Writing Every Day for a Month
I've previously mentioned a little challenge I set up for myself for the month of March, a challenge where I try to write every day for the month of March and now it's March 31st. By my standards, I was 1000% successful, even though I didn't write anything 3 days out of the 31 days in March. My main focus was creative writing with some blog posts sprinkled in once a week. I wanted to get back into the habit of writing, just purely for fun and something to do. This was low stakes writing, I'm not writing to try and publish a book or make money off of it or have someone else even read it, there was zero expectations and I think that was key to this challenge for me.
Writing stories was one of my main forms of entertainment as a kid and teenager. I'd write on paper or notepad on the computer, sharing with friends or just writing something to make my own adventure from my head. I even had a small fanfiction author career that spanned from as early as 2007 all the way to 2012 (and I even went back in 2020 and 2021 to write an additional chapter and new story on my old account). My friend and I even had an ongoing story we were working on together, where I write a little bit and send it to her and she'd add more to the story and send it back to me, and we'd just go back and forth until we had to create a new Word document because we'd written so much that the document was lagging when opening it. All of this was just for fun and entertainment between myself and a few friends (and the handful of people who read my fanfiction stories).
At some point, with a lot of my hobbies, my writing habit slowly died down. I stopped writing because I was too busy with college or my internship or with work. I was severely burnt out by 2018 and ended up having absolutely no creative hobbies or motivation to do anything creative anymore. I was just working my 9 to 5 and rotting on the couch or in my bed afterwards. I did get a spark of inspiration in 2020 and 2021 to write, it was quick and fleeting but I grabbed ahold of it and updated one of my FF stories and even wrote a new story in 2021 (a little back story on this one, I watched Freaks & Geeks for the first time and I just HAD to dump the idea for a season 2 out of my brain and decided to post it).
Writing and drawing were integral parts of me and my childhood enjoyment, that's what I did and who I was, and it was heartbreaking to slowly see myself drifting away from it because it wasn't a way to make money (for me). If it wasn't possible to become a side hustle and for me to potentially quit my day job, then what was the point of doing those things?
But, I'm on a healing journey with creativity and doing things for the sake of fun. It's been YEARS since my great burn out of 2018 but that had such lasting affects on me and it wasn't until 2023 and now 2024 where I feel like I'm recovering from that and finding myself again, not to be too dramatic but that's really how it feels.
Now, back to the challenge for March, I also decided to keep a word count tracker each day I wrote something. I wasn't trying to hit a word count goal but was just curious to see how much I would end up writing. My total word count for the month of March was 12,447 words (including this blog post). And below is the day to day word counts and what I was writing.
| Date | Word Count | What I Wrote |
|---|---|---|
| 3/1 | 875 | Bear Blog |
| 3/2 | 332 | Creative Writing |
| 3/3 | 552 | Creative Writing |
| 3/4 | 440 | Creative Writing |
| 3/5 | 132 | Creative Writing |
| 3/6 | 317 | Creative Writing |
| 3/7 | 116 | Creative Writing |
| 3/8 | 314 | Creative Writing |
| 3/9 | 1075 | Bear Blog |
| 3/10 | 0 | - |
| 3/11 | 216 | Creative Writing |
| 3/12 | 64 | Creative Writing |
| 3/13 | 0 | - |
| 3/14 | 281 | Creative Writing |
| 3/15 | 0 | - |
| 3/16 | 25 | Creative Writing |
| 3/17 | 393 | Creative Writing |
| 3/18 | 567 | Creative Writing |
| 3/19 | 318 | Creative Writing |
| 3/20 | 152 | Creative Writing |
| 3/21 | 555 | Creative Writing |
| 3/22 | 506 | Creative Writing |
| 3/23 | 871 | Creative Writing |
| 3/24 | 757 | Bear Blog |
| 3/25 | 608 | Creative Writing |
| 3/26 | 781 | Creative Writing |
| 3/27 | 260 | Creative Writing |
| 3/28 | 294 | Creative Writing |
| 3/29 | 388 | Creative Writing |
| 3/30 | 437 | Creative Writing |
| 3/31 | 821 | Bear Blog |
| Total | 12,447 | - |
I started off the month working on a writing idea that I had and ended up working on that project for the first chunk of the month. I basically wrote until I ran out of ideas of where to take that story and then decided to start on a different project, which I started around 3/17 (my word count spikes during that time while working on this other idea). Then I'd also do a few bear blogs in the mix, about once a week because I wanted to keep this up and consistent as well.
So, that's my month of writing [mostly] every day! I'd highly recommend giving yourself a little monthly challenge if there's something you're wanting to do or add back into your life, give it a go for 30 days and see what happens, but if you end up missing a day, don't beat yourself up and just try to do it the next day or the day after that!