Keeping pen and paper notebooks handy in your car, purse or pocket helps. Jotting down ideas in your mobile device using Evernote makes writers on the go even more organized. Writers can snap photos, take notes, and even record videos and voice memos. The content syncs to all of your desktop or mobile devices.

For Android users, you can use an app called Colornote Notepad. Colornote is a simple, color-coded note taking app that uses sticky note style homescreen widgets to give you quick access to your note from your homescreen. You take your notes on a stylized notepad, and can organize them by color and category so they stand out easily. Red for immediate! Or blue for, need to sleep on this one.

While brushing my teeth, I’ve been known to open and flatten a cardboard toothpaste box, just to have something to write on. I also have what’s called a tickler file. It’s a three-ring notebook with pockets. I scribble the idea on whatever scrap of paper is at hand, date the concept and add it to binder. That way I never lose the inspired moment.  My seeds are kept safe and dry until planted. Until yesterday, when I didn’t follow my own advice.

I took the day off from work. I was opening an antique washstand in my living room, by twisting an old-fashioned key into the lock. The washstand was from the farm my mother grew up on in Virginia. I keep votive candles and tablecloths in the washstand. As I retrieved what I was looking for I had a Maxwell House moment. A crystal clear idea for a play rose to the top of my mind. A play! I’ve never written one! The idea had to do with a totally different perspective on Memorial Day. One I’d never heard of or read about. The idea was so strong and so good and so complete I didn’t jot it down. Today the idea is a wisp in my memory.

So fellow writers, do as I say, not as I do. Grab those creative ideas, and jot them down anywhere, anytime. Don’t falter.

Until next time, keep on writing.

Finding the right home for your short stories can be a difficult task. Between June 2011 and November 2012, I must have received hundreds of rejection letters. Over that eighteen-month period, three things happened: I was encouraged to submit more, I honed my craft, and I looked up better ways to make submissions.

There are hundreds of places looking for stories—literary journals, magazines, web sites. Keeping track of them all is dizzying. Enter Duotrope, a site recommended to me by a woman who recently got an MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. Duotrope keeps track of all the different places that accept fiction and poetry, providing users with tools to track their submissions. I owe much of my success to that site. When I submitted through it, it did not have a paywall. Fortunately, its new model isn’t expensive at all.

If I could offer three pieces of advice to would-be writers of short fiction or poetry, it would be this: 1) Don’t submit to big names like The New Yorker. The odds of them accepting a submission from an unknown are infinitesimal. 2) Make sure the publication is a good fit for you. 3) Don’t, I repeat, don’t pay over $5 for a submission. There are some pretty unscrupulous places out there just looking to make money off of fees. I would not waste time or money on any contests.

Your goal is—and always should be—to get published. You should start small. If you think of any university, chances are you’ll find a literary journal attached to its English or writing department. They’re always looking for exciting work. That’s what worked for me.—Ian A. Peterkin Jr.

“He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.” – John Ray

Until next time, keep on writing.

Karen Russell’s (right) first novel, Swamplandia, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012 (the judges decided not to award the prize). Her new short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, has just been published and is featured on the cover of the February 10 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Reviewer Joy Williams writes of Russell, “Her work has a velocity and trajectory that is little less than dazzling and a tough, enveloping, exhilarating voice that cannot be equaled.”

In a recent “How I Write” Q&A at thedailybeast.com, Noah Charney, art historian and novelist (The Art Thief), interviewed Russell. (A note to locals: Charney will be the speaking at Fairfield University on Sunday, March 24 at 3 p.m. as part of the Open Visions Forum). One of his questions was, “How much do you have to write, in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?”

Russell’s long reply is worth reading in its entirety.

“I know many writers who try to hit a set word count every day, but for me, time spent inside a fictional world tends to be a better measure of a productive writing day. I think I’m fairly generative as a writer, I can produce a lot of words, but volume is not the best metric for me. It’s more a question of, did I write for four or five hours of focused time, when I did not leave my desk, didn’t find some distraction to take me out of the world of the story? Was I able to stay put and commit to putting words down on the page, without deciding mid-sentence that it’s more important to check my email, or ‘research’ some question online, or clean out the science fair projects in the back for my freezer? For me, a good writing day is when I can move forward inside a story, because I take so much pleasure in tinkering with sentences that I often have to fight my own impulse to dither and revise in order to keep the momentum of the narrative going. So if I can move in a linear way through the story, and stay zipped inside the story, not jinx myself with despair or frustration or over-confidence or self-consciousness, and be basically okay with not-knowing what is going to happen from one sentence to the next, that’s a great writing day. Writers are such excellent self-saboteurs, though. I swear, I can hijack my own writing day in a hundred ways—I can eject myself from a story because I’ve decided it’s ‘going good.’ There’s this excruciating aspect of joy, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, where you almost want to interrupt it. For me, the experience of losing myself in a character can feel intolerably wonderful. So I’ve decided that the trick is just to keep after it for several hours, regardless of your own vacillating assessment of how the writing is going. Is that setting the bar too low. . . ? Showing up and staying present is a good writing day.”

Let me try to boil Russell’s wisdom down to bulletin-board length—

Stay inside your story and move it forward.

Whether we count pages or words or neither, Russell’s daily measure of success is one we all should embrace.—Alex McNab

Click here to read the entire Russell interview at thedailybeast.com.

Poetry has always touched me deeply, it reaches places in my psyche that prose never can.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. -John Ruskin

The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. -Jean Cocteau

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. -Plato

Until next time, keep on writing, and if a poem tumbles from your soul today, cradle it.

You need to read it.

And that directive applies regardless of whether, like McPhee, you write nonfiction narrative journalism, or you write memoir, short stories, novels or some other form of prose. There is something in there for any writer who has ever struggled with how to organize a piece of writing—which means all of us.

I haven’t even finished the article yet. It is so dense with wise advice that I am purposely taking my time. But I wanted to let you know about it right away. Here is one excerpt, from many, that distills a fundamental challenge of structure clearly and brilliantly:

“Developing a structure is seldom. . .simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in. Through flashbacks and flash-forwards, you can move around in time, of course, but such a structure remains under chronological control and can’t do much about items that are scattered thematically. There’s nothing wrong with a chronological structure. On tablets in Babylonia, most pieces were written that way, and nearly all pieces are written that way now. After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker, I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure.”

McPhee, now 81, then shows us how he met this challenge in his 1967 profile of Thomas P. F. Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum, complete with a diagram of the eventual structure. It is one of several illustrative examples he offers in the article.

You don’t need to try to get into Princeton, pay $55,000 in tuition, room and board, and then hope to get into McPhee’s famous “Creative Nonfiction” course to learn from the master. (One who did study at Princeton with McPhee, and told us about it at the Library, when she spoke at an author lunch several years ago, is Jennifer Weiner, whose best-selling novels couldn’t be more different from McPhee’s work. Nevertheless, she said his advice helped her become a successful writer.)

Just read “Structure.” It is the latest in a series about his life as a writer that McPhee been contributing to The New Yorker. Someday, if his usual m.o. applies, McPhee’s pieces on his writing life will be published as a book, and we’ll be struck by how well they hold together as a unified whole rather than as a collection of previously published articles. It will be a book I’ll buy.—Alex McNab

[A note: On The New Yorker’s website, the full text of McPhee’s article is locked to all but subscribers. A simple Google search listed a link that tied into the entire text, so you can try doing that—although, as a former magazine editor, my conscience prohibits me from publishing the link here. Of course, the print edition of the magazine is available in the Periodicals Room in the Main Library and at the Fairfield Woods Branch.]

• Put your work-in-progress (WIP) into Scrivener and become competent in that writer’s program. Joanne Hus of our Saturday writers’ group was the first person who passed along a rave about Scrivener; that was several years ago. The program does cost money to download, and there may be other applications you can find for free that are useful. Plus, there’s always the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. As 2013 dawns, though, Scrivener is a key application in many writers’ toolboxes. For example, friends of our Saturday group and the FWB, including Gabi Coatsworth and Linda Howard Urbach, have written about it online (Linda, as usual, with tongue firmly in cheek). If you need any more convincing, in the Acknowledgments at the end of his big 2012 book Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon lets us know that, “This novel was written using Scrivener on Macintosh computers.” That’s a good enough endorsement for us.

• Sit down and read the first draft of your WIP from beginning to end, then revise same all the way through. Often you have no legitimate excuse for not finishing your revisions. But not always. Remember a couple of months ago when we blogged about local author A. J. O’Connell’s revision efforts on her novel? Like us, she’s still at it, she reports at her site “The Garret.” But she has a good excuse for not finishing in 2012. In the final few months of the year, she also wrote—and signed a publishing contract for—The Eagle and the Arrow, a sequel to her novella Beware the Hawk. Bravo!

• Submit your short stories, creative nonfiction and/or journalism for publication on a regular basis. Use such helpful sites as duotrope.com, with its search feature of outlets for your work (available to paid subscribers as of January 1, 2013), and submittable.com, the popular submissions management site for many literary journals. “Regular basis” means monthly at minimum. One of the writers in our Saturday workshop followed this formula, through many discouraging rejections. Then three acceptances arrived within weeks of one other. Superstition precludes the FWB from offering any further details, though, until the stories are in print.

• Watch the documentary “Tom Wolfe Goes Back to Blood.” Despite the mixed-at-best verdict of the reviews of the author’s latest novel Back to Blood, how often do you get to follow a master writer, over a four-year period, doing the work of creating a book? A great opportunity to see Oscar Corral’s film in a local auditorium came and went this past fall at the refurbished Bijou Theatre in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut. You should be able to watch it via the bigstar.tv website, which requires that you log in.

• Read Virginia Wolff’s To the Lighthouse for its lessons in shifting points of view and communicating characters’ interior thoughts. Too many mentors and fellow writers have recommended this classic to ignore it any longer, despite the fear that it may be difficult.

• Write some fresh articles of journalism and a fresh pieces of fiction. You may not be there yet as you keep refining your WIP, but the time may come to heed a few words of wisdom from novelist Elinor Lipman, who writes delightful domestic comedies (The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, et al.). She heard this once from her writing mentor: “Sometimes the best form of revision is to start something new.”

Happy New Year and good writing in 2013!—Alex McNab

Kahlil Gibran wrote, ”When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” Much of our collective grief has to do with the senseless killing of innocent children. Children who were in a safe place, school. Children who were with teachers and administrators, loyal to the children’s welfare and capable of taking care of them, until, the unthinkable happens. Gibran’s quote helps me see that I cry because I love children, because I’m a mom, because I’m a teacher, and because I love teachers. All those things, when taken in the balanced order of life, bring delight. I mourn, with the rest of our country and the world. As a writer, I write, to help me get through this grief. So, I am going to continue with the essay I planned, an article about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

Dipping my toe in the NaNoWriMo seas again this year was truly delightful. This past November, I managed to participate in NaNoWriMo and still keep my job. Plus keep all my diverse professional and personal plates spinning. The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to inspire writers of all ages to write 50,000 words in one month. I entered with my eyes wide open, knowing that reality prohibited me from having the spare time to write a 50,000 fictional novel. However, if I added up all the words that I wrote for work, I’m sure I’ve written several full-fledged novels during the month of November. I used NaNoWriMo as a way to fertilize my own writer’s platform, by playing in a national arena. I knew I couldn’t complete a new novel, but my day job gave me the opportunity to participate as part of a community outreach. (It’s nice to write for a living.)

To complete the participation in NaNoWriMo, I needed to look into my own resources of what I’d previously written. I brushed off a parable, for children of all ages, that I wrote 21 years ago. I re-worked some sections, and wrote some with fresh eyes. NaNoWriMo inspired me this year. I had to submit something to get the dandy “Participant 2012″ icon you see above. I submitted my children’s parable in a word document to the official NaNoWriMo word count counter on their website. The word count added up to a spanking 2,369! Like any good teacher who acknowledges an advancement that his or her student makes, I’m giving myself an A for effort.

Being involved in NaNoWriMo writing circles also gave me a chance to learn more about their Young Writers Program for kids and teens. It looks like an energizing and creative way to engage young writers. I’d encourage any teacher out there, reading this post, to incorporate this into next year’s Language Arts syllabus.

I end today’s piece in a dedication, with love, with compassion, and with inspiration to all the children and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

On a holiday note: All of us at the Fairfield Writer’s Blog wish you a peaceful season and a New Year filled with hope.

Until next time, keep on writing.

We aspiring writers who live in Fairfield County, Connecticut, are fortunate. With the center of publishing only 50 miles away in Manhattan; with vibrant public libraries and their energetic events coordinators in almost every community; with fine chain and independent bookstores within easy driving distance; and with several universities featuring creative writing programs and commitments to cultural outreach close by, we have a steady schedule of author appearances to attend for education and inspiration. As I reported in my previous post, for example, bestselling writers Dennis Lehane and Peter Abrahams shared their wisdom with us in person less than 24 hours apart. Like Western pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail arriving at Bent’s Fort, authors on the book-tour trail find our area a welcoming stopover.

But what if you cannot get to an author talk? Or if you live in a place far from that book-tour trail? How can you sit face-to-face with a National Book Award winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a bestselling crime writer, a unique-voiced memoirist? That’s why the Internet and YouTube were invented, of course.

Herewith an annotated index of a baker’s dozen links to a random sampling of author talks online. And I’m not referring to someone’s latest appearance on “Today” or “Charlie Rose.”

A caveat: I have watched only a few of these. Thus, I cannot promise you they all impart ready-to-use writing advice. Nor can I promise that these are the best available videos of each writer. My purpose is simply to show that, if you are looking for inspiring sights and sounds from one of your favorites, you may be able to find it. So here’s the list, in alphabetical order, except for Ian McEwan in the anchor-leg spot, the reason for which will be apparent.

• Michael Cunningham. The Pulitzer Prize winner for The Hours, from the fabled Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

• Louise Erdrich. The new National Book Award for Fiction winner (The Road House) on Well Read.

• Elizabeth Gilbert. Her famous 2009 lecture on creativity at the TED conference.

• Mary Karr. The poet and memoirist (The Liar’s Club, et al.) from the Writer’s Symposium By The Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University.

• Barbara Kingsolver. Thoughts on libraries and on being a writer from the author, most recently, of Flight Behavior, from Minnesota Public Radio.

• Elmore Leonard. The now-87-year-old crime master on his writing schedule and process, one of several short segments from AuthorLearningCenter. Given his lofty spot in my pantheon of writing heroes, I also recommend his recent acceptance speech at the National Book Awards (scroll down), where he received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. (I skipped over Martin Amis’ introduction; Leonard gets his medal and takes the mic at roughly the 6:30 mark).

• Laura Lippman. Her illustrated master-class lecture—on how she does it—at the Crime Fiction Academy.

• Alice Munro with Diane Anthill. The short-story genius with the British novelist and editor, plus a moderator, at the International Festival of Authors in Canada. There is a much longer, biographical interview with Munro at TVO.

• Richard Price. How to capture the sound of the streets in dialogue is one of several segments in this presentation at Big Think. Other writing experts at this repository of no-frills, in-their-own-words videos include, Margaret Atwood, Anne Lamott, Tom Perrotta, Salman Rushdie, The New Yorker Editor David Remnick, Robert McKee (the screenwriting guru) and Gay Talese.

• Gay Talese. Take an author-guided tour of his English-basement “writing bunker” in his East Side of Manhattan brownstone via The New Yorker.

• Kurt Vonnegut. Listen to him enumerate, in this clip, his famous instructions on how to write a story .

• Tom Wolfe. Oscar Coral’s 72-minute documentary, “Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood,” on the 81-year-old white-suited wonder’s reporting and writing of his new novel. (This on-demand viewing may require registration and perhaps a fee.)

• Ian McEwan. In a video produced by his publisher for the Anchor paperback release of his novel Solar in 2011, McEwan offers “Advice for Aspiring Writers.”

Now, having proffered this list, I urge you, before clicking on the Play arrow of any of the above, to read the first comment beneath the McEwan video, posted by someone named Lucian O’Rourke. It reads:

Aspiring writers: stop watching YouTube!—Alex McNab

Of all professions, it seems like writers are the ones who always have the most excuses not to write. Today, as the wind howls outside, my family and I are in the home of friends. I thought distractions would be a good topic for today’s blog. Here’s my list of hints and observations:

1. Only you are in charge of your focus, be ruthless in carving out your mental space.
2. Like rubbing a knife on a whetstone, look for ways in your everyday life to sharpen your writing skills. Those exercises help you down the road.
3. Writing for social media trains your mind to cut to the chase. Condensing a topic to 140 characters or less on Twitter is a good way to hone your writer’s brain.
4. If you have to write captions for your job, like I do, that can sharpen your communication skills.
5. When you write, write, don’t edit.
6. Set aside time just to write. Don’t pick up the phone, do laundry, or check your Facebook account.
7. Make sure your tools are up to date before you start writing. Check the ink in your pen before you sit down. Make sure you have a full toner cartridge in your printer.
8. If you are stumped on what to write, set a timer for 20 minutes. Write nonstop, don’t edit or ponder. Write stream of consciousness, when the timer goes off, stop.

Enough of my ideas, what are your favorite suggestions?

Until next time, stay safe out there, and keep on writing!