I know I’ll sound incredibly stupid when I tell you what my personal writing challenge was. I say that because it’s one of those silly, basic things that no writer ever (I assume) struggles with. But I am not a writer, sadly, although I spent years just trying to cope with words and write something from my heart. Poetry was, however, all I made out of it. And I am thankful for that, even though the most of my poems are not good, or not even average – and that’s okay, as long as they have a personal meaning to me.
This little thing I challenged my self with, on the other hand, included prose only. I am very embarrassed to admit this, but I failed in every single attempt I have ever had in my life to write a story. the closest I’ve ever been to achieving this was 80 pages, and that was five years ago. Not to mention that the story was avarage, with many cliches and plot holes, and no plans whatsoever. My other attempts were eather too weird and silly (I am too old to call any piece of literature weird – yet still!) or interrupted by other, new, working projects which were later cut by the new ones and the magic circle of that evil spell goes on and on.
So a year ago, I finally decided to break that horrible curse of mine and get to some serious writing. And I gave myself a challenge:
Write a book in a year. No giving up. No other writing projects. No distractions. Just one simple book.
And to be quite honest, that was another simplest yet impossible challenge for me. I didn’t write a book, sadly. I did stick to my rule of not starting another projects while having one unfinished, though. I am working on one specific little thing ever since. And that little thing has only 50k words so far, but it’s still a progress compared to all those failures I had before. This one almost happened to be one of them, as it happened to me so many times that I had an urge to simply start a new thing. But I thought to myself ‘ugh, that challenge!‘ and I tried including those new ideas for a new story into the existing one. Now I have quite of a mess there, but it’s still something.
Do I expect anything from this? No, not really. The only thing I’m hoping to succeed in doing is finishing this novel I’m currently writing. It might take me another year, but it doesn’t matter. All I truly wanted from this was to be able to write prose. And I’m taking incredibly small steps but I’m on my way.
Yay! (Trying to be as optimistic as I can! XD)
If you have your own challenge or simply a goal, let me know what it is. Even if it’s a silly thing like this one of mine.