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In kindergarten I was tasked with making a shoebox diorama that showed me engaged in my future vocation. The little cardboard me I cut out wasn't playing a professional sport or fighting a fire or walking on the Moon. Instead, Mini Me sat solo in the empty Vans shoebox, in a tiny cardboard chair, behind a tiny cardboard table, in front of a tiny cardboard typewriter. It wasn't a dream I chased very far. At some point growing up I was dissuaded by pragmatism. Having learned that I stood the same chances of becoming a successful writer as my kindergarten classmates did becoming a professional baseball player, I steered clear of ever being caught playing the dreamer.

This is for people who are making plans for a brand new year, and especially people who have decided that in 2015, they are going to stop making unfulfilled promises to themselves for some unspecified time in the future and actually give writing fiction a go. Savvy enough to already know that getting a first novel into print without a publication record is well nigh impossible, they decide that short fiction is the necessary first step.

Once the decision to write has been made, the next step is to decide what to write about. For many people, unfortunately, this first hurdle is the one they stumble over so badly that they never get back up. For others, the choice is obvious; with particular interests and experience in one of the prominent genres such as sports, science, historical or crime writing, they can immediately make use of their professional lives in their fiction writing. Genre writing has limitations and restrictions of its own, and many people who have taken the decision to write will be reluctant to be pushed so severely in an unnecessarily narrow direction from the start.