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, 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.

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.