• Video - Award-winning author Lavie Tidhar shares the hidden design within his story plot that goes beyond just a sequence of events.
• Markets and contests with submissions open or opening soon.
• JANUARY 31 - Mastering Structure And Plot: The Blueprint Of A Story led by award-winning author Lavie Tidhar. Discount code!
• Care to drabble with us? Each week our drabble community writes 100 words (or they don't—their call) to a single-word prompt.
• This Week's Prompt. An interesting item from the news to provide you with fodder for your creativity. This week, we emit a visible light that vanishes when we die.
  
  

What Is Plot? (The Hidden Design)

Markets and Contests

• 🏖️ Adventitious is open to submissions of “surprising” short stories and novelettes of up to 17,000 words until February 5th. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 🌿 Wild Greens Magazine is open to submissions of flash fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and music on the theme of “The Tempest and the Calm”. Send them stories of up to 1,000 words, nonfiction writing of up to 2,000 words, a single poem of any length, or a studio recorded song with lyrics. This call closes on February 8th. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 🃏 Poemancer is open to submissions of short poems to go in a deck of cards! Send them up to three poems of up to 14 lines each. The call will close once they receive a maximum number of submissions, so don’t delay. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 📝 Craft Literary is open to submissions of short fiction and creative nonfiction of up to 6,000 words. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 🌲 Ecotone is looking for work that “reimagines place”. Send them fiction or nonfiction between 2,000 and 10,000 words, or up to five poems. They prefer formal and structured poetry rather than free-verse poetry. Their first window closes on February 4th, with a limited number of fee-free submissions. Then they’ll open again for free submissions for one day only on February 13th. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 📜 Abyss & Apex is open to submissions of speculative short stories for one week only, February 1st through 7th. Send them work of up to 10,000 words. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 📗 Luath Press is open to submissions of full-length novels, nonfiction work, and poetry collections in English as well as Scots Gaelic. Note that they only accept hard copy submissions. Send them a query letter, synopsis, and sample chapters. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 📘 Legend Press is open to submissions of full-length crime and historical novels. Send them a query letter, synopsis, and the first three chapters. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 📙 Turtle Point Press is open to queries of full-length novels, memoirs, and poetry collections. Their guidelines are pretty sparse, so have a look at the other books they’ve published. Then send them a query letter with an author bio and a writing sample. No submissions fee! 💰Paying market!💰
• 💨 Root Smoke is open to submissions of writing in all mediums, including short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid work. Send them stories of up to 8,000 words, personal essays of up to 6,000 words, or up to five poems. No submissions fee!
• 🌤️ Heaven Magazine is open to submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Send them up to 1,500 words of prose writing or up to three poems. No submissions fee!
• 🩸 In the Veins is open to boundary-pushing short stories and poems. Send them stories of up to 3,000 words or up to five poems. No submissions fee!
• 🌚 Cold Moon Journal is open to submissions of up to five poems in any style. Their style seems to lean shorter (haiku et al.). No submissions fee!
• 🎭 The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is looking for screenplays to be adapted into short films by graduate degree actors. Scripts should have three or four characters and be five to seven minutes (ie. pages) long. This call closes on February 11th. No submissions fee!

Mastering Structure And Plot: The Blueprint Of A Story

• Paragraphs as the smallest building blocks of fiction: action, dialogue, description
• The Rule of Three
• The who, what, why, where and how of fiction
• The difference between short, novelette, novella and novel and how it affects the writing of each
• Characters and their goals
• Names and their significance
• The role of the narrator
• Writing the perfect shape short story
• Time and its relation to narrative

Care To Drabble With Us?

This Week's Prompt