of images related to the subject I am writing
Steven made me feel a little less schizophrenic,
I was telling a friend about some story ideas I had mulling around in my head, she said that it must be busy “in there”. I told her that at times it seems like a cocktail party,…Once I get at least the outline of a guest’s story to paper, they tend to back off and let me relax.
Brandy is, like many of us, a list-maker and note-taker,
1. Keep paper and a pen/pencil everywhere; in the car, my purse, on tables, on window ledges, etc., because I never know when inspiration will strike and not having materials near me could kill or stall a great idea.
2. Install whiteboards with markers in different areas of the house and several larger ones in your office/studio. I have found that having a place where it is okay to write in an nontrational way helps me free my thoughts. ..Having a wall of white boards in the studio/office allows me to write “on the walls” which is something we have been trained not to do since childhood…
3. Write EVERYTHING down…My grocery lists end up with story ideas, character quotes, and settings along with the bananas and soup…
You can read all the comments in full here.
I have decided to award today’s prize to Brenda and Brandy, but thanks to everyone for taking the time to share your tips.
Recently, naturalists announced that the sloth — the animal whose name has become a synonym for laziness — is actually a lot more active than previously thought. It turns out that when we cage them and observe them, we don’t see what’s really going on in the sloth’s world.
Today I have a great guest post for you from Susan Daffron, a writer and publishing consultant. She shows us how, as writers, the times when our minds are most fertile and active, might — to an observer — look like the times when we are being, well, slothful. She shows us that productivity for writers makes its own demands, and how to succeed by embracing that.
(You can read more about Susan’s upcoming publishing conference at the end of the article).
Then, leave your comments about how you will jump-start your creativity at the end of the article and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes – a great creativity booster in a box!
As a writer, I’ve gone through periods of extreme productivity and extreme sloth. Although I have written 12 books, last year in 2010, I released exactly zero.
For a variety of personal and business-related reasons, I went through a creative burnout like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Writing, which had always been fairly easy for me in the past, was suddenly extremely difficult.
I also discovered that the less I wrote, the less I wanted to write. Talk about a lack of productivity!
I spent some time looking back at what happened during my creative slump. I realized my lack of writing productivity stemmed from three issues:
1. Lack of ideas. The stressful events I experienced caused my creativity to simply shut down. To jumpstart my mind, I surfed to online writing sites (like StoryaDay.org!), used random-word and writing-prompt generators, and started talking to my husband about my various writing thoughts for outside feedback and support.
2. Lack of motivation. As noted, a bunch of things that happened last year brought me down. Creativity does not flow when you’re depressed. I decided to make a commitment to exercising and started reading more inspirational materials on creativity, writing, and life balance. (The library is full of wonderful FREE books just waiting to be read!)
3. Lack of time. You’ve read it before, but I’ll say it again: you have time to write if you make time to write. During my slump, I wasn’t working smart. Part of me already knew it, but I had to forcibly reacquaint myself with the methods I’d used in the past to carve out real productive writing time. I opted to make a commitment to write every morning and also started thinking up ideas for articles and posts the night before. “Sleeping on” a writing idea really works!
I’m happy to report that the old adage “writers write” is true. Since I got my writing mojo back again, I have been writing regularly. I have my next book completely outlined and 19 case studies/interviews input so far. I’ll be speaking at a conference this summer and plan to release the book in time for it. (Deadlines help motivation too!)
If you’re a writer who wants to publish, you can get inspiration and learn more about the book publishing process at the Self-Publishers Online Conference. The third annual event is May 10-12, 2011 (http://www.SelfPublishersOnlineConference.com) Use the code SusanSentMe and get 10% off your registration!
Susan Daffron, aka The Book Consultant (http://www.TheBookConsultant.com) owns a book and software publishing company. She spends most of her time writing, laying out books in InDesign, or taking her five dogs out for romps in the forest. She also teaches people how to write and publish profitable client-attracting books and puts on the Self-Publishers Online conference (http://www.SelfPublishersOnlineConference.com) every May.
Leave a comment with your best tips for jump-starting creativity and win a copy of Rory’s Story Cubes, a wonderful dice game that doubles as a story-telling tool. Roll the dice and make a story from the extremely cute images on the dice. Brilliant for days when you’re stalled and need to regain your mojo.
Special thanks to Rory O’Connor and the lovely folks at Gamewright Games for donating this prize.
This week marks the 98th anniversary of the birth of blues great Muddy Waters.
This week write a story on the theme of one of his greatest hits:
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] I’m Ready!”
I have a subscription to Storyville, on my iPhone, because I’m a sucker for new business models and digital publishing, and I’m enjoying being exposed to a wide array of stories (old and new) every week.
This week’s story, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li, slowly unfolds the story of a couple, past the first flush of youth, meeting and deciding whether or not to marry. The story is set in modern-day Beijing. The woman in the story has lived there all her life, hardly noticing that she is aging and becoming a spinster, while the bachelor son of her old college professor has been off living in America.
It is anything but a cliched romance, though I will say that it has a satisfying ending. The author is quite skilled at making the characters and their culture seem complete and real without losing their interesting edge.
I liked the indirect way we learn about the characters and their backstories, as in this remark about the professor,
“Professor Dai must miss her students these days,” Siuy said after she and Hanfeng had exchanged greetings, although she knew it was not the students that his mother missed but the white skulls of mammals and birds on her office shelves, the drawers filled with scalpels and clamps and tweezers that she had cleaned and maintained with care and the fact that she could mask her indifference to the human species with her devotion to animals.
All the revelations about the characters are measured and careful, just like the characters. The whole story is a skilled blend of what we are told and how it is told, leading us to accept the ending and even agree with the choices the characters make.
It’s worth remembering that how a story is told can contribute as much to the reader’s experience as the things we write.
This week my community is raising money and saying prayers for a little boy called Trey Love.
So how about a “love” story this week, in honor of Trey and his family?
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Love”
Tomorrow is the birth date of escapologist and magician Harry Houdini, so it seems a good time to write a story about escape.
Conversely today marks the 10th anniversary of the Russian Space Station Mir falling back to the Earth that had held it in is gravitational embrace for so long. Mir never really escaped from Earth, but it did soar above us, suggesting the promise of escape to those of us who look to the stars in our dreams.
Write a story about escape – or the failure to escape.
This week, try starting in the middle of the action and unpacking the back story as you go.
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesdays] Escape”
“What if my stories are no good? What if I fail?”
This is possibly the most powerful thing holding us back.
We can find or make time if we really want to. Even if the power lines went down and the world ran out of paper, we could tell our stories out loud, around campfires as of old.
The most insightful of us understand that success brings its own stresses and that worries us.(Imagine if your first novel was a best-seller. Where would you go from there?!)
But the thing that really stops us?
Fear of failure.
Today’s prompt comes from Rory’s Story Cubes. I rolled them for you, but you can use them in any order and in any way you like.
Write On!
Yesterday was Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Carnevale, Fastnacht, whatever you choose to call it.
In countries around the world, people celebrated in advance of the sombre season of Lent, which starts today. Poeple around the world celebrated, even if they aren’t participating in the penance-fest that is the Lenten season.
Write a story that features a big, last blow-out before a change, echoing the idea of Mardi Gras.
(It might be a stag night, the last meal at a diner before an old man goes into a nursing home, or it might be Mardi Gras in New Orleans, itself. And don’t forget, you can write it from the perspective of the day after, too!)
The Rules:
- You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
- You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
- Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
- 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 Mardi Gras story: http://bit.ly/el8ltW #WriteOnWed #storyaday
Laissez les bon temps roulez! It’s still Mardi Gras at #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://bit.ly/el8ltW
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is “Mardi Gras”: http://bit.ly/el8ltW #storyaday
Come and write with us: http://bit.ly/el8ltW #WriteOnWed #storyaday
See my story – and write your own, today: http://bit.ly/el8ltW #WriteOnWed #storyaday
With thanks to my friends at Creative Copy Challenge for inspiration and support. Go to Creative Copy Challenge every day for a new writing prompt and supportive community of writers.
from Fifty Great Short Stories
This story, originally published in The New Yorker in 1949, is a wonderful example of how every line in a short story should contribute to the story, the plot or the characterization. That’s tough to do, so don’t be discouraged if your first draft isn’t as good as Mr O’Connor’s New-Yorker-ready version! It is, however, a goal worth keeping in mind.
The story’s opening is crammed with short, efficient sentences that do an amazing job of setting the scene,
“When I woke, I heard my mother coughing, below in the kitchen.”
We don’t know yet, when the story is set, but we have a setting – a home, where the main character still lives with his/her mother. The mother is up early, in the kitchen, probably fixing breakfast.
“She had been coughing for days, but I had paid no attention.”
That sounds callous, but consistent with what we discover about the narrator: that his is a ten year old boy. It also sets up a tension that carries right through to the end: what is wrong with the mother. Will she survive? Will he be paid back for his callous disregard of her? When a line like “I had paid no attention’ is offered up right a the start of the story, it makes me nervous!
The third sentence (we’re still only 24 words into the story here) is completely natural and conversational, easily rooting the story in its geographical place, painting a picture of it and, at the same time, letting us know that this was happening some time ago,
“We were living on the Old Youghal road at the time, the old hilly coaching road into East Cork.”
All that from 19 words. I love it!
The rest of this paragraph paints a picture of both the mother and the narrator that puts us firmly on their side and rooting for them both,
“The coughing sounded terrible. I dressed and went downstairs in my stocking feet, and in the clear morning light I saw her, unaware that she was being watched, collapsed into a little wickerwork armchair, hoding her side. She had made an attempt to light the fire, but it had gone against her. She looked so tired and helpless that my heart turned over with compassion. I ran to her.”
Isn’t that a great opening?
The story is mostly told in one voice — that of the 10 yr old boy — but from time to time the voice of the older version of the boy creeps in, now grown up and telling us the story, judging, explaining. In one glaring example the narrator voices an opinion that will enrage most of the women (and some of the men) reading it, when he casually opines,
“It’s a funny thing about women, how they’ll take orders from anything in trousers, even if it’s only ten.”
Not a very modern, politically-correct attitude and it is the one line that makes the story seem old-fashioned. The rest of it seems fixed in a particular time, but also pretty timeless: a small boy is struggling between childhood and responsibility; sometimes he’s good; sometimes he fails; how he feels about it all. We’ve all been 10 [1. with apologies to any younger readers out there. You’re even better placed to understand this character!]. We’ve all struggled with the passage from childhood to adulthood, whether in rural Ireland or a suburb or a city.
But even that one jarring line serves an important purpose in the story. It’s not just in there because the writer wants to tell us something about his character’s attitude towards women. It tells us the age of the boy in the story, and that there is no way he should be the titular man of the house. It also tells us a thing or two about his mother in particular, (and you could argue that it talks about her only, rather than women as a whole, if the line makes you uncomfortable).
Most of the time, though, the world is presented to us through the voice of the ten year old from a particular time and place.
“In the afternoon, my mother wanted me to run out and play, but I didn’t go far. I knew if once I went a certain distance from the house, I was liable to stray into temptation. Below our house, there was a glen, the drill field of the barracks perched high above it on a chalky cliff, and below, in a deep hollow, the millpond and millstream running between wooded hills — the Rockies, the Himalayas, or the HIghlands, according to your mood. Once down there, I tended to forget the real world…”
He notices the things a ten year old boy would notice: the barracks where the soldiers live, the millpond where you could find creepy crawly things, and the hills, a setting for imagined adventures.
The story continues to take our likable little hero away from home and into temptation. Whether he resists and whether he has to pay for his sins are the questions that kept me turning the pages faster and faster until I reached the end.
Is your writing economical or more wordy? Which point-of-view do you use most often in short stories? Are your ‘voices’ distinctive?
Tell us in the comments:
How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Practice, Practice, Practice!
If you really want to become a good writer, in this lifetime, you have to write. You have to write a lot.
Here are seven of the best tips from last year’s StoryADay participants, to help you become an insanely productive, happy and sane writer. Plus one bonus tip and a question for you, at the end.
“Nothing will work until you do.”
-Maya Angelou
There is nothing worse than carving out some time to write and then being stuck for a place to start. So start now: pay attention to all the ideas you have, all the time, when you are away from your desk. Carry a notebook around. Capture snippets of conversation, what ifs that occur to you as you people-watch, thoughts spurred by other people’s stories. Write them all down, ready to be picked up again when you sit down to write.
When you sit down to write, actually write. Don’t check email, don’t check Twitter, don’t even check the StADa site (unless you need the daily prompt). Just leaf through your ideas until you find one you can work with, and go. Turn off your email notifications, close all the browser windows. Don’t worry about fonts and formatting or whether it’ll be any good. Just write.
@Gabi If I think too much about writing before I actually start doing it, I tend to psych myself out. Instead I just start writing and before I know it, I’ve got a bunch of words on the page and it’s time to call it a day.
Starting stories is all very well, but anyone can do that. The point of StADa is to help you learn to craft a whole, finished story. Keep writing until you finish. Even if you hate it, keep writing. You’ll thank me later.
Obviously, if your kids are screaming or someone comes to the door to tell you you’ve won $10million in the lottery, or your boss calls to ask where you are, you might have to get up from your desk before your story is finished. In which case, go. But keep thinking about your story. Leave it in the middle of a sentence, so that you’re ready to leap back in, and go. But keep thinking about it. When you’re walking to the coffee machine, wonder what your characters will do next. When you’re doing some menial, mindless task (can you tell I’m a mother?) let your mind wander and picture how you’re going to resolve the central mystery of your story. If someone turns on a radio, listen to how people talk and steal yourself some dialogue.
@KristenRudd says: “My trick so far is to mull my story all day, while I’m doing whatever it is I do. I think about the directions it could go, but I mostly think about how to open it. Then, when I can finally sit down after the kids are in bed, the dishes are washed, and I’ve done everything else that needs doing, I’m excited about the story that’s been buzzing all day.
You can put off watching TV shows and you can turn down an occasional invitation for coffee without your life falling apart. Tell people you’re working on your writing this month, that you’ll be a better friend next month (maybe). Take some time to make your writing your top priority. You’ll always wonder, if you don’t, what you could have achieved. Explain to friends that you are investing in your dream of becoming a writer, just as they might make time to invest in a course of golf lessons or an art workshop. If you want to take your writing seriously you will find that something’s got to give, but the good news is: that could be the housework!
StADa: How do you make time for writing?
@AdorablyAlice This is a good question. And when I have an answer that doesn’t involve neglecting chores/cooking, I’ll let you know.
It’s tempting to think that you need solitude, silence and a particular pen to be able to write, but that’s a rookie mistake. Professional writers write wherever and whenever they can squeeze in some time.
You may need some peace and quiet to get a story started, but once you’re up and running, write! Write when ever you have 15 minutes, wherever you are, with whatever comes to hand. Write!
(Hint: you full-time workers have the gnawing envy of stay-at-home parents of young children: you get a lunch break. Are you sneaking off somewhere and using it for writing?)
You’re not going to write an epic or a polished draft in a day. You’re going to write something and it’ll likely be bewtween 30 and 2000 words. The more frequently you write and finish a story, the more you’ll get a sense for how to pace yourself and your story. Don’t waste time on backstory or explaining anything at the beginning. Jump in half way through and unpack the story as you go. Some of it will be terrible, some of it you will learn from and some of it might even be quite good. On a good day you’ll write a character you’re proud of or make yourself smile with a twist, or discover you can write really convincingly about a gardener.
@GabiOnly a handful of the stories are worth keeping and working on. One of them has spawned into an idea for a middle-grade book that I am in love with.
Every lesson enriches your writing. Every day you practice, you’re one step closer to Carnegie Hall.
I know a lot of us are loners (I certainly crave my ‘alone’ time) so the idea of joining a community seems strange. But one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in the past year is the value of having people on your side, people who understand what it’s like try to write, people who are rooting for you (because if you can do it, maybe they can too).It was incredibly inspiring to drop in to the StoryADay.org forums during May – and afterwards ‘meet up’ with people on Twitter – and trade stories of how our writing day is going.
Join our Serious Writers’ Accountability Group (SWAGr) and post your goals for this month…today! (We’re “Serious”, not sombre. All are welcome!)
Thanks to all the previous participants for their comments and suggestions, quoted here or otherwise.
What do you do to keep writing? Share your best tips in the comments.
To be among the first to hear when sign-ups open for this year’s challenge sign up for the Advance Notice List. (No spam. Just StoryADay.org news)
If you saw the comments on last week’s post 6 Reasons You’ll Never Be A Writer, you’ll know that one reasons touched a nerve with a lot of people:
#6: You’re Too Nice
Commenter Michelle Kobayashi captured the mood when she said:
“My first 17 chapters were very nice. There was little conflict and the characters worked out their issues reasonably.
“It sucked.
“Then I learned about inciting incidents and the need for conflict. That’s when the fun began. One character in particular is so rude I cringe when I reread her scenes. And I wouldn’t change a thing. Embrace your inner sadist indeed!”
(Thanks to Donald Maass for the catchy slogan at the end there!)
Seems like this is something ia lot of us need practise with. So,
Write a scene featuring a truly loathsome (but believable) character. They don’t have to be a Disney Villain. It could be that really annoying person at work who has no redeeming qualities that you can find, no matter how hard you try.
Dig deep. Remember how annoying, frustrating, irritating your least favorite person in the world is. Pair them up with your favorite hero-type and give them a scene.
Then let your hero say all the things you’ve rehearsed in your head but would never say, because you’re just, well, too nice.
Let it all out. Make us (and yourself) cringe.
The Rules:
- You should use the prompt in some way in your story (however tenuous the connection)
- You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
- Post your scene in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
- 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:
Embracing My Inner Sadist: http://bit.ly/ehx03t #WriteOnWed #storyaday
I never knew I could be so mean! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://bit.ly/ehx03t
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is “Embrace Your Inner Sadist″: http://bit.ly/ehx03t
Come and write with us today: http://t.co/OpHsJ04 #WriteOnWed #storyaday
See my story – and write your own: http://t.co/OpHsJ04 #WriteOnWed #storyaday
With thanks to my friends at Creative Copy Challenge for inspiration and support. Go to Creative Copy Challenge every day for a new writing prompt and supportive community of writers.
from Fifty Great Short Stories
I don’t know much about Henry James, though I have struggled through more of his short stories than I have novels. I’ve never formally studied his writing, so don’t know what the prevailing literary criticism theories are…but I can tell you this: I dislike his characters and I dislike his outlook and I always end up, as I did at the end of this story, wanting to punch at least one of the characters in the nose.
Which is, I suppose a kind of a compliment to the writer.
As much as I say I don’t ‘like’ Henry James’s stories, I do recognise the work of a master craftsman. (I wonder if I would have liked him any better if he had been writing today [1. Probably not.])
The first thing I admired about this story was the way he pulled me in right from the first sentence. You might not think of the slow-paced Henry James novels as belonging on the same shelf as Ian Fleming or James Patterson, but there is, nonetheless, plenty of suspense to keep the reader hooked:
We are scattered now, the friends of the late Mr. Oliver Offord, but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a certain esoteric respect for each other.
Who was the late Mr. Oliver Offord and why do his friends only ‘chance to meet’ and share a ‘certain esoteric respect’ – and what does that really mean?
James continues to ratchet up the suspense in the very next sentence,
“Yes, you too have been in Arcadia,” we seem not too grumpily to allow.
Why was it “Arcadia” (and why would they ordinarily be grumpy with each other)?
The story turns out not to be about Mr Offord at all, but about his butler, Brooksmith and the perils of allowing the servant class to rise above their station.
I’m not sure which side Henry James would really have taken on the issue of class and station, but his narrator has a very fixed, extremely anti-egalitarian viewpoint that makes him supremely unsympathetic to the modern reader.
He is, however, so unrelentingly shaped by his societal norms that he is absolutely believable and ‘true’ – and loathsome, I might add.
It really struck me — after putting down this book with a sneer on my face and a punchy urge in my fist — that my writing could benefit from a bit more loathesomeness. I’m really a very nice person, trained in life to be fair and tolerant and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. But being well-brought-up can create a tendency to be too nice to my characters, too forgiving.
If I want to create characters as ‘true’ and real as Brooksmith‘s unworthy narrator, I have to risk creating characters that someone 111 years from now might want to punch.
What do you do to make your characters ‘real’? Please do leave a comment!
Wondering when you’ll reap the fame and fortune that come with your dream of being a writer? Well, probably never. If you’re making any of these six classic mistakes…
Wondering when you’ll reap the fame and fortune that come with your dream of being a writer? Well, probably never. If:
At least, not the right things. You read all the books on writing and polishing and publishing, and all the books that literary critics are praising, but nothing of any real value. You don’t read books that light a fire under you, you don’t read in your genre, you don’t read non-fiction for fun and inspiration. You don’t have an Audible membership or a library card and you couldn’t name a book that has meant anything to you since you turned 20.
If you were learning to be an accountant you’d study accounting law. If you were studying to be a doctor you would read medical books. Stephen King, in On Writing
“Read, read, read, Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.”
-William Faulkner.
You’re not independently wealthy: you’ve got a job, a family, commitments, a social life, a pressing engagement with the cast of Glee! You can’t possibly squeeze any time out of your day to write.
Jon Scalzi
So: Do you want to write or don’t you? If your answer is “yes, but,” then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say “no.” And that’s fine. Just don’t kid yourself as to what “yes, but” means.
You can make time to write, but something else is probably going to have to give. It might be sleep, it might be ‘watching Ellen in the afternoon’, it might be having lunch with the same people every day in the dreary work cafeteria. It might be ‘feeling bad about yourself because you’re not getting any writing done and eating ice cream instead’.
But, chances are, you can make time to write.
Every time you sit down to write you are paralyzed by the overwhelming feeling that everything has been said before. Well, you know what? You’re right. But it hasn’t been said by you, in this time and place, at your age, and in your circumstances. Agent Donald Maas talks a lot in The Breakout Novelist
I once interviewed Daniel Pinkwater
I love that what my readers need, they can only get from me. It’s riskier, but much more ego-gratifying
-Daniel Pinkwater, 2003 interview
He also said,
Ideas are everywhere. I have 60 ideas a day. So do you. So does everybody.
-Daniel Pinkwater, 2003 interview
The trick is paying attention, taking those ideas and developing them into the story only you can tell.
No writer does. Every artist is engaged in creating something unique and new. Experienced writers say this all the time: I don’t know what I’m doing until I’ve done it. Here’s a little evidence:
The only way to write is to write… Stupid b*****d job.
-Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale
Very few writers know what they are doing until they have done it.
-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
You can’t completely understand what good writers do until you try it yourself…Write from the very beginning, then, and keep on writing…The next story will be better, and the next one after that still better, and eventually—
-Isaac Asimov, Gold
When you do make the time to write, it’s hard. The words do not come dripping off your pen easily; all the elements in your story don’t come out in the right order; your characters are flat and uninteresting and they speak in cliches; you want to give up.
And that is what Anne Lammot calls your ‘shitty first draft’. It has to be got through in order to get to the second draft, the third, and the polished end result. If you are too scared to suck, too scared to fail then you will never be a writer, because all writing involves putting some truly terrible prose on the page — and excising it later or, like William Faulkner, throw it out entirely and start again,
Write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.
-William Faulkner
Sure, it’s scary but even the great and prolific Isaac Asimov says, of the writer’s daily task:
We sit there alone, pounding out words, with out hearts pounding in time. Each sentence brings with it the sickening sensation of not being right.
-Isaac Asimov, Gold
Can you allow your first drafts to be less than perfect?
In real life it’s nice to be nice: people like you, you offend nobody and your mother is proud of you.
In literature, being nice doesn’t pay. It’s boring if nothing happens, if no-one gets upset, if no-one is threatened, insulted, shamed, murdered, even. Your writing can be your playground. Be nice in real life if you must but, in your writing,
Embrace your inner sadist.
-Donald Maass, The Breakout Novelist
I’d love to hear which of these touched a nerve with you. Let me know in the comments which part of your writing life you’re struggling with the most at the moment? Has it changed over time?
If you’re feeling inspired to write now, why not check out some of the StoryADay Writing Prompts? You might want to start with some Flash Fiction, to warm up.
Introducing Write On Wednesdays: a weekly warm-up for all endurance writers. Wednesday is the day we limber up for the challenge of writing a story a month; or keep the muscles warm after the challenge is over. No point getting all those creative muscles in shape only to let them atrophy!
What might you – or a character very like you – have been doing on this afternoon ten years ago? Write a short story that springs from a circumstance or character from your life in February 2001.
OK, so we weren’t traveling to moon bases and stopping off on rotating space stations, but there was a lot of other stuff going on. Remember, this was post-Millennium Bug, pre-9/11 (but only by 7 months), after the first dotcom bubble had burst but before the banking/mortgage collapse. Friends and Seinfeld were still on the air but American Idol was not. “Reality” TV was just about to take over from quiz shows as the new money spinner for networks and no-one was watching video online yet.
What was life like all those years ago? Take us back.
The Rules:
- You should use the prompt in some way in your story (however tenuous the connection)
- You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
- Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
- 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:
Travel back in time to Feb 2001: http://t.co/OpHsJ04 #WriteOnWed #storyaday #wow
What were you doing 10 years ago? Is there a story there? #WriteOnWed http://t.co/OpHsJ04
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is “2001”: hhttp://t.co/OpHsJ04
Come and write with us: http://t.co/OpHsJ04 #WriteOnWed #storyaday #wow
See my story – and write your own: http://t.co/OpHsJ04 #WriteOnWed #storyaday #wow
With thanks to my friends at Creative Copy Challenge for inspiration and support. Go to Creative Copy Challenge every day for a new writing prompt and supportive community of writers.
from Fifty Great Short Stories
I’m working my way through this short story collection which was first published in 1952 and starts with a lot of what would have been quite ‘modern’ writers’ stories: Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, V. S. Pritchett.
Only one story so far has featured a moment that seems as if it might change the main character for life. The rest are moments in time, even missed opportunities, made fascinating by the writer’s attention to the tiny details of their worlds. It strikes me that this is something you can do with a short story that you couldn’t do with a novel – at least not without annoying most of your readers. Novel readers expect something transformative to happen. Short story readers? Well, maybe they’re more forgiving because they haven’t invested quite so much time in the thing. But I still get annoyed with a lot of modern ‘literary’ stories where nothing happens and there is no sense of an ending. These stories all seem to pre-date that trend, thank goodness.
I’m not usually a fan of descriptive writing, but in these short stories I’m finding it is making all the difference.
The Standard of Living by Dorothy Parker is a fabulous example of how a writer can flesh out a story whose plot is basically a build up to a simple punchline and turn it into something that stays with the reader. Parker creates two ordinary, shallow young women (girls, really), who are creatures of their time and trends and who think they are oh, so very sophisticated. They walk together on Saturday afternoons and play a sort of ‘imagine if you won the lottery’ game. Close to the end, something happens that reveals how far from sophisticated they are. That is the punchline, but the way they handle it is…well, I’ll leave it to you to discover.
What make the story, is the luscious, descriptive writing. It starts with a literal feast of words:
They lunched, as was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils, and butter-fats. Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate, gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beats of inferior oil, containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale stiffening sauce…”
And it goes on. Are you starting to get a feel for who ‘they’ are yet, from this description? Who might they be? Parker gives us another big clue.
They ate no other kind of food, nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.
Ah yes, they are those despicable creatures: young women! (Can you guess I’m staring aghast at the rapidly approaching 4-0?)
Only now, half a page in, does Parker give our characters, names, station, a bit of backstory. In one paragraph she tells a lifetime. She says a lot with few words ending with:
Each girl lived at home with her family and paid half her salary to its support.
Aha! These are not high-society misses at all. These are working girls affecting a life of leisure.
(I’ll freely admit I loved that sentence in part because it captures the lives my grandmothers lived before they were married, but how many young women – or men – would do that today?)
Every description of the girls is full and sensual and tactile and fixes them in time and space.
They wore thin, bright dresses, tight over their breasts and high on their legs, and tilted slippers, fancifully strapped.
Even their state of mind is shown viscerally from:
they held their heads higher and set their feet with exquisite precision, as if they stepped over the necks of peasants.
to later, when things are not going so well. Parker never says, “they felt bad”. Instead she writes:
Their shoulders dropped and they dragged their feet; they bumped against each other, without notice of apology, and caromed away again. They were silent and their eyes were cloudy.
It’s not how I write. It’s not my style. But I loved this story and definitely want to try out a story where I try out something more phsyical and real, like this one.
Do you write in a very descriptive way? Is your style similar in most stories? Do you like to read stories in the same style as yours, or do you also enjoy stories in a radically different style? Tell me how you read.
This tweet and the article it links to got me all riled up on Sunday[1. With all due respect to Colleen Lindsay who is an extremely generous tweeter and knowledgeable publishing person who you should totally be following.And I do sympathise with her points, from her perspective.]
Now the thread goes on to make some valid points, from the point of view of a publishing insider. The article she links to however, gets my hackles right up and I call for a rallying cry of:
“Yah boo sucks to you! I’ll write any damned thing I want”
And so should you!
The publishing machine exists for a reason (to help authors distribute their work to the masses). For some authors that still works just fine.
For the vast majority of writers, however, the publishing machine is broken. They don’t have a big audience, so they don’t fit the economic model.
The problem comes when publishing insiders forget that the limitations of their system are exactly that: economic.
If something is deemed ‘unpublishable’ it does not mean that,
It might mean that,
My problem with “Oo, the peons shouldn’t write their stories” articles [3. Apart from the short-sightedness, a lack of awareness of subaltern studies school of historical research and the insufferably smug arrogance, obviously] is that they are destructive to the very soul of humanity.
I’m not exaggerating here.
We are a story-telling people. It’s how we make sense of our lives and our world. It’s what separates us from the brute beasts. It is an essential part of our nature.
Sometimes we make up stories about our origins and pass them on to our progeny. Sometimes we write beautiful epics that explain the human condition. Sometimes we unwittingly preserve a way of life that is destined to die out and be forgotten, except for our stories about it.
What does it do when some arbitrary gatekeeper says, “No, the story of your life growing up in Hicksville with a quirky family isn’t important enough to be published. Don’t even waste your time writing it down.”?
What arrogance! What utter idiocy!
We’ve been trained by a couple of generations of TV, music labels, and yes, publishers, to believe that we little people aren’t qualified to tell stories, make music or entertain our friends.
What do we do? We watch pre-packaged, fake ‘reality’; we listen only to homogenous music on stations that only play one style of music, and we read only the stories that an intellectual elite has chosen for the universality of their appeal.
There is nothing wrong with best-sellers, nothing at all. I love me some pulpy paperback mystery and sci-fi, and I read the big ‘literary’ hits whenever I can stomach them.
The problem I have with the top-down model of publishing (whether books or music or art) is that it stifles the creative lives of ordinary, gloriously creative people. Because that’s what we are, us humans. Endlessly creative and passionate and social animals.
Luckily, we live in a great age for do-it-yourself distribution of creative products, whether stories, music or video.
No, not everything that people put out into the world is my cup of tea.
Yes, there is a lot more dross to sort through these days.
But it’s also a lot more likely than ever before that I’m going to find something fascinating to read, on a topic of my choosing, by asking around online and getting recommendations from people with similar tastes.
This flowering of creativity and distribution is going to be an absolute gold mine for anthropologists in the future.
As someone with an MA in History, I am incredibly excited about the breadth of primary sources we are leaving to future historians[5. Part of my Masters’ research was on the travel journals of explorers to the New World in the 1500s. Some of my other research invoved the shopping lists of Ventian guilds and what they could tell us about what was going on in the city and the world at the time. I’m betting the people who wrote those documents never imagined they’d be considered important by scholars 400 years into the future] Imagine if everyone in the Bronze Age had had a handy, dry cave wall where they could have documented their daily deeds. How much more would we know about our ancestors than we do now from a few scratchings in Lascaux and the occasional stomach-pumping of a frozen ice-mummy?
So go. Write your memoirs. Make them as detailed as you like. Make them as vivid as you can. And don’t listen to anyone who tells you it’s all been said before. Because it hasn’t.
Not by you.
And your story deserves to be written.
A 6-part journey through the short story.
Starts July 28, 2023
![[Daily Prompt] – May 11 – Little Red Riding Hood](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Prompt_challenge2011tn.jpeg)
![[Write On Wednesdays] Escape](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/mir.gif)
