Psst, subscribers…your Lunch Break 12/21 and Happy Hour 12/22 links are at the bottom of this email!
+This month only, all newsletter subscribers can join Happy Hour :D
This year I threw a party. I started writing with some of you every Wednesday. I made exactly one pie. I went to dozens of doctor’s appointments, and I read some great books while I sat in the waiting corral. I completed a thirty day yoga challenge in ninety days. I worked with twelve private clients whose projects ranged from dystopian YA to war autofiction to a collection of poetry involving all 206 bones of the human skeleton.
Are these achievements so shining that they will surely make a film about them one day? Will they be highlighted in my author bio for 2023? Are they eerily proportionate to the goals (which read a lot like genie wishes) that I wrote in my planner at the start of the year? No! Sure, I made some bigger strides this year too, but these small achievements mark something important.
Progress. Headway. Movement.
The end of one year brings with it the question of how the next may pan out. When we find ourselves wondering while writing a story: What comes next? the answer is only ever the same as the question. What comes next is what logically comes next for your characters. If you follow the flow of cause and effect, your story will always keep moving. Just like you know yourself, you know your characters. You know the choices laid before them and the way they react to things and what the consequences of their choices will be. The best course of action is to simply trust and follow your character. And if you mostly follow them toward the best choices they are capable of, you’ll end up with a happy ending.
You know this. Because this is life. Look back and zoom out on your year. You are not where you started. You’ve grown leaps and bounds. What tasks did you commit to? Maybe you started running or you took a class about something you’re interested in or you started therapy. That rules! No, maybe you did not win a Noble Peace Prize, but would you look at that movement? I looked back at my planner this week feeling a little end of year pressure and melancholy—had I accomplished enough in the last 12 months?? I was surprised to be proud of every single checkmark in the book. They each represented a vote toward who I will become. Dare I say, I was looking at thousands of steps toward my dreams.
Click back on your Google calendar, flip through your own planner. Count it all, from going to the dentist to walking the dog. Every drop in the bucket adds up. Look at you, and your little tidal wave! You’re making a splash into 2023. Where will you take you next? Trust yourself and find out.
Some big Fledgling strides of 2022
Carmen Taylor published her short story "The Trigger" in the Dodge Magazine. "The Trigger" is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also received grant funding to continue land-based writing and environmental science programs, geared towards creating greater access to outdoor education for rural New Mexican youth. New Mexico Earthlings is currently fundraising for the 2023 season and every little bit helps! Donate at: https://nmearthlings.org/donate
Sam Jacobson began the substack, Modern Trepidation, a periodic newsletter finding humor in the challenges of identity in this confusing age of Everything, Continuous. The bones for his story Labor Day were constructed during a prompt free-write during a Fledgling workshop in 2019.
Kat Meister turned a short piece they wrote in a Fledgling Workshop into a short film with fellow Fledgling Shara Tonn and released it to the general public in June for Pride month. Watch Otra Vida/I Feel… here.
Congratulations on all your 2022 achievements, Fledglings!
News:
🚨Flight Behavior, Fledgling’s generative novel planning workshop, is on sale until Christmas day and nearly full. If you’re thinking about it, sign up soon and holler with any questions. This unique 6-week course (open to memoirists as well) includes both weekly lessons and daily prompts. Read more about the course and sign up here.
🎁Did you know you can gift a paid subscription to Fledgling Writers Nest to a friend? Paid subscribers have access to five monthly writing events. Give or ask for the gift of some community writing time this holiday season by clicking or sharing this link. It’s that easy!
📝Happy Hour is our monthly community workshop where we swap inspiration, learn a little something related to craft, and write! This month’s will happen on Thursday, December 22, and I’m bringing back on old favorite topic—how to finish something. Usually only paid subscribers have access to Happy Hour but as a holiday treat, this month everyone’s invited. Look out for the invite and link coming to your email tomorrow.
Prompts:
Turn your phone on airplane mode. Choose a prompt. Write to it for 10 minutes. If you want to keep going, keep going. If you like what you write, reply it back to me and maybe see it in the newsletter next month...
Choose to write about yourself or a character. Write about what it’s like for this person to go home again as an adult—to sleep in their childhood bed and eat at their parents table. If that hasn’t happened or will never happen, imagine if it did.
Find the last thing you wrote, even if it felt done or like it had no legs. A journal entry will do or a story idea from five years ago. Consider only the last three sentences. Where are they going? Study them. What words (especially nouns and verbs) carry the most energy or potential? Take that element and try to carry it into a new sentence, paragraph, or scene. Maybe the original path of the story becomes longer, or maybe it veers off entirely and begins a new one.
And lastly, something to read:
From Colum Mccann’s essay “Don’t Write What You Know” originally published in his craft book, Letters to a Young Writer.
“Don’t write what you know, write toward what you want to know.
Step out of your skin. Risk yourself. This opens up the world. Go to another place. Investigate what lies beyond your curtains, beyond the wall, beyond the corner, beyond your town, beyond the edges of your own known country.
A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn’t know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. A Galápagos of the imagination. A whole new theory of who we are.
Don’t sit around looking inward. That’s boring. In the end your navel contains only lint. You have to propel yourself outward, young writer. Think about others, think about elsewhere, think about a distance that will bring you, eventually, back home.
The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. There is one simple word for this: empathy. Don’t let them fool you. Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open. Once you go there, you can be changed. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. But the truth is that the cynics are the sentimental ones. They live in a cloud of their own limited nostalgia. They have no muscularity at all. They remain in one place. They have one idea and it sparks nothing else. Remember, the world is so much more than one story. We find in others the ongoing of ourselves…”
Find out how to join the December Happy Hour focused on Finding the End below!
(Thursday, December 22, 6-7:45 pm EST on Zoom)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Fledgling Writers Nest to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.