Unfinished business
There’s nothing that bugs me more than an unfinished project.
Unfinished pieces tend to loom over me like that guy at the party whose name I can’t remember, the one who stands too close to ignore, but just outside the circle of conversation. It’s downright uncomfortable. Right now, I’ve got an essay that needs a total overhaul, two stanzas of a sestina, 5/9 of a nonet, more than half of a ghazal, four lines (and a great refrain) of a rondeau, bits and pieces of an echo poem, and at least two incomplete tritinas. Not to mention the novel that I’m trying to edit. (I’m about a quarter of the way through the second draft.)
But what if I look at these projects in a different way? Instead of ending the year with a ton of unfinished business, maybe I’m starting the new year with a handful of beginnings. Maybe I just need to turn around and reintroduce myself to the stories I’ve started.
So go ahead, finish that story or poem you put aside months ago. Just remember to read the submission guidelines before you press post or hit send, especially if you are new around here. Have a favorite yeah writer or two? Why not ask them to be your writing partner? Everyone needs another set of eyes to point out the typos, word repetitions, content errors, and ungainly phraseologies in our posts.
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prompt up!
Prompt up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float down it to other territories.
This week’s prompt up, taken from Nancy’s essay Meeting a Prophet On the D Train, is: “His shout makes everyone on the train tighten.”
more prompts for you
Write—not sing, we promise—a ballade or check out the master class all around you in this month’s nonfiction know-how.
yeah write #297 fiction|poetry writing challenge is open for submissions!
Basic yeah write guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
- 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
- Follow the InLinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
- Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
- Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
- 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.
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