100-for-100 Challenge Report (aka i've fallen and i can't get up)

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Thursday, September 8th was the final day of the 100-for-100 Challenge hosted by Go Teen Writers. In case you're unfamiliar with that, it's a challenge to write at least 100 words daily for 100 days.

So. Since the beginning of the summer (June 1st), I have written every day.* Um, wow. And I don't mean wow, look at me, I'm such a fabulous superhuman writer. Because I'm not. (More on that in a minute.) I mean, wow, did I actually manage to follow through and beat the challenge? I honestly thought I would fail.

*Minus the twelve grace days I took. Participants were allowed one grace day a week, and one grace week throughout the duration of the challenge. I saved my grace week for family holidays, but we never took any, so I just kept writing.

In a way, the challenge seemed to drag on and on. Around the half to three-quarters mark, it felt like it would never end. But then I think I just fell into a daze of writing exhaustion and typed with numb fingers until, oh look, it's over. And in a way, it passed quite quickly, and it doesn't feel terribly long ago that I started out.

A hundred days is a long time to sustain something. So I thought I'd recap the challenge by sharing with y'all what I did to stay on track (in hopes of bolstering your own writing habits and figuring out how the pumpernickel I did it myself . . . because if I don't write it down, I won't internalize it). And I'll also share the pros and cons of writing daily. I sense lists coming up! Because lists are life, am I right, my questing quizzle-birds?*

*What those are, I have no idea. Somebody make up some facts and add them to Wikipedia, quick!

I like charts almost as much as lists, so before we get to those, here's my word counts for the challenge, if you're interested:

How I Survived

• I set a timer on my phone to go off at 8 pm daily. I'm often busy earlier in the day, so if I hadn't written anything by the evening, I had that automatic reminder to get cracking. Most days when my alarm started tinkling sweet music, I had not written a single word. I wasn't always able to put in my daily words right when the alarm went off, either, but having it ring near the end of the day kept that goal hovering at the forefront of my mind the rest of the evening. Some nights, I sat in my PJ's on my bedroom floor to throw out a hundred words before bed. There were even a few nights where I'd already turned off the lights before I remembered, shoot, I haven't written yet! Let's just say there were a couple bleary-eyed, my-brain-is-dead writing sessions this summer.
• That's basically it.
• But a one-item list is lame, so let me think about this harder.
• . . .
• . . .
• Little is okay. Only two days did I break into a four-digit wordcount. Only twice! And only twenty-two days saw me crest 500 words. To say it another way, the only way I could manage to keep this up all summer was to be okay with producing small bits at a time. I just didn't have the stamina to come up with a ton of story every day. But even a couple paragraphs moves the book forward. It's that forward movement, that momentum, that's important.
• I let myself write junk. On busy days where my creative juices were low and the words just clunked together like tin cans in a dryer, I refused to freeze up. I wrote down those ugly tin can words because they were words. When I sensed the pacing doing weird things, or plot holes forming, I left myself notes and plowed onwards. To keep my momentum, I didn't have time or energy to go back and fix things. Besides, this is a first draft. It's not supposed to be pretty.
• I slacked on research. You guys know this book (The Prophet's Key) involves globetrotting and consequently, research. I had some stuff done beforehand, but once the challenge began, I very quickly realized that my schedule didn't have time for in-depth research AND daily writing. So there are plenty of places where my description is nonexistent, where I made up placeholder names and directions, and where the timelines are simply not discussed because I have no idea how many days the characters have been traveling. It was about getting the story down, not about getting all my facts right. That's for editing.

The Pros of Writing Daily

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• Momentum. If you push yourself to add something to the story each day, you keep yourself from getting stuck. With that self-imposed challenge hanging over your head, you force yourself to push through, even if the result is messy. This makes it easier to pick up again the next day. The work is fresh in your mind, so moving your characters one step further doesn't take so much forethought.
• Productivity. I wrote 32,768 words this summer. It's not as much as I expected, but it's probably more than I would've written had I not participated in the challenge.
• You realize how valuable a few minutes are. It doesn't take long to write 100 words. I'm not the fastest writer, and I usually did it in five to ten minutes. Some days I wrote two or three times the minimum in that timeframe. You don't need three hours of free time to get writing done! Yes, those long stretches can be great, but writing is sustainable even when you're busy. A few minutes before you go to work or school, a bit of time snatched over a meal break, a quarter hour in the evening . . . It's doable.
• You form a habit. Eventually, it became more natural to sit down to write every day. I don't think I'll keep writing each and every day like this (which I'll explain in the con list), but now I know I can write little bits more often.

The Cons of Writing Daily

"I've fallen and I can't get up." -Alfred from Larryboy and the Fib from Outer Space

• Some of your work is going to be horrible. Like I mentioned earlier, some days I just wrote filler. I'm not real happy about that, but there it is. Yes, first drafts are messy, but at the same time, I feel like I just made more work for myself later on.
• Burn-out. To be honest, I'm relieved the challenge is over, because I'm feeling kind of dry. I am so ready to take a break now, which college is forcing me to do. Having to come up with another piece of the story on a daily basis sometimes stretched my creativity and even my desire to be writing.
• If you're not careful, you can get wrapped up in hitting your wordcount goal instead of enjoying the process. I'm a goals person to begin with, so it was easy to fall into the trap of focusing on numbers rather than immersing myself in the experience of creating something from nothing. Parts of this draft probably suffered for it. But at least it's written. You can't edit what's not there, right?
• You may train yourself to write in spurts, so when it comes time for a long haul, you're not strong enough. It's like sprinting every day instead of training for a marathon. Since the challenge ended, I haven't yet tried to write for a couple hours at a time, but it may be a stretch when I do. I'm not sure if my brain will, after writing a couple hundred words, say, "Okay, I've done my due diligence, goodbye." (Though this might be remedied by writing several spurts in one day? And decreasing the intervals between spurts day by day?)

My conclusion is . . .

I'm glad I participated in the challenge! It feels good to have beaten it, and I'm over 30k words further in my story than I was at the start of summer. But am I going to keep writing every single day? Probably not. I've come to appreciate the value of breaks. A good balance for me personally would be writing four to five days a week, if I was a full-time author. As it is, present circumstances may allow only one or two days a week.


But I don't regret participating, and I may even join in again one day! It was a good motivator to keep plowing through a difficult, stubborn first draft.

Did any of you participate in 100-for-100? Have you ever? Would you ever consider it? What do you think about developing a daily writing habit?