Writing Prompt: The Button Factory

I joined an online writing group.
The organizer gave a few writing prompts.

I chose this one:

The button factory had gone utterly silent. All eyes were on the birthday cake and it's 50 candles. Slowly, hesitantly, George...

Writer's Knowledge Base

Elizabeth Craig and Mike Fleming have come up with The Writer's Knowledge Base (WKB).

This is a searchable collection of articles that are highly relevant to writers. The articles are diverse and cover such topics as the craft of writing, getting published, promotion, etc.

One of the problems of trying to find industry-related information on your own in a lack of searchable database. Unless you go to an individual agent or editor blog and search on each of their sites, you’re going to get very spotty results on a Google search.

The WKB carries out Google-like searches against Elizabeth's hand-picked articles on writing. Because of this, all of the results are on topic and much more likely to be relevant to exactly what you're looking for.

It is better than Google at finding writing resources, since it presents you with random articles from the thousands of links in the repository, allowing you to find interesting articles "by accident."

You can find The Writer's Knowledge Base (WKB) at  http://hiveword.com/wkb.

8 Tips For Creating Great Stories

Recently Fast Create profiled the new book by Jeff VanderMeer  Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. The book is billed as an all-new definitive guide to writing imaginative fiction and takes a completely novel approach, fully exploiting the visual nature of fantasy through original drawings, maps, renderings, and exercises to create a spectacularly beautiful and inspiring object.

Fast Create highlighted 8 tips from top storytellers like George R.R. Martin, Junot Diaz, Lev Grossman, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Catherynne M. Valente, and Karen Joy Fowler, to name a few.

1. Tell, Don't Show
2. Name Wisely
3. Build A Better Backstory
4. Take Your Lumps
5. Let It Bloom
6. Finish The Thing
7. Deform The Familiar
8. Talk To Strangers

The article 8 Tips For Creating Great Stories From George R.R. Martin, Junot Diaz, And Other Top Storytellers can be found on Fast Create.

Alice Munro - Nobel Laureate of Short Stories

I stayed at home until noon. I was supposed to be doing housework, and I would also do my writing then. Later on, when I wasn’t working everyday in the store, I would write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably till about two-thirty, and then I would have a quick cup of coffee and start doing the housework, trying to get it all done before late afternoon.

Interview with Alice Munro, Paris Review

Today it was announced that Alice Munro, the renowned short-story writer, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Alice Munro has published many short stories.

Here are a number of her short stories available for reading online

• The Bear Came Over the Mountain
• Amundsen
• Gravel
• Face
• Deep Holes
• Free Radicals
• Dimension
• Wenlock Edge
• A View from Castle Rock

A good guide to navigating the volume of prose produced by Munro was published in The Millions.

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.