Where do you find you can get creative? Do you have quiet—do you need it? Do you have beautiful things around you to inspire you—do you need them? Do you have novels and books-about-writing cluttered round your desk to inspire you—do you want this? There are a lot of rules and tips about making a creative space online, but I think it’s important to know what helps you get into your own creative flow.

Make a little time to cast an eye over the space where you get creative and think about what you need to change to make it more conducive to getting your stories written. Maybe you don’t have somewhere in your home that works for you—so go find a nice café. Or a library.

Today I’m working in a room at the back of our house. I tidied it this weekend and put all the clutter into binbags so I don’t have to look at it. Other days I can’t be in the house, at all. The clutter and the chaos are just too much, so I have a membership at The Broadway Collective, a coworking space where there’s nothing but free coffee and a comfortable place to sit. Getting there requires a bit more organization on my part, but it’s always worth packing my lunch and remembering my headphones.

So, here are the steps for you to take:

• Look at the space where you get creative. Ask yourself what works and what doesn’t. For YOU.

• Clear distractions. Find a place to hide your phone. It works for me–if I have notifications blaring, I can’t get anything on the page in a sustained way. Try it and let me know!

• Make it frictionless. This means that when you sit to write (or stand, if you’re Arthur Slade with his walking desk), you start with ease. You’re not sitting down and then having to get up to get a glass of water or disappearing into the latest headlines when you open your computer. I just spent ten minutes clearing my ‘new tab’ window so when I open the internet, I don’t start writing I don’t read grusome news stories…

I’m working on a book right now that helps anyone who wants to write as they travel on their journey. Sign up to my newsletter to stay connected, and share with me how I can help you get more creative in your own life by connecting with me on Instagram @alicekuipersbookclub

I got this in my inbox today, from One Story. I love them and their stories and I thought one of you might like to try for this opportunity:

Together with the Talve-Goodman Family, One Story is pleased to announce the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship. This educational fellowship will offer a year-long mentorship on the craft of fiction writing with One Storymagazine. The first recipient will be for the year 2019.

This fellowship calls for an early-career writer of fiction who has not yet published a book and is not currently nor has ever been enrolled in an MFA program. One Story is seeking writers whose work speaks to issues and experiences related to inhabiting bodies of difference. This means writing that explores being in a body marked by difference, oppression, violence, or exclusion; often through categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, illness, disability, trauma, migration, displacement, dispossession, or imprisonment.

Adina Talve-Goodman was raised in St. Louis and attended Clayton High School and Washington University. When she was 19 years-old, Adina received a heart transplant, due to a congenital heart condition, and began writing about it. Adina started working at One Storymagazine as an intern in April 2010 and later became Managing Editor. She supported emerging authors, helped organize donations to prisons, and had a strong interest in issues of embodied difference, illness, and suffering. In 2015, Adina won the Bellevue Literary Review’sNon-Fiction Prizewith her essay, “I Must Have Been That Man.”She left One Story in 2016 to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was working on her first book when she was diagnosed with cancer. Adina passed away on January 12th, 2018. She was 31 years old.

The 2019 fellow will receive:

• Free tuition for all One Story online classes and programming offered in 2019.
• Travel stipend ($2,000) and tuition to attend One Story’s July 2019 week-long summer writers’ conference in Brooklyn, which includes craft lectures, an in-person intensive fiction workshop, and panels with literary agents and publishers.
• A full manuscript review and consultation with One Story Co-Founder & Executive Editor Hannah Tinti.

Applications are now open and will close November 15th, 2018. The winner of the 2019 Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowshipwill be publicly announced on January 3rd, 2019. For complete details visit our website.

Like many of you, I read compulsively. I love books, paper books, ebooks, picture books, any books. I read a lot for pleasure. But I also read like a writer. This means that I notice things that other authors are doing so that I can improve my own writing.

Every book is full of possible lessons for writers. Each time I learn something new from someone else on the page, I feel my storytelling possibilities growing.

Here are five useful tips for reading like a writer yourself.

• Make notes and highlights. Some eReaders have seriously useful highlight and clipping capabilities. Use these when an author does something dazzling. Otherwise, good old pen and paper are just fine.
• Read certain paragraphs aloud. When you hear how your favourite author uses language it’ll help you transform your own writing.
• Notice technical skills on the page. If you don’t know how to punctuate speech, or if you struggle with how to use flashbacks, or if you wonder about sentence length or how to end chapters, take novels you adore and see how those authors managed these aspects of their writing. To paraphrase Stephen King, add to your writer toolbox. Think of each skill you pick up as another tool in your writing toolbox and notice tools that you’re missing. For example, it took me years to try writing in third person. Every time I see another writer doing it well, I make notes and appreciate their skill. Another technical aspect I note is good dialogue – when I see an author using great dialogue, believe me, I make notes.
• Pay attention to writing that doesn’t work for you. It sounds contrary, but actually it’s really helpful for you to notice what type of writing fails and why. What is the author doing that makes the story clunky or makes the dialogue flat? You can learn lots from what is unsuccessful. Also, with writing that doesn’t work for you but that everybody else just LOVES, try to figure out why. Make notes, read it aloud, think about how each sentence is formed and what the author is trying to achieve.
• Finally, and maybe this should have been first: read widely. Read lots of things you never normally read – broaden out to sci-fi, romance, poetry, plays, shampoo bottles, everything. Notice how every author uses words, not just authors you go back to time and again. In this way, you’ll broaden your own writing capabilities.

Reading like a writer helps me appreciate the written word – but I also remind myself to read for pleasure too. If I’m getting too writerly and forgetting the fun, I take a breath, turn the page of another book, and dive in. Now, where did I put my book?

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