A few weeks ago I wrote a post about some tools to help writers build a habit. All of those are super helpful when it comes to accountability, tracking progress, or even just getting reminders that it’s time to write.
None of those tools can make you sit down and use them, though. It still takes some internal motivation to start a writing habit, and for many people that’s the hardest part. I will say, there’s no magic formula for this. To some extent, it’s true that you just need to force yourself to do it and there aren’t really any shortcuts. That said, how you think about and approach the process of starting a writing habit can make a difference in getting it to stick. Here are the steps I took to build my current writing habit, which has been ongoing for a while now—even through an international trip, the last holiday season, planning the Scribble House Lit Fest, and other time-consuming stuff that is often deadly to writing routines.
When it comes to Mesoamerican cosmology, the Aztec tend to get the most press—largely because more Aztec history survived the Spanish than was preserved from many other cultures. When it comes to the Maya, the majority of their codices were destroyed, forcing modern scholars to reconstruct their beliefs from depictions on the structures and artifacts that avoided similar destruction. These efforts are aided by the one mythological text that was preserved by a uniquely forward-thinking Spanish monk named Francisco Ximenez: The Popol Wuj (or Popol Vuj), a name that roughly translates to “Book of the Community”. This text includes the Maya creation story, which flows into the tale of their culture heroes, the twins Hunahpu (or Junajpu) and Xbalanque.
If any place could be said to be the modern day domain of the Maya, it’s Guatemala. Of the 17.6 million people who live in Guatemala, nearly half (43.75%) belong to the Maya peoples. Maya culture lives on in the country’s food and customs, while the empire’s history can be traced through a slew of archaeological sites and the artifacts recovered from them.
I’m not sure if this is a universal experience for writers, but I usually find it more challenging to develop characters in a short story than in a novel. The reader doesn’t have much time to get to know them, which means the writer needs to be precise in choosing the right details, and conveying them effectively to make characters feel like real people as quickly as possible.
Often, when I read a story draft and feel like my characters are weak or vague, the problem isn’t just how I’ve written them—it’s that I don’t know the character well enough yet. It’s often not necessary to know as much about short story characters as those in a novel, but the writer still needs to understand their motivations and give their personality some depth to bring them to life on the page.
I love my writing group. A lot of us have been in the group for over 10 years, by this point, which means we know each other’s writing well—and that’s usually a good thing. Knowing the perspective each person is coming from helps to interpret their comments and put them in context, which makes it easier to fix the issues they spot without losing my voice. Their comments are also more likely to have that voice in mind since they’re so familiar with it.
That said, though, there are times that feedback from my workshop group might not be the most productive thing for the piece I’m working on. Sometimes it’s helpful to see how a story is reading to people who don’t know my writing, like when I’m playing in one of my established sandboxes and want to verify that it makes sense as a stand-alone, or if I’ve already workshopped the piece with the group and need a fresh perspective on how it reads after incorporating their suggestions.
Whether you don’t have a regular workshop group, or are looking for supplemental sources of creative critique outside your usual circles, here are some places you can get feedback on fiction without leaving the comfort of your house.
It’s New Year Resolution time again—when we all look back over our past year, what we accomplished, what we didn’t, and what we want to do better our next time around the sun. From talking to the writers in my circle, it seems like establishing a more consistent, regular writing routine is a popular resolution this year.
This is one area where I have some first-hand expertise to share. I’ve always been pretty good at establishing and maintaining routines when I put my mind to it, but I fell out of my daily writing routine a few years ago when both work and life in general got hectic. One of my goals for 2024 was getting back into a regular writing habit, and I’m pleased with the new routine I’ve developed over the past year.
Part of what has helped me to do that is finding the right tools to keep me accountable and give me a bit of extra motivation on the days I’m not quite feeling it. So I figured I’d share some of the tools I either use currently or have used successfully in the past to keep myself writing regularly.
There's a long and strong tradition of writing poems and stories based on works of visual arts. Such a strong tradition there's a whole genre devoted to it, ekphrastic writing, which is a term that can mean either a vivid, dramatic description of a work of art or a piece inspired by a work of visual art, depending on the context and who you're talking to.
I've experimented with ekphrasis in the past and find it to be a fun exercise. I also find that music can be an excellent source of creative inspiration, either as a direct prompt for story ideas or as a way to set the right atmosphere for a setting or home in on the personality of a character. Then there are other forms of art that have a very direct and obvious way of potentially inspiring stories. Things like drama and movies, for instance, which can be directly adapted into a story or poem, or can serve as the jumping-off point to extend the story beyond what's shown in the original. Many songs fit into this category too, I think, especially ones with lyrics that already tell a story or introduce characters, and visual art that depicts an action-in-progress can function in the same way. I'll group these things together as “narrative art” because they have some kind of built-in plot progression.
What I wanted to focus on in this post are a few prompts for getting story ideas from non-narrative works of art—things like instrumental music, music with abstract lyrics, or visual works like statues, abstracts, still lifes, and landscapes. Here are some ways I've gotten ideas from other works of art that I thought might be helpful for other writers, too.
Writing flash fiction in any genre is hard for me. I love a well-built world, a complex plot, a big cast of characters—all things that are tricky to fit into any short story length, much less in 1,000 words or less.
This is also what I’ve come to love about writing flash fiction, though. It’s a valuable exercise in focus and economy of language. Any flash story is condensed in some way, but that’s especially true for fantasy, sci-fi, or historical—any genre where you need to establish a world the reader doesn’t know yet. It takes a deft hand to immerse someone in a new reality, introduce them to a character they care about, and give them an actual plot to follow, without letting the story sprawl beyond a flash piece’s limited real estate.
