“The more surmountable flaws your characters have, the better readers will connect with them,” writes Jordan Rosenfeld in Writing the Intimate Character: Create Unique, Compelling Characters Through Mastery of Point of View (Writer’s Digest Books, 2016), a craft book exploring character development and point of view. How do readers sympathize with a character who has committed terrible acts? Explore this notion by writing a short story with a character traditionally perceived as the antagonist. Delve into the gray area between hero and villain, evoking sympathy for an otherwise unlikable character. Unravel the complexities of your character’s choices and look for the humanity and relatable flaws that will challenge and connect with readers.

“When I was twelve, I saw a terrible movie called Devil Girl From Mars. And I turned off the television and said to myself, I can write a better story than that. I sat down and began writing my first science fiction story,” says award-winning science fiction author Octavia E. Butler in a 1993 interview for BBC News. Butler, whose work has recently made a resurgence with multiple television and film adaptations, expanded and revolutionized the science fiction genre by writing from the perspective of a marginalized Black woman and celebrating her voice. Is there a film, book, or work of art that you encountered in your childhood that inspired you to start writing? Write an essay that reflects on the impact of this work. Whether through resistance or celebration, how can you trace the development of your artistry back to this first encounter?

Hearty congratulations to the shortlisted authors of the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize. Chosen from a longlist of twenty-five debut novels published in the U.S. this calendar year, the seven titles (and authors!) listed below will be celebrated at the Center’s First Novel Fête on December 1. The winner will be announced on December 5 at the Center for Fiction’s Annual Awards Benefit.

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Started in 2006 to honor exceptional debut fiction of the year and to help build literary careers, the Center’s First Novel Prize includes a $15,000 cash prize for the winner and $1,000 for each of the other shortlisted authors. The judges for this year’s award are Hannah Lillith Assadi, Ayana Mathis, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Deesha Philyaw. The Center for Fiction is a literary nonprofit “that brings diverse communities together to develop and share a passion for fiction.” Previous winners of this award include Raven Leilani (Luster), Noor Naga (If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English), and Kirstin Valdez Quade (The Five Wounds). Best of luck to this year’s First Novel Prize shortlisted writers!

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
Ecco, August 2023

Lookout by Christine Byl
A Strange Object, March 2023

Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson
McSweeney’s, October 2023

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks
Algonquin Books, January 2023

Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton
Ecco, January 2023

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White
Astra House, April 2023

Y/N by Esther Yi
Astra House, March 2023

In an interview for the Yale Review, Elisa Gonzalez, author of the debut poetry collection, Grand Tour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), discusses her relationship with perfectionism as a young poet with senior editor Maggie Millner. “I believed that the book would present itself to me as a kind of perfect object, nothing like all these flawed poems I had lying around,” says Gonzalez. “The gap between the dreamed-of poem and the real poem is painful. It is also, sometimes anyway, a gorgeous private thing, which no one else can ever touch.” Inspired by this reflection of the writing process, write a story in which a burgeoning artist reckons with the kind of art they make. Does this spiritual conflict affect the way they see themselves? How far will they go to be the artist they dream of becoming?

Earlier this month, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, announced its list of winners for their astronomy photographers of the year awards. The photographs, which were published in the Guardian, show various perspectives of observing the cosmos. In the overall winning photograph created by a team of amateur astronomers, a huge plasma arc shines next to the swirling Andromeda galaxy. In the young astronomy photographer category, the Running Chicken Nebula is captured, a diffused glow of crimson, violet, and black gases shining amidst a cluster of white stars. The photographs taken from Earth show the unexpected manifestations of space seen in our sky, as one features rare cloud formations in Hungary and another captures the orbital rotation of stars forming an infinite circle in Lancashire, England. This week write a poem inspired by these photographs that meditates on your place in the universe. For inspiration, read Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars.”

Before you go out to buy your Halloween pumpkin, consider submitting to Action, Spectacle’s Poetry & Prose Prize for a chance to win $1,000 and publication. English translations of works originally written in another language are accepted.

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Using only the online submission system, submit any number of poems totaling no more than 10 pages or up to 8,500 words of a novel or nonfiction excerpt, short story, or essay with a $20 entry fee by October 1. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Action, Spectacle is a biannual online magazine of art and culture based in Louisville, Kentucky, and Brooklyn, New York. The magazine has featured comics by Anne Carson, poetry by Douglas Kearney, and prose by Brandon Taylor, among other selections in art, commentary, fiction, interviews, memoir, verse, and reportage.

For centuries the autumn season has inspired writers to reflect on nature’s cycle of renewal. Temperatures drop, leaves change color and shed, and crops are harvested offering much to contemplate during the season about what it means to live. Poets are continually inspired by the season: Larry Levis writes about the “steadfast, orderly, taciturn, oblivious” yellowing of the leaves in “The Widening Spell of the Leaves;” John Keats reflects on the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” in “To Autumn;” and Marilyn Chin recalls how “all that blooms must fall” in “Autumn Leaves.” What comes to mind when observing the changing of seasons? Write an essay that reflects on how the days of autumn affect you.

“Cause that’s all the life of a painter is, the seen and gone disappearing into the air, rain, seasons, years, the ravenous beaks of the ravens. All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other,” writes Ali Smith in her award-winning novel How to Be Both (Pantheon, 2014), in which one half of the book is narrated by the ghost of an Italian renaissance painter. The artist looks at the modern world through fifteenth-century eyes, offering artful descriptions as readers come to understand how the narrator of the other half of the book, a young woman living in present-day England, is connected. What benefit could inhabiting a voice from the past offer to invigorate your use of language? Try writing a short story in the voice of a ghostly visitor from another century. What is new through their eyes?