Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He's published Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories; Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story; and Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo. His book The Art of Brevity is forthcoming in 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Best Small Fictions and Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. His essays on creativity have been published in the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He also co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing. Follow him at @grantfaulkner on Twitter and Instagram.
Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be…