What’s life really like as a writer? Well, the answer is as varied as the number of writers you ask, but for me, this is how things are going: Listen in, you might be inspired!
LINKS
Join Superstars + I, WRITER Course at a discount before Dec 15, 2024
Join the StoryADay Superstars for year-round support
Writing Prompts: Writing Prompts By Category
Flash Fiction Primer: Flash Fiction Essentials
The StoryADay blog: Blog – StoryADay
CHAPTERS
00:00 StADa235 A Writer’s Life
00:27 Bluesky/BSKY
05:16 Flash Fiction Notes
11:49 The Power Of Others
20:32 Recap
Watch on YouTube
Other Help for Improving Your Writing Life
Download the Short Story Framework:
Take the 3-Day Challenge
Sign up for the StoryAWeek Newsletter
Take the I, WRITER Course
Join the Superstars Group
https://storyaday.org/superstars
Coaching with Julie
Transcript
20241214 Podcast
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Julie from Story A Day here and this week’s podcast I’m going to catch you up with a bunch of things that have been going on in my writing week in the hope that I can inspire you or encourage you to think about your own writing, maybe give you a few ideas and just share this thing that we do, maybe some resources as well.
So Things from my week.
[00:00:27] Bluesky/BSKY
I joined BlueSky and I always like to investigate new technologies and platforms and things like that. And I, Twitter has been increasingly unusable for the past nine years.
I loved it back in 2007, all the way through to about 2015. And then I started to hate it, and I never really liked Facebook, but I jumped on Threads to see what was going on there.
And I’ve been trying to use Instagram, but for my purposes, it’s not really great, because it’s a visual website. platform and I’m not really in the visual medium and you can’t provide links because how I always used to use social media was to provide links to resources, places you could submit things, articles I’d written, things like that.
So I jumped on BlueSky when it launched and I tried Mastodon, didn’t like that much. Jumped on BlueSky, it was interesting, it felt like Twitter in the old days, but there weren’t that many people there and then something happened. Last month, in the wake of the US election, a lot of people in the arts, who tend to not be super right wing, let’s just say decided that they didn’t want to be left wing.
on the billionaire’s platforms as much. And a lot of us had decided that a while ago, but there was a huge influx of people, coming off Twitter/X, and a lot more, publications jumped over, a lot of writers who had clung on on X for a long time, because they, that’s where they were, and that’s where their community was.
They jumped ship. And 25 million users are now on BlueSky. So I am finding that is where the best conversations are happening. Threads was good for a while, but it is also fairly aggressively using algorithms to downrank things with links in them because they take you off their platform. And BlueSky doesn’t seem to be doing that yet.
I find Instagram almost unusable now because of all the ads. And also just again, me not a visual creator. Enjoy other people’s visual creations, but I’m not a visual creator. So the reason I’m telling you this is I’m going to be posting more on BlueSky these days because I really noticed engagement increasing over the past month or so.
There’s a lot more happening. It’s more easy to find the stuff that you’ve actually followed. The downside when not a lot of people were using it was that there wasn’t a lot going on every time I refreshed and that wasn’t, feeding my little dopamine craving addiction.
So now when I go on, there’s more stuff on there.
More likely to get interactions on my posts, more likely to see interesting posts from people who I used to follow years ago on Twitter. I’ve been finding a whole bunch of the writing community on there. People I haven’t seen for years, I haven’t seen their stuff, like Elizabeth Spann Craig, who always has tons of fantastic links.
People like that who I’m like, oh, where have you been? And the truth is, she’s been on Twitter and I haven’t. She’s on Blue Sky now and the publications are on Blue Sky. There’s a thing on Blue Sky called Starter Packs where people put together basically like lists of accounts that you can follow and you can follow them all with one click and I followed one the other day which was a list of a starter pack for flash fiction publications and oh my heart I’m so happy because now when I open up my little social media feed to get My hit, which I trained myself to do 12 years ago.
I’m not seeing ads for products and services and stuff like that. I’m seeing posts from flash fiction markets who are talking about the stories that they’re publishing. They’re talking about calls for submission. They’re talking about contests that their published stories have been selected, or have won or end of year lists that their stories have been listed in.
And this is what’s filling up my feed. It’s filling up my feed with writerly goodness. And, for now, I’m enjoying that. I’m not encouraging you to get onto Blue Sky and spend all your day scrolling, but if you’re looking for somewhere, if you’re looking to find out where the writing community decamped to, I’m going to suggest Blue Sky.
So it’s bsky. social and you will find me there at my usual story a day handle. So storyaday. bsky. social.
And you can follow me, and you can follow people I follow. Or you can just ignore the whole thing, and get back to your writing. And I will share with you here, and on my blog , and in my newsletter, my emails, I will share with you interesting stuff that I find there.
o that is there’s something that, that’s a service that I offer to you, for free. I troll the, trawl, I should say, not troll, I don’t troll, I trawl the resources and share them with you so you don’t have to, so you can get back to your writing.
00:05:16] Flash Fiction Notes
ne of the things that the flash fiction surge in my feed has reminded me that I have wandered away from flash fiction for a while, because you can’t be doing everything, right?
You can’t do everything, everywhere all at once, despite what the film would tell you ;), I am a huge fan of flash fiction. I love it. This year has been more about writing longer works. So at the beginning of the year I was writing, focusing on novels. In the, for Story A Day May, obviously I was writing flash pieces and short pieces, but I wasn’t really worrying about them, I wasn’t crafting them, I was just writing them as raw material.
Later in the year, I’ve been focusing on the skill of telling a slightly longer story. A short story, but one of those, 4, 000 word short stories, which has never been my natural length. So I’m exploring how to deepen stories in my own writing without weighing them down too much, without turning them, without letting them expand to novel scope, even novella length.
novellas yet, be honest totally honest with you. I don’t really know what goes into a novella. That’s something that’s on my list to investigate, but it’s not something I’ve researched and practiced yet. What I have practiced a lot is flash fiction and short stories and I’ve written five novels.
So those are the lengths that I am familiar with. I won’t say comfortable because I still find novels a real struggle. It’s hard. It’s hard work. I’m not a natural epic novelist. I don’t know if you are. Some people find short stories really hard because they are naturally novelists. So, Fine.
Anyway, flash fiction is on my mind because I’ve been looking at all of these markets that are coming out and it reminded me that I have a flash fiction workshop which I’m really proud of and it’s inside the iWriter course and you can also get access to it if you’re in the Superstars group. But I’m really proud of it because I created this flash fiction workshop which is about 90 minutes long when I was in the thick of just writing short stories.
I’d been doing story a day for about eight years at the time, I think maybe eight or nine years at the time. And I created this workshop which is just everything I’d learned about flash fiction, which is quite a lot. And there’s a question that people have about flash, right? How do you get depth into a story that’s only a thousand words or 500 words or even maybe shorter if it’s microfiction?
And there’s a technique that I uncovered, share in that workshop that I haven’t seen anyone else share. And it’s pretty simple and it’s pretty straightforward and a lot of people have found it quite powerful. And it’s just one of the six different aspects of short story writing that I focus on in the iWriter course, which is guess what what? Open for registration now. Now you can get, you can actually get the iWriter course at any time of the year, but what you can’t get are live meetings with me and a cohort of people who are going through it.
That only happens a few times a year, and it’s coming up in January. If you are interested in learning techniques like flash fiction, so that you can write a story whenever you’re in the mood, and make it something that’s actually, potentially publishing quality for all of these hundreds and thousands of flash fiction markets which are everywhere and relatively easy to get published in.
They’re not easy to get rich from. They are not easy to get published in. You still have to write good stories and you still have to do the work to get your stories out there, but compared to getting a 4, 000 or 6, 000 word short story or a novel to market, getting flash fiction to readers is relatively easier.
There are lots of markets, the work is shorter, the readers at the publication can read your work faster, they can make decisions faster, it gives you successes, it gives you things to put in your portfolio, it lets you experiment with characters and situations and voices that you might not otherwise do.
So this is why I’m always encouraging people to play with short stories, in general and flash fiction in particular. So that flash fiction workshop is in the iWriter workshop which is available right now. I’m also right this week
offering
a bundle to join the superstars community and get the iWriter course at a massive discount.
So if you want six weeks of writing craft and lessons on how to build your writing practice and weekly Q& A meetings with me, I would encourage you to come over to storyaday.org/superstars and that will take you to a page which shows you this offer for joining our Superstars group and getting the iWriter Course, which has that flash fiction course in it.
It has one about writing compelling characters. It has the most popular workshop I’ve ever done, which is called the copycat writing workshop.
It’s
a time tested technique for learning as much as you can about how to write short stories in the shortest amount of time and then implementing it.
And every time I run this course, people love the Copycat Writing Workshop. It’s work. It takes some time. You have to carve some time out of your week. But, people love it. And I use the techniques in it all the time and I had people years later come back to me and say “I was stuck and I went back to the techniques I learned in the copycat writing workshop and I got unstuck and now I have a story.”
I’m just saying, there’s that one, there’s the compelling characters workshop, there’s the flash fiction workshop, which I’m really proud of, and a bunch of other workshops in there which are based on, each week we focus on a different thing.
Conflict is one of them, which is really important.
And you have to get some tension some friction into your stories. So we talk about that. I am a huge fan of disaster movies and adventure stories and heists and spy thrillers and all of those kinds of stories, but that’s not something that you need to be writing in order to get conflict into your stories.
So we, we take a look at that in the course and every week there’s a lesson about how to build your writing practice.
So this is turning into an ad. Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to do that.
[00:11:49] The Power Of Others
Let me talk about another thing that I discovered in my writing week this week. And it’s not really a discovery.
It’s a rediscovery. I’m finding that life is a series of rediscoveries. Sometimes you learn something new. Sometimes you practice something and new lessons come from it.
You would think. Because I do this all the time, right? I’m dedicated to Story A Day. I write about writing. I write my own stories.
I lead a community of writers where we get together and have discussions. We write together. We do workshops together. All of this stuff. This is my gig. This is what I do.
You
would think that every day I would get up Full of the joys, I get to write today! Oh, fantastic! And I would sit down at my desk and the ideas would come and I would have all this mental space and I would just sit here at my nice white desk with my nice white bookshelves behind me and a nice blank wall over there that I can stare at when I’m trying to come up with ideas.
You would think that every day was a joy for me and I was so grateful and the ideas just poured out of my fingertips into my computer right now. Yeah, that’s not how creativity works. And that’s not how being human works. So there are days when I get up and I’m tired and I’m grumpy and I’m convinced that nothing I have ever written has been worth anything at all in spite of everything everyone has told me about my writing.
You’ve had compliments on your writing, right? And it doesn’t actually help when you sit down to write. It can. But it doesn’t always and there are days when you get up and you have a writing session on your calendar And there is nothing you would Less rather do It feels like a physical trial To get to the desk and sit there and open your laptop and type some words It’s ridiculous, but it’s true and it happens to me More than once a week So this week, I turned up anyway.
Because, when you’re trying to pursue something, and you’re striving to improve, you show up anyway, whether you’re in the mood or not. Which is a hard lesson to learn, but you do it. So I showed up anyway, and I was still grumpy. But I showed up for a writing sprint, which is one of the things we do in the Story A Day Superstars group.
We get on Zoom, and we write together. And sometimes we talk, and sometimes we don’t. Nobody talks. And whoever’s hosting the meeting is like, Hey, how’s everyone doing today? And everyone just stares at them. And we go, okay, we’ll just get started then. And some days we talk. We talked a lot on this particular day this week.
We talked about What did we talk about? We talked about the weather. We talked about the easy draw that Sweden got in the World Cup qualifying pools. And we talked about, I don’t know, something else. And just in that five minutes before we started to write, just seeing all these other writers popping into their little Zoom squares just made it all seem more possible for me.
It gave me that kind of peer pressure that says you’re here and these people are here. to do this writing thing. And so you should really do this writing thing. It’s you’re fortunate to be able to do this. You’ve got support. What the heck are you doing being grumpy about it? Which is fine.
You can tell yourself that in your head, but when you have other people around who are like demonstrating it they’re showing you what you’re trying to tell yourself in your head,
It’s harder
to turn away from it, but best of all, because we had that little bit of chit chat, it completely changed my state.
We are social beings. Regardless of how introverted you are, we need people. And just that five minutes of being silly about the weather and laughing about soccer and the fact that most of the people in the room didn’t even know what we were talking about, but two of us did, and, just laughing together and showing up and smiling because other people are on camera and you’re making an effort.
It’s incredibly powerful. So I have no excuses not to write. I have time. I have Sometimes, the motivation. I have works that I’m working on. I have knowledge. I have practiced. I have got my kids off to college. There’s nobody knocking on my door during the day. I have no excuses. And yet, it is still hard.
And the thing that makes it less hard is having other people around who are also doing this.
to just pull
people to just be pull you out of your head for a minute because what we do is so in our heads that it’s dangerous. Our inner voices are so creative and so powerful because this is what we do for fun.
This is what we’ve practiced all our lives is creating vivid, believable imaginary voices. So for us, when our imaginary voices, when our inner voice starts criticizing us and saying, oh you’re so lazy, oh your writing’s terrible, we, they’re convincing. So it really helps to have people around you who will pull you out of that.
It doesn’t have to be other writers. It can be other people who are excelling at something. If you want an accountability group where you check in with other people every week and someone is pursuing a particular area, finishing their first marathon and they tell you about their training practice and you think, oh my goodness, that’s so inspiring that they would be that dedicated.
Somebody shared with me this week pictures of bodybuilders and I did not like the pictures and I was not impressed by that. She was super impressed by the level of dedication because she was in the room with it. The level of dedication in that room was impressive and that I understand. When I go to see musicals I think about the hours and lifetimes of work that the performers on the stage have put in to get there.
The dance classes, the singing classes, the auditions, the endless rejection the being made fun of by their peers, the, all the stuff they went through at school when they were the oddball, and the decision every day. to get up and do this thing where there are no guarantees. And they end up on my stage in Philadelphia, which isn’t Broadway, but it’s a Broadway production, touring production.
It’s still looked down upon by some people because it’s not THE Broadway production. And they’re traveling and they’re sleeping in weird hotels every night and they’re turning up and they are showing all of this effort in order to entertain me. And I really appreciate that and I’m inspired by that.
So
Find what inspires you and hang out with those people. If you can get into a room with people like that, if you can talk to people who are striving, do it. If you don’t have a group like that, you know what I’m going to say. Come and join us in Superstars. I’ve worked hard to make Superstars a place that is welcoming, It gives you opportunities, it gives you time to write, it gives you connection with other writers, it gives you skills that you can join in, and I’m keeping it at a reasonable cost because I want people to stay and work on their writing long term.
And
they do. There are people who’ve been with me since the beginning. There are people who joined this year who’ve just renewed. There are people who are just joining now who are bringing new energy to the whole thing. It’s fabulous. If you’re looking for somewhere where you can be a writer, And not be quite as anonymous as you might be in a Facebook group, or just following people on a social media platform.
Maybe you joined Blue Sky, maybe you love it, but you can still be anonymous and you can still hide there. If you show up inside our community, people will notice you, people will welcome you, people will ask you how it’s going, and then you have to tell them. And then you have to get that validation that comes from talking about your writing with other people.
And it makes you take it more seriously, even for me. And I do this. This is what I’ve dedicated myself to for the past 15 years. It’s still hard. And it’s super hard to do alone. And I am an introvert. And I need a lot of downtime and quiet. And I need space for my ideas, but the thing about being in Superstars is you get that space because you’ve got writing dates that you can turn up for.
And you can just sit there and read. Somebody was reading the other morning when I was on a writing sprint. They were like, yep, I’m just reading this morning. Great. Reading is part of being a writer. So those are my three things from this week.
[00:20:32] Recap
Blue Sky is booming and it’s a, if you’re looking for a social media place where all the writers have gone, that’s where they are. If you’re not, if you don’t enjoy social media, if it makes you feel bad when you get off, if it wastes your time.
time. If it doesn’t inspire you, ignore that part of this podcast.
My flash fiction workshop is inside the iWriter course and I encourage you to have a look at flash fiction as a form. It’s short. It’s punchy. It’s concise. There’s tons of articles. There’s a flash fiction primer at the story a day website.
I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It’s a really great forum. It gives you that quick hit of finishing things, which if you’re working on a novel, sometimes the idea of finishing something is really appealing and it reminds you that you can do it and it reminds you that stories have an arc.
Stories have a journey to go on and when you’re in the midst of a novel, it can be easy to just be writing scenes and forget about that. So I encourage you to have a look at Flash Fiction as a form. There’s the primer on the website, there’s the iWriter course, all of these things are
in links .
In the show notes so click on them.
And if you’re looking for a way to stay more connected to your community next year, to yourself as a writer, consider the Story A Day Superstars. If you want to talk to me about that, just get in touch, and I will tell you all about it. And we’ll figure out whether it’s right for you.
It’s not right for everyone. It really isn’t. But it might be right for you.
I’m enjoying writing, even though it’s hard. I never regret time spent writing. I hope you find the same thing. I hope you give yourself some of that time this week. And we are starting, in the Story A Day Superstars, we’re starting a book club. On Monday we’re having our first meeting of that. If you join us before then, you can get in on that.
But we’re reading the, this year’s Best American Short Story Collection, which is really good. We’re going to talk about the first four stories in that collection. on Monday, and I’m looking forward to that discussion. It’s something we’ve done a little ad hoc before, but we’re actually going to go through this whole collection and figure out what we can learn, why we like these stories, why we don’t like these stories, and what we can learn from them, what they have in common, all of that kind of stuff.
Studying. Studying the market, studying the state of the art, is so valuable. And when I talk to people about short stories, they often talk to me about, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, or A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. These are classic stories, but they’re not always selling right now.
So it’s really valuable to be reading what’s current. So we’re starting with the Best American Short Stories of 2024 which is literary, largely. And my, my my hope for this venture is that we will venture out into other genres because there’s a robust short story culture out there. in many genres science fiction and fantasy, mystery
all of these areas.
So that’s what we’re up to inside the Superstars this month.
I hope that’s inspired you for this week. I hope you’re writing. If you don’t have time to write much over the holidays, make sure you’re reading. And make sure you’re reading with intention. You can read fluffy stuff, absolutely, but pay attention just to why you’re enjoying it. What is it about everything you read?
I’m not asking you to write a book report, I’m not asking you to analyse anything, but have your antenna out for what you are enjoying and why. Okay, that’s what I have for you this week. I hope you’re having a wonderful December or whatever month it is when you’re listening to this if you’re coming to it later.
And I will be back with you soon with more writing advice and inspiration. And if you need some inspiration, don’t forget there are 15 years worth of writing prompts at the Story A Day website. So go to the click on blog, click on writing prompts, and you’ll see They’re in categories of whether you want to write a character story, whether you want to write a story with a particular type of limit, whether, all kinds of stuff there.
Whether you want to focus on description, point of view. There’s also just like the years of the challenges. So you can go back to 2010 and look at the very first prompts that we did. Or you can look at last year’s prompts. Up to you. If you need some inspiration, something to get you catapulted into your writing sessions this week, 15 years worth of writing prompts there.
Use them. Ignore them, bend them, break them, whatever it takes to get you writing.
Have a great creative week, and most of all, keep writing.
“
, that experts become experts not by being talented or smart, but by loving what they do and putting in lots and lots of practice. He refers to a study into musical talent and preparation by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson: