Tell Me What You Want

(What you really, really want…)

At some point, you started following me: maybe for writing prompts (like these), maybe for inspiration and recommendations (like this), or maybe for something else entirely.

As I hatch plans for the coming year, I’d love to know how I can help you, best?

What do you need more of? What could you take less of?

How can I help you pursue your dreams?

I’d love it if you’d fill out this 2-question survey

(People often find that answering the questions helps them clarify where they need to focus.)

If you didn’t make it to our Annual Planning Workshop, this week, this exercise can be a springboard into your own end-of-year assessment/planning.

​Answer the questions here​

Keep writing,

Julie

Release The Hounds (aka ‘your stories’)

As I sit here, thinking about what I want to achieve over the next year as a writer, that generosity of spirit is something I want to keep in focus…

Note: I might be writing this message for myself.

One of the best things I did for myself this year was to take a chance on a book of poetry: Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama

(This is why I will never give up on physical bookstores and libraries: the sheer joy of stumbling across books and taking a chance on them!)

I’m not a poetry expert and often find books of poetry unsatisfying, as I sit there thinking, “‘what am I supposed to get from this? What am I missing?”

Well, Ó Tuama’s book follows up each poem with an essay in which he tells you what he loves about the poem. It’s not prescriptive. It’s not an attempt to tell you what you should get out of the poem, but it does offer a way in.

A Great Start To The Day

Every day that I start by reading a poem and essay from this book, is a good day.

I start my day thinking about words and what can be done with them.

I start my day thinking about how words affect the people who read them.

I start my day with black and white proof that it is possible to use words to share tiny moments and experiences, to be brave enough to put them out into the world, and to find other people who will be moved by them.

And that’s a pretty good way to start the day.

Borrowed focus.

Borrowed courage.

A chipping-away of my excuses.

Do The Work

In a recent conversation with one of the StoryADay Superstars she talked about a gift she made for her brother.

It was challenging (so much that she put off starting, for years), it was a little beyond her skill set (so much that it was imperfect) AND yet she resolved to finish it and give it to her brother anyway.

Of course, he loved it.

He saw all the things that were right with it, not the few tiny details that could maybe have been neater…

Perfectionism Generosity

As I sit here thinking about what I want to achieve over the coming year as a writer, that generosity of spirit is something I want to keep in mind: a willingness to finish things and share them, and let them be enjoyed.

To not withhold.

To not be arrogant enough to think I’ll ever ‘get it right’.

To be bold enough to finish and share my stories.

How about you?

What inspires you? What gives you courage? What’s the best thing you’ve done for yourself over the past year? What’s the most generous thing you will do, in the coming year?

Lessons in microfiction

Look how these five words transform everything…

Someone sent me this, this morning and a, haha, of course! And b, look how the last line turns this into an actual story…

The last line, just five words, puts the reader into a specific moment. Something is happening. We have a character to root for. Stakes! Suspense! (Ok, mild suspense but still).

That line alone transforms the whole thing from an funny observation into a story.

Everything Starts With A Story

In 1802 Albert Mathieu-Favier began telling people a story.

Imagine, he said, a tunnel that dives under the sea that separates France from England. It will be lit by oil lamps, and big enough for a horse-drawn carriage to pass through. Here, he said, is an island where the drivers will change horses. Here, he added, is the second tunnel that will carry away groundwater.

It was a crazy story.

And so everyone continued to make the trip by boat.

Later, people started to travel between the countries in a conveyance that had also started as an outlandish story: flying machines!

But Mathieu-Favier’s story never entirely faded away.

When I was three years old, people started talking seriously about the Channel Tunnel, this time for a train.

In 1990, when I was 18, the story first told by a Napoleonic-era French mining engineer had become a reality, as an English engineer reached through a gap in the rubble, under the sea, half way between France and England, and handed his French counterpart a cuddly toy version of Britain’s most famous fictional immigrant: Paddington Bear.

Stories FTW

Everything our civilization has ever produced,

  • started as an idea,
  • took root as a story, and
  • became reality when someone told the story well enough to convince a lot of people to make it real.

The world needs people who are curious.

The world needs people who can create characters, and situations, and worlds that we want to make real.

What you do is not frivolous.

And it’s not easy.

It’s hard to do alone.​

If November looks like it might be a hard month for you (and December, and January), it’s worth finding a place that is a refuge.​

Next week I’m opening up membership in the StoryADay Superstars for the next six months, because we need to be together.

I’ll have some more information (and some really nice bonuses) for you over the next few days.

If you want to know more, sign up here

    You’ll get a free “Creative Commute” lesson and worksheet, and I’ll know I should send you more information about the program.

    Let’s keep writing through whatever life throws at us!

    Keep writing,

    Julie

    Make a plan

    To ease eye strain, experts recommend that every 20 minutes we focus our eyes on something further away than our screens–ideally at least 20ft away– for at least 20 seconds.

    As a trained historian, I feel the same way about the news: current events are thisclose. It wouldn’t hurt us to make a concerted effort to look away, periodically. 

    Fortunately fiction offers the perfect respite.

    Today, why not step away from this place and time and read some Tolstoy or JM Coetzee, Nnedi Okorafor or Haruki Murakami, Kiran Desai or Ian Rankin. 

    Whether you’re voting in the US elections, or watching from abroad, or couldn’t care less about politics in a country you’re not in, this is a great time to remind yourself of the importance of writing.

    Here are my suggestions for you:

    Short Fiction

    Best American Short Stories 2024, Lauren Groff (ed)

    CRAFT Literary Magazine

    Poetry

    Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama

    Essays

    Book of Delights by Ross Gay

    General Non-Fiction

    Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

    Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

    Funny Stuff

    The Hidden Tools of Comedy by Steve Kaplan

    Comedy Book – How Comedy Conquered Culture–and The Magic That Makes It Work by Jesse David Fox

    KafClown on Instagram

    The Diplomat on Netflix (serious, but characters are allowed to be funny in places)

    Steve Martin: A Documentary In 2 Pieces

    My Man Jeeves: A Jeeves & Wooster Collection by P. G. Wodehouse

    Jeeves & Wooster (Hugh Laurie and Steven Fry version)

    Books About Writing

    Million Dollar Outlines by David Farland

    The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger

    Intuitive Editing by Tiffany Yates Martin

    Author in Progress, Therese Walsh (Ed)

    Watch 

    Shrinking (Apple TV), from the people who brought you Ted Lasso, and with a similar sensibility (Content warning: a dead wife/mother killed by a drunk driver.)

    The Dish – a quiet movie from 2000,  starring Sam Neil, about  a vital Apollo-era  satellite dish in an Australian sheep paddock!

    What would you recommend, for people looking to appreciate art and take a break from the here and now? Leave a comment.

    Keep writing,

    Julie

    P. S. If you want to focus on your writing, stay tuned for a super-special offer coming this week, that will help you improve your writing and stick with it over the long term (what?! I know!!) Want to be among the first to know?

      When Stories Aren’t Working

      I’m sitting here at my desk: time to write, a story to work on, all my tools on my desk.

      And I’m stuck.

      (Actually I’m not stuck anymore, and that’s why I’m writing this: so that when you find yourself in this situation, you might remember what I’m about to tell you and get yourself unstuck too.)

      Download the ‘Unstick Your Story Workbook’ now

      Writer’s Block – Real or Not, It Stinks!

      Sometimes blocks are about our fears (“I’m not good enough”) or our frustrations (“I’ll never get published, so what’s the point?”) – both of which are lies, by the way.

      But sometimes it really is about the story not working.

      The first thing to know about this is that EVERYONE experiences this. Novices, experienced writers, and award-winning writers. Every writer starts stories that get away from them a bit. 

      • The trick is to know what to try when it happens.
      • The second trick is to keep going, when it’s hard.

      Today i’m going to try to help a bit with the first trick, by walking you through what’s going on with my story.

      The Idea

      I had this idea for an advance party of colonists to land on a planet they’re planning to settle, only to crash on the way down. 

      Of course, they discover that the planet isn’t everything they thought it was, and they start to experience some strange side effects of being there.

      The Plot

      In my search for ‘what happens next’, I decided their quest would be to travel for three days across different hostile environments, to reach the rescue ship’s extraction point. 

      The Problem

      As I wrote the set up to the story, I had a character wake from a medically-induced coma to discover that her crewmates were on the planet and already experiencing the weird side-effects of being there. 

      Then I was going to force them to trek across the planet for three days.

      To make it interesting/realistic, I had an advance party of five people – one for each important function of the shuttle trip to the surface.

      And this is where I made my first mistake: even though one of them doesn’t do much (for story reasons), that’s a lot of people to manage in a short story. I had barely introduced them all and I was pushing the 1000 word limit.

      For a story that I was planning to bring in around 4000 words, I hadn’t left myself much room for the actual story!

      The Resistance

      Steven Pressfield famously says that “resistance’ in writers is/feels like an external force, pushing on us and trying to prevent us from doing our creative work.

      So when I stalled at the point where I had to make my characters get up and begin their trek, I considered that:

      Was I having internal resistance?

      And my answer was:

      Nope.

      I was just doing it wrong.

      I was stalled because I was overwhelmed by the prospect of coming up with several different environments on the planet that would cause obstacles to getting to the rendezvous point, guiding five distinct personalities through it with enough peril and banter to keep readers interested, and then come up with a final climax and resolution…all in the number of words a short story affords.

      The Answer

      I realized I was brainstorming a plan for a novella at the very least, not a short story, 

      Throw in a subplot about the geopolitical reasons they were there, or the secret sabotage efforts of one of the crew, maybe a romance, and I was working towards a novel!

      (Note: I wasn’t outlining as such, but, having reached a sticking point, I was brainstorming what needed to come next.)

      Short stories are short.

      Which means the central idea they address has to stay smaller in scale than our imaginations are capable of making it.

      I had to rein myself in.

      If I wanted to keep the five characters and if I wanted this to be a short story not a novella–and I did–I probably needed to shrink the scale of the problem.

      The New Idea

      At this point, a new idea began to form:

      What if the story is not about their trek across the planet, encountering obstacles? What if I bring the obstacles to them, and all they have to do is survive?

      That way, I avoid having to come up with new settings, as well as coming up with ways to address the passage of time, and several different types of peril. 

      Show The Most Interesting Parts

      This led me to another ‘aha’:

      I had already come up with an intriguing idea: that the planet was affecting them all differently. 

      I had not, however, shown the reader any of that.

      In other words, I had put all the most interesting parts in backstory and conversations:

      “Oh, yeah, by the way, while you were asleep, all these weird things happened. Look, let me show you the aftermath.”

      Yawn!

      That was me – the writer – telling myself the story.

      What if I showed the reader that weird and wonderful stuff as it was happening?

      Now I was starting to get excited about the story again.

      • I was thinking on a scale that would work in short fiction. 
      • I didn’t have to come up with a whole bunch of new ideas

      I immediately started thinking of fun ways to show what I had already described in my opening 1000 words, that would allow me to tell a whole story without overloading the reader with new settings and adventures.

      Starting Again Without Starting Again

      When a story stalls, it is oh, so tempting to throw it out and go with the shiny new idea that presents itself.

      But by digging into what I know a short story is and should be, I found my way back to the thing that excited me about this story in the first place.

      So sure, I had a lot of ideas that I’m discarding.

      Sure, I have to go back to the beginning and write it completely differently. 

      But now I get to play around with the ideas I already came up with instead of overwhelming myself—and potential readers—with too many new ideas.

      And I have a story idea (the trek across the planet) that I can use at another time.

      Give It A Try

      Want to diagnose your ‘stuck’ story and find a cure?

      Download a worksheet to help you ask yourself smart questions and unstick your story.