But if you are all caught up, then: this week you will be looking at all of the story bits and pieces you have collected during the previous weeks and flip-flapping them around until some combination makes sense.

First, print out or hand write all of your beginnings, middles, and ends. (If you’re going to print them out, I recommend putting more space around them than I did. These floppy strips were sort of hard to deal with.) You could write them on scrap paper or index cards. An advantage to writing them out is remembering what they even are.

Read everything over. You may find that beginnings that hummed with possibility when you first wrote them now seem flat. That’s fine. Note any that still seem sparkly or interesting. Some that seemed amazing to me when I first wrote them seemed ludicrously bad now. First draft problems!

Pull out the beginnings that are striking you—now, today—as interesting.

Look at your middles. Which ones seem like the logical middle for the beginning you’ve chosen? You might choose one or you might choose more than one. You could have a road trip where your main character becomes their true self. You could have unusual friends and a dreamscape (to use a few of my “middle” examples).

Since we came up with our endings based on stories that weren’t written, they probably won’t align perfectly with the beginning and middle you are looking at. One (or two) will be a close fit, though, as far as the feeling you want to have, or a direction you could see this story going in.

Or choose a beginning, a middle, and an end that have no business being together in a story, and then write a story with all of them. Why not?

Now: write a story! Just do it!

It might be bad. It might make no sense. It might be wondrous and magical. Maybe you’ll use three of your beginnings, two middles, and four endings. Mix them all up! Stories are everywhere, and this is just one way to find them.

The whole point of this project is not to write a great new story, but to open the door to inspiration and keep it open.

You might be uncomfortable while doing this.

You’re going to have to set any perfectionism aside.

You might find you are resistant to writing a story that will never get made into a book. It feels like it’s unproductive. You feel like, why bother? What’s the point?

You understand that not every story is a banger, but to set out to write a failure on purpose seems like a waste of time.

But remember that not everything has to be “productive.”

Isn’t it worthwhile to play with writing?

Keep your pen moving. Even though the story won’t be good, you’ll likely surprise yourself with a few sentences or plot turns.

This is not how books are normally made. If we’re lucky, we get a flash of inspiration and a story comes to us. But that only happens, in my experience, if I’m keeping the writing wheels turning on my own. Writing (any writing, even “unproductive” writing) keeps the wheels turning.

There was a feeling I had, writing my story, that it was like writing morning pages. I kept my pen moving, even when I wasn’t sure where the story was going, and found I was able to write through to the end. But, as I say that, I want to acknowledge that I know morning pages aren’t for everyone. The Artist’s Way isn’t for everyone. I know there is sometimes a discourse that you have to do it, that it will be life changing, and if you think it’s not working for you, you must not be doing it right, and if you want to change your life, really, then you’d really do it. That’s ridiculous. Of course it’s not for everyone. I like The Artist’s Way, I love morning pages (although I don’t do them every day!), but the whole fascinating thing about creative work is that we all come at it differently. The only constant is that in order to write a book, you have to write it (and no, using AI does not count as writing).

And so maybe the Story Blocks process opened doors to your inspiration, or maybe it didn’t work for you, and that’s FINE. You take that information and use it to know what does and doesn’t work for you.

I wrote a draft about a very grumpy main character who got lost and didn’t want to ask for help. It’s not great, but it’s not the worst (and I clearly needed more sleep the day I wrote it: this character was so grumpy). I don’t know that it will go anywhere, but it was fun to write.

The really magical thing that happened, though, was after. The day after I finished my Story Blocks draft, I got another inkling of an idea, and I wrote that down, and kept writing, keeping my pen moving. That second story was much better than the grumpy one I’d written the day before. The second story didn’t use any of the actual story blocks I’d assembled, but it definitely used the work I’d done as far as thinking about what I like in picture books. I don’t think I would have written the second, better, story, if I hadn’t written the first one.

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I’m currently reading/doing Julia Cameron’s book Write for Life, and there is a part where she is talking about the importance of being honest and vulnerable in our writing. “Writing from vulnerability, the writer finds strength. It is a paradox that in tenderness, we find power,” Cameron writes.

I know, as a chronic feelings-avoider, and also someone who writes funny picture books, I can get by without being too tender and vulnerable in my writing.

But what if I was?

That magical book I glimpse through the portal, the one that hits my heart like a tuning fork when I see it, it can only be written from a place of truth and tenderness. How could a book of the heart be anything else?

What if what I need, what we need, what the world needs right now is to be honest and tender in our writing, especially if we write for children?

And yes, it can be vulnerable and also be funny. I think it will, in fact, be even funnier, because it will be more true.

Maybe this story about a grumpy but lost character (which feels honest and true!) has potential after all.

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This is a quick note to let you know that the next round of Fail Better Club will be coming up in November (I’m still figuring out the date). If you are a new paying subscriber to Do the Work, you can learn more about Fail Better Club below, and in the meantime, look at your old dusty not-working manuscript and think about if you want to send it to me to read.

I procrastinated doing this week as much as I normally procrastinate figuring out the middle of a book, which is to say: A LOT.

Writing a beginning is when I feel like a writer, starting this book of wondrous potential.

Writing the end, I feel like I have accomplished something.

But the middle is often literally a mess. I hand write my drafts, and the middle parts are full of arrows and scribbles and crossed-out paragraphs. There are brackets that say things like “[part where Timmy goes to the witch here]” to avoid actually writing that part, so I can move on to the next part, the fun part (when Timmy is already friends with the witch and they are making cabbage pie).

Writing the middle, I always feel like Kevin McDonald in this Kids in the Hall sketch. Like, what even is this thing? (And, also, how is everyone else writing, and I can’t figure it out?)

You have the beginning and the end, sticking up like telephone poles, and the middle strung between them like the telephone wire. Once you get close, you see that the wire is made up of so many things.

The middle is the meat of the book sandwich.1 Without it, it’s an empty nothing. Which is a lot of pressure.

As you’re considering middles, look at the Whats (what is happening) and the Hows (how it’s written, i.e., the writing style).2 A middle might be a nice balance of an interesting What and some beautiful How, or it could just as much be mostly What (“there are things happening in this book!”) or mostly How (“wow, this is beautifully written!”).

This week is mostly about gathering Whats, with an eye toward Hows. I looked at books first to see what was happening in the middles, and next noticed if the What and the How were working together.

I’ll show you what I mean. A book I love is The Old Truck by Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey. In it, a pickup truck on a farm works hard, grows tired, gets older. Meanwhile, a young girl on the farm also gets older, takes over the farm, and works hard. The words are pleasingly spare, but there are lovely parallels between the words that describe the truck and the words that describe the girl. They both “work hard.” When the old truck grows “weary and tired” and takes a rest, we see that the girl is doing the same thing. They dream together. And there is a series of pages where the girl, now a grown woman, a “new farmer,” is working hard, not only at farming, but also at restoring the old truck.

So it is a story about a truck through the years, and of a human through the years, that also cleverly uses the same words and sentences to describe both of them.

I am then inspired, thinking about how to write a book about an object and a creature living parallel lives, and also about how to write a book where one set of words applies to two characters.

Your task for this week is this:

Get a stack of picture books, read them, and pull out all the ones you like. What are their “middles” about? You might find middles that are about:

• A journey

• A life

• A day

• A moment

• Wordplay

• First day of school

• That one thing that happened that changed everything

• New friends, new sibling, new pet3

• A misunderstanding

• A surprise

With this initial list, you are mentally absorbing all of the specifics, but only writing down the general type of middle. For instance, I read My Papi Has a Motorcycle, which is about a girl and her dad who go on a motorcycle trip through the city, which also ends up being a trip through family, history, and community. But for my list I chose a much more general topic for this book: road trip.

You may notice similarities. If you have a pile of twenty books, and seven of them are about bears, make a note of that. (“I like bears.”) Maybe you have pulled out a little pile of books that didn’t really do it for you, and all of those are about potty humor. (“I don’t like poop.”) Just like I realized that I had gathered a few first lines that echoed the title of the book, or many ending lines that began sentences with “And,” you will find patterns.

Last week we watched the movie Swiss Army Man, and that is making me think of stories that are uncategorizable. So maybe all of your books are easily categorized (“journey,” “a day in the life”), but maybe you find one that defies categorization. Before I watched Swiss Army Man, I hadn’t considered there might be a genre I would call Farting Corpse Saves Everything. There are more common genres woven in there—Man is Lost and Then Found, for instance, or New Friends. But the overarching story is so weird and wild that I didn’t know at all what was going to happen. So you might look for books that make you say, “What even IS this?” and then examine those.4

Here is my list of middles:

• Road Trip (My Papi Has a Motorcycle, Isabel Quintero, Zeke Peña, 2019)

• Character becoming their true self (Dooly and the Snortsnoot, Jack Kent, 1972; The Big Orange Splot, Daniel Pinkwater, 1977)

• Magical dream world (The White Marble, Charlotte Zolotow, Deborah Kogan Ray, 1963/1982; Everything You Need for a Treehouse, Carter Higgins, Emily Hughes, 2018)

• Quest (Who Needs Donuts, Mark Alan Stamaty, 1973)

• Surprising new friends (We Are Definitely Human, X. Fang, 2024)

• Main character is not seeing what all of us see (Good Night Owl, Greg Pizzoli, 2016)

• Sentient objects (The Bad Chair, Dasha Tolstikova, 2020)

• Growing/making something, which takes time (Worm Makes a Sandwich, Brianne Farley, 2025)

After you come up with a general line or two describing the middles, examine one or two of your favorites in depth. What exactly is happening? Why does it work? If you were to write a book that used that favorite book as a comp, what would you write?

The White Marble captures the dreamspace of childhood, where the world looks so different to you than it does to the grownups. It is also perfectly paced in a way that’s so incredible I’ve been trying to figure it out for decades. Nothing much happens, actually, in the book, but the experience of reading it pulls you inside the book in a way that I haven’t experienced before.

The What of this book is that a boy and his parents go to the park on a hot evening, and he runs into a classmate (more generally, it’s mostly a “moment in time” book). The How of this book is everything, though. It’s lyrical, beautiful, and dreamy.

Dooly and the Snortsnoot can be mapped more clearly, if you were to map it onto some sort of plot chart. There is a problem, it gets worse, even worse, and then worst of all, and then the main character saves the day by being himself. And that could, on the face of it, be a great story, or be a real dud. This is a great story, and it’s great because the language is funny, fun to read aloud, and smart, and because the illustrations are incredible (funny, fun to look at, and smart).

Unlike Weeks 1 and 2, you won’t be coming up with a brainstormed list of middles. Your job for this week is to figure out the middles in your picture book list, and think about what types of story you like.

Don’t worry about the beginnings and endings you came up with in previous weeks—we’ll bring all of these together next week.

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Now we’re going to come up with endings. Coming up with the beginning of a story is easy—that first line holds all the possibility. It’s knocking down the first domino. Plus it’s generally how we write (or it’s how I write, at least). You come up with an idea, and you write the first line, and then more or less keep going forward, until you come to an end.

But what if you write the end first? Why not? This week, we’re going to give it a try.

To write a good ending, you usually need some knowledge of what could have come before. You can see all of the fallen dominoes, and the ending is a way you can explain it all to the reader. You normally write the ending from a place of knowing where the story went.

If beginnings make someone want to keep reading, an ending makes them feel like reading the book was a good thing to have done. You want your reader to feel satisfied. You want them to say “THAT was a great story!”

In my copy of the early reader Mother Rabbit’s Son Tom by Dick Gackenbach, the previous owner felt the need to make it clear that the book had, in fact, ended. Mother Rabbit’s Son Tom is made up of two stories (“Hamburgers, Hamburgers” and “Tom’s Pet”) and the ending of the book, which is the ending of “Tom’s Pet,” is three wordless pages of Tom inflating an enormous dinosaur balloon and bringing it home. It’s a funny ending to this story, but I do wonder if, at the end of a book that a kid has worked very hard to read on their own, three wordless pages feel like a letdown (they might also feel like a relief). At any rate, one reader took a blue crayon and gave us two more words to read.1

Here were the endings I gathered this week.2

• “‘I don’t like Koala.’” Sean Ferrell, Charles Santoso, I Don’t Like Koala (2015)

• “Tomorrow we’ll be back. And then anything can happen.” Sara Stridsberg, Beatrice Alemagna, B.J. Woodstein (translator), We Go to the Park (2024)

• “And we went home to live in a house.” Liesel Moak Skorpen, Doris Burn, We Were Tired of Living in a House (1969)

• “And she was good.” Vashti Harrison, Big (2023)

• “‘So do I,’ said Frances, and she made the lobster-salad sandwich, the celery, the carrot sticks, and the olives come out even.” Russell Hoban, Lillian Hoban, Bread and Jam for Frances (1964)

• “And best of all, a room this big never looks messy.” Mac Barnett, Adam Rex, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem (2009)

• “Once upon a time, there was just a hungry little turtle and a very large cake.” Lucy Ruth Cummins, A Hungry Lion, or: A Dwindling Assortment of Animals (2016)

• “He said goodbye, hopped on his tricycle, and rode home.” Mark Alan Stamaty, Who Needs Donuts? (1973)

• “I helped.” Andrea L. Rogers, Rebecca Lee Kunz, Chooch Helped (2024)

• “The next day was Saturday, and Lunchbox Louie didn’t have to go to work, so he took Bigfoot the Chipmunk, and King Waffle, and Wuggie Norple, and Freckleface Chilibean, and Papercup Mixmaster, and Exploding Poptart, and Laughing Gas Alligator, and a big basket of lunch, and they all went to Nosewort Pond for a picnic.” Daniel M. Pinkwater, Tomie dePaola, The Wuggie Norple Story (1980)

• “And slowly, slowly, he walked back to town calling, ‘Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!’ Esphyr Slobodkina, Caps for Sale (1940)

• “Until you’re back home, and ready to do it all again.” Ruth Chan, The Alpactory: Ready, Pack, Go! (2021)

• “SPORK.” Scott Rothman, Avery Monson, Parfait, Not Parfait (2022)

• “And at last, when her room was neat as a pin, she hung up a very big sign—COME IN!” Norah Smaridge, Les Gray, The Big Tidy Up (1970)

• “When they had eventually calmed down a bit, and had gotten home, Mr. Duncan put the magic pebble in an iron safe. Some day they might want to use it, but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They all had all that they wanted.” William Steig, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (1969)

I’m noticing how many of these are sentences starting with “and.” So consider that when you’re writing your endings this week. An ending to a picture book often feels right when it’s “And…” You might write “Baxter viewed the events favorably” and then realize that, to make it end the book neatly, you want to change it to “And Baxter viewed the events favorably” (or maybe even “And Baxter viewed the events favorably forevermore”).

Some of these endings echo the events of the book, and are satisfying endings, but would be lackluster as beginnings. So that’s something to consider. Though I did have to throw in a few that are fairly phenomenal bits of in-world specificity, which make sense in the context of the book, but are hilarious and curious written up in a list like that (I mean, look at The Wuggie Norple Story, as well as Parfait, Not Parfait’s all-caps SPORK).

One interesting thing to me is that some picture book endings are forever imprinted in my mind (“and it was still hot” or “There they’ll be, Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne…Mike in his rocking chair smoking his pipe, and Mary Anne beside him, warming up the meetings in the new town hall”) and some are not. Some of my favorite books, I know how they end, but the last line isn’t seared into my mind. Which I think is fine, actually. Some of it is due to reading the book out loud one million times, there is a certain musicality to the last line, which is like a little last beat in a song, and seems to say, “Ok, that’s it, no more questions” and you shut the book with a fwap and it’s time for bed. That can happen with a memorable last line, or with a last line that wraps the book up nicely but is perhaps less likely to stick in a reader’s head. We don’t really get to choose what reader’s remember. We can consider it, but we can’t control it. You may want to write “probably memorable” last lines in your brainstorming this week,3 or you may want to imagine a last line that isn’t a bit of music, but does wrap up this book you haven’t written yet.4

Endings tend to either leave some space for the reader to imagine that the story will continue,5 or they tie everything up in a bow. The “leave ‘em hanging” endings usually work better in a story where we are permitted to eavesdrop on a slice of a day, and the “tied in a bow” endings work with stories that talk about important and possibly life-changing events for the characters. You could certainly try any type of ending on any type of story, and see if it works.

I do like tied-in-a-bow endings, but you have to be careful not to take it too far. At the literary6 magazine7 I co-founded in college, we had a heated discussion about a poetry submission that we all loved, except for the last line. “The last line says too much” became a code for a writer who doesn’t trust themselves or their reader enough to believe that leaving things as they are is enough. If you are tempted to write something like, “And little Bobby always trusted his dad’s wisdom from then on,” maybe delete that and see if the story makes sense without it. But for this exercise, go ahead and write that line about little Bobby, and you can mull it over and see if it leads anywhere. Go ahead and write: “The little red hen went home and had a good night’s sleep,” which sounds to me like a last line that says too much. But maybe you write it and then your next ending line you write is, “The little red hen went home and dreamed of revenge,” which is much more interesting.

Your job this week is to do a bit of reverse engineering. You don’t have to imagine the book that came before, but instead you might imagine the kind of book. What is the feeling of this imaginary book? And what, then, might the ending be?

So, with all of this in mind, look at the last pages/last lines in some of your favorite picture books. Why do they work? Why do you like them? And now write what you would consider great last lines, even if you have no story to go with them. You may find that you come up with fewer lines than you did for the beginnings last week. That’s normal (it’s harder to come up with the ending line first!). As you did last week, keep going until it feels like you have enough. I still think sitting for twenty minutes is a good amount of time.

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I could have very well included the beginning to Mother Rabbit’s Son Tom in my “beginnings” post last week. “I want a hamburger,” said Tom. is so, so great.

Week 1: Beginnings. What makes a good beginning? We write beginnings.

Week 2: Endings. What makes a good ending? We will write endings (note that these are just “endings” not necessarily endings to the beginnings we wrote in Week 1).

Week 3: Middles. What should happen in the middle of a picture book? What are types of middles, and which ones do you like? We’ll examine your favorites.

Week 4: Putting It All Together. We will look at these story blocks we’ve created, and see if they can be stitched together in any way.

Each week, you’ll look at some picture books, examine their discrete parts, and see what makes them work for you. You can use the same picture books every week. You can grab your favorites off your shelf. Or you can go to the library every week and get a new stack. Or whatever works for you! Just grab a stack (of ten, at least), and start reading.

What makes for a good opening in a picture book? I like to look for an opener that makes me think:

• What is this going to be?

• That’s interesting.

• Ok, tell me more.

I’m not saying this is the only way to write a picture book, or even that this is the only way to play with courting inspiration. But it’s a way, and it’s a way where you’re telling your writer brain that you are taking writing seriously, and you’re taking inspiration seriously, because you have a system, you have a play, and you’re setting aside time.

This week (and every week for this project) you will need:

• A stack of picture books. Each week, you’ll look at some picture books, examine their discrete parts, and see what makes them work for you. You can use the same picture books every week. You can grab your favorites off your shelf. Or you can go to the library every week and get a new stack. Or whatever works for you! Just grab a stack (of ten, at least), and start reading.

• About twenty minutes, to brainstorm. I recently got a visual timer like the one Bob Shea has, and I like it a lot. It’s pleasingly analog, and comes in fun colors.

• Something to write with. I have been walking to a coffee shop, getting a coffee, and writing my story blocks longhand in a notebook. This is working for me because I have the “commute” of the walk to think more. But you could also do it anytime, anywhere. I do recommend brainstorming longhand, if you can.

First, I want you to look at some picture books (or other books) and make note of beginnings you like. I’ll share the list I came up with.1 (Mostly picture books, one short story for adults, one short story for kids.) Some of these are books I knew I would put on this list, because their beginnings are ones that have stuck with me (Bikes for Sale, The White Marble), and some are ones that magically made their way to me the week I was was working on beginnings. They’ll come your way once you’re looking for them.

• “In the summer, the sun rises between buildings on our block to greet us at breakfast” Matthew Burgess, Cátia Chien, Fireworks (2025) (This is the first page, the sentence continues on the next page.)

• “More than anything, Chair wanted to be in on the game.” Dasha Tolstikova, The Bad Chair (2020)

• “In a dark, dense forest the witches live, sleeping safely in the branches of tall trees.” Adrienne Adams, A Woggle of Witches (1971)

• “More than his telescope, his trains, or his Tyrannosaurus, Collin loved coins.” Mark Riddle, Tim Miller, Margarash (2016)

• “Adam does not like Koala.” Sean Ferrell, Charles Santoso, I Don’t Like Koala (2015)

• “Some say we come from the stars, that we’re made of stardust, that we once swirled into the world from nowhere. We don’t know. So we go to the park.” Sara Stridsberg, Beatrice Alemagna, B.J. Woodstein (translator), We Go to the Park (2024)

• “They were new once. And then, they weren’t.” Carter Higgins, Zachariah OHora, Bikes for Sale (2019)

• “We know all corners of The Sea, but we’ve never been to the beach. Legs stuck to the seats, clicked into the heat, we are microwave molten goo.” Dorson Plourde, Isabella Fassler, Garbage Gulls (2024)

• “She was a busy little item. There was a doll to be fixed up and chastised with a hairbrush that was twice its length. Also a coloring book and a packet of markers, which she took out of the soft plastic sleeve and spilled all down herself so she was in the footwell and up again seventeen times between the Walkinstown roundabout and Newlands Cross.” Anne Enright, The Bridge Stood Fast (2025) (short story)

• “Oh, it was a hot night. The heat sat like a feathered bird over the city as the sun went down. It folded its wings, and the pink and orange plumage of the sunset was covered by the fleecy gray and purple sky.” Charlotte Zolotow, Deborah Kogan Ray, The White Marble (1963)

• “It was midnight when something crashed outside Mr. and Mrs. Li’s house.” X. Fang, We Are Definitely Human (2024)

• “We were tired of living in a house.” Liesel Moak Skorpen, Doris Burn, We Were Tired of Living in a House (1969)

• “One day when things were dull in Hell, the Devil fished around in his bag of disguises, dressed himself as a fairy godmother, and came up into the World to find someone to bother.” Natalie Babbitt, The Devil’s Storybook (1974)

I look at these and see some patterns. I like enigmatic poetic beginnings. I like beginnings that give me an image I wasn’t ready for: the Devil’s bag of disguises, or something crashing outside a house right on page one. I like beginnings that relate to the title—they make me think, yes, this is what I expected, now what’s going to happen?

So I had these written down, and I had them marinating in my brain, and then I walked to a coffee shop and wrote a list of my own beginnings. These are beginnings without a story. It’s more that I was riffing on the concept of what I think would make a good beginning.

I recommend you don’t even try to try to come up with a story, not yet. For now, only beginnings. What would be on a first page, that would make you (you, specifically) smile in delight, and need to read the rest?

It’s ok if you write something that’s not good. Just keep going. Sit down and write for twenty minutes. Or whatever time you designate. (I don’t necessarily mean you have to write for twenty minutes without stopping. I mean write for twenty minutes without letting yourself get distracted by something else. Stare into space, but don’t pick up your phone.)

You might find that one idea leads to another. During my brainstorming, I’d have one line (“The ducks were surprised when a pigeon hatched.”), and then the next try would be a different angle on that (“The whole barn was surprised when one of the ducks turned out to be a pigeon.”) and then a third that was a refinement of the concept (“One of the ducks was a little off.”)2 Keep going. They all count.

You might look out the window and see something that seems intriguing. You can decide you’ll sit and write for a certain amount of time, or that you’ll keep going until you have a certain number of opening lines. I recommend you keep going until it feels like enough. Don’t stop because you’ve done some (two or three) and then decide you can reward yourself by picking up your phone. Don’t do it. You’re a writer. So sit there and write. (For the record, I came up with seventeen beginnings.)

Maybe you’re having trouble getting started. That’s ok. Remember that this is an exercise that’s only for you. You’re not bringing it to a meeting with an editor and asking them to pick one. You’re bringing it to a meeting with your imagination and trying to delight it. So you could, for instance, look at your list of published picture book beginnings that you like, and copy one, changing a few words, to see where it goes. If you have the beginning to Where the Wild Things Are on your list (“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind…and another…”), maybe you write something like, “On the day when Goose had been horrible to the farm in so many different ways, Farmer Kerchief sent her to the rafters to think about what she had done.” Then maybe that turns into “”Goose had been horrible all day. “ Or just: “Goose was being horrible.” And you can go from there.

Ok! That’s it! Go write some beginnings! And then pay attention to what else starts tickling at your imagination, once you have started this process.

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My relationship to the internet is changing. It makes me mad, or at least annoyed, a lot of the time. It takes up my hours and alters my emotions. And it absolutely blocks my inspiration.

I want you to keep doing your own Short Story Project, but I want you to do it with short stories written on paper that you find in your house, your library, or your neighborhood. Not on the internet. And I didn’t want to spend the summer reading short stories online for this project.

But I still love celebrating Back-to-School season by setting up a mini syllabus. I still want to use this time to play around with story and writing. Part of the Short Story Project was writing for the purpose of playing around and trying things, not necessarily with the end goal of “this has to get a book deal.” Take some pressure off and goof around, while still taking writing craft seriously.

Part of my inspiration for this year’s project is that I am finding it difficult lately to sit down and come up with an entire story. I am getting snippets, bits, sentences, parts. I blame the internet, and the news. But still, we have to write. The stories need to be written, and if I can’t write an entire story right now, I can write down all of those parts that are coming to me.

So I’ve come up with a new project, one that is more offline than the Short Story Project was. I’m calling it the Story Blocks Project. Week One’s post will go out tomorrow.

You know those picture books with horizontal flaps on a spiral binding, with various parts of a character that you can change around? You can make, say, a green-headed monster wearing a purple t-shirt, plaid pants, and cowboy boots, and then you can flip the top flap to dress a blue-headed monster in the same outfit. You could make a hybrid animal like in Croc-gu-phant by Sara Ball or Merry Mix-Ups by Helen Oxenbury. In The Perfect Match by Wayne Anderson, you create all 8000 guests for a wedding by flipping the flaps. You know what I’m talking about!

We’re not going to create one of those (probably). But you can think of the parts of a story as separate entities. Eventually they need to work together, in the same way the neck of the top flap has to flow seamlessly into the shoulders of the second flap.

Last week, I was flipping through a sewing book I have, The Act of Sewing by Sonya Philip. The book has instructions for how to make specific parts of a garment, from necklines to waistbands to pockets. I can envision, for instance, a dress with a v-neck, pleats, and in-seam pockets, and this book will tell me how to make that. The Story Blocks project is the same idea. What are the parts of a book that intrigue you? What do you want to make?

The same way you might imagine a garment that would feel like a treasure if you found it shoved deep in a rack at the thrift store, what is a book that would thrill you to find it? Imagine this book, which you’d never heard of before. What does the cover look like, how does it draw you in? What is the first line? What’s happening on the first page? And then, what happens in the book? How does it make you feel when you’re reading it? How do you feel when you’ve read the last page?

This book: you can write it. If it’s a book that exists in the dark corner of some magical bookshop of your mind, you can make it.

Fair warning, though. It might not be easy. For this project, I’d like you to work on it, but don’t worry, just yet, about getting the book done. Don’t even worry about getting it good. Just compile the parts, and think about opening yourself up to the possibility of what this dream book could be (or dream books! there can be many).

Each week, we’ll brainstorm specific story parts, and then in week four, we’ll see what happens if we take the parts and flip-flap them all together. Do they make a story? Do they spark a new story? Only one way to find out!

Even if you don’t get a whole new story from this, you’ll be thinking about stories, and working on writing. Your access to your inspiration and writer’s intuition will be stronger. Maybe you’ll come out of this with a complete picture book manuscript. But the goal is really to open yourself up to offline inspiration. You will be writing down all of these story blocks that come to you, and therefore you are telling your imagination (and the universe, if you want to think in those terms) that you are ready to be inspired. You’re ready to get ideas and words and sentences about great picture books. And you’re going to write them all down.

You’re welcome to take this idea and run with it on your own, but if you want to do it with other people, and you want my instruction and insights about it, make sure you’re a paying subscriber (I think the first two weeks are free?).

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Thoughts and Links

• The hardware store near me has two cats (Bigfoot and Daniel), and they are hilarious and delightful. Daniel, in this photo, dropped a bunch of his food on the floor (he’s like the king from every cartoon: “who CARES about FOOD? More always appears!”) and Cosmo happily ate all of it. The cat is bigger than Cosmo. (OK WAIT. To me they are just the awesome hardware store cats, but I guess they’re famous? Listen. Let me live my semi-analog life. But now I have looked at their instagram, and I have just learned that: a) people fly in to visit the cats (is this true???) and b) Mary Chapin Carpenter came to visit them (!!!). This is like finding out your aunt has a TV show.)

• Here are 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing, from

• Thanks to Andrew Janjigian for linking to this great essay by Rax King: Love, Peace, and Taco Grease: How I Left My Abusive Husband and Found Guy Fieri

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• The Bear in My Family by Maya Tatsukawa: such a relatable sibling dynamic!

• More Than Sunny by Shelley Johannes is a sweet read-aloud that was an interesting and unpredictable meditation on mood and mindset (without ever saying that that’s what it’s about).

• Oh wow, I love coming across a snapping turtle. They are so cool and also scary. It’s like something from Dark Crystal wandering into the cemetery to lay eggs. Anyway. I love The True and Lucky Life of a Turtle by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Matt Patterson. The first illustration made me gasp!

• I read two books with “bog” in the title and I fell fiercely in love with both of them (rec me any other bog books, I guess?). The first is Bog Myrtle by Sid Sharp, which is a sort of picture book/chapter book thing, and is SO great, and SO funny, and I love it so much. The second is The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister, which is specifically atmospheric, weird, and enthralling (I’ve seen it categorized as “Southern Gothic;” it’s adult fiction).

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Who got a story written last week? I’m grateful to all of you, because I feel like, as the organizer of this project, I have to write a manuscript each week. I know if I skipped a week, you’d all be ok with it. But I want to write one each week, to do it alongside you.

I decided to write in response to “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” since I love it and the tone of it is frankly astonishing. But also, I went into it performatively, like, “sure, fine, I’ll just write something, it won’t matter what.”

I wrote some notes on what the picture book could be, and ran myself into some corners before realizing that, even in the spirit of playing around and seeing what happened, I absolutely did not want to write a story with violence in it. And then, just like that, I started writing, and wrote through to the end, and the manuscript I wrote, while still far from perfect, is by far the best of the three I wrote.

The lesson here is that regular practice, even if I drag myself to my notebook, still counts, and it adds up. It’s like, sure yes, it’s better to lift weights with gusto and proper form, but if you lift weights really slowly while yelling, “this sucks!” you are still lifting weights.

Surprise! This week we’re doing poems! Ok, ok, I KNOW that poetry is not short story. But I was thinking about novels in verse, and then (stupidly) googled “short stories in verse” before realizing that, uh, that’s just a poem. 

Which led me to the poetry textbook I used the one summer I co-taught a literature class, An Introduction to Poetry, Seventh Edition by X.J. Kennedy. 

Listen. I have to confess that much of the time I don’t “get” poetry. Or…I feel like I don’t have time for it? Because I know a great deal of the “getting” comes from reading it aloud, and I somehow never find the time to sit on my couch and read poetry out loud to myself. (Also I am scarred from too many terribly-read poems at college open mic nights to venture out to a public reading.) 

It is undeniable, though, that picture books are often poems, or at least, poetic. I spent days wading through An Introduction to Poetry (for fun!), remembering that sometimes the language of a poem, or the story it conveys, are transporting. And while yes, I know this is not The Poetry Project, I think you’ll like approaching these poems as we have been approaching the short stories. Picture books, like poems, are meant to be read aloud, so if we think of that magical music that is story language spoken to someone else, we can borrow a lot from poetry.

Fully all of these were in An Introduction to Poetry, the seventh edition, which was published in 1990. Mostly because I would never finish this newsletter if I started searching through every available poem. So there is nothing from the past 35 years. Nothing against modern poetry! I just needed some fences in place so I didn’t list 300 poems.

In the same way we can write picture books in response to short stories, we can view poetry and poetic language as a seed that might blossom outward into a new flower of a story, one that is not a direct copy, but is inspired by, that original seed.

Poetry offers beauty read aloud, it offers a shard of a day, it offers a life or a moment or an ode to something you love, boiled down to its essence. Picture books do this too.

If you’ve been doing the work of the Short Story Project these past three weeks, you have at least one manuscript, and hopefully three. So you have some story bones, even if they’re playful ones that you’d never send to anyone. The process of writing a picture book manuscript in response to a short story is a sort of copy→ paste thing, where instead of copying the short story exactly, you rip it into pieces, crumple the pieces into balls, and see what you get. 

The process of writing in response to a poem might need to be a bit different. Or it might not. You can, as you’ve been doing with the short stories, think about what you like or don’t like, and grow your manuscript outward from there. (I chose some of these poems for the story, the subject, or the structure, just like I choose the short stories.) But if you’re thinking about the language specifically, about a sound effect or some alliteration you love, you’re going to have to then work backward from there, to see what story you can build that supports that. If you want to have the sound of a car horn, or a line that sounds like it’s whispered, what is the story that goes with that?

Often the line between picture book and poem is blurred or nonexistent. There’s Lee Wardlaw’s haiku picture book, Won Ton. There are any number of picture books constructed around Langston Hughes poems (That is My Dream!, Sail Away, An Earth Song, Lullaby (for a Black Mother)). There are picture books by Amanda Gorman and Joy Harjo. There is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy and This is Just to Say. And, of course, thousands of picture books told in verse, not to mention the many picture books about poetry (like Daniel Finds a Poem and Nine, to name only two).

Maybe you’re a rhymer. I’m not someone who writes in rhyme. And yet, I remember when someone brought up Snappsy the Alligator (Did Not Ask to Be in This Book) in a blog post about rhyming books. It confused me for a hot second, until I realized, uh, yeah, the first page of Snappsy absolutely rhymes. And part of that was me playing around with the expectation that a picture book should rhyme, but part of that also was that, despite myself, poetry sunk in. I still don’t always understand it, but I try, at least, to make a stab at reading it, because I do think it’s important to understand the rhythms and the sound of the words in order to write a good picture book. 

And so! Here are:

The Poems

• “Night Driving” by Dick Allen. Scroll down a little past the intro. This reads like so many picture book images to me.

• “Digging” by Seamus Heaney. That link includes audio of Heaney reading the poem, which I recommend. Also, I once barn danced with Seamus Heaney; feel free to have that add some flavor to your inspiration.

• “To Autumn” by John Keats. It’s sweater weather! Pumpkin Spice Lattes! “summer has o'er-brimm'd!” Hang out by the “cyder-press!” Don’t worry about those songs of spring, you’re the one we love, Autumn. An Introduction to Poetry says that, three days after he wrote “To Autumn,” Keats wrote a letter to a friend talking about how much, for real, he loved Autumn. So much.

• “Home is So Sad” by Philip Larkin. I love stories about houses and the home that is made in them.

• “Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop. This poem has always seemed to me like it’s written from the POV of the child in the car. I recommend the audio of Bishop reading it (though it kills me to hear her saying the ending is no good!).

• “The One Girl at the Boys Party” by Sharon Olds. Identity and expectation told through the language of math. So good.

• “The Dirty Word” by Karl Shapiro. A prose poem about the curse word you love as a kid, and how it changes when you’re an adult (make sure you click through to the second page, to get the last few lines of the poem).

• “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” by Christopher Smart. This is a wild long list basically about how devoted to God his cat Jeoffry is, written in 1759ish while Smart was, alas, in “confinement for insanity.” Though it seems perhaps extremely sane to write things like “For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he’s a good Cat.” (There is also a Walt Whitman poem, “To a Locomotive in Winter,” which is similarly exultant, though about a locomotive instead of a cat. There is something lovely and relatable about a poem or story praising one specific thing. Like, it is clear Whitman really was a train guy.)

• “Yield” by Ronald Gross. This feels so much like a picture book to me.  

• “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur. I really, really love this poem.

• “Metamorphosis” by Wallace Stevens. What a read-aloud! Another poem that seems to fit this time of year, all dying husks and also silliness.

• “Image” by T.E. Hulme. A poem that is short on words but bursting with story and imagery, which is just what I want my picture books to do.

• “Rain” by Emanuel di Pasquale. Another very short poem, with language that is music.

• “On My Boat on Lake Cayuga” by William Cole. And here we are. More than 30 years after I used this textbook to teach poetry one summer, this is the poem I remember more than any other. Part of that is that it’s effortlessly memorizable, but also it’s hilarious.

Your first assignment this week is either to write a picture book inspired by one of these poems, or to take an idea from one of these poems and incorporate it into an existing manuscript of yours.

Your second assignment is to start thinking about how you might want to incorporate the Short Story Project into your writing process throughout the year (although if you only do it once a year here on Do the Work, that’s great too!).

After my experience this past week with flowingly writing a picture book that I ended up really liking, I am committing (to myself) to keep going with the Short Story Project on a regular basis. Weekly structured playful manuscript-writing is, it turns out, excellent for my writing in general.

With that in mind, here are some bonus assignments. These are all ways to find stories out in the world and write in response to them. I especially encourage you to approach these assignments as you’ve been approaching all of the assignments in the Short Story Project: as a way to play with stories and writing, and less as a means to get a perfect and submittable manuscript. I want you to write a perfect and submittable manuscript! But I also know that the way to get there is by playing around with stories.

Bonus assignments

• Go find a story for free somewhere, in a book in a Little Free Library, in a magazine, at the library. Write a picture book based on it.

• Sit in the park for 30 minutes, taking notes on all you see. Write a picture book based on your notes.

• Google “Billboard Chart Number 1” and your birth date, and then look up the lyrics to that song, and write a picture book based on that.

• Go on a walk and write down all the words you see. Graffiti, gum wrappers, the sides of trucks, street signs. Write it all down. Write something from that.

Tell us in the comments how this project has gone for you so far!

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I squeaked in my Week 2 draft only yesterday. Did you get one done? I ruminated on which story to write toward for the entire week, and found that, because of all that ruminating, the draft itself came fairly quickly.

I also did something I’m not sure I’ve done before: I wrote a new draft of an existing story, rather than write something entirely new. I have a picture book manuscript that has been languishing for years, one that I still think about, but where I also think, “Will I ever figure it out?” I realized I could instill parts of “Who Am I This Time?” (the Kurt Vonnegut story) (did any of you watch the movie version?) and take it in a new direction. I’m happy with how it came out, and, if anything, I have a new version of this old story to play with.

One of the things that links picture books and short stories is that, due to their brevity, they can be jarring and surprising in ways that perhaps would be tedious in a longer narrative. But in 600 words or so, we have plenty of space to be ridiculous and bizarre in a way that doesn’t wear out our welcome. If you’ve ever read the trippy 1978 classic The Rainbow Goblins, you know what I mean. The Rainbow Goblins is mesmerizing and transportive, and oh wow it would be way too much for a novel.

What makes a story unforgettable? Some of it might be surprise, yes. But a twang of true emotion will do it too. Or a mind bending element – is there a story that cracks your brain open and rearranges things? I remember sharing Battle Bunny with my friend Mark () for the first time, and he said, “I didn’t realize a book could do this.” A Hungry Lion, I Want My Hat Back, and I Just Ate My Friend are good examples too, where you read it and think, “oh! I never thought I could do this in a picture book!”

There’s a reason so many picture book authors cite The Stinky Cheese Man and The Monster at the End of This Book as where we turned, where we realized what a picture book could do, and decided we wanted in on this gig. They are surprising, and unforgettable, and brain-rearranging. 

The Stories

• “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” by Donald Barthelme (1973). Barthelme is such a master of deadpan. All you have to do is read the first two sentences of this story, and you’ll see what I mean.

• “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol (1836). A classic that is worth reading and always worth re-reading, and which always makes me think, how could this be illustrated if it were a picture book? I remember my habit in high school of saying, “Random!” about things, and feeling like my friends and I were the only truly original and weird generation. Reading “The Nose” cured me of that thinking. 

• “Gifted” by Simon Rich (2014). Sure, some kids can be hard to parent, but the kid in this story is literally a monstrous hell beast. His parents compensate with tutors, private school, and ADHD medication.

• “Mrs. Mantsey’s View” by Edith Wharton (1891). (Available as a PDF or a google doc at the bottom of that link.) In Edith Wharton’s first published short story, Mrs. Mantsey spends her days looking out the window, a pastime which is upended when she learns the neighbor is going to build a huge addition that’s going to block the view.

• “I Used to Live Here Once” by Jean Rhys (1976). The narrator walks to her old house, noting all the changes that have occurred since she lived there. A very short, spooky, story.

Your challenge this week is to write something totally fresh and different. The way to be unforgettable is not to write something where a reader thinks, “oh, this book is just like this other book I read a few weeks ago.” You can, of course, start with the ordinary and then turn it on its head. But remember, we’re just playing around. Why not take it in a weird-ass direction that doesn’t make any sense? (I still remember my shock when the woman in Leave Me Alone went to the moon. The moon!)

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How did you do in Week 1? Did you write a draft?

I played around a bit with what story to respond to. I love “The Enormous Radio” but couldn’t quite figure out an angle. I wanted to write something like “Stone Animals” because I love stories that center on houses, but I couldn’t figure that out either. In the end I wrote a draft in response to “Speaker” (the story where a human and hyena can hear each other’s thoughts). The story I wrote wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t bad.

The really important thing for me was that I wrote an entire draft. Here’s why:

I’ve been working on a new picture book. We’ll call it, I don’t know, Teakettle. I like Teakettle. I’m into the story. But every time I work on it, I think, “oh, this sounds too much like an allegory for something, and I can’t figure out how to make it just a story.” I was putting way too much pressure on it.

The story I wrote for The Short Story Project, which I’ll call Duckpants, was silly and a little simple. It could probably also be an allegory for something, but I didn’t worry about that. I just wrote it. There was no pressure. I was just goofing around (which, I’ll remind you, is the whole point of The Short Story Project).

I realized I’d been getting in my own way with Teakettle and I’d never be able to fix the potentially overwrought symbolism if I didn’t write the story in the first place. So I sat down and finished it, with an air of “just play around and see what happens.” It went in a fairly weird direction once I let it loose, and that’s fine. Now my job is to see what I can do with it in revision.

On to Week 2!

Who are you? This is such a fundamental element of stories (and life). Characters figuring out their identities end up helping readers on their own journeys of self. 

When you are a little kid, you are often told how to be, and who you are. Sometimes what you are told feels correct, and perhaps other times it does not. Reading books where characters struggle with identity can show young readers that they don’t have to be exactly how other people tell them to be. We Are Definitely Human, Your Name is a Song, Frederick, I Talk Like a River, Neville, and Julián is a Mermaid are just a few picture books about identity. There are hundreds. 

I find I am always riveted when there is a story where a character decides not to be who they were told to be. I love a story where a character realizes it’s possible to go in a different direction than they’ve been shown. It’s so relatable to watch their missteps and triumphs as they venture out in new terrain, and how extremely consequential it is, when they are not only walking down a path, but walking that path as a new person. 

We have so many ways to write about identity, thanks to the structure of picture books. It can be about a massive realization (“I’m a blue crayon!”) or it can be something smaller, the first time a character says no thank you to the food they don’t like, or chooses sparkly socks. 

One of my favorite books growing up was Dooly and the Snortsnoot by Jack Kent, which is about a giant who is not giant-sized. As an adult, I went on a bit of a Jack Kent collecting spree, and one of the ones I got is the 1968 book Just Only John. In it, a little boy named John “had been a little boy named John for over four years and he was getting tired of it.”

So he goes to the shop and buys a penny magic spell, so he can turn into something else. When he gets home, his mom says, “Where has my little lamb been?”

Every time someone tells him who he is or calls him something (a bunny, a pig, a little man) he turns into that thing, until he breaks down. It’s troubling to have the outside world so drastically shape your identity! In the end his parents tell him the trick is for him to remind himself who he is, and he remembers he is “just only John” and that breaks the spell. 

For years I’ve said that the pitch for any of my books is: “a misunderstood character who is trying to find their place in the world,” which is why I think I’m so interested in these stories about identity. Let’s show kids that they have options, and that they don’t have to decide right now who they want to be. They can play around with identity. 

The Stories

• “Louisa Please Come Home” by Shirley Jackson (1960). I read this story years ago, and it really rattled me (Shirley Jackson is so good at this type of story!). Louisa leaves home and starts a new life, but finds she cannot return.

• “Who Am I This Time” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (1961). When I was in high school, my mom and I repeatedly rented the hour-long PBS American Playhouse VHS production of this short story (that’s a YouTube link to the full video). It’s great. It stars Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon before they were huge stars, and is directed by Jonathan Demme. The short story is just as great! It’s about identity via acting in plays – and what if you don’t really have much of an identity when you’re offstage? 

• “Fish (in 13 Sections)” by Eric Ozawa (2001). During a breakup, a man is called “a fish” and spends the rest of the story systematically cataloging the facts and theories about what it means.

• “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1968). Is it still an angel, if what appears is face down in the mud in your courtyard, and is in fact a very old man with enormous wings?

• “It Came from Cruden Farm” by Max Barry (2020). On his first day in office, the president finds out the old rumors are true, and the government does have an alien. The alien is not what he was expecting. “In my opinion, sir, the alien is simply kind of a dick.”

Have fun! There are so many directions to go in. Society and parents and other adults tell kids how to be, and what if they are something quite different?

How did last week go? Tell us in the comments!

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Welcome to this year’s installment of The Short Story Project! I’m excited to get back into this with all of you. While I do read short stories all year long, and I often play around with writing a story in response to them, there is something extra-generative about amassing all of these stories and reading them with all of you. 

These are the themes for Short Story Project 2024, and the dates.

• October 8, Technology and New Things

• October 15, Identity

• October 22, Writing the Unforgettable and Surprising

• October 29, Poetry (plus some bonus assignments)

A recent (other) area in my life where I am embracing play is a new hobby: making soap. I love fancy soap. If there is soap that has layers and exfoliant and is made of goat milk and smells like citrus or pine trees or dirt (ironically), I will pay $8 for it. But I don’t want to pay $8 for soap. So I decided to learn how to make my own.

My kid Ramona and I made our first batch of soap, and it smells amazing and is the ugliest soap you’ve ever seen.

I want you to approach the Short Story Project with this soap in mind. You are playing. You may make something that is ugly and soft, but smells nice. Who cares if your soap (story) is ugly? You’re just figuring out how to make soap (write stories).

I am not giving up on soap. Just like I know that soap can be better than my first batch, you have read an amazing picture book, and you know what that looks like. So let’s keep playing. Our first attempts might be ugly, but we’ll keep trying.

This is how I, personally, approach writing within this project:

1. I read the story uninterrupted. I either print it out (sometimes this is difficult, if the story is very long or formatted oddly) or read it online with focused-reading elements in place (I pull the tab out into its own browser and close all other tabs, or I turn on Freedom).

2. After I read the story, I free write. What parts did I like? What parts didn’t I like? What part stood out the most? These are all highly subjective. I’m not taking notes to write a detailed analysis. I’m noticing what my feelings are after reading it. Most of the time, I end up writing a picture book riffing on what I liked the most. But if I really didn’t like the story, that’s interesting too. If I hated it, why? What did I hate? Did it fill me with dread in a way that made me uncomfortable? Did I think it was poorly written, and if so, why? Although I like to get inspired by things I like rather than things I don’t, sometimes it does happen, that I don’t like a story, and that’s interesting.

3. I think about how I could take the elements that stood out to me and translate them to a picture book. If I liked the relationship between the characters, what would that relationship be like if the characters were children? If I liked the feeling I got while reading it, what kind of picture book would evoke the same feeling? If the structure is interesting, what would the picture book version of that be? If the story is about being able to communicate via thought with a hyena, what would that be in a picture book? (That short story is “Speaker,” see below.)

4. I reread the story, now looking specifically at how the elements I liked work in it. In this reading, since I know what’s going to happen, I look more closely at the language. Often I notice things I missed the first time. Now I take notes. I note beautiful passages, and think about why they’re beautiful. I note particularly well-done bits – where there is nuance and layer in the language, or the tension builds in a cool way, or any parts where I can see the weight of a particular sentence. Short stories, like picture books, put a lot of weight and importance on the language and words, because there isn’t much space.

5. I write the picture book, long hand, in my notebook. I do my best to get all the way through to the end. If I get stuck, I free write, right there in the notebook, about what I think should happen next, what I want to happen, what I want it to feel like. And then I keep going.

Technology 

This week’s stories all center around technology, something that has become unavoidable in our lives, and therefore is showing up in fiction, although from what I can tell is making more inroads in adult fiction than in picture books. I think technology in picture books has the potential for being preachy and didactic (like, let’s not write The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Looking at His iPhone or whatever), but I think there are a lot of interesting directions when we start thinking about what role technology plays in our lives, and how we might translate our emotions about it into a story. That sort of thinking leads to much more interesting books, things like It Fell From the Sky by the Fan Brothers.

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Part of thinking about technology can also be about the introduction of something new and mysterious or confusing. What is a new sibling, really, besides the latest iteration of some newfangled technology? Brother 2.0. We can think about technology as in computers and digital things and inventions, or we can see that it might mean anything new and different. 

How does technology affect your life? How does it make your life better, or worse, and how does it make you feel? And then: are there ways to write about those feelings without having it be a picture book that takes place inside of a Radio Shack (because that’s a modern setting, Julie, sure)? So maybe it’s a character who is inventing time saving devices, or maybe a salescow shows up with the latest newfangled contraption to make your life easier, and both of those situations could lead to chaos and ridiculousness. Maybe they do make your life easier, and maybe they don’t. Both are interesting.

The stories

A word about the stories for this year’s project. Last year1 I worked to find stories that I was pretty sure most of you had not read. I wanted to find stories that were fresh, not ones you might have read in high school literature class.

I removed that constraint for this year, because, frankly, there were a few classics that I happened across (by Shirley Jackson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme, among others) that I deeply remembered. It’s an interesting thing, to reread. The older stories in this year’s Short Story Project are all ones that have been fairly sticky in my life. I think a lot these days about stickiness, mostly in terms of social media and the internet. I log off and am still thinking about the feeds, like they are made of honey and I can’t wash them off. So I am doubly interested in what makes a work of literature sticky. Why do some of these stories still stick with me, years after I first read them? Maybe you won’t have read any of these, of course. Maybe they won’t glue themselves to you the way they have for me. But if you have read them before, remember which parts you carried with you over the years, and note with interest which parts and details you might have forgotten. All of that is interesting information as we create our own stories.

Here are this week’s stories:

• “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever (1947). (An alternate link, which is easier to read on a computer, but has a few typos). It astonishes me how much this story mirrors our fascination with spying on other people’s lives through technology, and how awful we feel after spending all day doing it. 

• “Ride” by Linda Nagata (2021). An automated taxi system has a secret hack that brings you to where you really want to go. Which doesn’t seem to work at first for our main character.

• “The Center of the Universe” by Nadia Shammas (2021). A story about an NPC in a video game who is trying to get noticed (to a fairly horrific turn), but which brings up questions about who gets to be the main character and who gets to control the story.

• “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link (2008). Less about technology and more about a glitch in the system, one caused by moving to a new house. The house isn’t so much haunted as hauntING. And there are a lot of rabbits. Entirely too many rabbits.

• “Speaker” by Simon Brown (2021). A chip in their brains allows a human and a hyena to communicate hundreds of miles apart. For science! 

• “Find Water Near Me” by Jessie Ren Marshall (2023). A story told only via responses from a smartphone’s Siri-like program.

 Your assignment this week (and every week in this project) is to write at least one full draft of a picture book in response to one of these stories. You might write about a relationship similar to ones in the story, or write something that gets the feeling of the story, or write in a similar structure. Don’t worry about making it polished, but do try to write all the way through to the end. 

Comment below, if you’d like, with which story you’re writing toward, and how it went.

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I know this. It doesn’t make sense to expect a human to be full-on 100% productive for 8 or more hours a day. We’re not robots. 

And yet. 

What I often find happening to me is the opposite of robotic. I finish working on something, or I hit a wall and am not sure which direction to go, and, as the tide goes out, as the cloud disperses, I watch it go, and don’t wait for its return. I turn my back on it so I can’t see when the tide of my motivation and productivity rises again and is lapping at my heels. It’s deeply human, this throwing up of my hands and thinking, “It’s too hard! The words went away! I don’t know how to fix this!” and I assume I’ll never get the words back.

The solution to this is to play with write words. If I write something ridiculous and fun that is only for me, I am walking out into the ocean instead of waiting for it to come to me. 

I find that, even knowing this, I need to be intentional and systematic about courting playfulness. The kid in me thinks, “Oh, this is what being an adult is – when you have to be systematic about being playful.” 

It’s true, though. And that’s what The Short Story Project is all about! The Short Story Project is for you if:

• You’re forcing ideas, like you know you want to write a picture book but all you have written down is something like “A kitten…has lost…her mittens?” 

• You are in a place where you have a semi-decent idea, but then, when you write it, it’s the dullest thing you have ever written.

• You feel burned out about writing.

• You have limited time to write, and so are putting a lot of pressure on the words you do write, because you don’t have time to write crappy words, and you certainly don’t have time to play with writing (it’s a trick – you don’t have time not to play with writing).

What is the Short Story Project?

Each week, for four weeks, starting next week, I’ll send you a list of four or more short stories, loosely organized around a theme. You can choose one or more, and then write a story in response to, or inspired by it. All of the short stories are available for free online. 

If you write in response to a story each week, you’ll have four drafts at the end. Maybe one of them will turn into something submittable, and maybe it won’t, but you will absolutely build your writing skills. Just as important, you’ll remember that you are someone who is able to craft stories and have fun with it. 

Maybe you’ll be inspired to write more than one some weeks. Maybe, at the end, you’ll figure out a way to combine some of the stories into something new. Maybe you will only write one draft manuscript over the four weeks, and that’s fine too, since then you will have written one more manuscript than you would have otherwise.

Why is this behind the paywall?

Like I say in the video, I deeply appreciate those of you who are paying subscribers to Do the Work, and you deserve paying-subscriber-only perks.1 Also: it takes months of work to read the stories, decide which ones to include, figure out the themes, and organize it all. It’s fun, but it is a lot of work and time. 

A paid subscription is $5 a month or $50 a year, and the first two weeks are a free trial.

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If we’re writing stories inspired by other stories, aren’t you telling us to plagiarize?

Um, no. I mean, if you want to completely rip off someone else’s story just for you, to play around, and then never, ever submit it anywhere — fine. But the point of this is really to have fun, play with words and stories, and to build your skills. You can do that by copying, yes, but I want to push you to find the elements of the stories you like best, and then figure out how to incorporate those into your manuscript in an entirely new way so that the story is completely yours alone. My favorite manuscripts I’ve written (in my own, neverending Short Story Project) are ones where no one would ever, ever be able to figure out what short story inspired it. 

But you can be up front about the inspiration, too! Here is a recent book deal announced in PW, where Matt Phelan is making a picture book inspired by Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

So while I personally like to approach this as a means for playing around, and I don’t pressure myself or the words to be something final and submittable, it CAN lead to something submittable.

I can’t think about writing what with this election and stuff.

There is a magical spell that occurs when you step away from the relentlessness of the feed and allow yourself to be playfully creative. Really, what are you achieving by constantly scrolling for more election drama? You’re just getting agitated.

There is a time for outrage and agitation, yes. But not so much of it. I would argue the world needs you in a state of creativity and curiosity as much as it needs you to have occasional productive outrage.

Some of my favorite things have been written during times when I physically and mentally could not look at the internet anymore, and so I pulled myself away to write something goofy, just to remember that I could.

Can you give us an example?

I’m so glad you asked, because it means I get to share two hilariously unhinged short short stories by Daniil Kharms, who also wrote children’s books. Both are marvels of the sort of logic that only works in Russian short stories and picture books. They’re from, as far as I can tell, sometime in the 1930s.

Here is the first story: Clunk. (Go read it now; it’s short.)

It’s so silly! I read that and it immediately makes me think of a sibling picture book, where one sibling is deliberately annoying the other one. Would the annoying kid be the older sibling or the younger one? I like the idea of it being the younger one, who is maybe trying to get their older sibling’s attention.

Or: maybe they’re neighbors. Maybe the “annoying” neighbor is new and not great at interpersonal relations and is trying to actually convey something important, but doesn’t know how to say it. (Maybe they’re from outer space and “Clunk” is their way of saying hello!)

I might want to play with escalation, too. Olga Petrovna is getting increasingly perturbed. There for sure is a way to have her doing funnier things in her annoyance. Dragging the log to the top of a mountain, maybe. But I see a story here in whatever Yevdokim Osipovich’s reasoning is, if I dig deeper and assume he’s not just trying to be annoying.

The second (very short) story is sometimes called The Redheaded Man, and here is called Blue Notebook No. 2. This is a supremely weird and existential story, and it’s fewer than 100 words. 

In response, I might write about a person who tells stories in the vein of this, that make the main character’s brain hurt a little. Or maybe a little kid who has something important to say, and it’s a story like this, and eventually people dismiss the kid, and then, one day, he actually has something important to say (this is also The Boy Who Cried Wolf, probably). Or how does it feel to write an entire picture book that is like The Redheaded Man, pure absurdity and seeming nonsense, and end it with “let’s not talk about it anymore”?

I hope you’ll join me. It’s so fun (and necessary!) to give yourself space to play. And yes, now that we’re adults (allegedly) sometimes we have to schedule the play and give it some structure.

I am giving you permission to write fun and ridiculous stories that are only for you, in order to remind yourself that you can absolutely write great stories, and have fun while you’re doing it. Sometimes the publishing industry is extremely unfun for writers, and this is a way of owning your fun. 

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I find I still, always, think about whether a manuscript could be submitted, signed, made into a book. It’s my job and my livelihood and hard to separate. But by deliberately creating a place to goof around with words, to delight myself, I always end up brewing with thoughts and inspiration for new projects. This deliberate and structured play plants the seeds.

It’s intoxicating, that self-made delight. It’s by remembering that I can delight myself with words that I am inspired and encouraged to do it more and more and more, until finally I find an idea that is one I think could be submitted, signed, and made into a book, one that will hopefully delight readers, somewhere down the road. 

I invite you to join me on this project of delighting ourselves with words and stories.

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Thoughts and Links

• introduced me to the idea of keeping your life a “secret from the internet” and I am forever grateful.

• I love this essay from about how she launched a podcast (not her first) and then realized everything inside her was telling her not to have a podcast right now, so she deleted it. “I could immediately feel that opening another public portal and giving myself the job of maintaining yet another platform was absolutely the wrong choice for me.”

• I can’t stop thinking about this essay from : “After a Splashy Book Deal, I Got Dropped By My Publisher, But I Kept On Writing.” Ultimately, writing a book only for himself was the answer. I’m inspired and fired up thinking about what book I’d write that’s only for me.

• I used to wait as long as I possibly could before I checked my email every morning, but I have gotten soft about that practice over the last few months. This essay from spurred me to rededicate to it.

• Other people (: here) and (: here) have talked about Robert Caro’s daily log notebook, but I for some reason didn’t pay attention (I wasn’t ready???) until Ann Friedman wrote about it. My question for you all is: where can I get a paper daily log that has a very small space for each day, where I can record my word count (and, I suppose, like Caro, also call myself “lazy” when I don’t reach my goal)? I am considering this Midori Slim Pocket Diary or this Midori Desk Ring Calendar but I’d love your suggestions.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• I’m naming Carter Higgins’ instant classic Round and Round the Year We Go the read-aloud of the year. Go get it — it’s perfect.

• Leo’s First Vote by Christina Soontornvat and illustrated by Isabel Roxas is so good. It’s all about voting, without ever being didactic. A great introduction for kids…and maybe some adults? (Register to vote!)

• As someone who forever says her favorite book is Amos and Boris by William Steig, I felt a deep instant love for Travis Jonker and Matthew Cordell’s The Ship in the Window, which is another mouse-captains-a-boat picture book, and just as lovely and adventurous.

• I will admit I didn’t read the adult novel Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder earlier because the raw meat on the cover grosses me out, but then I saw it’s being made into a movie, and thought, sure, why not, and wow, I really loved it. It’s about modern motherhood through the lens of artmaking, myth, and societal expectations, and is a weird and wild ride.

Given the poll results from a week ago, the preferred time for a wrap-up zoom talk for the Short Story Project is Friday, October 13 (ooooh! spooky!) at 11am Eastern time. I hope you can make it! Let's talk about how the Short Story Project went, and how we might carry it forward. I will tell you that I fully planned on writing this week that I'm traveling in California, and that I haven't done that at all, and I decided this morning that that's totally fine. I think I could have decided that having a hotel room to myself gave me uninterrupted time and I would use that for writing, OR I could decide that I'd see redwoods and otters and pelicans (things I can't see where I live) and not worry about getting writing done. (I could do both, I suppose, but I also want to sleep.) I did print out a short story and bring it all the way across the country with me, though, so I do feel like a teensy bit of a failure for not writing a draft. (Maybe I still will?) We can talk about this on the zoom!

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Note: This post is older, and, therefore, some of the links may no longer be current.

Hello, and welcome to the final week of The Short Story Project! I have heard from many of you that you are writing and outlining new stories, and that is thrilling. I love that we are making brand new stories together. I’ve written three drafts so far that felt like they arrived out of nowhere, which is the beauty of a project like this. By playing with words and courting creativity, a story arrives that otherwise would not have shown up.

I spent the summer reading short stories for this project. I wanted to find short stories that most of you probably hadn’t read before. The biggest criterion really was that they had to be available to read for free. 

After I read each story, I made notes of themes, subjects, and feelings. I had this idea that weekly themes would naturally emerge and be neatly aligned with typical picture book themes. Pretty quickly I realized this wasn’t going to happen.

After I narrowed down the short stories (I read twice as many as ended up in this project), themes did begin to emerge, which you have been following along with every week (if you joined The Short Story Project late, you can see all the posts here). After the first three weeks, I was left with five more stories, which did not at first have a clear theme. All I knew is that I loved them and wanted to include them. And then I realized that was mostly because of their voice.

Voice! It’s something you hear agents and editors say they want, but there are no clear instructions on how to get there, because the method is something like “write a lot, and then vibe your way into it.” A way to get there (to vibe your way in) is to read a lot, notice when the writing voice is strong, and then figure out why it’s so strong — and a way to do that is by trying to write in the style of the story.

When I was writing this essay, I pulled a card from my favorite oracle deck, The Visionary Oracle, and I got “Cover Song.” This card is perfect for The Short Story Project. Here is what the guidebook says: “There is no artist that starts out without some copying. Do not be afraid of using something you’re inspired by as the jumping off point for creating something new, that’s how every artist has ever operated. You find your voice through the unique ways you diverge.”

Becoming a writer (or any kind of artist) is finding your voice, and being a writer (or any kind of artist) is honing and refining that voice until it is strongly and singularly yours. You get there is through play (as I talked about last week) and also by copying other people’s writing until you figure out what sounds like you.

You read a story that you love, and you riff on it, and try out the voice. It’s like the art school assignment of going to the museum and doing your best to copy a painting. You are trying things; you mimic styles, you try on the clothes and play dress up. But your ultimate goal is to find, clarify, and write in your own style. You write in the style of someone else, and it’s a way to play with voice in general until you figure out what feels right to you. 

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George Saunders tells the story in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain about how he was writing in other writers’ voices until he started playing, writing something just for fun, and that ended up being the best thing he’d ever written. Finally, after all that practice and riffing, he landed on his own voice.

There is a lot in the publishing business we can’t control, but we can control our own writing. We hone and strengthen our writing and our voice, and then it’s like we plant a flag in the dirt. Here is our space. Here is our voice. Your goal is to write and practice so much that the flag you have planted is large, singular, and recognizable. This doesn’t mean that you only write in one style, only one genre, or only one type of story. The opposite, actually: once your voice is strong and honed, you’ll be able to write across a broader range of stories, if you want to. The common factor is you, and as your voice strengthens and you get better as a writer, you will be able to play with all kinds of ways of writing.

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There is a great profile of Kate DiCamillo by Casey Cep in the New Yorker, and one thing that struck me was this: “DiCamillo is startlingly versatile…Some of her stories read like fables, stark and spare; others like the memoirs of mid-century children; still others like works of magical realism, ornate and strange.” She’s able to write with so much versatility because her writing voice is so strong. I thought too of Neil Gaiman talking on Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lessons podcast about how some writers are dolphins, who do the same trick over and over; and some are otters, who play and write whatever interests them at the moment. You may find your voice, and discover that what you like to write is singular, and similar. Maybe you are someone who writes a series of books that are about the same characters, and you love writing them, and you are overflowing with ideas for dozens more stories in the series. That is an amazing way to be a writer, honestly (and probably slightly less frustrating to a publisher).

Or maybe you are someone who has written historical fiction about a tree, a nonfiction book about gnats, a rhyming book about pudding, and a complex adult fantasy series. That’s cool too. I don’t know if this type of writer annoys a publisher or not. My guess is probably not. A publisher wants a writer who writes, and whose stories are great. It doesn’t really matter what they’re all about. Your only job is to write those great stories. I know. So much pressure. But notice I didn’t say every story has to be great. I personally plan on many of the stories being not-so-great, as they guide me to the great ones. (And then, after thanking the not-so-great ones, I put them in a folder that no one will ever see.)

The point is, playing with different voice will let you figure out how you want yours to be. Your voice will continue to grow and change as you write more. During 2020, every picture book I wrote was dark and tragic, because everything around me felt dark and tragic. I felt dark and tragic. It was unsettling to be writing in this voice that was so unfamiliar. I did end up revising those stories to be not quite so maudlin, but I let myself write them. I don’t think there’s any sense in thinking, “but how will this fit into my brand?” if what you’re doing is following your creative intuition and writing what feels right to you.

So, this week, notice voice – in these stories, in our own stories, and in the writing you love. There is no harm in trying out a new writing voice to see how it feels. Mimicry can be a way to understand the mechanics of the stories you love, and then, when you are more aware of the story ingredients that make it work, you can rebuild it using your own tools to get to that writer voice that is yours alone.

The stories:

• “Three is a Rational Number” by Michelle Finn Johnson

  The complicated algebra of junior high school bus relationships.

• “Pee on Water” by Rachel B. Glaser

  A poetic and dreamy short history of the world, and of toilets.

• “The Knowers” by Helen Phillips

  In the future, technological advances allow people to learn their death day, if they want to. One person in this story knows, and her partner chooses not to know.

• “The Great Awake” by Julia Armfield

  People in cities stop sleeping when their Sleep disconnects from them, as separate creatures who loom in the corners, silently. 

• “The School” by Donald Barthelme

  This short story, along with the Lorrie Moore one (“How to Become a Writer") from Week One, are the two older ones in this project. This one is from 1974. I had to include it, though, in case any of you hadn’t read it, because it’s so incredibly great.

If you haven’t voted yet on the best time to have our end-of-project Zoom, you can comment below to let me know what times work for you (you can see the options at the end of last week’s post). We’re going to talk about how you can do some version of this project going forward, and also probably creativity in general. Ask me anything!

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Note: This post is older, and, therefore, some of the links may no longer be current.

Last week I mentioned that, with a project like this one, my intention is not necessarily to write a banger of a picture book that might get a book deal, but a draft, from start to finish. It might be bad. It might go nowhere. You may ask, why bother?

Because writing for fun makes us better writers.

When I started writing picture books, I believed deeply in every idea I wrote up into a draft.1 Each idea that made it into a completed draft and through a few revisions gave me that feeling of “maybe this is it, maybe this is the one.”

I’ve learned that the dance of being a writer is moving between that place of “maybe this is the one” and “what even is this mess?” The middle place is where revisions happen.

I do think a long and fruitful career can be built out of only working on stories I have great hope in. I could very well keep coming up with ideas from my walks outside and then sitting down to see if they turn into anything. But I also know my process enough now to know I need regular jolts into new and unexpected directions. Fun directions.

I realized at the end of last year that the reason nothing I was writing seemed quite good enough was because I was in the process of leveling up as a writer, and I knew the way to make that happen was to play – to write stories for fun.

My goal for 2023 was to play. Right now it’s midway through September, and let me tell you that I have failed so far at reaching that goal. Part of my reason for doing The Short Story Project at all is to force myself to accomplish this goal before the year runs out. I have written a lot this year, but it has all been like checking an item off of my daily list. None of it has been to just goof around and play with words and with stories.

When I expect every story to have the potential to be great, it puts a lot of pressure on the story. I certainly understand the process—I know first drafts start out terrible. I know my job is to get the story out however I can and see if there’s something good to expand on, some glimmer that hints at what the story could be. I find, though, that when I expect every story to be sale-able, it’s like I’m yelling at it, “Where is the glimmer, dammit?”

So sometimes writing is balancing between “this is the best thing I’ve ever written” and “wow this needs so much work,” and sometimes it’s walking between “this is only for me” and “this unexpected glimmer is actually good.”

I have had so much fun working on these drafts the past two weeks. The process of writing silly picture books that are primarily for play feels good to me. It fills me with joy. It feels necessary – exactly the creative balm my writer self needs right now.

I had a thought: “Why don’t I do this every week? It doesn’t take that long, really, to read a short story and then write something, and this kind of regular playfulness with story is exactly what I need to do to write better stories.”

Immediately my Inner Critic interrupted, “That would be frivolous.”

To which I responded (in my journal) (although out loud would have been just as good): “Yes, that’s the point.” 

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Being frivolous is not a bad thing, it’s a blessing. Especially for a picture book writer, but I’d say for any writer. Being playful, carefree, and unserious is a great way to get good writing done. I am extremely serious about telling stories and the art form that is the picture book, but the stories themselves can be light, and my approach to the writing process can be frivolity all the way down. I will play with stories and try new things.

You’ve probably heard Ray Bradbury’s advice to write a short story a week, saying that if you write 52 short stories a year, there’s no way they will all be bad. Some of them will even be great. Even now, writing this, I can feel my resistance. I couldn’t really write 52 picture books a year. That’s preposterous. But…why? Why can’t I do that? They don’t all have to be amazing. But the math of practice says that some of them will be. Maybe even a lot of them. 

Writing is fun! It’s hard, but it’s fun. We get to make things up. We get to play with words. We get to transfer our emotions and our thoughts across time and space. We get to have an idea and make it into a solid, tangible thing. That’s magic. Of course it’s fun. Of course it’s play. 

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Appropriately, then, this week’s stories are all about fun. They are silly, they are serious, they all involve a lot of play.

Many of this week’s stories use animals as metaphors for love and relationships. Which is notable, I suppose. What I take from that is the reminder that there are many ways to write a story about the same thing. And also that I didn’t realize this fact, how similar these stories are, until I was rereading them for this post. Which is to say: write the story you want to write, and don’t worry if it’s too similar to other ones out there. 

The stories:

• “A Friend” by Kevin Wilson

  A laugh-out-loud story about a girl bringing home a new kid, who is wearing a denim vest but no shirt, is really good at stacking because he went to stacking camp, and is named Harbell Harbell.

• “A Token of My Affection” (pp 36-37 in the PDF that links to) by Elise Johnston

  A woman begins exchanging gifts with a possum, over her husband’s objections.

• “The Swan as a Metaphor for Love” by Amelia Gray

  Some facts about swans, which do not portray swans in the best light. The whole story rests on the title.

• “Gator Butchering for Beginners” by Kristen Arnett

  It is difficult work to butcher an alligator. And also to break up with someone.

• “Crazy Glue” by Etgar Keret

  What if the way to fix everything in your life was with extremely strong glue?

• “Mother’s Day Card from a Wooden Object” by Ben Pester

  Hilariously, the title of this story tells you everything you need to know.

Let’s have a Zoom!

Zoom schedule! Let’s plan that time when we can talk together about how to keep the momentum from this project going forward, or how to kickstart the momentum if we didn’t quite get it. I am traveling next week (Santa Cruz, CA area – any recommendations?), so let’s plan for the week after that. Tell me below what days and times work for you.

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Note: This post is older, and, therefore, some of the links may no longer be current.

Welcome to the Short Story Project, Week Two! How did last week go? Did you write a draft? Or are you reading this with feelings of woe, as you have no draft written? Let’s talk about that.

I imagine there are actually quite a few of you who did not write a picture book draft last week. Perhaps you did not even read one of the short stories. You saw them, considered them, knew you wanted to write, but then couldn’t find the time. 

We’ve all been there.

I was thinking recently about resistance. If you’ve read The War of Art, you know that the whole book is about resistance and creativity, and how the reason you aren’t getting your creative work done is because of this internal resistance, this fear. When I go to spin class every morning, there is talk about a different kind of resistance – the resistance wheel on the bike. Sometimes we dial it up, sometimes we turn it down. The idea, though, is to gradually increase the resistance, because working with that resistance makes us stronger. So it’s not so much about getting rid of resistance, but about acknowledging and working with it.

You have this internal resistance stopping you from doing the work, because you know it will be hard. But if we think of that resistance like turning up the resistance on a stationary bike, then it’s something you work with, something that makes you stronger. Yes, it’s hard. It’s supposed to be. You don’t get stronger (in exercise or in writing) by doing nothing.

If you didn’t write a picture book last week, is there something in you that is saying it won’t be good enough? (Or maybe you truly had a busy week! But did you? Really? Maybe yes but also, maybe not.) 

You might think, ok, this internal resistance is one thing, and then I have this whole other pile of external resistance factors coming at me. You might be wondering how to work through the voice of your inner critic, AND the daily fires that alight around you. There isn’t a difference between those, though, not really. They’re all resistance. They are all something you need to learn to work with, and once you learn how to do that, you will be stronger.

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You should assume your picture book draft won’t be good enough. I am embarking on this picture book writing project with the assumption that none of the picture book drafts I write will be good enough to submit to my agent. I don’t mean because they’re first drafts. I mean because the ideas themselves won’t be good enough. I might revise them a bunch, and still, they won’t be good enough.

But if this year’s project is anything like previous years, what will happen is that the stories I write that are inspired by short stories will lead to another picture book, and that one will be the one that is good. 

When I was getting started as an author, before I had an agent, I spent a lot of time playing with story ideas. I was still figuring out what my writing style was and what sorts of stories I wanted to write. I wrote a lot of picture books that weren’t good. But all of those served as stepping stones to becoming a better writer, and writing better stories.

Once I walked through some of these arbitrary doorways (getting an agent, having books published), I felt like I was supposed to have arrived in a place where everything I wrote was able to be revised into something that could become a book. That everything that flowed from my pen was a seed that would grow into a beautiful flower. 

I forgot that the way to be a better writer, a better seed-grower, a better anything, is to try, and to fail. A lot. To high five the resistance and then write something terrible, but that something terrible is new. With this project, I’m writing a kind of story I haven’t written before (because it’s inspired by a short story that is written in a style very unlike mine). Of course it’s terrible! IT’S A BABY. It is this new way of writing, this new kind of story, and there’s no way it’s going to be good enough yet. 

So, if you didn’t write a picture book draft last week, don’t worry about it. Acknowledge it, and move forward. Now, with this week’s short stories, you have even more to choose from. Choose one, any one of them, read it, and write something. Tell yourself it’s ok if it’s terrible. Maybe even tell yourself you’re going to write something terrible on purpose. Make yourself laugh with how truly terrible the story you write is. And then you do your job as a writer, which is to make it better.

I wrote all of the above last week, before I had written a draft myself. On Wednesday, I had it on my calendar. I knew which story I wanted to write a response to (“Sleeping Beauty”) and I had an idea for what the story would be. The first thing I did when I got to my desk on Wednesday, though, was not to sit down and write a draft. First, I responded to an email (an important email, but still). Then I ordered two pairs of shoes (important shoes? sure). Then I went to the library to return books and pick up an inter-library loan that was waiting for me. And then, finally (thoroughly annoyed with myself), I went back home and got to work.

I reread the story. I took notes. I free-wrote some ideas. Then I wrote three-quarters of a draft, and at that point, suddenly, a completely different story emerged because of four lines I wrote, and then I free-wrote about what that story might be. So I started again, at the beginning, and wrote that story. Parts of it made me laugh, and that’s always a good sign. Will it turn into something more? Who knows. I hope so. All I know is that I never would have gotten to that new story if I hadn’t sat myself down and started writing.

This week’s theme is Foundational Myths and Everyday Magic. We’ll be reading stories where threads of magic are woven in, or where folktales and fables are understood to be actual. There is a long history of picture books documenting fables, myths, and magic, from mermaids and monsters, to trolls and rainbow goblins. Now it’s your turn to give it a try.

The stories:

• “The Faery Handbag” by Kelly Link

  Genevieve searches for her Grandmother Zofia’s magical handbag, which holds a world.

• “Ogres of East Africa” by Sofia Samatar
  A man in 1907 catalogs local ogres, as well as all the interactions with the intriguing Mary, an ogre expert.

• “Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor

  A woman in an abusive marriage plays her guitar for a killer robot spider.

• “A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle” by Daisy Johnson

  Salma moves to her father’s house, and, as she becomes a teenager, the house has certain feelings about what she’s doing and who she’s inviting in.

• “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado

  A woman tells her story through the lens of folktales and myths. Read this especially if you were haunted by “The Green Ribbon” from In a Dark, Dark Room. 

• “Life Hack” by Patricia Callahan

  A tormenting bully dies, but the echoes of the torments remain, along with a witch (or maybe not) a doll that comes alive (or maybe not), and pumpkins.

• “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” by Anjali Sachdeva

  A woman loves a man, a man loves a mermaid, a mermaid loves a shark. The shark, we assume, loves no one.

So now it’s time for you to choose one of these stories, read it, and let your imagination give you something to write in response to it. Don’t overthink it! Now is not the time you write something to send to anyone in publishing. These four weeks, your job is to write things that are only for you. Let yourself be inspired. Remember that you have access to your inspiration at any time. Right now. It helps if you feed it, though. That’s what this project is about, it’s a way of feeding your inspiration.

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How’d you do last week? If you wrote something in response to one of the short stories, which one did you choose? Do you have a thing you do that lets you know that you have reached the far edges of your procrastination? For me, it’s always browsing for shoes. Once I start putting together custom Converse options, I know it’s time to shut the browser window and write something. Leave a comment below. I am aware of a login problem with the forum on my website (a bad “I’m not a robot” check box situation — maybe we’re all robots?) and am working to fix it asap. I’ll leave a note in the comments for this post when it’s fixed.

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Note: This post is older, and, therefore, some of the links may no longer be current.

Welcome to the official start of the Short Story Project. I’m glad you’re here! I’m also glad I’m here. I love writing picture books and I love stretching beyond the sorts of stories I’ve written before. 

Here is the schedule for the Short Story Project themes:

• September 12: Jobs and Occupations

• September 19: Foundational Myths and Everyday Magic

• September 26: Fun!

• October 3: Voice (and finding your own)

Each week, I’ll give you a list of short stories and their links, along with a brief description. It’s possible you and I have different taste in stories. I included a story if it did one of these things: made me feel something, surprised me, I couldn’t stop thinking about it (even if I wasn’t sure I liked it), or I wanted to immediately adapt it into a picture book. 

You can choose whether to read one short story or more than one. Go with your gut. Choose a story you have a reaction to. Maybe a description will make you say, “Yes! That!” or “Ew, what?” Start with those stories.

Here is how this process works for me. You can, of course, adapt it to your own process. But two elements are important: allowing yourself undistracted work time, and noticing what you notice.

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1. I read the story uninterrupted. I either print it out (sometimes this is difficult, if the story is very long or formatted oddly) or read it online with focused-reading elements in place (I pull the tab out into its own browser and close all other tabs, or I turn on Freedom).

2. If I’m reading a printout, I might make a mark in the margin if a particular part stands out, but for the most part, I don’t take notes while I’m reading the story, but take notes after. I go to the couch with my notebook and free write. What parts did I like? What parts didn’t I like? What part stood out the most? These are all highly subjective. I’m not taking notes to write a detailed analysis. I’m noticing what my feelings are after reading it. Most of the time, I end up writing a picture book riffing on what I liked the most. But if I really didn’t like the story, that’s interesting too. If I hated it, why? What did I hate? Did it fill me with dread in a way that made me uncomfortable? Did I think it was poorly written, and if so, why? Although I like to get inspired by things I like rather than things I don’t, sometimes it does happen, that I don’t like a story, and that’s interesting.

3. I think about how I could take the elements that stood out to me and translate them to a picture book. If I liked the relationship between the characters, what would that relationship be like if the characters were children? (The elements of what make a relationship work or not work are fairly universal.) If I liked the feeling I got while reading it, what kind of picture book would evoke the same feeling? If the structure is interesting, what would the picture book version of that be? If the story is about someone who befriends a supposedly-killer robot monster during a time of hopelessness, what would that be in a picture book? (That short story is coming up in Week Two.)

4. I reread the story, now looking specifically at how the elements I liked work in it. In this reading, since I know what’s going to happen, I look more closely at the language. Often I notice things I missed the first time. Now I take notes. I note beautiful passages, and think about why they’re beautiful. I note particularly well-done bits – where there is nuance and layer in the language, or the tension builds in a cool way, or any parts where I can see the weight of a particular sentence. Short stories, like picture books, put a lot of weight and importance on the language and words, because there isn’t much space.

5. I write the picture book, long hand, in my notebook. I do my best to get all the way through to the end. If I get stuck, I free write, right there in the notebook, about what I think should happen next, what I want to happen, what I want it to feel like. And then I keep going.

Sometimes that first draft is as far as I get. For whatever reason, it’s not working. I might keep thinking about it, might think more about why it is or is not working, and try again. If I do like the direction the story is going in, I do a revision by typing it up, and then I print it out, and revise from the printout (this is the method George Saunders uses, which he talks about in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain). 

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This week’s stories circle around the theme of Jobs and Occupations. What do characters do with their days? How do they get money? How do they spend their time? Is it a dream job, or not? Picture book versions of these show up as things like A Sick Day for Amos McGee or What Do People Do All Day? In stories for grownups, the question of a job might be an existential one for the characters. For kids, it might be exploratory (what do you want to be when you grow up?) or a current identity – your place in the class line (Caboose) or an extracurricular activity. 

The stories:

• “Sorry Dan, But It’s No Longer Necessary for a Human to Serve as CEO of This Company” by Erik Cofer
  Dan is fired and replaced by an allegedly personable robot in this McSweeney’s piece.

• “How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore
  An all-too-relatable classic about, yes, how to become a writer. Short answer: it’s not easy.

• “Sleeping Beauty” by Laura Demers
  A woman whose job is to dress as Disney princesses for kid parties finds herself wearing the wrong princess costume at an adult’s birthday celebration.

• “The Wife of the Lion” by Hernan Diaz

  Written in the style of an article, this is about a writer whose life and work eclipsed everyone else in his orbit.

• “Orientation” by Daniel Oruzco
  A first-day-on-the-job orientation. Pay attention. It’s complicated.

• “Mnemosyne, Missouri” by Sahalie Angell Martin
  One day, a woman realizes that she can remember everything.

Your assignment is to write one picture book draft. You might revise and polish it, or you might leave it in its first draft stage, but I strongly encourage you to write a draft through to the end. It might be terrible.1 That’s ok. You can fix it later. For now, at least get to the end.

Can you write more than one? Sure, of course. Can you not write one? I mean, yes. This is your project. There won’t be a grade. But if you’re here because you want to create something, why not do it? You can carve out 45 minutes to write a first draft. Maybe it will be the start of an amazing story. Maybe you’ll have a breakthrough. You’ll definitely learn something about yourself as a writer in the process. 

You can comment on Substack, or! You can head over to the forum on my website. Fancy, I know. I was looking into ways we could have more of a conversation about all of this, and when I think about places like Slack or Discord, it seems like you might also get distracted by other forums you are part of. I don’t want to invite distraction. So there’s a private forum on my website now. IMPORTANT: Mercury is still retrograde, and also I’ve never built a forum before. Please let me know if something isn’t working. Let me know if there are features you think I should and could add. Let me know if there are forum topics you want on there. You’ll be glad to know I paid extra to give us the ability to attach gifs and send each other private messages. That seemed important. At the very least, I’m thinking the forum will be a more organized way for us to share our thoughts. But also, be patient with it2 as we all figure it out. 

At the end of the four weeks, there will be a Zoom where we can talk about how this process was, and how to use what we learned going forward. I haven’t set a date for it yet because I’m traveling at the beginning of October. We’ll figure out a time in the next few weeks.

Ok! Let’s get to it! Choose a short story, read it, absorb it, then filter it through your own personal picture book blender and see what you come up with. 

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I started intentionally reading more short stories, looking for clues. What makes a good story? What takes my breath away? What narrative tricks make me smile? What stories don’t I like, and why? 

Almost immediately, I started getting glimmers of picture books inspired by the stories I was reading. Maybe a friendship between two characters would be complex and interesting – two 20-somethings who are best friends but also sort of mean to each other, and with a thread of love underneath it all. And I’d think, what would this relationship be if they were in first grade? And I’d try to write it. 

Short stories are also often extremely weird, or can play with unusual structure – tricks that might get incredibly tedious over the course of a novel, but are perfect in a shorter form. Those are inspiring too.

And so I’d like to invite you to join me in a short story study, where we read short stories, and then write picture books in response. This project will be behind the paywall, which is $5 a month or $50 a year, though the first 14 days are a free trial. (If you like these sorts of projects, there are more like it, so consider sticking around.)

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TO BE CLEAR: I am not (I can’t emphasize this enough: truly not) telling you to plagiarize. DO NOT write an exacting picture book version of the short story. If you copy and get in trouble, that’s on you. As says in Steal Like an Artist, “We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism — plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.”

So we will read these short stories and see what element we want to copy and try out in a picture book story of our own. We will read these short stories and think about what we like, or what we don’t. Maybe you are interested in the structure, or in the relationships, or in the weird magic. Maybe you love the voice. Or maybe you don’t like the ending, and you think, “what do I wish the ending was?” And then you can write that ending, but how it would work for a picture book, and then write the beginning and middle of the picture book that would go with that ending.

This Short Story Project will go on for four weeks. Each week, there will be a loose theme, and 4-7 short stories. All of the short stories are available for free on the internet. Your job is to read one (or more) of the stories, and think about how you would translate that into something that works in a picture book.

Ideally, you’ll write one draft a week. Will they all be winners? Who knows! Even if they’re not, you’re getting practice and courting your creativity, and that’s always good.

To start, in this pre-week, let’s look at three flash fiction stories. You are welcome to discuss them in the comments. Or you can print them out, take them to a coffee shop, and think about how you might turn them into a picture book.1

Let’s look at a story, and then I’ll walk through how I’d think about turning that into a picture book.2 The first story is “The Definition of Us” by Christina Dalcher. (Go read it now, it will only take a minute.) 

What stands out to me with “The Definition of Us" is the dictionary format/structure, and how I might construct similar unusual structures in picture books. 

A common “unusual” structure in a picture book is an alphabet book, and the most memorable recent ones put a story into that structure (Like Fraidyzoo or Z is for Moose). This is making me think how I could put a full story into a dictionary page. How would a character or plot move through the list of definitions? Consider the wordplay in this story. What word like “cast” could mean different things in a picture book?  It might be cool to have build, builder, building, rebuild. Or even a word like “jam” which could mean strawberry preserves, being stuck, or shoving into a tight space. 

Would there be a character? Is the character defining things for us? Why?

And a story comes to me: a character talks about being in a jam, and another isn’t sure what this means, and looks it up in the dictionary, but isn’t sure which definition is the one that works. They reply with a letter and a jar of jam. Maybe they point out the seal on the letter (or on the jam jar) and, confused, the recipient looks “seal” up in the dictionary, and isn’t sure which definition is right. Or– well there would have to be more confusion in this, maybe. I would go through an actual dictionary, and find fun words that kids would know but that have wildly different meanings. I like the idea of two characters running to their dictionaries to figure out what their friend is talking about. And then maybe, at the end, they make their own dictionary, like a lexicon of friendship. 

This isn’t the best idea ever. It’s not the sort of idea that comes to me out of the blue. But I like the idea of playing with the words and having the reader understand something that the characters do not. It’s enough to go on, to start playing around with. And maybe this is the sort of story where, during revision, the dictionary element falls away completely, and it’s just about these characters who show up. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t know until I started writing. (Which is the point!)

Here are two more flash stories for you to think about.

“Curriculum” by Sejal Shah also has an unusual structure (a list of courses).

“This is How You Fail to Ghost Him” by Victoria McCurdy is more straightforward (not an unusual structure, unless you count the brevity of flash fiction as unusual). You probably won’t write a story about elementary school characters meeting on a dating app, but there is something about making friends when you have failed to find your one true friend up until now, and you each tell a story you think you should tell. It’s also second person POV, which can be fun to play around with. 

Every week on Tuesday I’ll post the new short stories for paying subscribers. There will be three to five short stories each week. There will be a forum on my website so we can discuss all of the stories. Yes, you can still comment on Substack, but the forum allows us to be better organized, to upload photos and gifs, and to private message each other (maybe you’re looking for a critique partner?). At the end of the four weeks, we’ll have a zoom where we can talk about how it went, and ideas for how we can keep being inspired going forward.

Because all of these stories are available for free on the internet, some of them are a reading experience full of moving internet ads. These are the sacrifices we make. 

Also: these are stories for grownups. We will be putting them into the gears of our brains and turning them into stories for children, but do know that many of these stories have curses, violence, and sex. That’s a thing that happens in grownup worlds.

My goal for this is for us to play with exploring types of stories we haven’t written before. It’s incredibly useful (I find) to consider story elements that intrigue you, and then figure out how you would use them, ultimately revising into a very “you” story – a story only you can write. Even if none of the drafts you write turn into a submittable manuscript, if you play with writing a draft every week, you will grow as a writer, I promise.

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Thoughts and Links

• I had to update the bio for my next picture book (Help Wanted: One Rooster), and I asked to take out the references to my social media handles, so it just says “Find Julie at her website at juliefalatko.com.” My editor said I was the third author in a week to ask for the social media links to be taken out of their bio. INTERESTING.

• My favorite bookstore (Print: A Bookstore) is consistently amazing on TikTok, but this Freaks and Geeks one is so good I might have to go buy more books (yeah, we all know I was going to go buy more books anyway). This is your reminder that if you ever want one of my books signed and/or personalized, order it from Print.

• “Every finished book is the outcome of a problem solving process, most of which can and should be hidden from the reader.” I could have pasted in a dozen other quotes from this post by about running as a metaphor for writing; that one seemed as good as any.

• I love this post from about looking at the creative routines of people you admire, and then maybe ignoring them entirely.

• The always-wise has some wise things to say about the importance of taking breaks.

• on our inability to notice the gradual changes around us.

• Something I won’t apologize for is my love of a nice dishtowel. We use them a lot and if they are a good size and look nice, it makes me happy. I recently discovered that my local independent fabric store sells dishtowel fabric on narrow rolls, so two sides are already hemmed (link is to a different fabric store that has more options). All I have to do is decide how long I want it to be, and hem the short ends (and add a hanging loop). It took me twenty minutes to sew, and that’s because I was deliberately going very slowly to make sure the stitches were straight. And it cost $5.35.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• The Skull by Jon Klassen feels like a layered and meaningful revelation of a book.

• Ramona read (an advance copy of) Like a Charm and then groaned and said, “I really hope this is the first in a series, but if there is, I’ll have to wait forever, because this one hasn’t even come out yet.” And then I read it and thought the same thing. It’s great.

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