One Day Writing Challenge: My Experience
I am not sure if any such challenge exists. I guess I just made it up.
Hey all, sorry for not updating my blog for such a long time. Well, I have been busy doing nothing. You know how I am!
So, the other day I thought of pushing myself to see if I can reach a certain word-count limit. My writing has been the epitome of sloth in the past few weeks, and I could barely squeeze out more than 2,000 words per day (that too, if I sat in front of the computer for at least about 7-8 hours at a stretch). I have also been meaning to write a short story lately because I had kind of started to miss writing the words 'The End'.
I wanted to write no more than 500-600 words for each chapter, so the whole story ended up being 13,500 words in total, divided into 27 chapters. But when I wrote the entire thing, I cut off some chapters, and merged some because they had less than 300 words in them.
The date was July 20, 2015. I woke up at around 9:30 am, and sat in front of the computer at 10:30. Then, as usual, I got swept up by numerous Facebook posts, tweets and videos on YouTube.
I finally started writing at 12:15 pm. I also decided to live-tweet the entire thing, well, most parts of the journey, posting one tweet mentioning my progress after one or two hours.
Of course there were obstacles all the way in the form of more and more articles and videos on the Internet, but somehow I pushed through.
I have always been fond of checklists. Writing a to-do and checking off the small boxes were my absolutely favorite activities as a child. So I repeated the process here to motivate myself to write on. My plot was neatly laid out on Evernote (as a to-do list), and was open in one window. I finished one chapter and ticked off one box. I cannot tell you how excited I felt when I was checking off those small boxes.
I was slightly late because of wasting so much time after browsing, showering, lunch, gossiping a little with my mom, playing a little with my cats and of course, going back to read what I wrote. But eventually I made it!
Here's a summary of the progress (I have linked the corresponding tweets. Click to view them).
12:15 pm: Started writing (but I counted the start from 12:00 anyway).
1:00 pm: 679 words
2:00 pm: 1,392 words
3:00 pm: 1,754 words
5:00 pm: 3,184 words
6:00 pm: 4,211 words
7:00 pm: 5,125 words
9:18 pm: 7,447 words
11:21 pm: 9,073 words
12:00 am: 9,656 words
And finally, here are my winning tweets:
It took me 12 hours and 35 minutes to reach my goal of 10,000 words!
I still had two chapters to go, so instead of going to bed, I kept typing.
I finished the story at 1:30 am, sharp.
Then I thanked all and wrapped it up.
I had initially started this one to practice writing. It's sometimes hard for me to wake up on weekends and write. I experience too many mood shifts, and put off writing for a long time. Like they say, you have to learn to force yourself to write everyday no matter what if you actually want to succeed, and through this experiment, I learned that I can indeed push myself to write like that.
I usually do not sit in front of the computer for such a long time. So on an average, I should be able to write 5,000 words per day (on weekends) and a minimum of 3,000 words on the other days of the week if I try hard and have the resolve. Now I know my limits.
Although not in my initial plan, now I have started thinking about putting this on Wattpad. I might have to tweak it a little, otherwise I plan to keep it the same.
So, how was the experience? It was fun and thrilling because I have never seen myself put down so many words on paper at once. Yes, my shoulders were cramped, my fingers were hurting and my eyes were strained, but at least I achieved something.
Will I try this ever again? Probably not. I don't want to die from blood clotting or whatever that is (yes, there's a thing like that. Someone even died from it because he wouldn't stop playing computer games for 19+ hours at a stretch, I guess. Google it). But if I attempt to write another short story, I will likely break it up into small chunks and work on the pieces one at a time.
If you want to read this project, please keep an eye on this page, or you can follow me on my Wattpad account. If you want to be nice to me, you can also check out my other projects.
I still have to shoot and edit the cover, so I cannot upload the story right away; but I will do it soon. This blog post will likely get an update then.
Thanks for reading! If you want to do a similar challenge, tag it with #onedaywritingchallenge on Twitter. I will be checking this hashtag to see if you all made it!
NOTE: I have created another blog post to show you the steps of how I created the cover for this book from scratch! Go check it out. :) (click to read)
Hey all, sorry for not updating my blog for such a long time. Well, I have been busy doing nothing. You know how I am!
So, the other day I thought of pushing myself to see if I can reach a certain word-count limit. My writing has been the epitome of sloth in the past few weeks, and I could barely squeeze out more than 2,000 words per day (that too, if I sat in front of the computer for at least about 7-8 hours at a stretch). I have also been meaning to write a short story lately because I had kind of started to miss writing the words 'The End'.
Writing a #shortstory. Target: 10k words. Deadline, TONIGHT. 12:27PM here. I will live-tweet progress. This should be fun. #amwriting
— Mehnaz Tabassum (@mztabassum) July 20, 2015
So, without further ado, I decided to do the challenge. I started by quickly creating a plot on my Evernote app, keeping it simple and with as minimum plot twists as possible. My target was to be able to write freely and without thinking too much.I wanted to write no more than 500-600 words for each chapter, so the whole story ended up being 13,500 words in total, divided into 27 chapters. But when I wrote the entire thing, I cut off some chapters, and merged some because they had less than 300 words in them.
The date was July 20, 2015. I woke up at around 9:30 am, and sat in front of the computer at 10:30. Then, as usual, I got swept up by numerous Facebook posts, tweets and videos on YouTube.
I finally started writing at 12:15 pm. I also decided to live-tweet the entire thing, well, most parts of the journey, posting one tweet mentioning my progress after one or two hours.
Of course there were obstacles all the way in the form of more and more articles and videos on the Internet, but somehow I pushed through.
I have always been fond of checklists. Writing a to-do and checking off the small boxes were my absolutely favorite activities as a child. So I repeated the process here to motivate myself to write on. My plot was neatly laid out on Evernote (as a to-do list), and was open in one window. I finished one chapter and ticked off one box. I cannot tell you how excited I felt when I was checking off those small boxes.
I was slightly late because of wasting so much time after browsing, showering, lunch, gossiping a little with my mom, playing a little with my cats and of course, going back to read what I wrote. But eventually I made it!
Here's a summary of the progress (I have linked the corresponding tweets. Click to view them).
12:15 pm: Started writing (but I counted the start from 12:00 anyway).
1:00 pm: 679 words
2:00 pm: 1,392 words
3:00 pm: 1,754 words
5:00 pm: 3,184 words
6:00 pm: 4,211 words
7:00 pm: 5,125 words
9:18 pm: 7,447 words
11:21 pm: 9,073 words
12:00 am: 9,656 words
And finally, here are my winning tweets:
It's 12:35am here and I have just reached my target wc of 10K (10,002w). Thanks for the support all day! #shortstory #challenge #amwriting
— Mehnaz Tabassum (@mztabassum) July 20, 2015
12pm to 12am. 10,002 words written. Goal of 10K reached. Have never written so many words in one day! #amwriting #shortstory #challenge
— Mehnaz Tabassum (@mztabassum) July 20, 2015
It took me 12 hours and 35 minutes to reach my goal of 10,000 words!
I still had two chapters to go, so instead of going to bed, I kept typing.
I finished the story at 1:30 am, sharp.
Then I thanked all and wrapped it up.
So, my #shortstory ended at 11,376 words. Wrote in 1 day. Excited. Feeling accomplished. Thanks for the support y'all! #amwriting #challenge
— Mehnaz Tabassum (@mztabassum) July 20, 2015
The final product has 21 chapters in total. ^_^I had initially started this one to practice writing. It's sometimes hard for me to wake up on weekends and write. I experience too many mood shifts, and put off writing for a long time. Like they say, you have to learn to force yourself to write everyday no matter what if you actually want to succeed, and through this experiment, I learned that I can indeed push myself to write like that.
I usually do not sit in front of the computer for such a long time. So on an average, I should be able to write 5,000 words per day (on weekends) and a minimum of 3,000 words on the other days of the week if I try hard and have the resolve. Now I know my limits.
Although not in my initial plan, now I have started thinking about putting this on Wattpad. I might have to tweak it a little, otherwise I plan to keep it the same.
So, how was the experience? It was fun and thrilling because I have never seen myself put down so many words on paper at once. Yes, my shoulders were cramped, my fingers were hurting and my eyes were strained, but at least I achieved something.
Will I try this ever again? Probably not. I don't want to die from blood clotting or whatever that is (yes, there's a thing like that. Someone even died from it because he wouldn't stop playing computer games for 19+ hours at a stretch, I guess. Google it). But if I attempt to write another short story, I will likely break it up into small chunks and work on the pieces one at a time.
If you want to read this project, please keep an eye on this page, or you can follow me on my Wattpad account. If you want to be nice to me, you can also check out my other projects.
I still have to shoot and edit the cover, so I cannot upload the story right away; but I will do it soon. This blog post will likely get an update then.
Thanks for reading! If you want to do a similar challenge, tag it with #onedaywritingchallenge on Twitter. I will be checking this hashtag to see if you all made it!
NOTE: I have created another blog post to show you the steps of how I created the cover for this book from scratch! Go check it out. :) (click to read)
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