sftw – StoryADay

Maybe You SHOULD Be Writing

Some weekend reading and listening to inspire you to write…

I’m in the midst of asking writers I admire to contribute prompts for this year’s StoryADay Challenge. It’s nerve-wracking, and takes a little courage, but I do it.

Then, inevitably, when they say ‘yes’, I experience Big Emotions: Happiness and, weirdly, overwhelm. And I want to run away from my computer!

Today I caught myself feeling those feelings. I took a deep breath and asked:

What if I don’t let the Imposter Syndrome rage?

What if, by creating StoryADay May, I really HAVE created something awesome that people love to support and take part in?

What if I am doing good, and that’s good enough?

And so, I ask you the same question: what if you ARE good enough, as a writer?

Some Weekend Reading/Listening For You

I wrote about this here: What if you ARE good enough?
I talked about ‘How good does your writing have to be?’ on the podcast here
Here are some suggestions in case your writing really isn’t good enough
And if you want a gallery of encouraging quotes about keeping going, outrunning the Imposter Syndrome, here you go:

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Creative Encouragement

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Discussion Time: How Do You React?

Do you ever struggle with receiving positive feedback on your writing?
Do you ever demur and dismiss people’s praise with an “oh, go on, you’re just being nice…”?
What if you could stand your ground, sit in the discomfort, and let their praise sink in?
What would it do for you, if you could truly believe that your writing is good enough, of service to readers, and that you can accept praise?
Would you become an arrogant monster? Or would you become invigorated and want to write more stories for people to enjoy (Hint: it’s not the first one).

Leave a comment and let me know

Be Precise (Not Merely Concise)

While concise writing can be a useful skill, precision is more interesting to readers.

This email is an excerpt of the Be Precise Workshop, a benefit of being in the StoryADay Superstars group. Interested? Find out more.

Sometimes when I talk about precision in writing, people worry that I want them to write in a formal, clinical, or clipped fashion. Not so!

If you want readers to be interested in your characters, you need to bring them alive. One way to do that, is to use exquisitely targeted facts about them, including showing us what they notice.

The Things They Carry

The details that characters notice and obsess about are specific to them and their experiences.

Here’s an example, in which a young research associate observes his colleagues. As you read, notice: What do we discover about how Daffyd feels about each of them, from the details he notes?

Tonner Freis—with his tight smile and his prematurely gray hair that rose like smoke from an overheated brain—was, for the moment, the most celebrated mind in the world.

“From where Daffyd stood, the distance and the angle made it impossible to see Tonner’s face clearly. Or the woman in the emerald-green dress at his side. Else Annalise Yannin, who had given up her own research team to join Tonner’s project. Who had one dimple in her left cheek when she smiled and two on her right. Who tapped out complex rhythms with her feet when she was thinking, like she occupied her body by dancing in place while her mind wandered.

-James S. A. Corey, The Mercy of Gods (The Captive’s War Book 1), Orbit 2024

Here are some exercises to keep you company this weekend, and to help you sharpen your powers of observation in writing:

How does Daffyd feel about Tonner?
How does Daffyd feel about Elise?
If he were to approach them, what might he be feeling?
Write down five precise details that give you a sense of each person and how Daffyd feels about them.
Go into a passage of your own writing and try to replicate this idea: which details does your character notice about other people (or the setting), and what is it about your character that makes them choose those detail to notice?
Have you used the most precise language you can, to highlight those details?

What did you discover? Join the discussion

(Why Most) Writing Prompts Suck

Most free writing prompts suck…and worse than that: they waste your time and energy. Here’s what to do instead…

Last year I excitedly signed up for two different ‘a year of free writing prompts’ from sources I have turned to for writing inspiration and instruction for decades…and every time I open the weekly email, they make me sad.

The prompts kind of suck.

They feel worth what I paid for them: nothing.

In fact it’s worse than that. The cost isn’t 0.

The cost is my time and energy, spent opening the emails, looking at the prompt, and losing a little more hope every week.

Every time I see an offer for one of those free prompt subscriptions, I feel like I should sign up, if I’m serious about my writing. Shouldn’t I be doing everything I can, to advance my writing.

If you feel the same way, let me help you out: no. You should feel no guilt about walking away. Why?

It’s Not You, It’s Them…

Maybe you’re like me: I’m a lifelong journaler who doesn’t need prompts to journal. Many people throw out ‘writing prompts’ that are really just instructions to ‘write about a time when you…’.

There’s little direction about how to make that writing time useful, or ways to develop your skills, and really, what writer needs more ideas?!

Or maybe, like me, you’re a short story writer or novelist.

While you can use journaling prompts to hone your description and dialogue skills, wouldn’t you rather be doing that while writing a story? For some reason, few writing prompt writers bother to spark actual stories.

Some writing prompts give you a genre, a character, and an object and tell you to write a story from that.

But, while that might help you come up with a premise for a story, there’s more to a story than that. For example,

How do you decide what the character wants?
How do you know what the character decides to do with the object?
Why does the object matter?
What are the genre norms?
Do you even want to write in that genre?

Does the prompt help you think about any of these things? Rarely.

Ideas are easy. Crafting them into a compelling piece of writing is the part that matters. And it’s frustrating when a prompt leaves you high and dry.

Frustrated No More

If you’ve found writing prompts as frustrating as I have, I have an invitation for you, this week, and that’s to check out a free sample of my StoryAWeek newsletter.

In 15 years of running StoryADay May, I’ve learned a lot about what helps writers to start and finish stories.

And it’s more than giving you a simple idea or a premise and saying, ‘good luck with that! Seeyabye!”

It’s also

Supplying brainstorming questions to help you find a way into your writing
Teaching craft and writing-practice techniques in bite-sized chunks, tailored to the prompt
Sharing examples of stories that exemplify the best of the craft
Sending words of encouragement, that help you remember you’re not alone, and that you can do this. Of course you can!

A prompt should, er, prompt you to write. It should inspire you; spark connections in your brain; send you scurrying to the page, eager to craft a new piece of writing.

Torturing A Metaphor

Prompts that give you ideas for fragments are like plastic pony beads you buy from the craft store:

Mass produced
Colorful, but uniform, inspiring nothing unique
Not something that often contributes to creating a valuable finished object.

A prompt that inspires you to craft a written piece readers will enjoy, is more like a natural pearl:

Created by a slow but reliable process,
Subtle in its variation as you hold it up to the light of your imagination
a treasure that can be used to create other treasures.

Am I over-selling the importance of NOT wasting your time and energy on crappy writing prompts?

Forgive me. I feel strongly about this.

You don’t have to subscribe to the StoryAWeek Newsletter (52 weeks of hand-crafted, lovingly spun writing lessons, prompts and letters of inspiration taken from my years of experience), but I hope you will at the very least give yourself permission to walk away from all those worthless writing prompt offers, and trust your own writerly instincts.

If you are looking for a weekly reminder to sit down with your writer-self and develop some new stories and scenes, delivered to your inbox, please do consider the StoryAWeek Newsletter

…But also: “How?”

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that knowing ‘why’ you are writing makes figuring out the ‘how’ easier.

But it’s not a magic spell. It’s not that having-a-clear-vision-of-what-writing-means-to-you suddenly leads to National Book Awards and infinite riches, or some zen-like state of contentment with your writing practice.

You do, also, have to think about how you will fit writing into your routine.

Simply believing you’re meant to be a writer doesn’t get the job done.

Why Without How

Recently I came back from a longish trip to Scotland, full of clarity about what I want to work on. It was exciting…in the abstract.

But each day, when I got up, I was unsure of what I should work on today, and each day I found myself pottering around with tasks that felt like ‘writing’, but weren’t actually helping me progress towards my (clear) goals.

I hadn’t ‘reduced to practice’ my desire to write. I hadn’t thought, specifically about how I would get it done.

Every day I fell into that old trap of asking myself what I felt like writing today.

Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Making decisions uses up energy (literally. They can see it on brain scans).

Writing, it turns out, is a series of decisions that we need to make on behalf of all of our characters.

If we waste all our creative juice on making ‘how will I work today’ decisions, we leave ourselves less energy for the important creative decisions that go into our fiction.

What’s the way around that?

Have routines.

And I know many of us rebel against routines, as creative people, so I’ll be talking about that more in upcoming issues.

But for now: what habits and routines do you have in place to help you get to the page? What do you struggle with?

Leave a comment and let us know: