Writing Prompt: August 7th, 2012

Every Tuesday and Friday, I'll be posting one or more writing prompts as possible starting points for stories or poems. I'll be mixing this up as much as possible and will sometimes utilize quotes, photos, music, and anything else I can think of which might help get your creative inspiration going.

Here's today's writing prompt:

Image by Mark Rain used under Creative Commons license

I hope that it inspires some of you to write something amazing. If you end up writing something based on this prompt and it gets published somewhere (including your blog or personal website) please stop by and leave a comment so I can see what you came up with.

Come back on Friday for another Writing Prompt.

Monday Motivation: Making Things Happen

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.
- John F. Kennedy

This quote feels very timely coming on the day of the successful landing of Curiosity on Mars, both since that certainly is something that was made to happen and since the same speaker famously challenged the US space program to land a man on the moon in a decade.

It applies to our writing, of course, as well. Our stories can't write themselves. We have to be the ones to sit down and do the work. Make the time to make the things you want to see happen, happen.

Guest Post: Rebecca Roland on Maintaining a Writing Routine with Children

Today's guest post is by Rebecca Roland; she talks about learning to maintain a writing routine while adjusting to having a child. Rebecca has a blog titled "Spice of Life" and she is also on Twitter.

Thanks, Rebecca, for writing this post!

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When I had my son, I took time off not only from my day job, but also from writing. It was hard enough to find time to shower, much less put words on paper. But after a few weeks, I had the itch to write, and I slowly got back to it.

Gone were the hours on weekends and days off when I could ease into my writing after goofing around on the Internet or doing the dishes or vacuuming the cat. I had a finite time to write, and I needed to make the most of it.

I tried to figure out how other people did it. I knew writers with twins, for crying out loud, and they still managed to fit in writing time. I even scoured the Internet for tips and tricks. How was I supposed to work and care for my son and fit in the writing?

Link of the Week: L. Lambert Lawson on Writing Every Day "Our Honor Becomes Greater Than Our Moods"

Every Saturday I highlight a link that I think is worth checking out for writers, particularly those who are working on developing a daily writing routine. As soon as I read L. Lambert Lawson's great post "Writing Every Day: Our Honor Becomes Greater Than Our Moods" last night, I knew it had to be this week's featured link.

I'm featuring this not because he starts out by mentioning "Write Every Day." (Well, okay, that certainly didn't do anything to discourage me from liking the piece...) What I really loved about it, though, was how he synthesized multiple different pieces of advice and inspiration here. He draws from not just what I've written, but from behavioral psychologists and Stephen Covey, who is the source for the title of his post.

Historically, I've been quite good (or, rather, poor) at letting my moods and whims take hold of my direction in some aspects of life. I've written quite a few times about how I had written frequently as a child but then spent hardly any time as an adult writing up until this past year. But once I committed to writing every day and got a bit of momentum, having that commitment has gotten me through many, many days when I truly didn't feel like writing. Those might not always have been my best writing days though I think that in general once I get in a groove for a writing session, my original mood is largely irrelevant. So that quote from Covey really rings true for me and is a nice crystallization of how I feel about that very topic.

In fact, I'm finally making some progress with using the same core concepts behind the Daily Writing Chain in another area of my life. My wife and I have had a small side business for years which has started to languish in the past several years for a variety of reasons. I committed to putting a small amount of effort into it every day starting July 1st. So far, I've met that commitment every day and even met a small stretch goal which I had set for myself for the month of July as a whole.

We've talked some here recently about how writing every day doesn't work for everyone -- people for whom it doesn't work shouldn't feel any less good about their own routine. But for me, and for quite a few other writers, it's been a very fruitful technique.

Thanks to L. Lambert Lawson for his insightful post.

Writing Prompt: Friday August 3rd, 2012

Every Tuesday and Friday, I'll be posting one or more writing prompts as possible starting points for stories or poems. Sometimes when I'm having trouble getting started on a particular day, I'll look for a writing prompt to help get my imagination going. This has helped me keep up my routine of writing every day.

For the prompts on this site, I'll be mixing this up as much as possible and will sometimes utilize quotes, photos, music, and anything else I can think of which might help get your creative inspiration going.

Today's writing prompt is:

A hot day at the State Fair.

I hope this prompt inspires some of you to write something amazing. If you end up writing a story, poem, or anything else based on this prompt and it gets published somewhere (including your blog or personal website) please stop by and leave a comment so I can see what you came up with.

Come back on Tuesday for another Writing Prompt.

Upcoming Deadlines: Kazka Press Flash Fiction & Dead North

One of the tools I've used sometimes to help myself get started on writing is writing towards prompts or themes for upcoming publications, either anthologies or themed issues of periodicals. Below you will find information about two such calls for submissions.

Kazka Press has made some changes to their monthly flash fiction contests and there's one in particular which I'd like to draw your attention to. The September contest has the theme of "Love Beyond Death" and will be guest-edited by me. This issue's submission call runs from September 1st through 20th, 2012 and Kazka will be paying a flat rate of $10 for stories of 713-1,000 words. They asked me to provide a few words about what I wanted to see in submissions and I said:

The best thing I can say is: surprise me! There are some obvious directions this theme could take: ghosts, other paranormal beasties, personality-on-a-microchip/uploaded-brain type stories, etc. I’m not saying I won’t take those if they’re great, because we want to provide great stories for the contest’s readers. But if I’ve got the choice between a great ghost story and a great story that took the theme in a direction I couldn’t have anticipated and that made me say ‘Wow!’ I know which one I’ll pick every time.

The second submission call for this week is for the Dead North anthology. This is an anthology of zombie stories set in Canada. This submission call runs through September 30th, 2012. They pay 2 cents (Canadian) per word plus two copies of the anthology for original stories of 2,000-10,000 words. Reprints will be considered at a flat rate of $40 Canadian. Authors do not have to be Canadian themselves to submit, though the editor has asked for authors with Canadian citizenship or permanent residency to state as such in their cover letter.

As always, please make sure to read the linked guidelines pages closely to ensure that you understand details of the submission guidelines, terms, payment information, etc.

Stop back next Thursday for more Upcoming Deadlines!

Three Things You Can Get From Writing Something Different

One of the things that I consider when I'm in a bit of a writing rut is trying to write something different from my usual fare. This could be something significantly different -- a poem when you usually write prose, a story in a genre you usually don't write in, etc. -- or it could be something like trying a stylistic approach you rarely use. Maybe you rarely write in 1st person, for example. You could try giving that a go. (Note that this works best, in my opinion, for shorter works where you're expending a relatively small amount of energy in the experiment.)

Here are three reasons to consider writing something different, whether you're in a rut or not.

1. You might find out you like/are good at what you try. Just like with trying a new food or listening to a new type of music for the first time, you could very well find something that you enjoy doing quite a bit by trying writing something beyond your usual work. Depending on where you are in your writing career, it may or may not make sense to pursue that with vigor, but it can't hurt to know it either way.
2. You might be able to take things you learned from the experiment and apply them to your more-typical work. One of the things that you would hopefully be doing from this type of experiment is growing as a writer, at least in breadth of experience. Having broader experience gives you more to draw from while writing in general.
3. You have a bit of experience with something new if you want or need to work with it more in the future. Maybe your experiment was with writing a story in a setting different from your usual setting. If a themed anthology opens up, then, which depends on that setting you already have some background knowledge from which to start.

Something to bear in mind is that these three reasons can apply to not only writing, but to reading. I wrote a story recently which I personally was very happy with and which also got very good comments (along with suggestions for improvement, of course) from my beta readers. That story is one that I think shows some influence from the poetry reading I've been doing over the past couple of months.

That's a great thing about being a writer -- all this stuff funnels into our brains and it can come out later in pretty darn awesome ways!