This year, one of my Resolutions was to undertake a writing challenge, and on October 21 I met the goal! It was a lot of fun, and very good practice for me, so I’m going to share what I did in case anyone else wants to give it a go.
300 Mini Prompts in under a year
- The prompts don’t have to be finished; in fact, I left many open ended to pick up the threads later. Most were 250-350 words.
- I used sentence starter prompts, giving me a starting point and leaving the rest up to me (the prompt itself didn’t count towards the total words written).
- In general, they can’t all be part of the same continuous scene. I had some universes I visited more than once in these snippets, but the prompts themselves are meant to be new scenes.
- Fanfiction, AU, Original stuff all appeared in the prompts.
- They don’t have to be good or polished (In fact, unless one is really speaking to you, I recommend leaving them alone until after it’s all done). I have several that were duds and probably won’t be expanded upon, but that’s normal with so many pieces in a short time.
Goal of the Challenge
I wanted to explore new ideas/characters and revitalize old ones. This challenge was helpful for me when my writing felt stagnant and I didn’t feel I was making much progress or engaging my readers. The idea was to make myself write a variety of stories, to practice and learn how to move different scenes in different ways, while also establishing background in a limited space. I definitely feel an improvement in my writing after this challenge.
Note: 300 prompts in a year was a lot for me, based on my schedule and general energy levels. If it’s too much, the challenge can be 200 or 100 prompts instead. If 300 or a whole year sounds to easy, well, make it a little bit tougher. The point is that it pushes you a little (but not too much!). A year is also a lot to plan ahead, so it can help to divide the task (so, for my goal, so long as I wrote at least 25 prompts a month I was on track).
The results are well worth the hard work.
Writerly Things 