Neil Gaiman: You Have to Write When You’re Not “Inspired”

If you only write when you are inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet but you will never be a novelist.

Neil Gaiman

Making the Ordinary to be Extraordinary

In this installment of Creation Stories, Ricky Gervais shares a doozy about an early, indelible writing lesson, telling a story about how he learned to write.

[Source: Fast Create]

Submitting and Writing Contests

Here are some recent places I came across to submit to:

• Bare Fiction Magazine
  We do not charge a reading fee for submissions to the magazine.
  We read work in the English language all year round, therefore we aim to respond quickly (usually within 28 days). Though we do accept simultaneous submissions, please do keep in mind this time frame when submitting and ensure that you contact us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere. 
• Narrative Magazine
  WE WELCOME SUBMISSIONS of previously unpublished manuscripts of all lengths, ranging from short short stories to complete book-length works for serialization. Narrative regularly publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including stories, novels, novel excerpts, novellas, personal essays, humor, sketches, memoirs, literary biographies, commentary, reportage, interviews, and features of interest to readers who take pleasure in storytelling and imaginative prose. We look for quality and originality of language and content. 

A great piece of advice I heard is why not look at submitting to a literary magazine as a kind of contest and submit there. It is full of competition and the reward is great if you succeed at getting published.

Beware

For submitting to contests there is a bit of warning, that some contests (especially ones with an admission fee) are just looking to make money and not help writers at all. Read these warnings.

Locate Your Obsessions

I always tell students, when I teach writing, to locate their obsessions, and look to them when they’re searching for the story they should be telling. When a writer attaches her work to the engine of what she cares about most passionately (even irrationally, perhaps) the work will be infused with a similar passion, I believe. And come into being most organically.

Joyce Maynard

Testing Morning Pages

I recently came across the tool called Morning Pages. I have been struggling with getting myself to write, and to tap into a deeper, creative potential.

8 Terrific Writer Forums

I like connecting with other like-minded writers to hear their experiences and get feedback on my work. Making the time to get to a writing group on a regular basis is hard to schedule, but tapping into online writing forums is a great alternative. Here are 8 terrific writer forums that I have compiled, and visit.

Free Write: Rowboat

I call this a faux mafia story. I saw a writing challenge recently to  make a script that's festival sized (5 to 12 pages), where the main prop accessible is this neat rowboat. So I started tossing around ideas for a story in a rowboat, and the image came into my mind of that scene at the end of Godfather II, where Freddy is taken out on the lake with the hitman to get his punishment. As I played around with that scene, I thought 'What if that scene played off differently?'