I scheduled this blog post well in advance, because I’m saving up all my creative energy for Y’All Write this month! If you ever heard about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, a writing challenge where you create a novel in 30 days), Y’All Write is basically the same thing. Only it takes place during a sensible month, with a close-knit and Texas-local community, for an organization that didn’t sell out to GenAI. I wonder how that stance worked out for NaNoWriMo.
Like with NaNoWriMo, the official goal for Y’All Write participants is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I did NaNoWriMo in 2021, and have done a similar Writing Month every year since then, be it with different organizations or different times on the calendar. You don’t have to be in Texas, or even sign up, to do this challenge on your own. I imagine it’s nice to have community support on such a long, lonely journey, but on my fifth go-around I don’t need much encouragement to crank out another tome!
So much of my writing time these days goes towards admin or career work (editing, submissions, research, supporting local writing organizations, etc.) that it’s important I set aside a month to actually create as an author, not merely manage or organize. March is all about reorientation towards my passion, to remind myself why I dedicated my life to this craft. That, more than any result, is what these writing challenge months provide for me (that’s also why I’ll never tell you what each novel is about, sorry not sorry).
Do you do a Writing Month, or a month dedicated to accomplishing some quixotic goal of yours? Or do you not get the point behind such rigidity? If you ran a Writing Month challenge, how would you design it to give the participants the best possible results?
I’ll answer your questions later, got get back to writing!