Goooooooal!
I have friends doing NaNoWriMo. I love my friends. I do not love NaNo. And not just because, as an editor, I end up seeing tooo many sloppy projects (honestly, save your editor time and you money and check out last year’s Scarlet Quill series on editing before you dump that NaNovel on anyone). No, it’s because those large goals seem genuinely insurmountable to me. Whether it’s “write 50K words in a month” (I’ve done that in a week) or “write 1700 words every day for a month” (I’ve done more than that a day for 6 months solid, I just stumbled over the writing logs that prove it) I just can’t wrap my head around it. And yet, as noted, it happens to me when I’m not looking. Mostly because I have an insatiable need to know what happens next, even when I’m the one writing it. What about you? Are you a goal setter? Do you chip away at your writing? Or are you the goal equivalent of a pantser, writing as much as you can whenever the magic brain monkeys are willing to sit down at their typewriters, but helpless in between productivity bouts? Make me feel better about myself on Discord!
~Rowan
This Week’s Writing Prompt is:
This week, your job, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story, essay, or poem incorporating the following prompt:
Trope: Grandma’s Recipe
We’re taking a cue from this year’s Scarlet Quill Society and getting some practice incorporating – or subverting – popular tropes. This week, we’ve got a nod to the US feast of gluttony and genocide [I take full responsibility for this phrasing but I said what I said. /rbg] with an old trope for an old recipe. Rowan’s family may have completely overhauled their gathering and their recipes in the past three years but you don’t have to. Whether fiction or non, traditional recipes are also fodder for your writing. If you need more information on the prompt, click the link and check out the description. What will your take be on this trope?
Play with the prompt, and when you’ve got your story down, share your response in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook and Discord, by linking your blog post, Google Doc, or other file. Bonus points if you do it on WIP Wednesday! Stuck? Check out last year’s — no, year before last! — series on responding to prompts. While you’re at it, make sure to check out your fellow YeahWriters’ responses, and don’t forget to leave them some love in the comments!
Looking for our weekly grids? After nearly ten years, they’ve been retired. Read more about the latest changes to YeahWrite in the #500 Weekly Writing Challenge Kickoff Post.
The Schedule
We will release a new prompt on our blog every Friday at 12pm Eastern. Then it’s up to you! Write your response to the prompt on your own blog or website and share the link in the Coffeehouse, located both on Facebook or Discord. If you prefer to keep your work under wraps (and away from the eyes of potential publishers), you can still ask for beta readers in the Coffeehouse and share your work privately! Every Monday, we’ll check in to see how you’re doing and what your writing goals are for the week. Wednesdays are “Work-in-Progress Wednesdays.” Share a few sentences or even a paragraph or two in the Coffeehouse (no more than 250 words, please). Even if you’re not done writing, this could be the boost you need to stay motivated. Did you publish a book? Do you have a story in a magazine? The First Friday of every month is for self-promotion, where you can share commercial links to your work for purchase. (You can always share the news that you’ve been accepted for publication, though!) And of course, the entire community is here 24-7 to share your victories and setbacks, challenges and accomplishments. So come on in, pull up a chair, and say hello. We’re all writers here.
Upcoming and Ongoing
Sign up for our email blast so you don’t miss out on any upcoming classes, workshops, or competitions.
Scarlet Quill Society (Free Workshop w/ Optional Paid Benefits)
Welcome to the secret back room where the Scarlet Quill Society meets. In this year-long workshop, we’ll be focusing on tropes! Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t avoid ’em. For the purpose of this year’s workshop, we’re defining a trope as a building block of storytelling. It’s a device or pattern of events that is used to solve plot or character problems or communicate meaning efficiently and effectively.
Check out November’s post, where we jump from tropes to metatropes with the Death of the Author. It’s one way to engage with media when the creator has done their best to Ruin Your Childhood, but is it the best or only way? Find out in our post, and then come see what our experts have to say for the low low price of $5 (or free with your YW membership). This month’s live discussion is TBA, but we’ll keep you updated!
Did you miss October’s post? Hop on over to YouTube to watch the recording and check out what our experts had to say (about monsterfucking) on a pay-what-you-can basis! If you have a good time, leave a tip and we’ll love you forever.
Scarlet Quill Society workshop posts are always free. In addition, we are offering a couple add-ons that we think you’ll find exciting and worth a few bucks a month: face-to-face (okay, virtual) monthly gatherings to delve into the topics and answer your questions, and an editorial backroom on Discord! And for a bonus, if you’re a paid SQS member and you can’t make it to a meeting, you can still send us questions beforehand and we’ll make sure to cover them.
Sign up for a membership today to join the Scarlet Quill Society and automatically receive the Zoom link and password for every meeting. One-off monthly meeting tickets can also be purchased on Kofi. At YeahWrite we believe information wants to be shared. If you can’t afford to join us for society meetings, we post the recording about a week later, and you’re welcome to leave the tip you can afford (even if that’s just a nice thank you comment). Check out our YouTube channel for more.
2023 Anthology? WATCH THIS SPACE!
Spontaneous Writing Challenges
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
