The Weekend Writing Showcase is open!
TGIF, YeahWriters! Let’s make this place your home for all the stories that didn’t make it to the YeahWrite competitive grids this week. As a refresher, here’s what we had going on!
Technique Toolbox: Design
Layout and design are a huge part of getting and maintaining readership. If you’ve got an agent and a publishing house, they’ll take care of that for you. For the rest of us, clicking out our thoughts into a computer day by day, let’s sort out what to look for and avoid in our writing. For this month’s Technique Toolbox we’ll be talking about design and layout, and how your visual choices affect whether people can and will read your work. Rowan has some ideas for you right here.
Fiction|Poetry Prompt Up:
The first prompt is: include a character whose occupation is veterinarian.
The second prompt, from YeahWrite #353 fiction|poetry winner Asha, is: your story must contain the following sentence: “The child began to hum.”
Poets: post poems that include a veterinarian, the prompt sentence above, or post an erasure poem.
February Poetry Slam: Kyrielle
What do you say we give the traditional sonnets a break this year, and try something else for February? As a nod to the sonnet, we’ll look at a form that has rhyme and scansion, but with a twist: this poem has a refrain, too. So with no further ado, Rowan presents February’s poetry slam form: the kyrielle.
January Microprose:
This is your last chance to take advantage of our January microprose prompt! This month, we asked you for a brand new story in a very old genre: a fable in exactly 51 words. A fable is a short story that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as the main characters (with human traits, but not human), and that leads to a particular moral or object lesson, such as”a friend in need is a friend indeed,” “the early bird catches the worm,” etc. Many of us are familiar with the fables of Aesop, but the form exists in many different cultures, both ancient and modern. See, for example, the Japanese folktale The Two Frogs, numerous Australian Aboriginal stories, or the Indian Tales of Panchatantra. Franz Kafka’s A Little Fable is more modern example, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm could be considered a fable in novel form.
For the purposes of the microprose challenge, your fable:
- Must feature anthropomorphized animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as the main characters.
- Must illustrate a particular moral.
- Must be completed in exactly 51 words, excluding the moral, which should be no longer than one sentence and may be added on (optionally) at the end with no word count penalty.
You know the drill, YeahWriters. Bring us your best writing this weekend!
You got rules, right?
What?! It’s the weekend. There are no rules during the weekend. You can share a post that’s as many words as you like, a piece of fiction, a poem of your choosing, or a persuasive essay. Whatever you want, you can share. Well, except commercial or sponsored posts. That’s the one rule that never changes.
While you’re hanging out with us, please remember to visit other posts on the grid, comment, and take part in the community here! That’s what makes YeahWrite the place to be.
How to submit and fully participate in the Weekend Writing Showcase:
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: no word limit; no date restriction; no commercial/advertising posts (product reviews, sponsored posts, etc.); three post maximum per writer.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the Weekend Showcase 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 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; and
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.
Have fun!
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
Arden joined YeahWrite in early 2014 to operate as its Social Media Manager. She also heads up YeahWrite’s Who’s on Fourth feature, as well as the Weekend Writing Showcase. Working day-to-day as a paralegal, she spends most of her free time writing short stories and the occasional nonfiction essay at her website. She is currently working on the first novel of her Hybrid trilogy as well as a fantasy anthology with three other writers.
