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.

I love playing with cryptids, fae folk, and other creatures from myths and folklore in my fiction. For one thing, it’s just a ton of fun to research and write about these otherworldly beings or unconfirmed beasties. They’re also versatile in terms of what they can add to a story, as useful as a source of tension, terror, or danger as they are for whimsy and humor.

I recently went to the Albatwitch Day festival in Columbia, PA for the first time, which gave me a whole slew of new ideas for cryptid-adjacent stories (and at a very good time, too, considering I’m about to delve into writing a cryptid-heavy novel that’s been bouncing around my head for the past few months). 

In that spirit—and since we’re now officially in Spooky Season—I thought some cryptid-themed writing prompts might be a fun source of inspiration.

The question of whether an MFA is worth it pops up on my various social feeds and other online outlets now and then. I’m not going to aspire to answer that question for everyone in this blog post, because I feel like that’s one of those things that doesn’t have a straight “yes or no” answer.

For me personally, earning my MFA was the first step that led me to the career and life I have today. I loved my time at Chatham, which was my first time being part of a community of writers since I studied music in undergrad. Without the degree, I don’t know that I would have had the confidence to go for a career as a writer, so while you definitely don’t need an advanced degree to make a living with words, for me it was the key that unlocked that path.

I’m currently reading Muraski Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji—or the first volume of it, at least, which I think is probably where I’ll stop for the time being, considering the burgeoning height of my TBR stack.

For those unfamiliar with it, The Tale of Genji is often cited as the world’s first novel, written in the 11th century by a Japanese noblewoman. Its main value for modern historians is its depiction of court life during the Heian period of Japan, as the events in the book are thought to have been based very closely on Murasaki’s real-life experiences as a lady-in-waiting.

While it’s called the first novel, The Tale of Genji doesn’t completely hold to what modern readers would expect from the form. It does have characters who recur throughout, and the primary protagonist (Hikaru Genji, son of Emperor Kiritsubo) does age, grow, and change over the course of the plot. I’m using the term “plot” loosely here, though, because the book doesn’t have the tight cause-and-effect type of forward momentum we expect from novels today. Instead, it has more the feel of an episodic TV show—there are threads that run across multiple chapters, but the arc is more a series of humps than an overarching narrative. Other essential features of storytelling today are used, but in a way that modern novelists (and readers) would look askance at, like its cast of roughly 400 characters. Comparing it to modern novels is an intriguing study in how the form has developed over the centuries.

Like I imagine is the case for many people right now, the Olympics has become my default “on in the background” content since it started. Not because I’m particularly passionate about any of the sports involved—more the opposite, in fact. There’s something very intriguing and entertaining about watching sports I normally don’t think about, or seeing things I’m only familiar with from family picnics being played at an exceptionally high level.

Something else the Olympics makes very clear: sports are omnipresent in just about every culture of the world. This has likely been true for thousands of years. From the original Olympics held in ancient Greece to the ball game of the Aztec and Maya, just about every culture we know about had some kind of sport.

Despite this, I think it’s safe to say that sports are among the most neglected aspects of society in creative writing. You can definitely find examples of sports in fiction and poetry, but not nearly to the same degree as other cultural touchstones like food, music, religion, or fashion.

I have a habit of writing a lot of eating and cooking scenes into my stories. This wasn’t something I realized on my own—my writing group pointed it out, and after that I started to see just how often I use food in my fiction.

There are a few different reasons for this, I think. One is that I came of age reading fantasy series like Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, and Redwall, all of which feature frequent, detailed descriptions of meals. There’s also the fact that I spent most of my twenties working in food service and in the spirit of “write what you know”, I end up writing a lot of characters who prepare food for a living.

But, most of all, I think food can be a very useful device for fiction writers in both literary and genre camps. One of the presenters at the In Your Write Mind conference last weekend was Tim Waggoner, who gave a talk on writing with an immersive point of view. One point he made was that the strongest senses—sight and hearing—aren’t the most effective for immersing a reader because they’re powerful enough people can use them from a distance, or even through a screen. To activate our weaker senses—scent, taste, and touch—we need to be right in that environment, and this makes the reader feel right there too when you call on these senses.

I just wrapped up my first experience at the In Your Write Mind conference hosted by Seton Hill University’s popular fiction program—quite literally, in fact; I’m on the train back to Pittsburgh as I write this.

You might think, given how many writing conferences and such I go to in a typical year, that the experience would be predictable by this point, but the truth is that past experience has just taught me not to assume anything. Conferences and conventions vary wildly in just about every respect. I’ve been to some that last a single day and others that last 4-5, conventions with 10,000+ attendees and others with less than a hundred. Most have book fairs or exhibit halls, but not all; some are mostly panels, some mostly workshops, some mostly readings, some a mix of all three—and the value I’ve gotten from going to those activities has been just as wide-ranging.

TV, like the internet, is simultaneously among the best and the worst things for a writer. It can absolutely be a distraction that can prevent you from writing if you allow it to be. But it’s also a potentially valuable source of inspiration and ideas, and one that I think gets overlooked because it’s viewed as an unproductive time sink.

What’s great about TV for a writer is that everything on-screen is edited and packaged for maximum viewer retention. It’s a case study in creating emotional hooks, setting up cliffhangers, establishing tension and intrigue, and building characters through dialogue and actions—all things that are very useful for both prose writers and poets. 

You can also get more direct story inspiration from watching TV, and not always in the ways you might expect. Here are three prompts that can encourage you to see TV in a more creative way: