Psst–hey, you

Yes, you—yeah write writer. I’ve seen you posting those 42 words over on the microstory grid for the last couple of months. Come on over here.

Here’s your chance to kick off the week with a new challenge: creative nonfiction or, as we like to call it, personal essays and mostly true stories. Like yoga or any fitness routine, changing up your writing practice is critical for building literary strength. But you have to give it more than one try and you may need to spend some time reflecting on editing choices for that first draft. So write an essay for this week’s (newly unmoderated!) grid, take at least an hour to edit your draft, post it to this week’s challenge before Wednesday, 10 PM (EST), and do it again next week. And the week after. You’ll find a supportive audience of fellow yeah writers. All the guidelines and resources are below, including Rowan’s brilliant nonfiction know-how.

Thanks for joining us. Dive in—the water is warm.

Nonfiction know-how:

writing emotion without crutches

Writing about the most difficult – and exhilarating – times can be cathartic. Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in the emotion of it all and we “tell, don’t show” or rely on crutches to convey our feelings. It’s those times when we don’t do that when our work stands out. This month, Rowan offers up some advice on avoiding those crutches and really showing the reader how you feel. Fictioneers, there’s some good stuff in here for you, too, so don’t miss this one!

Want more info?

Is this your first time here? Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook. If you’ve never taken the time to read them, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines. The rules are a little different for each of our challenges and we’d hate to have to send back great writing on a technicality.

Did you happen to end up here because you suddenly saw yeah write in your stats? Sometimes members of our community spot excellent writing and they send those posts on over to us. We hope you don’t mind. Take a look around and get to know our community. We’re sure you’ll be happy here.

Have questions you can’t find the answer to by poking around the site? Email us or find us on Facebook and Twitter and we’ll happily help you out.

How to submit and fully participate in the nonfiction challenge

Basic yeah write guidelines: 1000 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; nonfiction personal essay, creative opinion piece or mostly true story based on actual events.

How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:

1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the challenge grid badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry.
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid.
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message.
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge.
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.

Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.

Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…