In recent years, NASA scientists have found a steadily increasing amount of evidence that liquid water once existed on Mars. These discoveries could lead to scientists’ quest to confirm that the planet has hosted life. Write a poem in which you explore the mysterious possibilities of the red planet, extraterrestrial life, the galaxies and constellations, or the notion of human colonies on other planets. Focus on examining the emotions that emerge when you contemplate the vast unknowns of outer space.

Whether or not you believe in astrology, it can be an engaging exercise to contemplate the authority of a prediction based solely on your birthdate. Look up your current horoscope in a newspaper or online, and take note of how the forecast characterizes your astrological sign. Which particular elements of the horoscope’s characterizations do you find yourself immediately agreeing with? If you find yourself mostly in disagreement, what would you predict for yourself instead? Using the second-person voice, write an essay in the form of an astrological forecast. Describe how you foresee the upcoming month in terms of love, finances, home, and spiritual matters, and cite how these predictions are justified by your personality traits. Or, if you’d prefer, write an essay against astrology, pointing out the flaws in such pseudoscientific systems of divination, and examining what it is about your personality that opposes them.

Belarusian author and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich has received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was announced today in Stockholm by Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who called Alexievich’s writing “a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” 

Alexievich is the author of seven books, including Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), for which she interviewed more than five hundred eyewitnesses of the 1986 nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine—including firefighters, doctors, physicists, politicians, and citizens—over a period of ten years. The book was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Her other works—such as 1988’s War’s Unwomanly Face, comprised of interviews with hundreds of women soldiers who fought in World War II—collect the memories of wartime, including the Soviet-Afghan war, the war in Afghanistan, and the fall of the Soviet Union, creating what Danius calls “a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.”

“By means of her extraordinary method—a carefully composed collage of human voices—Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy noted. “For the past thirty or forty years, she has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. But it’s not really about a history of events…. What she’s offering us is really an emotional world.”

Alexievich was born in Stanislav, Ukraine, in 1948, and grew up in Belarus. She worked as a reporter for several local newspapers, a Belarusian carp fishing magazine, and a Minsk-based literary magazine before dedicating her work to oral histories. Persecuted by Lukashenko regime for the nature of her writing, Alexievich left Belarus in 2000 and lived under sanctuary for a decade in Paris, Gothenburg, and Berlin, before returning to Minsk in 2011.

She becomes the fourteenth woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canada’s Alice Munro, received the award in 2013. French novelist Patrick Modiano won the 2014 prize. Alexievich will receive eight million Swedish kronor, or approximately $1.1 million.

Though in many ways the act of writing can be considered an exercise in control—over everything from plot arc to characters to the weather in your setting—what happens when you take a more passive position and relinquish control, allowing a story to emerge from your unconscious mind? Many scientists, spiritualists, and artists have reported on “automatic writing,” in which a person steers clear of putting any conscious intention behind the words that are put down. Try your hand by first writing about what comes to mind immediately: perhaps the changing colors and textures of autumn leaves outside, or everyday details about upcoming holidays and visiting family. Try not to pause or edit yourself. Gradually let your mind progress into an associative stream of consciousness. Take a look at what you’ve written and, using your favorite elements, write a short short story with a seasonal theme, allowing it to be nonsensical, absurd, or surreal.

“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself,” said author Mohsin Hamid in a 2012 interview. Think about a stranger with whom you recently crossed paths. It could be the person who bagged your groceries, stood in front of you in line at the post office, or simply walked by you on the street. What type of situation can you imagine this stranger experiencing? Which emotions or feelings would you project onto this stranger? Write a poem about this imagined event from the stranger's perspective. Concentrate on digging deeply into your own private observations and personal history to capture what sensations might be echoed in another person’s experience.

Kirkus Reviews has announced the finalists for its second annual Kirkus Prize, given for books of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature published in the previous year. The winners, who will be announced on October 15, will each receive $50,000.

The six finalists in fiction are: Susan Barker for her novel The Incarnations (Simon & Schuster, 2015); the late Lucia Berlin for her short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Lauren Groff for her novel Fates and Furies (Riverhead, 2015); Valeria Luiselli for her novel The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press, 2015) translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney; Jim Shepard for his novel The Book of Akron  (Knopf, 2015); and Hanya Yanagihara for her novel A Little Life (Doubleday, 2015). This year’s fiction judges are Megan Labrise, Nicole Magistro, and Colson Whitehead.

The six finalists in nonfiction are: Ta-Nehisi Coates for Between the World and Me: Notes on the First 150 Years in America (Spiegel & Grau, 2015); John Ferling for Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War that Won It (Bloomsbury, 2015); Helen Macdonald for H Is for Hawk (Grove Books, 2015); Adam Tooze for The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (Viking, 2014); Simon Winchester for Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers (HarperCollins, 2015); and Andrea Wulf for The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World (Knopf, 2015). The nonfiction judges are Meghan Daum, Marie du Vaure, and Clayton Moore.

Books published in the previous year that received a Kirkus Star review were eligible. The editors of Kirkus Reviews estimate their reviewers cover eight to ten thousand books every year and give 10 percent of those books a Kirkus Star. Established last year to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Kirkus Reviews, the inaugural Kirkus Prize was given to Lily King for her novel Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014) and Roz Chast for her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury).

October begins today. Pick a memory, moment, image, object, or idea that holds the essence of the month in your mind. Explore this entity from multiple angles: the visual, literal, historical, and metaphorical. Perhaps it is rooted in nature or childhood, in a color or flavor. Examine your associations with the month and how your perceptions have changed over the years.

The National Book Foundation announced its annual 5 Under 35 honorees this morning. Now in its tenth year, the program honors five young fiction writers, who were selected this year by previous 5 Under 35 honorees.

This year’s 5 Under 35 are:

Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins (Black Cat), selected by Paul Yoon

Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), selected by ZZ Packer

Megan Kruse, author of Call Me Home (Hawthorne Books), selected by Phil Klay

Tracy O’Neill, author of The Hopeful (Ig Publishing), selected by Fiona Maazel

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy), selected by Dinaw Mengestu

Since 2006, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program has honored writers in the early stages of their careers, including Téa Obreht, Karen Russell, and Justin Torres. The honorees each receive a cash prize of $1,000, and will be celebrated at a ceremony in New York City on November 16, hosted by LaVar Burton.

Autumn leaves are a pleasurable part of the season, until it’s time to rake them up. Write a story about a character who rakes her neighbors’ lawns for extra cash. Have her deliver a short narrative about each home she visits. Delve into how these narratives relate to one another and whether they are intertwined. Do they reveal a greater story about the neighborhood that has been hidden until now? Does your narrator uncover secrets about her neighbors or her home?