Sick of starting and never finishing writing projects, in April 2010 I announced that I was challenging myself to write a story a day in May.

Born of A Hunger To Write

Word spread around the writing blogs and the Twitter hash tag #storyaday was born.

• Within 3 days about 80 people had signed up to join in,
• and many more joined throughout the month.
• At last count (not counting spam bots) the active membership was over 500 writers.

Some people decided to write on weekdays only, some declared they would sketch a story idea every day, some weren’t sure what they could manage anything, but just the idea of committing to this hare-brained scheme with a bunch of other writers had got them so excited they couldn’t resist.

The enthusiasm for the project amazed me. It spoke of a hunger to write, no, a hunger for permission to write that I never dreamed was so widespread.

We gathered our story ideas and fragments and waited for the “off”.

The Rules

“Write — and finish — a story every day in May.”

That’s it.

[Although you can check out the FAQs for clarifications]

Who Are The Writers?

The writers come from all walks of life and all over the world:

• The youngest participant (so far) was a seven-year old home-schooled girl from Texas.
• One of our writers from nearer the other end of life’s journey lives in New Zealand. Every day she had written and posted her story long before the US participants woke up.
• We have participants from the US, Canada, India, Germany, Spain, Singapore, the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

Anyone can be a StoryADay writer. It’s perfect for launching yourself (back) into creative writing, because, as many excellent writers have said, the only way to improve your writing is to write. Yes, read lots of good writing, but to be a writer you must, er, write. Lots.

What Did They Achieve?

Honourable Mention from the BBC

While many writers ‘win’ by writing  31 stories in as many days, there is much more to a StoryADay victory than just the ability to write everyday.

• Julia H. West sold one of her 2011 stories on the first anniversary of its first draft.
• Alexis A. Hunter has sold multiple stories from her StoryADay collection.
• Morgen Bailey put together an short story collection ebook from her 2011 StoryADay efforts
• Matt Zandstra’s turned one of his 2010 Story A Day ideas into a radio play that was chosen as a runner-up in a contest at the BBC’s Writer’s Room — judged by a working BBC drama writer.
• Marta Pelrine-Bacon had her first story accepted for publication (in a paying market) for the first time ever.
• Simon Kewin was inspired to set up his own extreme writing challenge: Write1Sub1 to help writers push their writing careers to the professional level.
• I signed up for NaNoWriMo and wrote my first and second novels and ended up meeting the founder of NaNoWriMo.
• Other writers found a way to start writing again after years of being stalled.
• Active novelists found that writing stories every day jump started their creativity and allowed them to try new voices and approaches, freshening up their prose.

But most of all, everyone involved got a crash course in finding our writing groove, discovering our voice, playing to our strengths and working on our weaknesses. We got a huge creative boost from writing, reading and sharing stories with a bunch of other writers who understand the urge to write in a way that ‘normals’ in our lives, no matter how loving, really can. We found friends. We found encouragement. We found our tribe.

StoryFest

And then, to celebrate, we threw ourselves a party.

Between mid-June, we highlight some of the best stories to come out of StoryADay May.

We call it StoryFest and highlighted several stories every day, promoting them on Twitter, Facebook and the front page of the site.

“How Can I Get Involved In StoryADay May?”

Oh yes, it’s coming back. Story A Day was way too much fun not to do again.

Sign up for the Advance List, and be the first to hear all the details in the run up to each year’s challenge.

Whether as a writer or a reader, we’d love to have you as part of the family.