This Month, We're Kicking Down Inspiration's Door

Because knocking is highly overrated.

Welcome back to Keep Writing, dear readers; I hope the back-to-school season is treating you as kindly as our resident elephant butler on Free Peanut Night. If you’re new here, you’ll find a wealth of information and inspiration in our archives. Please help yourself to the towering pyramid of apple cider doughnuts in the corner and make yourself at home.

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Strap on your hard hats, dear readers: We’re going inspiration-hunting this month. We are donning our headlamps, our shinguards and kneepads, our bubble wrap and gloves. We are weary of staring at our blank pages in dismay or placing trinket offerings under our pillows in hopes the muse may pay us a visit. No, no: Today we’re busting down the muse’s door and paying her a visit. (Enough is enough, right? She works far too fickle hours not to take house calls! We live in a society.)

You’ve no doubt heard the old saws about inspiration: That it comes from all around us or hits when you least expect it or is ~*~everywhere~*~ if you *just* know where to *~*look*~*.  (I mean, if you’ve figured out the secret to knowing “where to *~*look*!*,” would you mind sharing with the class and sparing the rest of us the damn trouble?)

I don’t know that inspiration is everywhere—or at least the readily accessible, exciting, spark-meets-flint kind of inspiration that sends us flying to the page. I don’t know that you’re going to find it if you’re turning over the same stones you’ve flipped a thousand times before. Sometimes, I think, we have to spend time actively seeking it out. Blazing new trails, sailing new waters, or at least finding some new rocks to kick over. And that’s what we’re going to focus on today: Ways to Hunt Down and Drag Out Inspiration When You’re Feeling Uninspired, Listless, or Just Plain Bored With What You’re Working On. 

Seven Ways to Go Inspiration Hunting

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LeVar Burton Was Right 

Take a look, it’s in a book—or a magazine, a play, or an illustrated deep dive on the history of canine lingerie. Follow the reading rainbow to the end of your writer’s block. Me, I’m always hungry to read and write about lesser-known women from history, so I seek out nibbles of things that might later turn into a full-course meal if I get inspired enough. Books like Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America or The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II  are obvious choices for someone with my inspiration palate, offering a buffet of stories between one spine. Look for books that offer similar smorgasbords of inspiration, allowing you to pick and choose what strikes your fancy.

But maybe you’re unwilling to commit to a full book—I get it. Instead, consider stealing a pocket of time and embracing a...

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Tumble Down the Internet’s Rabbit Holes

Deep dives are hardly necessary when the Internet contains vast shallows for you to splash in. Play WikiRoulette to display a random Wikipedia page, or play Redactle to uncover one by guessing words and topics until the page’s subject matter is clear. Peruse some of the 48,707,325 items (Images! Texts! Videos! Sounds!) on virtual display at the Digital Public Library of America. Check your local library’s website to see what digital offerings they have for cardholders—mine has portals for HeritageHub for genealogical research (what inspiration is lurking in your family tree?), collections on Black and Hispanic life in America, and a lovely collection of historic state photos (where I found, among other gems, a sled hearse pulled by sleddogs from 1904).

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Go Niche on Netflix

The only bright side to the streaming giant’s penchant for ordering good shows and then immediately canceling them is that the streamer’s back catalog is frighteningly deep and excellent for low-stakes perusing. The one-season docuseries We Are the Champions may be the stuff short stories and profiles are made of: Each one highlights a community of competitors in their area of expertise, from cheese rollers to competitive chili eaters to fantasy hairstyling. You could see how design-minded creatives work in fields like costume design and toymaking in Abstract: The Art of Design. Or you could opt to be inspired by the creative process of songwriting in Song Exploder (based on the popular podcast of the same name) which does a deep dive with musicians on how popular songs like R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait for It” came into existence.

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Passive Listening, Active Inspiration

It’d be swell if inspiration could come a-knocking while you’re doing other things, like cleaning your house or re-organizing your vintage garden gnome collection. Happily, podcasts can fill our ears with knowledge while our hands are otherwise engaged. Pick an episode at random from the Apple Podcast Charts and enter a new-to-you world of information. Nonfiction writers should feel free to venture outside their normal beats; you never know how a fresh topic will make you look at your main-squeeze subject with fresh eyes, or show you a new way of presenting information. Fiction writers may find relative feasts of low-stakes high-drama inspiration in podcasts like “Normal Gossip” (promising “juicy, strange, funny, and utterly banal gossip about people you’ll never know and never meet”) or Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? (a “true crime/comedy podcast” dedicated to investigating the titular mystery). SFF enthusiasts will find a wealth of world-building in actual-play DND or other tabletop gaming podcasts, and the arrival of spooky season will likely bring an abundance of fresh horror podcasts to the already existing riches in production.

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Become a Rotating Armchair Expert

Writer Rachel Syme once tweeted about a game she plays called “Sunday Expert” in which she selects a topic she “was instinctively interested in (a 1920s writer, dinosaur hunters, the barbizon hotel, the history of a fabric or a fruit) and asked myself ‘what if i had to become an expert on this thing by the end of the day?’” The goal is not to add stress but rather to gain newfound knowledge: “[You] follow wild hunches. you look up old articles. you buy and read a few chapters of a biography. you watch videos. you read old interviews. you dig with the intensity of a lil harriet the spy. all you lose is a day! and you gain a twig for your brain magpie nest.”

I love this idea not only as a weekly ritual to chase away the Sunday Scaries, but as a game writers can play as often as their schedule allows. Perhaps you can only become a First Sunday of the Month expert or a Solstice/Equinox Expert—that’s still a lot more expertise to add to your collection than you would’ve had otherwise. (And if nothing else, you’ll gain a wealth of fun facts to help heartily vanquish your competition at Trivia Night.)

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Embrace a Homework Project

Me, I like frameworks versus free-for-alls; I welcome bumpers in my creative bowling lanes to keep me on track. So I love a good structured project, which is a form of self-assigned homework that feels soothing and productive versus stuffily collared. My main passion outside of writing is food and cooking, so I do nerdy “cookalongs” a few times a year with food-related television. I’ll look up the main challenge for each episode of Top Chef and make a related dish to enjoy while I watch, for example, or cook every dish featured on Midnight Diner. This may not make me a particularly fun person to talk to at parties, but it does push me to make dishes I might not ordinarily attempt, and it boosts my enjoyment of the series to boot. Maybe you’d like to do a competitive ranking of every pick-your-own-apple farm in a 30-mile radius, or carve famous cats from literature into pumpkins, or write a haiku for every guest star appearance on Grey’s Anatomy. Well, what’s stopping you? And the beautiful cherry on top: In addition to finding inspiration along the way, you can pitch your findings/revelations/rankings at the end of it as an article or essay to a relevant publication.

(Prefer to have someone design the framework of your challenge for you? Writetober, a daily prompt list for the month of October, might be right up your alley; here’s last year’s list to get an idea of what to expect.)

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Tidying Up Memory Lane

If you can’t bear the thought of chasing inspiration without being productive at the same time, I see you, I get you. For those with analog photo collections: Consider organizing old snapshots and errant pictures, making notes on where and when each one was taken as you go. Not only will this help you with future memoir or essay projects, but it’ll also jog your memory as you work to recollect the details behind each photo. There are plenty of stories to be found there.

For those who’ve gone digital: If your camera roll is as chaotic as mine, you’re likely in just as much need of organization in the digital realm. (If having 1,734 photos of my dog sleeping is wrong, I don’t care to be right.) Swipewipe is here to help. The app will organize your photos by month, so when you find a small pocket of free time, it’s easy to flick through them and swipe to keep the good, delete the bad, and shudder at the ugly. Pay special attention to the hard decisions: Why are you finding it so difficult to delete certain images? What hold do they have over you? What do you fear you’ll lose by deleting it? Might there be a poem or essay here?

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Conflict Chasers

Conflict is the spark that powers all of our stories, be they fiction or nonfiction. If your life offers precious little to draw from at the moment—you lucky duck, you—you’ll have to go hunting conflict elsewhere. Embrace your internal investigative detective, your inner fly-on-the-wall. Browse NextDoor for petty squabbles or hotly divided opinions. Peruse the comments section of your local news sites to see what topics are riling up your neighbors. Local Facebook groups or IG/Twitter hashtags can be an early harbinger of matters impacting or dividing your community. Catch up on the latest drama enthralling TikTok. Or step outside your local region and go broader in your conflict search: Find out once and for all why your favorite band broke up. Scour subreddits like AITA or Hobby Drama. Research famous feuds from history. Ruffled feathers may be wildly unpleasant in our personal lives, but they make ideal linings for our creative nests.

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Inspiration may not be everywhere, but it certainly is somewhere—lurking on your horizon, under the floorboards, hiding in the forest, waiting to be found. The key is not waiting for it to find you. Move through your world with a careful eye, an open mind, and a generous heaping of curiosity, and then bring all the treasures you’ve found to the page and watch them shine.

Until next month—

Keep writing,

Nicki

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October 2023 calls for submissions

My fellow horror lovers will delight at the number of spooky-season-adjacent content this month, but plenty of more general calls await writers below as well. A few September opportunities from last month’s newsletter still remain open as well. Happy submitting, dear hearts.

This month’s listings in brief

• Spotlight: Indigo Literary Journal: “Ghost” submissions

• Club Plum: Literary horror

• Contemporary Verse 2: Poems for “Versus Narrative: The Addiction Issue”

• Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology: Surveillance-themed poetry

• little somethings press: Desert-related flash and poetry

• Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival: LGBTQ+ stories and poems

• Witches Magazine: Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for witches

• Arboreal Literary Magazine: “Fresh hell” submissions

• The Echo Teen Art & Lit Mag: “Nightmare” submissions from teen writers

• Present Tense Magazine: “Landscape” submissions

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Spotlight Pick

Indigo Literary Journal: “Ghost” submissions

“This period of time between the Hungry Ghost Festival and Halloween, we urge you to think about the word ghost—however you’d like,” urge the editors of Indigo Literary Journal. “Perhaps you will write an essay about the history of eerie sightings at your ancestral house, or a poem about that afternoon you spent with a little boy as a kid, only for him to disappear into wisps of smoke. Maybe you’d like to explore a fictional world where the living are fewer in number than the undead, however you'd like to interpret that. Tell us about your connotions [sic], your experiences, your beliefs; and make us believe in turn.” Send up to three pieces no more than 3,000 words each. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are all welcome. 

Deadline: Oct. 25

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Other listings

Club Plum: Literary horror

Send your most thrilling, chilling literary horror to Club Plum for its annual literary horror October issue. Submit one lyric essay/creative nonfiction piece up to 3,000 words or one piece of flash fiction up to 800 words. Up to three hybrid works or prose poems (no lined poetry—only prose) are also welcome, although for the latter, editors note “we are not fond of straightforward paragraphs masquerading as prose poetry.” No payments, no submission fees.

Deadline: Oct. 1

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Contemporary Verse 2: Poems for “Versus Narrative: The Addiction Issue”

Submit poems on addiction and recover for consideration in this special issue from Contemporary Verse 2. “We welcome submissions that engage with personally-lived experiences of addiction and/or recovery, and we also welcome submissions that engage thoughtfully with the lived experiences of people close enough to you for you to feel comfortable exploring them. As with any subject, we would gently encourage you, if submitting work that discusses an addiction and/or recovery experience that is not directly your own, to consider your positionality to addiction and/or recovery as you write and submit,” editors say. “Crucially, if you are someone who lives with addiction, has lived with addiction, and/or is in recovery, we want to read whatever you want to send us; we do not expect or require work that is solely ‘about’ the theme of this issue. If you are in addiction or recovery, we want your poems – about anything.” Send no more than six pages. No submission fees.

Deadline: Oct. 1

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Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology: Surveillance-themed poetry

Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology is launching a poetry prize “to provoke new writing on the theme of surveillance.” The prize is $2,000 and judges “welcome poetry in any style and any form, on any aspect of the phenomenon of watching and being watched, in both the intimate and public spheres of our lives.” Send up to three poems with a maximum of ten pages. Carolyn Forché will judge.
(Thanks to Erika Dreifus’ The Practicing Writer newsletter for spotlighting this opportunity.)

Deadline: Oct. 1

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little somethings press: Desert-related flash and poetry

little somethings press’ sixth issue will examine the perceptions that shape desert climates. Send desert-related flash—fiction or nonfiction—up to 300 words or poetry with 12 lines or less.  All writers are welcome to submit, but space will also be held for contributors based or connected to Tempe, Arizona. 

Deadline: Oct. 1

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Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival: LGBTQ+ stories and poems

Hosted by the same folks who run the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival, the Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival is hosting two writing contests: One for fiction and one for poetry. For the poetry contest, which has a theme of “Transformation,” send two to four poems with a max combined length of 400 lines for a chance to win the grand prize of $500 and publication in the Saints and Sinners Poetry Chapbook. For the fiction contest, which has a “broad theme of ‘Saints and Sinners,’” send fiction with LGBTQ+ content between 3,000 and 7,000 words for a chance to win the grand prize of $500 and publication in an anthology. The contests are open to “LGBTQ+ authors at all stages of their careers, from all over the globe, with stories in all genres.” $20 entry fee. (Interested writers can also submit to the Tennessee Williams Festival literary contests via the same link.)

Deadline: Oct. 1 for short fiction, Oct. 15 for poetry 

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Witches Magazine: Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for witches

This quarterly “magazine for witches, written by witches” is looking for witchy poetry, short fiction, and articles on spells, crystals, tarot, etc. Content should be tailored to the current season (i.e. fall). Prose should be between 300 and 1,500 words and poetry should not exceed 40 lines. No book reviews. Editors note that if a writer does not receive a response in six weeks, they should “assume your submission has not been accepted.” No submission fees, no payments that I can find. 

Deadline: Oct. 1

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Arboreal Literary Magazine: “Fresh hell” submissions

For its fourth issue, Arboreal Literary Magazine invites writers to submit works that deal with the theme “fresh hell.” “The phrase ‘fresh hell’ embodies the intersection of humor and despair in the face of life’s twists and turns. We invite you to respond to this theme by responding to the tumultuous and unpredictable facets of human experience—personal, social, cultural, global, or otherwise,” editors say. Send up to four poems or prose up to 4,000 words. No submission fees, no payments. 

Deadline: Oct. 15

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The Echo Teen Art & Lit Mag: “Nightmare” submissions from teen writers

Share this one with a teen writer in your life: The Echo seeks “nightmare” related submissions until the middle of the month. Submissions will be considered for publication in The Echo’s annual print issue, podcast, and/or website. No payments, no fees. Normal response time is 2 weeks.

Deadline: Oct. 15

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Present Tense Magazine: “Landscape” submissions

Present Tense Magazine, which publishes poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction “with a strong sense of place,” is open to submissions for its upcoming “Landscape” issue. Flash fiction can be up to 1,000 words, poetry can be up to 40 lines, and other prose (nonfiction and fiction) is capped at 3,000 words. Submit one work per issue. £3 submission fee. Payment is a comp copy plus £25 for poetry or £5 per 100 words for prose. Writers may also pitch human interest features, interviews, and essays. 

Deadline: Oct. 31

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