Hello dears!
We've missed you all terribly, and want to apologize for our long absence. Everyone on the admin team has had a great many life changes and interferences that have made things difficult. But we're eager to get back to it and get things rolling around here again!
So, in an effort to keep that creative juice flowing, we're going to be taking up a writing challenge we thought would be fun, originally created by Creative Writing Now, though we may alter some prompts to help them better fit the community if we see a need to do so.
The idea is that once a day for 30 days, you sit down and try to write for at least ten minutes using a prompt they give you (we have the lil ebook version with all the prompts, which you can get free from their site!). Sometimes it will be a specific scenario, sometimes just "write a story with these things in it," etc.
There won't be any fancy sign up or anything to submit in any sort of really official sense, just us providing you the resource (again, via the linked website) to kickstart your writing if you're feeling low on muse or just want something fun to try! You can go about this however you want, but here are some recommendations we have for going about this:
Keep all your writing for this challenge in one place - whether it's in a journal or a single document folder or whatever, keep it all together. (Personally, I'll be using a journal/notebook that's dedicated to this challenge! - Admin Andie)
Set a timer for the same time every day - it's easy to let the writing time get away from you, and to make excuses for not doing it one day by saying "I'll get to it" but not being diligent. Just like a physical workout, if you do your writing at the same time every day, it'll become a habit more quickly! A timer helps to remind you - setting it for five minutes before allows you to wrap up whatever you were doing and get all setup!
Do it with friends - if you have writing buddies who are willing to do the challenge too, it'll help keep you motivated and accountable! Plus, you can bounce ideas off each other later if you want to expand on something you wrote during your writing time.
Don't stop writing - We don't know about you, but we find it incredibly easy to lose steam when writing if we keep correcting every single thing as we go. Try to let go of the need to fix things and just write until time is up, then go back and edit! Even Victoria Roth has said the same thing about the writing process - don't edit as you go, or you will get discouraged and lose any ideas you might have had!
Mix it up with every prompt - if you're like us and might be doing this challenge with fanfics and scenarios in particular (with a little more freeform writing mixed in), we recommend trying something new with every prompt. Obviously you shouldn't force yourself if you really have muse for a certain fandom or pairing or whatever, but try to explore new characters and new worlds every time you write, and see if you can find something you like that you hadn't worked with before! Try a new genre or fandom, maybe write a scenario instead of a slash work - just be explorative and allow yourself the freedom of experimentation!
We will be posting each prompt at 6am PST/PDT (GMT -8) every day, starting Friday 9/1 via our queue, so it goes up at a time that will hopefully work for writers on all coasts. Of course you should do it when you have time to sit down and write comfortably, but we wanted the prompt posting to be consistent too.
So, will you take on the challenge? Feel free to let us know if you're interested or will be joining in, or send us what you come up with during the course of the challenge!
Since this isn't a formal fic event, this will also be the first time the HWN hosts an event that is entirely open to the public! If you have friends who want to join in but aren't members, they're entirely welcome to join in the fun!
- HWN Admins