A Million Little Delights: Creative Living Essays Free Tip Jar Option

WORD COUNT: 500–1,000 words
PAYMENT: $0.08 per word, based on the final edited word count. Payment is issued upon publication.

A Million Little Delights is seeking stories about trying things, making things, following curiosities, and giving yourself permission to be a beginner.

We're interested in what happens when you take an idea you've been carrying around and actually do something about it—especially when you have no particular reason to believe you'll be good at it.

Take the pottery class. Audition for community theater. Learn to sew your own dress. Join the choir. Spend a month painting tiny watercolors. Try improv. Make pasta by hand. Plant the absurdly ambitious garden. Learn the dance you've watched other people do a hundred times.

You don't need to become excellent at any of it.

That's kind of the point.

The spirit we're after:

I Signed Up for a Stand-Up Comedy Class Because I've Never Made a Whole Room Laugh — what happened when I decided to try something I had absolutely no evidence I'd be good at.

Please use this as an example of the specificity, voice, and spirit we love—not as a story to pitch. This piece is already in development for an upcoming issue.

What we're looking for

We're looking for stories about creativity in practice, not general advice about living creatively.

Pitch us the experiment.

What did you decide to try? Why that particular thing? What happened when you actually showed up? What surprised you? What went embarrassingly wrong? What did you discover that you couldn't have known from the sidelines?

We're especially interested in hobbies, classes, creative experiments, unusual skills, abandoned interests picked back up, ambitious little projects, and pursuits undertaken primarily because they sounded fun.

The experience doesn't need to result in a transformation. You don't need to turn your new hobby into a business, become exceptionally talented, or conclude with a tidy lesson about believing in yourself.

In fact, we'd rather you didn't.

We're interested in creativity that exists outside achievement and productivity—the pleasure of making something, learning something, getting a little better at something, or simply discovering that you'd like to do it again.

Bring us personality, specificity, curiosity, mishaps, discoveries, and the details that make your particular experiment yours.

Be bad at something. Get curious. Tell us what happened.