If you are anything like me, you may find that your writing productivity ebbs and flows. You are excited about a story and obsessively work on it, and then the excitement slips, and your productivity slips with it. As Joshua Michael Shrei says on the Emerald podcast, clouds gather, and clouds disperse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other perks include Fail Better Club, subscriber-only essays, and discounts on my online courses.
The Short Story Project 2024, Week 0