Start of a 7-day writing streak challenge
These past few months have been a little hectic for me. I embarked on new journeys and began new challenges, both in my personal and my professional life, which is awesome, but sadly this has also led to me neglecting my writing. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t written at all. I actually did advance in my novel these past few months, but I won’t lie by pretending that I advanced as much as I wish I had, or even as much as I know I could have.
That’s alright though. I know that these things can happen sometimes, and that the important thing is that I’m still here and I haven’t given up.
And now that I think I’ve regained more stability in my daily schedule, I’m dead-set on re-prioritizing my writing.
Just as I did at the beginning of the year, I’ll be focusing on a daily writing time rather than a daily word count.
A few months ago my goal for my daily writing time was a minimum of 1 hour per day, but since I’ve not done this in a while, I’ll start slow and work my way back up. Remember that writing is just like exercising. This means that you have to start slow and build the muscle up – because yes, writing is a muscle that can and needs to be trained – before being ready to do the cool and hard stuff. And just like with sports, if I start too strong too quickly, I know that I’ll run the risk of burning out before having built up a steady base. That’s why I’m determined to do this right.
Of course I also want to keep it fun, and that’s why I’ve decided to make my writing more exciting by adding in a few challenges.
The first challenge I’m setting myself is to start a writing streak.
And since my whole motto right now is “start slow but consistently, and steadily build up to more”, my first goal for this challenge is to complete a 7-day writing streak.
This means that I have to complete a full writing session every single day for 7 days.
That sounds reasonable for a first challenge, right?
And since I’m determined to do this right — and I know I have a tendency to overdo it — I’ve set myself a clear goal and rules for this challenge.
My goal is to complete a daily, uninterrupted 30 minute writing session. That means that for 30 minutes every day, I have to be sitting at my desk and working on my manuscript. Whether I write a thousand words, or only ten during that time doesn’t matter. What matters is that I stay focused on my manuscript for the full half hour.
My first rule is that completing a 30 minute writing session is the requirement to validate that day’s writing for the 7-day writing streak challenge.
The second rule is that I cannot spend more than half an hour at a time writing. Whenever I’m writing, no matter where I am in my writing, when the 30 minutes are up, I have to stop and take a break, before being allowed to return to writing.
That’s it, these are the goal and the rules I’ve set for myself for this first week back. Easy, clear, perfectly reasonable to fit into my day, and hopefully they’ll help me build a stable base that’ll benefit me in the long run.
At the end of the week I will see how well I did or not, after which I will re-evaluate the rules to see if I keep them or modify them for the next challenge.
But first I need to actually complete the first challenge.
The good news is that I can already mark the first day as completed, since I completed my half hour writing session before working on this post. Yay!
I’ll be back tomorrow for day two of the 7-day writing streak challenge!