I usually mostly enjoy being a freelancer—more than I've enjoyed any past jobs, if nothing else. Even so, there are those days that it just feels like a personal affront that it's 2025 and we still have to work for a living. No matter what you do for money, there are times that it's just a grind.

And I get why a lot of writers neglect work in their stories. If you're the kind of person who writes (or reads) as an escape, then your job is probably one of the primary things you want to escape from. It already sucks up 40+ of your hours every week. Does it really need to take up real estate in your creative writing, too?

When I was first preparing my short story collection to send to publishers, I was self-conscious that I’d broken a writerly rule: 3 of the 12 stories start with the viewpoint character waking up. And even worse, some would say: two of those include the dream the character was having right before they did. I wasted a good amount of time trying to “fix” those stories to avoid this, but quickly realized those adjustments hurt the stories rather than helping them. That rule is still a decent one to follow, but in these stories, the moment of waking really was the right place to jump in.

Granted, that collection still hasn't been picked up by a publisher, so maybe that is a bigger problem than I want to think. But all 3 stories that start with wake-ups have been published, so some editor at least thinks they passed muster. And I'm far from the only writer who includes dreams and sleeping in my work. The collection I'm currently reading has dream right on the tin (Adam Dove's Everyone! In the Dream! is You!) and makes use of dreams at multiple points. You can even find examples in the canon—maybe most famously Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, which opens on Gregor Samsa waking as a beetle.

More so this reading period than in the past, I’ve been seeing more submissions in the After Happy Hour slush pile that make use of alternate approaches to formatting dialogue. This tracks with what I’ve read in other literary journals in recent months. It seems like ditching the quotation marks is on-trend right now—and there’s nothing wrong with doing that, in a general sense, but I’m not sure everyone who’s making this shift is doing so with a reason. I like it when it works, but a lot of the stories I’ve read, it feels like more of a distraction.

When a reader sees quotation marks they know exactly what this means, even if the writer hasn’t attached a dialogue tag to it: someone is speaking aloud. It’s an easy shorthand. Readers don’t have that same implicit understanding of other formatting approaches. You can teach the reader the conventions of your story quickly, but it’s still going to stand out for them as different from the norm. This means it takes a bit more mental effort to read the story—and, even if just at a subconscious level, the reader wants to feel like there’s a payoff for that extra effort, and a clear reason why the author made that formatting choice.

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.

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.

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.

I've had a soft spot for stories told as found documents since I first watched the Blair Witch Project in high school. And, yes, while there are legitimate criticisms of movies made in that kind of shaky-hand, “no this is real, though” style, I do appreciate the extra level of immersion it brings. It's a full commitment to the lie. Typical movies say, “Here, watch this idea I came up with and let's pretend together that it's something that happened.” But when it's found footage, the person behind the camera is saying: “This really happened.” And no, they don't really believe that—but there's more of a sense that they want the reader to believe it, more of an invitation to inhabit the story's world.

The same applies when the story is told in book form. High school was also around when I first read other people's published journals, Anne Frank's first for class then Sylvia Plath's on my own. Real-life journals are even more intimate than a memoir or autobiography. The author isn't curating their life to present it to the audience. They're showing their inner thoughts, day-to-day, exposing their full, theoretically uncensored selves on the page.

November is upon us, and with it the annual return of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as the cool kids call it). For those unfamiliar, the idea behind NaNoWriMo is to produce an entire novel draft in a month, which is typically defined as writing 50,000 words. I’ve dabbled with taking part in these challenges in the past, but admittedly not for many years—and, the few times I did attempt the challenge, I gave up well before reaching that 50K word count aim.

I’m a very achievement-oriented human overall, so it bothers me more than it probably should when I fail to meet a goal—even an arbitrary goal that I set for myself and no one else cares if I hit or not. This is, honestly, part of why I don’t try to do the NaNoWriMo thing most years. My usual approach to long projects isn’t to just vomit all the words out at once in a torrent. I’m typically more inclined to write a few chapters at a time, bouncing back and forth between generating new words, editing earlier chapters, and stepping back even further to fill in details of the world or characters.

This year, though, I happened to have a novel idea that’s been sitting in my head waiting for me to have time to write it. I’ve already built a lot of the world, created several of my characters, and have a rough idea of where I want the plot to go. Because of this, it felt like the perfect opportunity to give this whole NaNoWriMo thing another shot. But this has also gotten me thinking about creative goals in general, and just what makes a goal valuable.