It Takes a Village to Write a Book
I’ve been joining things over the last week. Writing groups, blogging challenges, regular meetings with writer friends. If you sat still with a cup of coffee, I’d very likely join you too. It began as an attempt to revive my sagging enthusiasm for writing my novel, and to rebuild my writing community.
I used to have two groups I regularly shared my WIP with. One was an internet group consisting of three women writers; one in Argentina, one in Chile, and me in Texas (at the time). I’ve never met the other two in real space, but we Skyped every few weeks for several hours. We know the ins and outs of each other’s lives, as well as each other’s writing.
The other group met in a real physical space, and was a diverse group of writers with wildly different interests, genres and styles. Both groups required the writers to share work unguardedly and honestly, and be open to feedback and critiques. I learnt as much from reading their work, as I did from them reading mine. The writers in both groups helped shape so much of my writing.
Since I moved back to Australia, it hasn’t been practical to meet with those groups. Obviously, I couldn’t turn up to the weekly in-person meetings of my local writers’ group, and even the online writers’ group meetings were complicated by horrendous differences in time zones.
I’ve missed the generous sharing of work and ideas that happened in those collegiate settings, and the sense of community. I’ve missed the many voices that shaped my WIP.
April ‘Poetry’ Slam: Microprose
Charles Dickens was paid by the word, and it shows. I mean, if you’ve ever read Oliver Twist, we bet you found yourself wondering if all those words were really necessary to move the story forward. It’s a question we should all face every day while editing our own work, to be honest: why all these words? How can we tell our story without forcing the reader to slog through a whole bunch of extra text and without losing the essence or the voice? This month, instead of looking for ways to flesh out your writing, we’ll be talking about ways to trim it down – just in time for the first grid of our monthly microprose challenge! Learn more from Christine here.
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 it down to other territories.
Lisa reminded us what instant attraction feels like in her post, A Crush. This week’s Prompt Up is: “Stand there at the sink eating maraschino cherries.”
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the fiction|poetry 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; and
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…
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Asha keeps moving from one side of the world to the other. Her most recent move has taken her back to Perth, Western Australia where she grew up. She lives near the beach but hates sand between her toes. It’s a real conundrum. Asha began blogging at YeahWrite in October 2014 with this post, and YeahWrite was lucky to pull her on board as a Contributing Editor in December 2016. She is currently working on a novelette that grew from a series of flash fiction pieces. Asha is published in a variety of places including Modern Loss, PANK, Dead Housekeeping, and SheKnows. You can find her inconsistent blogging at Parenting In The Wilderness, or at her fiction blog, FlAsha Tales.
