Creative Writing Challenge Complete!

I did it! ~*Confetti!*~

I’m super proud of myself, y’all. You may remember my first post, where I introduced my New Year’s Resolution: to reignite my spark for creative writing. Because resolutions are hard, I created a more bite-size goal: to follow a creative writing prompt every day of January. The parameters of the goal:

1.) I had to use one of the two daily prompts I had already set out for myself in December.
2.) I didn’t have to follow the prompt exactly, as long as I drew inspiration from it.
3.) The writing had to be posted here.

I’m thrilled to report that I fulfilled my goal with 100% success! Not only did I accomplish my goal, but in doing so, I completed my resolution as well. I am passionate about creative writing, and I’m happy to have it back in my life. I want to take a beat to break down why I think this was so successful for me, and then dive into my growth, resources I’ve loved, and what’s next on my creative writing journey.

Why did this goal work for me?

A buzzword in the business world is “SMART” goals. It stands for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. I wasn’t thinking about this acronym when I set out, but it hits all the markers.

• The three parameters above covered Specific.

• Measurable is also covered by the above parameters. Posting all of my results also helped keep me accountable by keeping the pressure up. Any of my friends could also check in and “measure” my success.

• Attainable was the only part of the acronym I wasn’t sure about. Although completing a writing prompt every day seems achievable, shit happens, and sometimes days don’t meet our expectations. Luckily, I had a chill January, and no hurdles popped up that kept me from setting aside a little time to write each day.

  • I built in wiggle room by giving myself two prompts each day, and by allowing myself not to follow the prompt verbatim. I think flexibility like that is key. Some days I’d open the prompts and think “Wow, I don’t want to write about either of those.” That allowed my creativity to kick in. For example, on January 8th, my prompt was “Teacher’s Pet”. I was supposed to write about an inspirational teacher I had. Although I’ve had several teachers that had a tremendous impact on me, I wrote a short fantasy story about a young witch about to graduate from a magic academy and the teacher that inspired her instead. That felt more rewarding.

  • I also removed barriers for myself before I even got started. I had already gathered all the writing prompts for the month ahead of time. That made my goal more attainable, because I didn’t bog myself down searching for a prompt every day. I could jump straight into the meat of it: writing.

• The goal of doing a writing prompt each day is Relevant to my resolution of reigniting my passion for writing.

• Time-bound is obvious, as I was doing it for the month of January. I think this helped me persevere, even on the days when I didn’t feel like it. If I said I was going to follow a writing prompt every day this year, it would have been daunting, and I might have made an excuse to skip a day or two along the way. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel was a big motivator, and every time I hit “publish”, I could see myself getting a step closer to my goal.

Aside from hitting all the SMART objectives, I simply enjoy writing. I looked forward to it every day. If my goal was something I didn’t want to do, like go for a run (bleh), or avoid chocolate (why?!), then no matter how “smart” my goal was, I can’t say if the results would be the same.

Resources I’ve loved, and how I’ve grown so far

For my first round of resources, check out my progress post from two weeks ago. This list will build on those.

First, I finished auditing Brandon Sanderson’s creative writing class on YouTube. So that was fun!

The most incredible resource I’ve discovered in the last two weeks is a program called ProWritingAid. It’s not free, but there are tons of discounts available via “AuthorTube”, so I got a year subscription for 20% off. It’s an editing software that goes so much further than spell checks. It looks for things like word repetition, sentence length and variety, passive voice, weak adverbs, slow pacing, and much more. Some stuff I remembered from high school English (but it was very dusty), and other stuff I wouldn’t have known to look for if ProWritingAid hadn’t pointed it out. Even better than it telling me things it thinks I should improve, it tells me why, so I can see those things as I’m writing in the future, improving my writing and have fewer mistakes as I grow. It even has articles and seminars related to different grammar topics, so you can learn more. This program has been a bit of a game changer for me. I discovered it about a week ago and started plugging in my daily writings before publishing them. I couldn’t believe what a difference it made. Since then, I have gone back and edited every writing prompt I’ve published all month, and re-posted them in a more polished form (at least on here, not on other platforms). Some of them I’m very proud of. Some are meh. But at least now, they’re all shiny! ProWritingAid is the closest thing to having an English teacher again. It’s well worth the subscription for me.

[Tangent] As a young person and through college and even grad school, homework and essays were often based on word counts. I understand why teachers/professors do this. But sometimes you don't need many words to get the point across. You shouldn’t take ten words to say what you can say in five. It muddies the waters. Word count objectives for assignments make writing very flowery and full of fluff. In other words, I’ve gotten very good at writing bullshit. ProWritingAid has helped point that out to me, and I’m seeing it as I type now. I wrote nearly 18,000 words in my combined January prompts. After filtering through ProWritingAid, my word count for those 31 prompts is now 17,483. I shaved off almost 500 meaningless words that were hampering the readability of my stories. That’s pretty impressive! [\End tangent]

Another resource that I’ve realized I had in my back pocket this whole time is Matt Colville’s YouTube channel. Specifically, his playlist “Running the Game”. I’ve been watching his videos throughout the pandemic to improve my Dungeons & Dragons gaming, because that’s what those videos are about. But I realized a lot of other authors I listened to were saying things I had already heard from Matt. While some of his content is about improvising at the table, game mechanics, and how to deal with player conflicts, the heart of the playlist is about how to tell interesting stories. And he’s great at that.

My favorite writing podcast I’ve listened to so far is called Six Figure Authors. It’s mostly about indie publishing/self publishing your own novels, but it has been very educational for me so far, and I’ve enjoyed listening.

What’s next on my creative writing journey?

For starters, I won’t keep doing a daily writing prompt. Prompts are great when you can’t think of anything to write, but it will be nice to write about things I want to write about, without being beholden to a prompt. Also, I won’t beat myself up on the every day thing. I want to keep writing, but some days it’s not going to happen, and that’s fine. This goes against the SMART method I spent all that time writing about. So maybe this will fizzle out and I’ll realize my intention to keep writing isn’t working the way I wanted it to. I’ll re-evaluate later this month based on how February goes.

I mentioned in my progress post that I bought a few books about writing. A goal for February is to make it through one of those books. It should be easy, but I’m in the middle of reading a fantastic fantasy series right now, so the real challenge is taking some time to read non-fiction between the page-turners.

I feel like I need to have more concrete goals after my January success, but my only other goal for this month is to keep learning and seeking new resources to improve my writing and my knowledge of the writing industry.

To infinity and beyond…

What I learned this month is that my childhood dream of being an author is still my dream. I want to write a novel and someday publish one too. Hopefully many. It won’t be easy, and I’m not quitting my day job. But my passion is still there. This is what I want to do, even if it’s a long time before I write anything worth reading.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and for sharing in my excitement about completing my goal and reigniting my passion. I’m excited for where this will take me through 2022 and beyond.