Good morning, squiders! Still on track for Nano, still kind of feel like I’m cheating. I’ve completed two whole chapters and am starting on a third, though, so making great progress. Chapters are a little longer here in the middle of the book. Should definitely hit halfway before Nano is over, so huzzah!
(In the book, I mean.)
I realized, once again, that I’d gotten behind on the WriYe blog prompts for the year, so we’re going to play a bit of catch-up again.
This is September’s prompt, but oddly appropriate for now: Do challenges help or harm you?
I’m assuming we mean writing challenges since, you know, writing community.
In general, I am pro-writing challenge. I’ve done a ton of them to varying success. The most common ones have word count goals in certain time periods (Nano, the now-defunct April Fool’s, WriYe itself), but I’ve also done ones that are writing prompts, exploring different craft aspects, building up to certain other goals, etc.
When we moved to California right after college, I went through a few months of serious depression. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have a job, I was in a new city in a new state that I’d never been to before, etc.
(I did eventually get a cat, and then a job, and then things got better.)
While I was sitting at home spiraling, I dove into my writing to help. I’d done Nano for the first time about two years before, but I was only doing Nano and not really writing outside of that. Right after we moved is when I decided I wanted to write for real, with the goal of getting my stories out into the world.
But I didn’t know how to do that, and I ended up joining a bunch of writing challenges for inspiration, advice, and companionship.
Am I always successful at challenges? No. Success varies on a number of factors.
- Challenge Length – Shorter challenges are better if I’m doing something new or something that doesn’t tie in to a specific project. I can do longer challenges (quarterly, yearly) but they need to be directly tied to my own goals and not something I’m experimenting with.
- Challenge Appropriateness – We did talk a bit about this in relation to Nano this year. If I am trying to do a writing goal on top of a revision project, I’m doomed to failure. If I pick a big word count goal without a project in place, same deal. If I’m working on marketing or publishing or whatever, a challenge is rarely appropriate. (Though if there are marketing challenges out there, maybe I should look at them.)
- Real Life Obstacles – Writing challenges were easy peasy until I had kids, full stop. I could manage around college, full-time jobs, what have you. And people just kind of let me. I remember several Thanksgivings where, after the meal was over, I would go hide in the basement and type out a couple thousand words. Sometimes real life gets in the way, and there’s not much you can do about it except not beat yourself up.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I can judge whether a challenge is going to help me or hurt me, and I can usually tell going in whether or not I’m going to hit my goal. I do sometimes do it anyway, or pick a higher goal than I’m likely to hit, just in case.
I think you just have to be honest with yourself, kind if things go sideways, and know that, in the long run, whether you won Nano or EdMo or whatever matters absolutely not at all.
See you next week, squiders!
