![]() We had the joy of knowing that someone else was doing the same amount of writing and could encourage us if we needed. My friend and I made our own 50,000 word challenge and did it over two months instead. Maybe you’re like me and think NaNoWriMo is impossible to balance with work, school, and whatever else you have going on. The good thing about these kinds of challenges is that you can change them to fit your ability and needs. You know that every day you have a certain word count you need to reach, and you can outline your novel to make that goal very attainable. It seems impossible, but the joy of writing challenges like this is the amount of mechanical, procedural methods you can rely on. You may have struggled for years to finish a single novel, but some people can write a novel (albeit a shorter one) in 30 days? In the month of November, thousands of novelists take pen to paper (or more likely, fingers to keyboard) and write a 50,000 word novel in one month. National Novel Writing Month is one of the most famous time-based challenges. Often, the organizations that run these challenges will offer prizes for following through with the challenge (which makes them a contest of sort). A good practice could be writing some micro-fiction based on a prompt before you begin writing your own desired story.Īnother popular writing challenge is the time-based writing exercise. You can check out their writing prompts here. Reedsy has combined weekly prompts with a writing challenge. ![]() Winning a writing contest can give you the confidence you need to keep writing, or it can just be a good way to get some prize money. You can use the prompt as a way to work on concision, outlining, imagery, or whatever you find that you need to improve.Īnother reason to practice using writing prompts is that they are often the way creative writing journals present a writing contest. Writing prompts can be just the beginning of the exercise. The important thing for a writer like this to do is determine how long of a story they’ll make from a prompt like this (or whatever prompt-adjacent ideas come to their head). It’s entirely possible that whatever story comes to your head may seem more enjoyable to write than the prompt suggests, even if they don’t include the suggested elements. For those people, my suggestion would be to watch their thoughts after reading the prompt. Some people whose imagination needs very little stimulation may despise the writing prompt, but I think they see it as too restrictive. They like the constraints and the challenge of including certain prescribed story elements. What a writing prompt has the potential to do is work as a jumping pad.įor some people, the writing prompt gives them everything they need to write a story. The truth is everyone’s imagination is different and draws from different sources. Other people see them as a primer to their own creative procedures. One reason people hate writing prompts is the restriction to creativity. Some people love them others despise them with the entirety of their souls. The first type of writing challenge is one that you’ve probably done if you’ve ever taken a creative writing class or learned any sort of creative writing in your middle school to high school classes. ![]() If that’s the case, then you can do different kinds of challenges as warm-ups before working on whatever project you have in front of you. If you’re anything like me (or plenty of other writers), you may think that all of your writing skills need improvement. Some of the challenges are innately hard, but if you do a writing challenge that works on descriptive imagery and you struggle with it, you might have found the part of your writing that needs the most work. If you have trouble finding what part of your writing needs improvement, you could try a bunch of different writing challenges and find what’s the hardest for you to do. Some challenges will help you with outlining, some will help you come up with ideas, some will improve your vocabulary.īasically, if you notice that you have a problem with a certain area of your writing, finding an associated writing challenge could be the very thing you need to improve in that area. I can’t think of a single writing challenge that will improve every aspect of your writing (except maybe finishing your first novel), but different challenges will improve different sections of your writing.įor instance, a challenge like NaNoWriMo will improve your writing consistency and your writing speed. Writing challenges have many functions, but their ultimate goal is to improve some aspect of your writing. ![]()
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