Don’t you know anything about the aborigines of Papua New Guinea? Patience! This is a good opportunity to document yourself and learn something: the knowledge you have acquired could always prove useful for that novel you have been trying to write for some time, but which languishes on page 1.254 without you knowing how to turn the plot. Does the competition announcement require only a limited maximum of jokes? No matter, visit this page and write the same if you like the theme! Once I came across a nice contest for stories of up to a hundred words. The subject requested intrigued me, so I wrote the first hundred and realized that they weren’t enough to even sketch the character I had in mind. I went ahead: I wrote another hundred and I realized that history needed much more space to breathe well. I went on, and another ten people came to mind to work with the protagonist. Now I am about twenty-four thousand three hundred and eight words, and I count on having written only two-thirds of the story (which, at this point, has all the air of wanting to become a short novel). See what’s the hint of the suggestion? Once you start, don’t limit your writing. Remember the Basic Rule n. 2? Writing is written. And that n. 3? Even if you start writing something that will not be useful to you right away, go ahead: sooner or later you will find the right place.