Episode 017 - Story a Day with Julie Duffy
March 10, 2020
In this episode, I speak with Julie Duffy, founder and director of StoryADay.org, about creativity, mindset, the importance of community, and the strategies and tools you can use to write today, not someday.
Julie Duffy has blogged about the creative life and short stories since 2010. She is a columnist at WriterUnboxed.com. She speaks at writers’ groups and conferences about creativity and writing, and is a book coach for entrepreneurs and business writers.
Julie has written for Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Journal, was the genre columnist for Flash Fiction Chronicles, and was Director of Author Services at the world’s first author-focused print-on-demand publishing company.
Julie has written for Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Journal, was the genre columnist for Flash Fiction Chronicles, and was Director of Author Services at the world’s first author-focused print-on-demand publishing company.
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. This is Matty Dalrymple and my guest today is Julie Duffy. Hi, Julie, how are you doing?
Julie: Hi Matty. Great to be here.
Matty: Just as an introduction of Julie to our listeners, Julie Duffy is the founder and director of the creativity challenge storyaday.org where she has blogged about the creative life and short stories since 2010. She regularly talks at writers' groups and conferences about creativity and writing. Julie has written for Writer's Digest and Writer's Journal, was the genre columnist for Flash Fiction Chronicles, and is a columnist at WriterUnboxed.com. She was once upon a time the director of author services at the world's first author focused print on demand publishing company.
She's a book coach for entrepreneurs and business writers and continues to write short stories and novels. And she knits and juggles, although rarely at the same time, although I note that that doesn't say never at the same time, so that's very intriguing.
And as you'll be able to tell in a moment from her lovely accent, Julie is originally from Scotland, and if I'm not mistaken from near my ancestral home of Dalrymple, Scotland in Ayrshire. Is that right?
Julie: Indeed, indeed. I moved around a little bit when I was younger, but yeah, that's where I settled. I lived my formative years in Ayrshire, it was a pretty good place to grow up.
Matty: I would like to just start out with you giving an overview of what Story a Day is and what prompted you to found it.
Julie: Story a Day is an annual challenge. It started as Story a Day May back in 2010 and originally it was just a challenge to myself to write and finish a story every day for a month, which is kind of insane. But if I go back to where I was before that, I was staying at home with two young kids. It's not an intellectually stimulating environment and it certainly doesn't give you much free time for writing.
I kind of got out of the habit of writing, and then whenever I did sit down to write, it was this big pressure to do a good job. It became impossible to write and anytime I did start, I wouldn't finish things and they would just wander off in the middle. And I was aware of challenges.
I had tried challenges before, like 100words.net, which was write a hundred words a day for a hundred days. And some friends did Illustration Friday, and I think NaNoWriMo had been going for a number of years for that point. And I knew I couldn't take on a novel. Every year when NaNoWriMo came around, I would get envious and I'd be like, man, there's nothing for short story writers.
And then one year, I realized if there was nothing for short story writers, I needed to stop complaining about it and do something about it. So I launched Story a Day May. I thought up the idea in March and I was like, Oh, I want to do it right now. But then April was poetry month and I feel like the poets have so little, I hate to steal from them.
Story a Day May rhymed, and it was far enough away from NaNoWriMo that I thought it wouldn't interfere if anyone else wants to join me. I issued this challenge. I said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a story a day for a month in May. Obviously, they were going to be super short stories mostly, and the key thing for me was to make it public, because I know I'm an obliger. I am someone who does better when I have external accountability. I made it public and I put it out to a few friends online, and they told their friends and they told their friends. I'd slapped up a website, and by the time the 1st of May came around, there were 97 people who'd signed up for this challenge.
And since then it's just gone on and on. And now it's hundreds of people and thousands of people every year who sign up. And it's finish a story every day in May. And I don't require people to submit it anywhere. It's kind of you do it on your own. And actually I've always said from the very beginning, you make up your own rules.
If you know writing a story a day is insane and you're never going to be able to do that, and that's setting you up for failure. Then you can make your own rules at the beginning of the month and just say, okay, I'm going to write three days a week, or I'm going to finish a story a week, or whatever you need to push yourself beyond where you've been. That's what I encourage people to do. The challenge runs May and it runs in September, and it's a whole bunch of other stuff at the site as well that we can get into. But that's where it started. It started out of desperation and finding accidental community.
Matty: The community topic is one that I'm very interested in right now. Can you describe the Story a Day communities that have built up around that goal?
Julie: I started it off, in the early years just being blog comments. And then I had an online community that was a forum. And over time, the thing that I found that works really well is I started this Superstars group where people opt in and they pay a small fee and then they are involved beyond the challenge. I have writing sprints that we do on Zoom and we get together in this sort of virtual room where we're all looking at each other's faces and we sit and write, and I run those during the challenge. The first year I did that was a couple of years ago, and after the challenge was over, it was so effective and the people in that group who were seeing each other face to face were so much more connected and so much more motivated.
I noticed that these were the people who were finishing their stories, who were finishing the challenge, who were then revising their stories and going out and taking them out to the world, whether they were submitting them to publications and getting them published or self-publishing them or, you know, turning them into novels.
These people who turned up and connected with each other were the ones who were doing what they wanted to do. And they were the ones who were happiest. And even when they were frustrated, they knew they had a place to turn. I couldn't let it go. And I've continued that group throughout the year.
We get together once a month, so we still have blog comments at the site. There's a post I do on the first of the month where I encourage people to come and make their commitments for the month and then come back the next month and tell us how they got on and then and commit to something for the following month.
Because it's so easy for life to get in the way. And if you've got this place wherever it is, if you can turn up on a regular schedule and say to people, Oh yeah, I said I was going to do this. And if you're checking in once a month, it's like having your new year every month to check in on your resolutions and see what your goals were and have the sense that other people are not just watching you instead of judging you, cause it's not really that, it's more that they're seeing you and they're witnessing what you're promising to yourself. So, I have found that whatever you can do to strengthen your ties to other writers is fantastic for helping you to make progress.
Matty: Do you feel that there's a difference in how you do that if you have the opportunity to connect in person, like in person writer's group meetings versus using a virtual forum like a Zoom meeting? Can you talk about the pros and cons of those?
Julie: Although I'm very much an introvert, I'm a huge fan of getting together in the same room with people if you possibly can.
I've had writing friends online and other types of friends online since the early nineties, and it just makes a huge difference when you are in the same room as them and maybe you sit down and have a meal with them or something. And that really is a wonderful way to deepen the connection.
In the absence of an ability to do that, these Zoom meetings, these like face to face video conferences, are also wonderful because you can have a conversation with someone and you can see whether they're, I mean, you can hear on the phone if somebody's smiling, kind of, but when you're having this back and forth, and you can see when someone's about to leap in with an idea and you just get a sense of who they are so much more.
I loved the early days when there were forums and you could sort of go in and leave comments and form your thoughts carefully and present this best version of yourself in a recent comment, but as time has gone on, I've really come to appreciate the spontaneity and the willingness to be silly and the willingness to say stupid things and make mistakes and say the wrong thing and see someone reacts and apologize and go, "Oh, wait, no, tell me what I did. What do I need to know? What did I say wrong?" That kind of thing. There's a lot of lessons to be learned there. I like real life groups because they get you out of the house, they force you to turn up, usually on a regular schedule.
The downside of in-person groups in your own personal area is that it can be a little limited because you go to a group and all the writers in the area who are free that night are going to come, and that can be wonderful because there's cross pollination and you learn about stuff that you would never have learned about if you stayed in your bubble.
But on the other hand, making deeper connections in that kind of group tends to take a little longer because you don't have a specific thing in common apart from writing. Whereas if you come to a Story a Day meeting, you're with people who love to write short stories. And if you go to a science fiction writers' board, then you know that you're going to meet people who are writing the same kind of thing as you.
So there's pluses and minuses to both. You can make deep connections in both ways, but you have to be willing to put yourself out there and you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself sometimes.
Matty: You said that on the Zoom meeting, the people there are really just writing, but being together virtually to ask each other questions? Is that how the Zoom meeting is used? Or to share ideas or say, "What do you guys think about this?"
Julie: Somewhat, we have some chit chat at the beginning, and that's kind of, you know, you get to know each other. And we actually also have a Slack channel that we use, in between times. That tends to be informational as well as chatty. People will share places to submit, things like that. When we're on the calls, we tend to check in with each other on a more mindset level, you know, "How are you doing? How was that story that you submitted?" Stuff like that. And then what we do, which sounds really crazy, is that we actually do writing sprints right there on the video call, we'll mute the microphones, and I'll set a timer for 15 minutes. And then we all just sit and write.
And it can be like 12 people or you know, like all these little heads and everyone's facing a different way and somebody lighting is terrible and people are making faces and just the sense that you're there and you've put this on your calendar and you've said to your family, I'm going away to do my writing meeting. And then you sit down and if for this focused 15 minutes, everybody else is writing, there's a kind of positive peer pressure there and you are extremely motivated not to waste that time and not to flick over to Facebook and not to go down a research rabbit hole because it's just 15 minutes.
And then we're going to break. And I might say to people, what was your word count? Or I might say, you know, how did everyone get on? And especially during the challenge if everybody is pushing to get something finished, it'll get a little competitive.
People will be like, "Oh, I wrote 565 words," "I wrote 874 words." "How did you manage that?" and so we just check in with each other and then you're sort of spurred on and you're extremely motivated to focus on the writing for that short period of time. And we take a break. And then we'll go again.
And if any questions have come up for people while they're writing, like somebody might say, okay, I'm having problems, you know, punctuating this dialogue. Or, last time we did it, I know I have a couple of artists in my group and I was writing a scene with an artist. I said, "Oh, what does an artist's studio smell like?" And then they were able to give me that information and then we set the timer and I went off and wrote that stuff down and completely stole from them. It's really kind of ridiculous how productive you can be just sitting in a virtual space with other people and writing at the same time as them.
Matty: It's so interesting to hear that because I'm both ready to rush off and sign up for Superstars now and intimidated because the whole idea of word count is something that I have never been able to get my brain around. I heard somebody describe it, I think they called it intellection. Have you heard this term?
Julie: I have.
Matty: But the idea that there are people who have to write to get going. They write a thousand words and of those, 250 are good, and then they work with those and they throw the others out. And then there are people who muddle through in their mind. And then when they sit down, what they can capture is quite clean. And I think I'm the second one. Even though I'm writing full time now, I can go for a day or two without writing anything on the fiction side. But then when I sit down and do it, I've actually been writing in my head the whole time. The idea of having someone say "15 minutes: Go!" I'm pretty sure at the end of it, I would have nothing because it's just not how I'm used to working while still finding the community aspect of it super appealing.
Julie: Yeah. I think I probably work the same way as you. I'll noodle around with things, but sometimes I'll just sit and I'll write, you know--ideas for scenes, or sometimes people use the time for research. And then in between times is just a chance to sort of hang and share ideas and ask questions of each other and commune that way. And I also do a monthly workshop where we'll look at one aspect of writing or we'll study a short story and talk about what worked for us and what didn't.
We've done workshops on stuff like openings and endings or flash fiction, then I'll give them exercises to do right there in the class, and some people do them and some people don't. It's interesting because of all the different styles of writing.
Matty: The other thing that I think is very interesting that this is making me think of is that in forums, whether they're online or in person, and I'm thinking of let's say Facebook groups or writers' group meetings, there are often people who are looking for two different things. There are people who are looking for. "Can someone tell me if I need an ISPN for my ebook?" Really tactical, logistical information.
Julie: Yeah.
Matty: And then there are people who are looking for, " I started writing as a child because of my difficult relationship with my parents." You know, that kind of support. And when you mix those people, it can be problematic because each kind of person is frustrated by the other kind of person. Have you found that you have both those kinds of people in the groups you facilitate and if you do, how do you mediate that?
Julie: I have focused consciously on the creative side of Story a Day. And I think part of it came out of my frustration with early writing websites, which go very quickly from, here's how you have an idea, here's how you sit down to write, to here's how you become a world class bestseller and get your book published and blah, blah.
And it's all like this tiny short journey. And for certain people, if your aim when you set out is to publish and learn how to indy publish and stuff like that and that's your aim when you sit down, that's great. But you got to understand that that's your aim.
And for a lot of people, they just feel this urge to write. And if you're still struggling with the fact that you're not writing enough or you don't know how to get into writing or you're not confident in your writing, then you really need to not be thinking about the publishing part of it yet.
It's sort of putting the cart before the horse. You want to get yourself into a place where you're writing regularly and where you know what you're trying to achieve and that you're completing things and that you're turning up regularly.
So that's where I focused Story a Day very narrowly and all of my community stuff tends to be that. And because I come out of the self-publishing background myself and being in and around the edges of the traditional publishing industry as well, I have to stop myself from going there. I don't tend to get people in my group who are looking for tactics on the self-publishing end.
Having said that, Story a Day has been around for 10 years now, and there are a lot of people in the community who've made a lot of progress, and they're definitely at the point where they're publishing and they're thinking about the next steps. So there's some of that that tends to be more in that Superstars group, which is behind a wall at the site, it's not something that everybody's going to see, but it tends to be the kind of thing that comes up in our discussions with that smaller group. But again, I tend to point people elsewhere if they're looking for specific tactics.
Like for example, I'm really thrilled that you've released this book The Short Tack, because tactically, it's the next step for people who are writing and writing short or writing long and interested in experimenting. I can help them figure out how to write a short story, I can help them get more short stories written. But your book is kind of like the next step for them to say, okay, so I'm doing this, or I'm thinking about doing this really actively. What's my strategy? What am I going to use these short stories for? I mean, everybody struggles with mindset all the time, but my focus is on the mind set and to a certain extent some craft issues and getting people to teach themselves how to get the work done. So I don't focus on that stuff, so I'm thrilled that you are.
Matty: Excellent. We have a good team going here, and I found that my coauthor Mark Lefebvre, we're bringing some different perspectives, and we're starting to work on a second coauthored book, and it's even more pronounced there where he's going more for the mindset things. And after having spent several decades as a project manager in corporate America, I go right for the tactical stuff.
Julie: Oh, I envy those skills. I really do.
Matty: But it's nice to have both those perspectives and have that happy medium that we meet at rather than having it be all one or the other.
I agree. I was listening to, I think it was the Writers, Ink podcast, which is a pretty new podcast with J D Barker and J Thorn. I hope I'm attributing this to the right source, but one of them described the idea that, and I'm extrapolating a little bit, but the writer has to have three hats. You have the writing hat, you have the editing hat, and you have the business hat, and I think that what you're describing is that Story a Day is more the writing and editing hat and resources like Taking the Short Tack is more of the business hat. And one thing I really liked about that analogy is that it makes it clear that the writing and editing hats are two different hats, two different mindsets you have to bring, but it was also that you should be writing and editing in a sense independent of where that work is going to end up. And then when you've polished it, you step back and you decide what you want to do with it. Do you want to look for an agent for it or look for a publishing house for it? Or do you want to independently publish it? And I really liked that because it emphasized that the quality expectations should be the same.
You shouldn't be saying, well, I don't really need my editing hat because I'm going to self-publish this so who cares if there's some typos. You know, I like that it's a separate decision that you make, but the product that you're taking to whatever platform you choose is the same.
Julie: And that's an interesting perspective talking about the quality parts of it.
Cause I do think that at a certain point, once you are writing regularly and you're confident enough to want to take your writing out to the world, it doesn't hurt to start a project thinking about its eventual outcome. A lot of professional writers write stuff because this is what their publisher has said they want from them next. You know, I want you to write in this series, not that series. And I want you to write a short story for this anthology on this topic. So it's not that you can't think about the ultimate destination for your story before you get started. It's just that it's dangerous to get hung up on that. And I think it is important to think about what your readers will want at some point.
Once you're writing regularly, the next stage is to start thinking about reader expectation. You have to write to delight yourself first and to entertain yourself cause you're your first reader. But then if you want to take it to a wider world, it's okay to start thinking about, what do readers of urban fantasy want and what do readers of romance want? And readers of this particular publication want?
But that can become very discouraging if that's where you start. Because the advice is always, do you want to get published? Read the publications, see what they're looking for, and for a beginner writer, or somebody who's coming back to it or moving into a new genre or whatever, that can be very discouraging cause it seems so mechanical and so devoid of romance and creativity. It's not, but it can seem that way.
Matty: One of the episodes I just recently listened to--I even know the number, it's episode 154 of the Story a Day podcast--and it was the one about a system for delighting readers and editors so that you get great reviews and raving fans will share your work with other readers who also love what you're writing.
And that was a really timely podcast for me to listen to because I've been talking to fellow authors in my own community that I've built up, and we're having a lot of conversations about genre and genre expectations, and it's always something that I think about with my Ann Kinnear books because it's a paranormal theme, but it's not super paranormal. So I've been careful not to promote it to paranormal-specific platforms because I think that they would be expecting more.
And my speculation is it's resulted in me having a fair number of really good reviews on Amazon, for example, and high ratings. But that I'm limiting my audience by doing that.
Can you talk a little bit about what you would discuss with the people in your groups about considering those reader expectations, especially for the short stories they're writing and how they balance that against market potential.
Julie: And that's going back to your three different hats again. I think the decision to not market to paranormal heavy platforms is smart because you don't want to set up expectations that aren't there. So that's definitely your business hat. You know, that was kind of an unusual podcast for me to do. This community that's been around for a while, there's people in there who are looking for the next step. I was talking about, in that one, if I had a method for doing some market research and looking on Amazon and looking in publications and just trying to not worry about so much what the editor's saying, but looking for reader reactions and what they are getting excited about.
And you can do this even if you're writing short stories and you don't really know where to go to find similar short stories, you can do this yourself. You can treat yourself as the ideal audience for your story and pull a bunch of books off your shelf. Go back through short stories that you've read and look at which ones you absolutely loved and what they have in common. One of the things I really love about short stories is that genre isn't as important as the effect on the reader. I have several authors who I love, and I'll read anything that they write.
And some of their stories might skew speculative fiction, and some of them might be set in ancient Greece. And some of them might be set in Chernobyl in the 1980s, they could be all over the place and some of them might be a murder mystery. And what I tend to find is that there are commonalities running through the short stories that I love that I have identified by paying attention.
I would encourage my community to do this as well, to pay attention to what they love and then just to maybe do a little survey of what are the commonalities between the stories you love. I like stories that have something a little bit weird about them. Something unexplained.
There was a story I read about a Mr. Potato Head in a cupboard in a bed and breakfast that sprouted roots and became sentient and took over the whole place. And the story did not start out like that. You know, it was no indication that this was going to be some kind of weird fantasy story. It just went there.
And one of the stories I read last year that I loved was called "Joan of Arc Sits Alone in Her Dorm Room on a Saturday Night" or something like that <"Joan of Arc Sits Naked in her Dorm Room" by Rachel Engelman - see below for link>. It wasn't quite the title and it was Joan of Arc, but she was sitting in a contemporary dorm room worrying about stuff.
I went through a bunch of stories and wrote down the things that I like. I like things that jump around in time. I like things that leave gaps for me to fill in. I like stories that don't have a neat ending. In that case, my market research is what lights me up. And then I keep a document of that stuff so that if I'm writing a story and it's going off the rails, I can look at that and I can say, okay, where have I gone wrong? Oh look, I'm writing a really traditional narrative story that might as well be a novel. And that's not what I love about short stories. Therefore, I'm going to course correct.
For somebody else, it might be that they love traditional happily ever after short romance novels and therefore their short stories might be just like that. And that's fine too. My advice would be in researching genre, not to worry about genre so much, and in researching market to think about yourself first and what excites you and what delights you.
And then you can go out and start researching publications guidelines and things like that. And if you're not finding anything where your stuff fits, you have a couple of options. You can begin to self-publish and try and find your audience that way.
Keep doing what you're doing, as long as it makes you happy, and at some point, if you get frustrated, it means you're ready for the next thing. You're ready for a new challenge. If you're writing a ton of stories that you're really enjoying and you're sharing them with a small group of people and everyone's loving them, and that's fine, then great.
When you come to a point where you start thinking, I'd really love to be hitting a larger audience, I'd really like to get a traditional publishing deal. Then you have to start analyzing the market and saying, okay, which things am I willing to change to fit that market or to fit that economic need?
Which things am I willing to adjust or what new thing am I willing to learn in order to get my work out there? But I don't think you have to worry about any of that stuff if you are still having fun, still learning new stuff, still advancing on the step that you're on.
I hear you saying that you're worrying about limiting your market and at some point, you're going to say to yourself, how much does that matter to me and what am I willing to do about it?
Matty: Right. It matters more to me now that I'm writing full time than when I was doing it part time with a corporate job. But again, I don't want to disappoint people, so I'm happy to gradually increase my pool than suddenly start posting Facebook ads to the paranormal groups on Facebook.
Julie: We have so many options now because with the self-publishing option you could decide to dip your toe in that water, and we could all do this. You know, we can see something that looks interesting. And this is the beauty of short stories. You can try testing the market, you can say, "You know what? Maybe I'll write something that's more heavily paranormal. See if I enjoy it. See if people like it." You test it out. You don't spend five years on it, you know? We have so many options. It's a pretty cool time to be a writer.
Matty: Yes, and especially cool time to be a short story writer because you can do that experimentation without, as you're saying, sinking years into it, and share it with people and kind of get that immediate input.
Julie: And if you don't love what you experiment with, you course correct, if I can use your nautical analogies.
Matty: Yes, thank you! Well, that is great advice, Julie, and I know you have tons of resources online, so do you want to share with our listeners where they can go for more information about you and Story a Day?
Julie: Yes, come over to storyaday.org and check out everything on there, the podcasts and articles, and there's years and years of writing prompts.
And I say writing prompts, but what I usually do with the writing prompts is I'll suggest that you try something and then I'll give a bunch of tips on how you can implement that or how you might turn that idea into a story. I rarely post something like, you know, a werewolf is walking along a beach and meets a little girl, that's rarely the kind of prompts I give. But what I tend to do is talk about parts of writing or an approach to writing a short story or a short story form. And then I'll give a bunch of tips about that. So if anybody's ever feeling the urge to sit down and write and kind of stuck, and you've got that window of time, but you don't know where to go, hop on over to storyaday.org and look up the writing prompts and you will find tons of stuff there.
And I also have, which I think is quite timely with your book coming out, with The Short Tack, where you're talking about what people can do with short stories if they want to broaden their reach, I have a free giveaway at my site, and people can come to storyaday.org/indyauthor and I will put up there a short story framework, which I share with people. It's for those of you who are pantsers out there and are scared by the idea of a framework, I am totally with you, but what I've learned over the years is that stories, whether they're novels or short stories, tend to wander in the middle and you tend to forget what you wanted to write the story about in the middle as you complicate matters and it can go in many directions. This framework is just a way for you to brainstorm stories before you even get started.
Or when you get stuck in the middle, you can go through the framework and just brainstorm the character, the conflict, some complications that might happen in the middle and the mood or image that you might want to end on. And the aim is to cut down your writing time by creating a coherent vision for your story more than an outline.
I found it really helpful myself and a lot of people have told me that it has helped them get from beginning to end of the story in a much shorter time. And keep the story on track. And delight their readers because if you hit all the parts of a story that our reader is expecting, then you don't leave them frustrated at the end.
So they can come to storyaday.org/indyauthor and I'll put that up there for them.
Matty: Julie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. That was wonderful information.
Julie: Thanks for having me.
Julie: Hi Matty. Great to be here.
Matty: Just as an introduction of Julie to our listeners, Julie Duffy is the founder and director of the creativity challenge storyaday.org where she has blogged about the creative life and short stories since 2010. She regularly talks at writers' groups and conferences about creativity and writing. Julie has written for Writer's Digest and Writer's Journal, was the genre columnist for Flash Fiction Chronicles, and is a columnist at WriterUnboxed.com. She was once upon a time the director of author services at the world's first author focused print on demand publishing company.
She's a book coach for entrepreneurs and business writers and continues to write short stories and novels. And she knits and juggles, although rarely at the same time, although I note that that doesn't say never at the same time, so that's very intriguing.
And as you'll be able to tell in a moment from her lovely accent, Julie is originally from Scotland, and if I'm not mistaken from near my ancestral home of Dalrymple, Scotland in Ayrshire. Is that right?
Julie: Indeed, indeed. I moved around a little bit when I was younger, but yeah, that's where I settled. I lived my formative years in Ayrshire, it was a pretty good place to grow up.
Matty: I would like to just start out with you giving an overview of what Story a Day is and what prompted you to found it.
Julie: Story a Day is an annual challenge. It started as Story a Day May back in 2010 and originally it was just a challenge to myself to write and finish a story every day for a month, which is kind of insane. But if I go back to where I was before that, I was staying at home with two young kids. It's not an intellectually stimulating environment and it certainly doesn't give you much free time for writing.
I kind of got out of the habit of writing, and then whenever I did sit down to write, it was this big pressure to do a good job. It became impossible to write and anytime I did start, I wouldn't finish things and they would just wander off in the middle. And I was aware of challenges.
I had tried challenges before, like 100words.net, which was write a hundred words a day for a hundred days. And some friends did Illustration Friday, and I think NaNoWriMo had been going for a number of years for that point. And I knew I couldn't take on a novel. Every year when NaNoWriMo came around, I would get envious and I'd be like, man, there's nothing for short story writers.
And then one year, I realized if there was nothing for short story writers, I needed to stop complaining about it and do something about it. So I launched Story a Day May. I thought up the idea in March and I was like, Oh, I want to do it right now. But then April was poetry month and I feel like the poets have so little, I hate to steal from them.
Story a Day May rhymed, and it was far enough away from NaNoWriMo that I thought it wouldn't interfere if anyone else wants to join me. I issued this challenge. I said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to write a story a day for a month in May. Obviously, they were going to be super short stories mostly, and the key thing for me was to make it public, because I know I'm an obliger. I am someone who does better when I have external accountability. I made it public and I put it out to a few friends online, and they told their friends and they told their friends. I'd slapped up a website, and by the time the 1st of May came around, there were 97 people who'd signed up for this challenge.
And since then it's just gone on and on. And now it's hundreds of people and thousands of people every year who sign up. And it's finish a story every day in May. And I don't require people to submit it anywhere. It's kind of you do it on your own. And actually I've always said from the very beginning, you make up your own rules.
If you know writing a story a day is insane and you're never going to be able to do that, and that's setting you up for failure. Then you can make your own rules at the beginning of the month and just say, okay, I'm going to write three days a week, or I'm going to finish a story a week, or whatever you need to push yourself beyond where you've been. That's what I encourage people to do. The challenge runs May and it runs in September, and it's a whole bunch of other stuff at the site as well that we can get into. But that's where it started. It started out of desperation and finding accidental community.
Matty: The community topic is one that I'm very interested in right now. Can you describe the Story a Day communities that have built up around that goal?
Julie: I started it off, in the early years just being blog comments. And then I had an online community that was a forum. And over time, the thing that I found that works really well is I started this Superstars group where people opt in and they pay a small fee and then they are involved beyond the challenge. I have writing sprints that we do on Zoom and we get together in this sort of virtual room where we're all looking at each other's faces and we sit and write, and I run those during the challenge. The first year I did that was a couple of years ago, and after the challenge was over, it was so effective and the people in that group who were seeing each other face to face were so much more connected and so much more motivated.
I noticed that these were the people who were finishing their stories, who were finishing the challenge, who were then revising their stories and going out and taking them out to the world, whether they were submitting them to publications and getting them published or self-publishing them or, you know, turning them into novels.
These people who turned up and connected with each other were the ones who were doing what they wanted to do. And they were the ones who were happiest. And even when they were frustrated, they knew they had a place to turn. I couldn't let it go. And I've continued that group throughout the year.
We get together once a month, so we still have blog comments at the site. There's a post I do on the first of the month where I encourage people to come and make their commitments for the month and then come back the next month and tell us how they got on and then and commit to something for the following month.
Because it's so easy for life to get in the way. And if you've got this place wherever it is, if you can turn up on a regular schedule and say to people, Oh yeah, I said I was going to do this. And if you're checking in once a month, it's like having your new year every month to check in on your resolutions and see what your goals were and have the sense that other people are not just watching you instead of judging you, cause it's not really that, it's more that they're seeing you and they're witnessing what you're promising to yourself. So, I have found that whatever you can do to strengthen your ties to other writers is fantastic for helping you to make progress.
Matty: Do you feel that there's a difference in how you do that if you have the opportunity to connect in person, like in person writer's group meetings versus using a virtual forum like a Zoom meeting? Can you talk about the pros and cons of those?
Julie: Although I'm very much an introvert, I'm a huge fan of getting together in the same room with people if you possibly can.
I've had writing friends online and other types of friends online since the early nineties, and it just makes a huge difference when you are in the same room as them and maybe you sit down and have a meal with them or something. And that really is a wonderful way to deepen the connection.
In the absence of an ability to do that, these Zoom meetings, these like face to face video conferences, are also wonderful because you can have a conversation with someone and you can see whether they're, I mean, you can hear on the phone if somebody's smiling, kind of, but when you're having this back and forth, and you can see when someone's about to leap in with an idea and you just get a sense of who they are so much more.
I loved the early days when there were forums and you could sort of go in and leave comments and form your thoughts carefully and present this best version of yourself in a recent comment, but as time has gone on, I've really come to appreciate the spontaneity and the willingness to be silly and the willingness to say stupid things and make mistakes and say the wrong thing and see someone reacts and apologize and go, "Oh, wait, no, tell me what I did. What do I need to know? What did I say wrong?" That kind of thing. There's a lot of lessons to be learned there. I like real life groups because they get you out of the house, they force you to turn up, usually on a regular schedule.
The downside of in-person groups in your own personal area is that it can be a little limited because you go to a group and all the writers in the area who are free that night are going to come, and that can be wonderful because there's cross pollination and you learn about stuff that you would never have learned about if you stayed in your bubble.
But on the other hand, making deeper connections in that kind of group tends to take a little longer because you don't have a specific thing in common apart from writing. Whereas if you come to a Story a Day meeting, you're with people who love to write short stories. And if you go to a science fiction writers' board, then you know that you're going to meet people who are writing the same kind of thing as you.
So there's pluses and minuses to both. You can make deep connections in both ways, but you have to be willing to put yourself out there and you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself sometimes.
Matty: You said that on the Zoom meeting, the people there are really just writing, but being together virtually to ask each other questions? Is that how the Zoom meeting is used? Or to share ideas or say, "What do you guys think about this?"
Julie: Somewhat, we have some chit chat at the beginning, and that's kind of, you know, you get to know each other. And we actually also have a Slack channel that we use, in between times. That tends to be informational as well as chatty. People will share places to submit, things like that. When we're on the calls, we tend to check in with each other on a more mindset level, you know, "How are you doing? How was that story that you submitted?" Stuff like that. And then what we do, which sounds really crazy, is that we actually do writing sprints right there on the video call, we'll mute the microphones, and I'll set a timer for 15 minutes. And then we all just sit and write.
And it can be like 12 people or you know, like all these little heads and everyone's facing a different way and somebody lighting is terrible and people are making faces and just the sense that you're there and you've put this on your calendar and you've said to your family, I'm going away to do my writing meeting. And then you sit down and if for this focused 15 minutes, everybody else is writing, there's a kind of positive peer pressure there and you are extremely motivated not to waste that time and not to flick over to Facebook and not to go down a research rabbit hole because it's just 15 minutes.
And then we're going to break. And I might say to people, what was your word count? Or I might say, you know, how did everyone get on? And especially during the challenge if everybody is pushing to get something finished, it'll get a little competitive.
People will be like, "Oh, I wrote 565 words," "I wrote 874 words." "How did you manage that?" and so we just check in with each other and then you're sort of spurred on and you're extremely motivated to focus on the writing for that short period of time. And we take a break. And then we'll go again.
And if any questions have come up for people while they're writing, like somebody might say, okay, I'm having problems, you know, punctuating this dialogue. Or, last time we did it, I know I have a couple of artists in my group and I was writing a scene with an artist. I said, "Oh, what does an artist's studio smell like?" And then they were able to give me that information and then we set the timer and I went off and wrote that stuff down and completely stole from them. It's really kind of ridiculous how productive you can be just sitting in a virtual space with other people and writing at the same time as them.
Matty: It's so interesting to hear that because I'm both ready to rush off and sign up for Superstars now and intimidated because the whole idea of word count is something that I have never been able to get my brain around. I heard somebody describe it, I think they called it intellection. Have you heard this term?
Julie: I have.
Matty: But the idea that there are people who have to write to get going. They write a thousand words and of those, 250 are good, and then they work with those and they throw the others out. And then there are people who muddle through in their mind. And then when they sit down, what they can capture is quite clean. And I think I'm the second one. Even though I'm writing full time now, I can go for a day or two without writing anything on the fiction side. But then when I sit down and do it, I've actually been writing in my head the whole time. The idea of having someone say "15 minutes: Go!" I'm pretty sure at the end of it, I would have nothing because it's just not how I'm used to working while still finding the community aspect of it super appealing.
Julie: Yeah. I think I probably work the same way as you. I'll noodle around with things, but sometimes I'll just sit and I'll write, you know--ideas for scenes, or sometimes people use the time for research. And then in between times is just a chance to sort of hang and share ideas and ask questions of each other and commune that way. And I also do a monthly workshop where we'll look at one aspect of writing or we'll study a short story and talk about what worked for us and what didn't.
We've done workshops on stuff like openings and endings or flash fiction, then I'll give them exercises to do right there in the class, and some people do them and some people don't. It's interesting because of all the different styles of writing.
Matty: The other thing that I think is very interesting that this is making me think of is that in forums, whether they're online or in person, and I'm thinking of let's say Facebook groups or writers' group meetings, there are often people who are looking for two different things. There are people who are looking for. "Can someone tell me if I need an ISPN for my ebook?" Really tactical, logistical information.
Julie: Yeah.
Matty: And then there are people who are looking for, " I started writing as a child because of my difficult relationship with my parents." You know, that kind of support. And when you mix those people, it can be problematic because each kind of person is frustrated by the other kind of person. Have you found that you have both those kinds of people in the groups you facilitate and if you do, how do you mediate that?
Julie: I have focused consciously on the creative side of Story a Day. And I think part of it came out of my frustration with early writing websites, which go very quickly from, here's how you have an idea, here's how you sit down to write, to here's how you become a world class bestseller and get your book published and blah, blah.
And it's all like this tiny short journey. And for certain people, if your aim when you set out is to publish and learn how to indy publish and stuff like that and that's your aim when you sit down, that's great. But you got to understand that that's your aim.
And for a lot of people, they just feel this urge to write. And if you're still struggling with the fact that you're not writing enough or you don't know how to get into writing or you're not confident in your writing, then you really need to not be thinking about the publishing part of it yet.
It's sort of putting the cart before the horse. You want to get yourself into a place where you're writing regularly and where you know what you're trying to achieve and that you're completing things and that you're turning up regularly.
So that's where I focused Story a Day very narrowly and all of my community stuff tends to be that. And because I come out of the self-publishing background myself and being in and around the edges of the traditional publishing industry as well, I have to stop myself from going there. I don't tend to get people in my group who are looking for tactics on the self-publishing end.
Having said that, Story a Day has been around for 10 years now, and there are a lot of people in the community who've made a lot of progress, and they're definitely at the point where they're publishing and they're thinking about the next steps. So there's some of that that tends to be more in that Superstars group, which is behind a wall at the site, it's not something that everybody's going to see, but it tends to be the kind of thing that comes up in our discussions with that smaller group. But again, I tend to point people elsewhere if they're looking for specific tactics.
Like for example, I'm really thrilled that you've released this book The Short Tack, because tactically, it's the next step for people who are writing and writing short or writing long and interested in experimenting. I can help them figure out how to write a short story, I can help them get more short stories written. But your book is kind of like the next step for them to say, okay, so I'm doing this, or I'm thinking about doing this really actively. What's my strategy? What am I going to use these short stories for? I mean, everybody struggles with mindset all the time, but my focus is on the mind set and to a certain extent some craft issues and getting people to teach themselves how to get the work done. So I don't focus on that stuff, so I'm thrilled that you are.
Matty: Excellent. We have a good team going here, and I found that my coauthor Mark Lefebvre, we're bringing some different perspectives, and we're starting to work on a second coauthored book, and it's even more pronounced there where he's going more for the mindset things. And after having spent several decades as a project manager in corporate America, I go right for the tactical stuff.
Julie: Oh, I envy those skills. I really do.
Matty: But it's nice to have both those perspectives and have that happy medium that we meet at rather than having it be all one or the other.
I agree. I was listening to, I think it was the Writers, Ink podcast, which is a pretty new podcast with J D Barker and J Thorn. I hope I'm attributing this to the right source, but one of them described the idea that, and I'm extrapolating a little bit, but the writer has to have three hats. You have the writing hat, you have the editing hat, and you have the business hat, and I think that what you're describing is that Story a Day is more the writing and editing hat and resources like Taking the Short Tack is more of the business hat. And one thing I really liked about that analogy is that it makes it clear that the writing and editing hats are two different hats, two different mindsets you have to bring, but it was also that you should be writing and editing in a sense independent of where that work is going to end up. And then when you've polished it, you step back and you decide what you want to do with it. Do you want to look for an agent for it or look for a publishing house for it? Or do you want to independently publish it? And I really liked that because it emphasized that the quality expectations should be the same.
You shouldn't be saying, well, I don't really need my editing hat because I'm going to self-publish this so who cares if there's some typos. You know, I like that it's a separate decision that you make, but the product that you're taking to whatever platform you choose is the same.
Julie: And that's an interesting perspective talking about the quality parts of it.
Cause I do think that at a certain point, once you are writing regularly and you're confident enough to want to take your writing out to the world, it doesn't hurt to start a project thinking about its eventual outcome. A lot of professional writers write stuff because this is what their publisher has said they want from them next. You know, I want you to write in this series, not that series. And I want you to write a short story for this anthology on this topic. So it's not that you can't think about the ultimate destination for your story before you get started. It's just that it's dangerous to get hung up on that. And I think it is important to think about what your readers will want at some point.
Once you're writing regularly, the next stage is to start thinking about reader expectation. You have to write to delight yourself first and to entertain yourself cause you're your first reader. But then if you want to take it to a wider world, it's okay to start thinking about, what do readers of urban fantasy want and what do readers of romance want? And readers of this particular publication want?
But that can become very discouraging if that's where you start. Because the advice is always, do you want to get published? Read the publications, see what they're looking for, and for a beginner writer, or somebody who's coming back to it or moving into a new genre or whatever, that can be very discouraging cause it seems so mechanical and so devoid of romance and creativity. It's not, but it can seem that way.
Matty: One of the episodes I just recently listened to--I even know the number, it's episode 154 of the Story a Day podcast--and it was the one about a system for delighting readers and editors so that you get great reviews and raving fans will share your work with other readers who also love what you're writing.
And that was a really timely podcast for me to listen to because I've been talking to fellow authors in my own community that I've built up, and we're having a lot of conversations about genre and genre expectations, and it's always something that I think about with my Ann Kinnear books because it's a paranormal theme, but it's not super paranormal. So I've been careful not to promote it to paranormal-specific platforms because I think that they would be expecting more.
And my speculation is it's resulted in me having a fair number of really good reviews on Amazon, for example, and high ratings. But that I'm limiting my audience by doing that.
Can you talk a little bit about what you would discuss with the people in your groups about considering those reader expectations, especially for the short stories they're writing and how they balance that against market potential.
Julie: And that's going back to your three different hats again. I think the decision to not market to paranormal heavy platforms is smart because you don't want to set up expectations that aren't there. So that's definitely your business hat. You know, that was kind of an unusual podcast for me to do. This community that's been around for a while, there's people in there who are looking for the next step. I was talking about, in that one, if I had a method for doing some market research and looking on Amazon and looking in publications and just trying to not worry about so much what the editor's saying, but looking for reader reactions and what they are getting excited about.
And you can do this even if you're writing short stories and you don't really know where to go to find similar short stories, you can do this yourself. You can treat yourself as the ideal audience for your story and pull a bunch of books off your shelf. Go back through short stories that you've read and look at which ones you absolutely loved and what they have in common. One of the things I really love about short stories is that genre isn't as important as the effect on the reader. I have several authors who I love, and I'll read anything that they write.
And some of their stories might skew speculative fiction, and some of them might be set in ancient Greece. And some of them might be set in Chernobyl in the 1980s, they could be all over the place and some of them might be a murder mystery. And what I tend to find is that there are commonalities running through the short stories that I love that I have identified by paying attention.
I would encourage my community to do this as well, to pay attention to what they love and then just to maybe do a little survey of what are the commonalities between the stories you love. I like stories that have something a little bit weird about them. Something unexplained.
There was a story I read about a Mr. Potato Head in a cupboard in a bed and breakfast that sprouted roots and became sentient and took over the whole place. And the story did not start out like that. You know, it was no indication that this was going to be some kind of weird fantasy story. It just went there.
And one of the stories I read last year that I loved was called "Joan of Arc Sits Alone in Her Dorm Room on a Saturday Night" or something like that <"Joan of Arc Sits Naked in her Dorm Room" by Rachel Engelman - see below for link>. It wasn't quite the title and it was Joan of Arc, but she was sitting in a contemporary dorm room worrying about stuff.
I went through a bunch of stories and wrote down the things that I like. I like things that jump around in time. I like things that leave gaps for me to fill in. I like stories that don't have a neat ending. In that case, my market research is what lights me up. And then I keep a document of that stuff so that if I'm writing a story and it's going off the rails, I can look at that and I can say, okay, where have I gone wrong? Oh look, I'm writing a really traditional narrative story that might as well be a novel. And that's not what I love about short stories. Therefore, I'm going to course correct.
For somebody else, it might be that they love traditional happily ever after short romance novels and therefore their short stories might be just like that. And that's fine too. My advice would be in researching genre, not to worry about genre so much, and in researching market to think about yourself first and what excites you and what delights you.
And then you can go out and start researching publications guidelines and things like that. And if you're not finding anything where your stuff fits, you have a couple of options. You can begin to self-publish and try and find your audience that way.
Keep doing what you're doing, as long as it makes you happy, and at some point, if you get frustrated, it means you're ready for the next thing. You're ready for a new challenge. If you're writing a ton of stories that you're really enjoying and you're sharing them with a small group of people and everyone's loving them, and that's fine, then great.
When you come to a point where you start thinking, I'd really love to be hitting a larger audience, I'd really like to get a traditional publishing deal. Then you have to start analyzing the market and saying, okay, which things am I willing to change to fit that market or to fit that economic need?
Which things am I willing to adjust or what new thing am I willing to learn in order to get my work out there? But I don't think you have to worry about any of that stuff if you are still having fun, still learning new stuff, still advancing on the step that you're on.
I hear you saying that you're worrying about limiting your market and at some point, you're going to say to yourself, how much does that matter to me and what am I willing to do about it?
Matty: Right. It matters more to me now that I'm writing full time than when I was doing it part time with a corporate job. But again, I don't want to disappoint people, so I'm happy to gradually increase my pool than suddenly start posting Facebook ads to the paranormal groups on Facebook.
Julie: We have so many options now because with the self-publishing option you could decide to dip your toe in that water, and we could all do this. You know, we can see something that looks interesting. And this is the beauty of short stories. You can try testing the market, you can say, "You know what? Maybe I'll write something that's more heavily paranormal. See if I enjoy it. See if people like it." You test it out. You don't spend five years on it, you know? We have so many options. It's a pretty cool time to be a writer.
Matty: Yes, and especially cool time to be a short story writer because you can do that experimentation without, as you're saying, sinking years into it, and share it with people and kind of get that immediate input.
Julie: And if you don't love what you experiment with, you course correct, if I can use your nautical analogies.
Matty: Yes, thank you! Well, that is great advice, Julie, and I know you have tons of resources online, so do you want to share with our listeners where they can go for more information about you and Story a Day?
Julie: Yes, come over to storyaday.org and check out everything on there, the podcasts and articles, and there's years and years of writing prompts.
And I say writing prompts, but what I usually do with the writing prompts is I'll suggest that you try something and then I'll give a bunch of tips on how you can implement that or how you might turn that idea into a story. I rarely post something like, you know, a werewolf is walking along a beach and meets a little girl, that's rarely the kind of prompts I give. But what I tend to do is talk about parts of writing or an approach to writing a short story or a short story form. And then I'll give a bunch of tips about that. So if anybody's ever feeling the urge to sit down and write and kind of stuck, and you've got that window of time, but you don't know where to go, hop on over to storyaday.org and look up the writing prompts and you will find tons of stuff there.
And I also have, which I think is quite timely with your book coming out, with The Short Tack, where you're talking about what people can do with short stories if they want to broaden their reach, I have a free giveaway at my site, and people can come to storyaday.org/indyauthor and I will put up there a short story framework, which I share with people. It's for those of you who are pantsers out there and are scared by the idea of a framework, I am totally with you, but what I've learned over the years is that stories, whether they're novels or short stories, tend to wander in the middle and you tend to forget what you wanted to write the story about in the middle as you complicate matters and it can go in many directions. This framework is just a way for you to brainstorm stories before you even get started.
Or when you get stuck in the middle, you can go through the framework and just brainstorm the character, the conflict, some complications that might happen in the middle and the mood or image that you might want to end on. And the aim is to cut down your writing time by creating a coherent vision for your story more than an outline.
I found it really helpful myself and a lot of people have told me that it has helped them get from beginning to end of the story in a much shorter time. And keep the story on track. And delight their readers because if you hit all the parts of a story that our reader is expecting, then you don't leave them frustrated at the end.
So they can come to storyaday.org/indyauthor and I'll put that up there for them.
Matty: Julie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. That was wonderful information.
Julie: Thanks for having me.
Links
storyaday.org - Story a Day creativity challenge
storyaday.org/rr-joan-of-arc-engelman/ - "Joan of Arc Sits Naked in her Dorm Room" by Rachel Engelman
storyaday.org/indyauthor - Story story framework for listeners of The Indy Author Podcast
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
