Image source: Pixabay
Welcome to our new prompt of the month! In this post, you can read about Write Club, a small and virtual (yet worldwide) workshop community comprised of fiction writers who love the craft of short story writing. We work in a range of genres, but we all have one thing in common: we are committed to publishing our work in mainstream magazines, professional online journals and short story anthologies.
Several of our members are successfully published, and we credit the honest yet caring critiques of our workshop members for helping us to achieve these milestones.
Each month our members write a short story from a writing prompt, and then review each other’s stories. The next phase is to revise our own stories based on the workshop feedback, and do another round of critiques. This method helps us to prepare our manuscripts for professional editors.
If this sounds like a fit for you, read on!
Invitation to Short Story Writers
If you love to write short stories and are intrigued by Write Club, here are two options:
- Watch for our monthly writing prompts. Feel free to use them to inspire your short stories. You can post them on Hive, Medium, Vocal, your own blog, or wherever you like. Note that we do not offer critiques out of our workshop. This is just for inspiration!
- If you are serious about short story writing and have a desire to get your work published in publications such as literary, sci-fi or horror magazines, you are also welcome to check out our Write Club workshop.
About the Write Club Workshop
Write Club purposefully remains small. This enables us to read and provide thoughtful critiques on every story. However, we do occasionally add additional writers who are seeking a workshop and want to get their work published professionally.
If you’re interested, the next step is to review the prerequisites:
- You should already have a strong foundation in short story writing, and a desire to continue building your skills.
- You should have the goal of publishing your work in professional publications.
- You must be ready to commit to monthly deadlines, including drafting and revising stories.
- You must be willing to provide helpful feedback to other writers and support their journey as well as your own.
- Most importantly, you must have an open mind to accept critique of your own work so that you can revise and polish your stories.
To connect with us and check out our workshop, just pop in as a visitor to our Discord channel and tell us about your interests. We would love to connect with you to see if it seems like we’re a good fit for your writing journey!
This month’s writing prompt
That brings us to the prompt. For the month of July 2022, Write Club members must write a story based on this prompt: coffee
Where to begin? Start thinking about scenarios, characters, and settings. What might happen during a blind date over coffee? Could a coffee stain be incriminating evidence in a crime? What would happen if coffee became a currency?
Get your engines running
Start thinking about who will populate your story, and how they might seek to overcome a challenge they are facing. The more your conscious and sub-conscious brain are working on developing your MC (main character), and defining the scenario that has brought us to the time and place of this story, the sooner your story will take shape.
You could write out some loglines — one-sentence story plots — and then choose the one that resonates the most with you. Or join our discussion on Discord and get input on which idea seems like the most promising one to move forward.
Looking for Writing Resources?
I love to share tips and ideas about creative writing! Here are two treasure troves for you:
- You can find many of my tips and resources on my website, in the On Writing section.
- I also share writing tips in The Ink Well community on Hive. See the complete catalog for the full list of writing tips.
Have fun and keep writing.