One of my biggest literary pet peeves is the mindset that genre and literary fiction are completely separate entities. What bugs me about this division most is that there's an implied hierarchy, where literary fiction is a higher form of art and all genre fiction is inherently worse—which simply isn't true. There are tons of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mystery stories that pay the same attention to craft and language as the works in the literary canon. On the other side, I'd also say that I've read my fair share of poorly written realistic stories.
The reality is that writing quality and plot-driven narratives are not mutually exclusive, and how literary something is has nothing to do with whether the story it tells is realistic or not. I think part of the problem here is that “literary” has become a kind of catch-all term, often used to refer to any realistic fiction that doesn't fit neatly into another category. A story isn't automatically literary just because it's a realistic story with low action, any more than a story is automatically not literary just because it has supernatural elements.
One of the great things about working remotely is that, when the weather is nice, I can spend my workday outside instead of cooped up in my office. My usual routine is to start on my back patio then venture in the afternoons to a coffee shop or park—or at least, that was the pattern the last couple of years, when Pittsburgh was spoiled by fairly dry summers. This year, it's been a rare day that's gone by without any kind of rain, and I've found my plans interrupted by the weather on an obnoxiously frequent basis.
Which got me thinking: If I'm annoyed by the unpredictability of weather, that's something I could use to annoy my characters, too. The weather is one of those pervasive background elements that I think I too often neglect in my stories, which is to my detriment because it can be a very useful tool. It can be a plot driver, a tone builder, or a way to show the passage of time and ground the reader in both the where and the when of a story. So I wrote myself a couple of weather-based prompt exercises to start me thinking about better ways to use it, and I figured I might as well share them in case they're helpful for other folks, too. (If you want to check out past writing prompt posts, you can see the full list of them here).
I can tell that a writing conference was worth the attendance when I leave feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the new info stuffed into my brain. Which was how I felt leaving the most recent In Your Write Mind workshop last weekend, enough so I needed a bit of time to let my mind settle before going back over my notes to pick out the gems.
This is probably going to be a slightly more random-feeling blog post than my usual because the topics covered at IYWM were pretty varied, and the notes I took on them were filtered through the lens of “shit I find neat and/or useful”. But I also figured I probably wouldn't be the only one to find said shit neat and/or useful, and putting them together into a blog post seemed like a useful way to trick myself into actually going through my notes before they just got shoved into a folder and forgotten about—so here we are. Read on for some random but hopefully beneficial advice. I also did a similar post for last year’s conference if you’re looking for more random writerly advice.
Lately I've been reading Liza Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki, which is a bit of an outlier read for me. I don't often read historical fiction (though there are exceptions), and usually I like a bit more action in my plots—and I'll admit, there have been parts reading this book that I've itched for something to, you know, happen. But I find the content and context fascinating enough that it's kept me reading, albeit a bit slowly.
One of the reasons I picked up The Tale of Murasaki was to get some context for The Tale of Genji, which I made an aborted attempt to read a few months back. A bit of a mental shift is always necessary when reading something from so long ago, but I found Genji particularly opaque because much of the plot hinges on the rhythms and expectations of Japanese imperial court, a world foreign to me in just about every respect.
And I'm happy to report that The Tale of Murasaki makes an excellent bridge in that regard, bringing just enough of a western, modern sensibility to ground me in this world. In many respects, this kind of far-in-the-past setting requires the same attention to worldbuilding as a secondary world. Honestly, it's easier for me to picture how the world works in a future Earth setting like Star Trek than in 11th-century Japan, probably because a speculative future world is inevitably laced with the perspectives of the time it's written in. It can't fully spring from the substrate of the future because that culture doesn't yet exist, and we don't really know what will happen between now and the 24th century that will shape how people then think. With things that happened in the distant past, there is an established cultural context separate from our own, even if we no longer know or understand the full details of it.
I’m mostly a pantser when it comes to the writing process. Now and then I’ll know where a story’s going ahead of time, and may even do a bit of outlining for longer works, but my preferred approach is just to start writing and let the story tell me where it wants to go.
Because of this, my rough drafts don’t tend to be what I would call “finished stories.” They have a beginning, middle, and end (usually) but they still don’t have an effective arc, are riddled with inconsistencies, and have the kind of rambling pacing that feels like the author’s just making shit up as they go instead of intentionally moving from one scene to the next. Which makes sense, because that’s exactly what happened.
The editing process is when I wrangle these messy rough drafts into something other people can actually read and make sense of (and hopefully enjoy). I do have some help in this process because I have an incredible writing group. But even with a workshop group or beta reader, you can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for you. Most stories need to go through multiple editing rounds before they’re fully finished—more versions than you can realistically expect anyone else to read.
I took last week off from writing a blog because I was busy with stuff for both After Happy Hour and Scribble House—things like getting ready for the return of the Send It! group next week and wrapping up the Issue 27 reading period, but mostly finishing up a workshop I did yesterday through Chill Subs about common mistakes made by submitters. Doing that has made me think a bit more deeply than I usually do about why we reject work for After Happy Hour.
People have asked me this question before, of course, mostly during events like AWP or other conferences when I'm at the AHH table wearing my Managing Editor hat. I feel like they're usually a bit annoyed by my answer, because the truth is, the best way to get an acceptance from us is the same generic advice you get from every journal: Send us your best, read what we publish, follow our guidelines. And, yes, this is stuff every writer has heard before. But there's also a reason editors keep saying it over and over again: Almost everything that we reject at After Happy Hour, it's because the writer didn’t do one (or more) of those things.
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.