National Novel Writing Month, often shortened to NaNoWriMo, is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes creative writing around the world. Its flagship program is an annual, international creative writing event in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November. Well-known authors write "pep-talks" in order to motivate participants during the month. The website provides participants, called "Wrimos", with tips for writer's block, information on where local participants are meeting, and an online community of support. Focusing on the length of a work rather than the quality, writers are encouraged to finish their first draft quickly so it can be edited later at their discretion. The project started in July 1999 with 21 participants. In 2022, 413,295 people participated in the organization's programs.
Flash fiction is a brief fictional narrative that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story ; the "dribble" ; the "drabble" ; "sudden fiction" ; "flash fiction" ; and "microstory".
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015.
A drabble is a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.
Bruce Holland Rogers is an American author of short fiction who also writes under the pseudonym Hanovi Braddock. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Micro Award, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and Spain's Premio Ignotus.
Dinty W. Moore is an American essayist and writer of both fiction and non-fiction books. He received the Grub Street National Book Prize for Non-Fiction for his memoir, Between Panic and Desire, in 2008 and is also author of the memoir To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, the writing guides The Story Cure,Crafting the Personal Essay, and The Mindful Writer, and many other books and edited anthologies.
John Warner is an American writer, editor, and teacher of writing. He is the author of seven books and the editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is a frequent contributor to The Morning News and has been anthologized in May Contain Nuts,Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction, and The Future Dictionary of America. He frequently collaborates with writer Kevin Guilfoile. Warner's most debut novel was The Funny Man. The book has been reviewed by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. His most recent work is the short story collection A Tough Day for the Army edited by Michael Griffith and published by the LSU Press series, Yellow Shoe Fiction.
Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Word Riot was an American online magazine that published poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, reviews, and interviews.
Deb Olin Unferth is an American short story writer, novelist, and memoirist. She is the author of the collection of stories Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation, both published by McSweeney's, and the memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, published by Henry Holt. Unferth was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Revolution.
The Southern Cross Novel Challenge, or SoCNoC, was a yearly event held every June from 2007 - 2013. The southern hemisphere's version of National Novel Writing Month, June was selected as the month for this challenge because it is considered the equivalent of the northern hemisphere's November in terms of weather and temperatures. This challenge is hosted by Kiwi Writers, a New Zealand-based writing group which housed members primarily based in New Zealand and Australia but stretched as far as the United States and Canada. SoCNoC was the largest writing competition in the Southern Hemisphere.
National Poetry Writing Month is a creative writing project held annually in April in which participants attempt to write a poem each day for one month. NaPoWriMo coincides with the National Poetry Month in the United States of America and Canada.
James Robison is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and screenwriter. The author of The Illustrator (1988) and Rumor and Other Stories (1985), his work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker and numerous other journals. He is a recipient of the Whiting Award for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has held teaching posts at numerous universities across the United States, including the University of Houston and Loyola University Maryland.
Dixon Hearne is an American educator and writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He has published an education text, four short story collections: Delta Flats: Stories in the Key of Blues and Hope; Plantatia: High-toned and Lowdown Stories of the South; Native Voices, Native Lands; and When Christmas was Real, and edited several anthologies. His novella, From Tickfaw to Shongaloo is forthcoming from Southeast Missouri State University Press. It was previously named the sole runner-up in the international creative writing competition sponsored by the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans. The contest was judged by Moira Crone.
Archana Sarat is an Indian author, a short story writer, a flash fiction author and poet. She is known for her 2016 novel, Birds of Prey, a psychological crime thriller. The novel has been adapted for the screen in Tamil on the OTT platform, Aha Tamil. It is titled Irai, and stars R. Sarathkumar. It is directed by Rajesh M. Selva and produced by Radaan Mediaworks.
Rahul Mehta is an American author. They were born and raised in West Virginia, and their work focuses on the experience of being queer and South Asian. Mehta is the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Gay Fiction and the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction for their short story collection Quarantine (2011). They teach Creative Writing at the University of the Arts.
100 Word Story is a literary magazine that was founded in 2011 by writers Grant Faulkner and Lynn Mundell in Berkeley, California. It publishes stories and essays that are exactly 100 words in length ; each piece is published with an accompanying photo.
Jasmine Guillory is an American romance novelist. Her works' protagonists are often African-American professionals. In February 2019, her book, The Proposal, was ranked on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback trade fiction.
Eugen Bacon is an African-Australian computer scientist and author of speculative fiction.
