Just Write, The Newsletter

(Edition 6)

This project is a personal challenge to write regularly. These newsletters will wrap up the writing ‘week’ that was. It is a gentle encouragement to me to celebrate the words I have wrestled into shape since I last wrote one of these round-ups.

Hopefully, it will be an encouragement to you as we all slip into another week of writing. That’s the plan. I’ll share my writing whilst gratuitously fishing for compliments, and there will be writing prompts to fire up your imagination. Quotes too, I love a quote.

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Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash

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I thought I might write about a whole variety of things when I started this publication back on 1 May. As it turns out, it is fiction that has bubbled to the surface. Perhaps, subconsciously, I am alert to the 76,000-word manuscript hiding in the box I call my ‘office’. I suspect this ‘public practicing, learning a craft in the open’ is geared toward preparing myself to do something with the draft.

I should dig it out and try to read it objectively. Is there anything in it? Is there a story fighting to get out of the starting blocks? Who are the characters … do I feel anything for them … do any of them deserve a leading role, an emergence from the shadows I have written them into? Have I backed the right horse? Who should the story be written around, and whose eyes should it be seen through?

In the meantime, I just write, right?

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"Writing is its own reward"

(Henry Miller)

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Since I Last Wrote to You

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Let’s start with the elephant in the room.

When is a novel not a novel?

When it is sitting in a box, 161 pages of Times New Roman 12 pt, doing nothing very much at all other than nagging (silently, in a particularly malevolent way) that it has been 3 7 25 37 weeks since it was last worked on.

Maybe I should write about how that makes me feel …

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While the dystopian story thinks it is the only show in town, other writing is available (just don’t tell the manuscript - let’s just keep this between ourselves).

Other writing, you say, Mr Fables?

Loads of it … mostly short and sharp 100-worders.

Fair point. But why 100 words?

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One hundred-word stories are everywhere. They would be centurions were we writing in Ancient Rome. Centenarians, if we were a little older. If they went down in the annals, they would be centuries. The genre has legs, no doubt about that, centipedes if you will. We should celebrate with a centennial. I have told myself a hundred times to move on to another form of writing but I feel I must deliver five score more. It would be a cardinal sin to cease now. In a century or so history would judge us ill. One hundred words it is then.

Mr Fables - Words About Words

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100 Not Out

Here is a handful of 100-worders wrapped up in a single post:

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Oh, and here’s one that didn’t make the list but it’s still pretty good:

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Artful Fiction

There’s some great writing about art on Substack. Just check out

Art Every Day

or

Beyond Bloomsbury

as fine examples. And there are words about artists and their processes as

Jillian Hess

peeks into their notebooks for us.

It got me thinking about the stories happening ‘just beyond’ the scenes captured in famous artworks, the ‘noises off’. Who are the characters in the scene, who is just out of sight, what happened a few moments before?

There is so much room for idle (fictional) speculation.

I began with ‘Nighthawks’ by Edward Hopper and started making stories up.

Maybe I should gather them together. Maybe I just did.

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"Writing is the painting of the voice"

Voltaire

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This week’s writing prompts are:

• A case of mistaken identity

• As soon as we turned out the light, the scratching started

• She didn’t want to take the credit but there’s no way she deserves it

Where will you find your inspiration this week?

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