Presenting: What the Hell to Get Your Writer Friend in 2025

A gift guide for all the writers in your life.

Nov 28, 2025

Welcome back to Keep Writing. If you’re new here, warmest welcomes to you: Help yourself to the world’s largest pumpkin pie on the back deck—we’re trying to break a world record here, people—before taking a merry winter stroll through our archives.

Writers are either the easiest people in your life to shop for or the absolute hardest. If they’re the type to go ham over a new notebook or pen, job sorted. If you have access to their bookshelf or Storygraph/Goodreads history, a good book in their favorite genre is a safe bet.

But once people figure out a notebook is a great gift, writers tend to receive them in droves; you can’t open a writer’s closet without heaps of blank gifted notebooks avalanching out. And if you have no idea which books a writer has or hasn’t read, staring at bookshop shelves feels like trying to find the lone unread needle in a literary haystack.

Fear not, friends, I am here to be your Fairy Godmother of Gift-Giving for the Writerly Among Us, ushering you to a curated selection of gifts that will ideally tick the boxes for every writer on your list.

None of the links below are affiliates. ‘Fraid you’re stuck with me and my standard run-of-the-mill vanilla URLs, dear hearts.

The First Gift is the Best Gift On This List

…And it’s the gift of time. Time to write. Time spent thinking about writing. Time away from the house or time holed away in it. Time away from a job or chores or kids or pets. This is probably the best gift you can give any writer, but often the most difficult to facilitate.

Here are some ways you might manifest the gift of time:

Purchase a writing class registration fee or a gift certificate at a writing school. Gotham immediately comes to mind here, since they offer gift certificates for online classes (and I have taken them! And enjoyed them!), but a quick Google search of “writing classes in [your area]” should yield a list of results as fruitful as Aunt Jo’s fruitcake.
Gift a writing conference registration. However, be certain that your writer is available on the required dates and has the means to travel there.
Provide a certificate for childcare, pet care, housesitting, etc. Anything that facilitates time to write.
Gift an overnight stay somewhere. (It need not be fancy! It need not even have a desk! Edith Wharton famously wrote from bed, and so can your writer.)
Offer your own home for your loved one to write at when you go out of town. (As an added benefit, you’ll have someone to snag the mail, water the plants, and keep the pipes from freezing.)
Volunteer your services as an accountability buddy. Schedule a time and support each other. Every other Sunday morning, say, you meet with your writer friend and log some quality work time together.

No- or Low-Cost Gifts

1. Tell your writer friend what you love about their writing. Tell them specifically; let the specificity be the gift in itself. Tell them how they effortlessly paint fictional rooms with both accuracy and ambience. Tell them how their dialogue is so real-to-life it sounds like something overheard, not imagined. Tell them which sentences made you laugh. Tell them the phrases that stick in your brain. Tell them where their writing haunted you and where it healed you. Write it down. Wrap it up. Show them specifically how their words moved you.

2. Offer your services as a beta reader or critique partner.

3. Seek out new writing opportunities for them. Curate a list of journals (or agents, or small presses) that look right up their writing alley. Include their basic submission info.

4. Make or bake writing snacks (and label them “Writing Snacks”).

5. Assemble simmer pot kits, especially if they evoke a fitting scent for their writing project.

6. Make them a custom playlist.

7. Draw their characters or create a mock book cover to give them encouragement to keep going and see it published one day.

8. Write an anti-rejection letter that lists all the ways the writer you love is Really Great, Actually, even if the industry can’t always see it.

Now for a List of Stuff You Can Actually Buy

To Write Cozily

One of my most-used writing accessories is a pair of fingerless gloves, because typing with cold fingers makes me feel like I am a bookkeeper at Scrooge & Marley (pre-epiphany).

These candles are designed to burn for 20 minutes, which is a terrific amount of time for a daily morning writing practice. (Especially when we Northern Hemispherians are staring down a season of cold, dark mornings.)

I love that the Unemployed Philosophers’ Guild makes gigantically wide literary mugs. I own two, and they’re sturdy, weighty, and can hold a tidy cauldron of caffeine, which is important to me when I’m powering through a writing session. Choose from writer-friendly designs featuring Shakespearean insults, literary cats, first lines in literature, and more.

Out of Print is a forever favorite of mine for literary products, ranging from the high-minded (Mr. Darcy Fan Club enamel pins, anyone?) to the nostalgic (There’s a Monster at the End of This Book merch galore).

To Write Anywhere

Lap desks. Lap desks! Such an unsung hero for the “write from couch/bed/chaise lounge” among us.

Freewrite is decidedly one of the most expensive items on this list, but perhaps an option for “the writer who has everything…except a way to block out distractions.” The company also is currently taking preorders for a mechanical keyboard designed for writers, which offers an odometer-like word-counter tool and a redesigned row of F keys that offer shortcuts to common writer commands like Find, Replace, Print, Undo, etc. Certainly not for every writer, but for some it may appeal.

Sometimes, you really do need to write anywhere. No laptop? No problem. A miniature phone keyboard will do the trick when desperation strikes.

Or maybe you know a writer who wants to think about writing even when they’re not writing. Bring Papercuts, a game that’s like a literary-minded version of Cards Against Humanity, to your next writerly get-together and watch the sparks of laughter fly.

To Write Creatively

If someone says they want to read more, Book of the Month or Journal of the Month are tried-and-true favorites for a reason. There’s also libro.fm or Audible, if audiobooks are their thing.

The nonfiction writers in your life will appreciate The Moth’s Game of Storytelling, which can function both as a party game or a deck of prompts for their own writing practice.

I enjoy George Saunders’ writing newsletter immensely, and I suspect any fellow craft nerds in your life would, too. A subscription to Story Club will grant them a wealth of insight on the art of the short story taught by one of its masters.

Stocking Stuffers

Pens! So many pens!

I do love being able to keep my desk and keyboard sparklingly clean thanks to this mini rechargeable vacuum. But if your writer is more of an analog type, consider a laptop brush instead.

A bookish-themed oracle deck may offer inspiration, reflection, or guidance to writers who enjoy gentle divination practices.

Feel free to drop what you’re hoping to gift or find under the tree yourself this year. And no matter how busy this holiday season gets, I hope you find (or better yet, make) time for yourself to write, too—it’s the first gift on this list for a reason.

Until next month—

Keep writing,

Nicki

December 2025 Calls for Submissions

Spotlight Pick

Exposition Review: “PARA/SOCIAL” submissions

For its 11th annual issue, Exposition Review welcomes submissions on a “PARA/SOCIAL” theme. “For this issue we invite work that traces the edges of intimacy and illusion. We seek longing projected across distance, the distortions of connection, and the gifts of being alongside – with or without perception and recognition. This theme is not a verdict, but an invitation: to consider how we live beside each other, how we build connections through shadow, screen, and story, and how we might reimagine the boundaries of the social altogether,” editors write. For fiction, send stories or excerpts up to 5,000 words or flash fiction up to 1,000 words (“the shorter, the better”). For nonfiction, send up to 5,000 words; for poetry, send up to three poems of any form. Scripts, comics, and experimental narratives are also welcome. There is a submission fee of $3.50. Payment is $50.

Deadline: Dec. 15

Months to Years: Grief- and dying-related topics

Months to Years is a quarterly online journal seeking work related to mortality, death, and grief. Send previously unpublished poetry or up to 2,500 words of nonfiction. (No fiction.) No fees, no payments.

Deadline: Dec. 1

Superpresent: “Echoes”

For its Winter 2026 issue, the quarterly magazine Superpresent seeks submissions that have to do with its chosen theme of “Echoes.” Send up to three poems (one per page) or 500-2,000 words of prose (essays or short stories). No submission fees.

Deadline: Dec. 1

Black Beacon Books: Horror stories

This press is currently accepting submissions for its second installment of The Black Beacon Book of Horror. The preferred word count for both anthologies is 3,000 to 9,000 words. Payment is $39 per original story and $10 for reprints, plus a print copy of the finished anthology.

Note: If you’ve got a finished novelette (9,000 to 25,000 words) sitting around on your hard drive and would be interested in Kindle-only publication, Black Beacon Books is also accepting submissions for those until Jan. 1.

Deadline: Dec. 31 (or Jan 1 for novelettes)

Blue Cubicle Press: Submissions from airline or airport workers

People who work or have worked in the air travel industry—air traffic controllers, flight attendants, pilots, TSA agents, ramp agents, etc.—are welcome to submit fiction or poetry to Tales from the Concourse, the 22nd issue in Blue Cubicle Press’ Workers Write! series. Both unpublished and previously published material will be considered. Payment ranges from $10 to $50.

Deadline: Dec. 31

Spectrum: Submissions on “consumption”

For its 69th volume, Spectrum asks writers to “consider how artists can make meaningful engagements with the internal worlds we embody and the external worlds that surround us.” Send one piece of prose up to 5,000 words or up to five poems. That said, contributors should not feel limited by genre: “If it can be printed in two dimensions, we will consider it for publication,” editors say. No submission fees, no payments.

Deadline: Dec. 31

Tiny Memoir: Micrononfiction

Send memoirs that are 50 to 200 words long for consideration in Tiny Memoir. Send only one piece for consideration. No submission fees, no payments.

Deadline: Dec. 31

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