We’re all writers here, but sometimes we hit that wall, that infamous barricade – writer’s block. In tonight’s live-streamed event, Start Your Story, Sian Campbell shows us what to do when you’ve been staring at that blank page a little too long.

Editor-in-Chief of Scum Magazine – an online repository of fiction, memoir, rants and ‘basically whatevs’ – Campbell knows all the tricks of the trade. Through plotting, planning and scheming, learn how to defeat writers block and Find Your Words at 6pm (AEST) tonight.

But to get you started, here’s a great exercise for you to dust off those cobwebs.

NYWM Challenge #1

Sometimes starting small is the best way to ease in to writer mode – and there’s nothing smaller than micro-fiction. In this bite-sized exercise, get a feel for crafting situations simply and succinctly.

How?

Write down a season of the year, an emotion, a time of day, and a place: for example, angry/winter/river/morning. Using these four prompts, write a micro-fiction story in third person that accurately portrays a situation, and don’t use more than 500 words. If you have a writing partner or Pen Pal, you can write each other’s prompts!

Events and Opportunities

Sometimes all you need to get started on a piece of writing is an idea of where to submit or a goal to work towards. So, let’s have a chat about some of the opportunities around!

Perhaps you have a short story that could use a polish? With the theme of “Giving Women a Voice”, the NSW Society of Women Writers are presenting a short fiction competition, which awards a cash prize to the winner, as well as the opportunity to be published in INK3, a publication commemorating the 90^th year of the NSW Society of Women Writers. Stories are due next week on June 9 so check the website for further details now.

And for all school students aged between five and eighteen years old in Western Australia, you’re encouraged to put pen to paper and submit an original piece of writing to the Tim Winton Award for Young Writers. Entries may be fiction or non-fiction, up to 2000 words, however all submissions should be written in prose. Entries are due on June 16, so check their website for more details.

And lastly, we want to know how you begin a new piece of writing! Do you have a new routine for each piece? A list full of ideas that you go back to? Do you set yourself a goal to reach? Tell us on Twitter using the #NYWM15 now.