I got a great question from a long-time StoryADay community member today: “Will One-Story September help me write my novel?”
Here’s what I answered:
On balance, I don’t think it’d give you enough support or direction for a novel project. Really, this challenge is designed to poke writers to keep working on a story throughout the month and to give some thought to what each part of the story is doing for the reader. It’s not designed to be a content-heavy course. Having said that, you could use One-Story September to help you flesh out the central spine of the novel’s story, or alternatively, to let you play in your novel’s world with less pressure. A short story set in the world of your novel could help you develop backstory, character development and voice, and let you fall in love with the world of your novel (as well as potentially giving you the bones of a chapter, or a standalone story that supports your novel when it comes time to market it). I’ve done this for several projects and enjoy it, but it all comes down to what you want to do. I’d hate to see you throw away money on the wrong thing, which could, in turn dent your confidence. I see two options: join this challenge and write a short story set in your novel’s universe that could stand alone or grow into something bigger; or put the money aside and begin saving for a more substantial “How To Write A Novel” course or cohort. All of which is to say, the One-Story Challenge might not be right for you—right now—and that’s absolutely fine.
But if you’re intrigued by the idea of crafting a complete story this month, come and play with us!
If you’re here because you clicked through from my email saying: ‘interested in writing One Story along with me, thanks! Leave a comment, letting us know why you are excited about focusing on one story, for a month, or what you’ve achieved in past challenges.
“But I want to write novels! Why do people keep trying to get me to write short stories?!”
I hear you.
I used to simply answer: “If you don’t want to write short stories, you don’t have. Go, write your novels. Be free!”
Learning About Learning
Then I watched as thousands of writers struggled to get past the 30% mark of their novels, and got discouraged.
And I went and learned a few things about how we, as humans learn.
Turns out: it’s all very well to try new things, but unless you’re able to observe the consequences of your actions, you can’t know if what you’re trying is working.
Telling a story over the course of a novel might take you months or years.
Telling a story over the course of a short story is much faster.
You get to see and feel what ‘idea generation’, and ‘writing a bold beginning’ and ‘getting through the middle’ and ‘managing the turn towards the end’ all feel like.
You begin to be able the feel a story taking shape and tell if it’s correctly proportioned.
You get to find experiment with different styles and genres
You get to find out–more often and more quickly–what readers experience when you write different types of stories, characters, endings, and language.
In short, you develop your craft skills more quickly when short stories are part of your practice because you:
Experiment more often and more freely,
Experience the consequences of those experiences for your characters, stories, and readers.
Can adjust course or abandon experiments more often, and try something new.
And don’t even get me started on the value of a having ‘low cost of entry’ ways for new readers to experience your writing and discover they love you; or the marketing options that open up for you if you have ‘teasers’, ‘interludes’, or ‘reader magnets’ in short form, to invite readers in or keep them interested while you’re finishing off the next novel.
You Don’t Have To Love Short Stories…
…but it’s a really great idea to incorporate them into your writing life
(There’s a reason MFA programs feature them so heavily.).
I still hate the idea of them being ‘just for practice’, but the reality is that—even though they can be so much more—they actually are really good practice in storytelling.
Fiction Is Hard, Even For Good Writers
If you’re a good writer you might have ended up in a profession that has writing as a part of it, but here’s a hard truth: it may have trained you out of being good at writing fiction.
If a life in journalism has stunted your ability to spin out a longer tale
If you’ve been away from fiction writing for a while
If your day job requires you to manipulate language to sell things to people, or write persuasive copy, or organize technical manuals
…coming back to fiction can be humbling. Being able to string words together in pretty sentences is only one of the skills you’ll need.
Short stories are a great way to level up in all those other skills.
Yes, you may want to write novels—you may have started or even finished a couple.
But if you are finding it slow-going, consider spending a little time with me here, in the One Story Challenge – The Whole Story Edition, coming live in September 2026.
This Is Not The StoryADay Challenge
In fact, it’s kind of the anti-StoryADay Challenge.
I’ve run this twice before, each time forcusing on a different fiction skill (“Show, Don’t Tell”, and “Mastering The Middle”).
Each time, I’ve led a group of writers through a month of bite-sized tasks that took them through the process of
coming up with a new story idea
fast-drafting a version of the story
sticking with it throughout the month to craft a complete story they’re proud of.
Along the way they’ve benefitted from:
3-4 small lessons and prompts a week, to keep them on track
A community of other writers going through the process at the same time
Bonus writing sprints and Q&A sessions with me
Built-in ‘Rest and Recharge’ days every week
The limited container of a single month, to create just enough urgency that you get the story finished.
The Whole Story
This year the challenge is focused on ‘The Whole Story’, which means we’ll be making sure each part of the story adds up to a well-structured whole.
By the end of the month you’ll have learned a whole lot about your writing, your skills, your interests, and you’ll have proved to yourself that you can finish, and learn from writing a single story — one that is more complex than the kind of one-day Flash Fiction we often create during StoryADay May.
Sound interesting? Sign up for updates. It’s coming soon.
In an early scene in the ‘fish out of water story’ TV show Ted Lasso, Ted—an American—is offered a cup of tea by his British host. He sips the tea and promptly spits it out…right into the face of his glamorous new boss.
“It’s horrible,” he says, shaking his head.
Same, Ted. Same.
I have a cup of tea about once a year, just to make sure I’m not missing something.
Nope. Still horrible.
What Does “Discipline” Taste Like, To A Writer?
When I ask writers about their biggest challenge ‘time’ is always number one, with ‘focus’ or ‘discipline’ or ‘consistency’ running a close second.
But what does ‘more focused’, ‘more disciplined’ or ‘more consistent’ look, smell, feel, and taste like?
As a Brit, ‘tea’, to me, has a narrow definition. “Tea”=black tea…and I do not like it.
But if we allow ‘tea’ the more expansive definition Americans often use, I can like ‘tea’. There are plenty of herbal infusions that give me actual pleasure.
Define The Terms
The ‘Productivity industry’ has a lot to answer for.
It has pushed a grim vision of ‘discipline’ that says if you don’t show up every day, and suffer a bit, you’re failing.
I bought into it.
I started the StoryADay May Challenge because I thought I needed to write every day to ‘be a writer’. I couldn’t make myself do it for more than about 12 days and I thought that accountability and the threat of public shame would fix that.
Confession time
Forgive me writers, for I have failed: I have never once created that unbroken streak of days when I started and finished a story for 31 days in a row.
Not once in 16 years.
Does that mean I’m not disciplined enough to be a writer?
I’ve certainly wasted enough time worrying about that, over the years.
Maybe you have, too.
They Laughed At Me (in the nicest possible way)
It took other people laughing at me (kindly) to make me notice that there is a certain discipline (stubbornness?) and consistency in:
Running an annual challenge for 16 years straight;
Writing five novel drafts;
Writing enough short stories—and sending them to enough markets—that some of them have been published;
Leading a writing community for 8 years;
Producing almost 340 podcast episodes and writing almost 2,500 blog posts about this writing journey we’re all on.
I still can’t write fiction every day.
AND I have learned so much.
‘Failing’ my own challenge year after year is a delightful reminder to me that ‘disciplined’, ‘consistent’, or ‘focused’ are never going to look, for me, like creating an unbroken streak of days where I write new words. (Your mileage may vary.)
I need days off. I need time to wander around and breathe in life, without the pressure of having to synthesize those experiences and breathe them out into new words, today
.For me, ‘consistency’ and ‘discipline’ will likely always be lumpy, seasonal, cyclical things.
Sometimes it looks like generating new words.
Sometimes it looks like learning new skills
Sometimes it looks like taking two steps backwards as I experiment
Sometimes, yes, it looks like staring out of the window or going on a long walk.
And it all adds up.
Do This Now
If you keep telling yourself you’re ‘failing’ to be consistent or ‘disciplined’ in your writing, look back over your lifetime and notice the times when you were most productive.
What was working for you, then? (And it’s more than ‘I had more time’. It’s also ‘I had something I was trying to achieve’ or ‘I had someone cheering me on’ or even ‘I was paying for a class so I showed up’)
Did you ever need to sit at your desk for 3-4 hours every weekday to produce quality writing? (If not, why would you think that’s what a ‘successful writing life’ looks like, now?)
Take a look at your upcoming week and ask ‘what’s the tiniest step I could take to show up for my writing this week?’. Then put that on a piece of paper and carry it around with you. Do it. Celebrate with a dance party in the privacy of your bedroom (I suggest listening to music you loved as a teenager). Then come back and do it again.
Practice joy in your writing life enough, and you’ll start to crave it.
Consistency and discipline become issues you never have to worry about, because you’re chasing something better.
LEAVE A COMMENT: What has helped you feel more successful/joyful in your writing lately? What is an essential part of your practice? What’s negotiable?
Stuck? Stalled? Not Sure What To Do Next?
Let’s talk through one specific question, challenge or decision and figure out your next move.
No ongoing coaching commitment. Just focused help with the thing that’s getting in your way right now.
I’m already starting to think about next year’s StoryADay May and, here in this age of AI, I was struck with the awful thought: why bother?
AI means you can generate 31 short story writing prompts in 90 seconds (5 minutes if you’re willing to wait for more polished prompts with a theme and multiple repetition. How do I know this? I asked it.)
It takes me roughly 3 months of (admittedly part-time) work to research guest authors, reach out to them, assemble their responses, curate and cue them up, create pretty images, summaries, and queue everything up.
But the point is that you get a human-created journey through a month of story writing. You get a peek inside the head of other writers. And you get to have the experience, along with other writers in the community.
It’s not for everyone. But I’ll keep doing it for you.
And also for me.
Because the work is not just about the prompts. It’s never just about the output, the end product.
Writing Changes Us
The struggle, the striving, the research, the craft, the failure, the resilience, the patience, the growth…It’s personal development at its finest.
How To Bother, in an age of AI
I’ve been preaching this for a decade and a half (and now I have the experience of leading a group for 8 years to back up my hypothesis).
The most important foundation you can give your writing is to:
Define success
If you don’t know what success means for you, how are you ever going to know if you’ve attained it.
Not someone else’s vision of success.
Yours.
And that means asking some questions about why you’re doing this.
Are you doing it to be published?
Are you trying to support yourself from your fiction writing?
Are you building a daily practice for self-development?
Are you trying to improve a particular craft skill?
Are you keeping a promise you made to yourself as a child?
Are you setting an example for a younger person in your life who needs to see what ‘self-respect’ looks like?
This is Step One.
Without it, you will never be—or feel—successful, no matter what external measures of success you hit.
If you skip this step-–or if you think this remains static forever—it’s almost impossible to be productive, motivated, or fulfilled by writing. If you’re simply on a treadmill, turning out words, you’ll be consumed by the idea that it’s never enough—that you’re not enough.
Do This Now
If you haven’t taken the time to examine your definition of success lately—and perhaps to notice how it has changed since you were 14, 25, 35, 45—put down your pen, push away the keyboard, and spend the next week just noodling on these questions:
What does success look like for you, in the next few years?
In order to get there, what milestones would you have to hit, if any?
What would you have to do regularly, to feel successful when you look back at your month?
What does that look like, for today?
If you do this exercise right, you’ll notice that it becomes easier to show up for your writing and enjoy yourself.
Without taking this step, your internal ‘motivation process’ can look like this:
“Today I have to work on finishing the novel so that I can get it out into the world and quit my job and prove to [that friend/family member] that I haven’t been wasting my time all these years.” [Sighs. Drags self to coalface….]
Not only is that demotivating since your inner critic is bound to kick in and try to keep you safe by pointing out how hard it is to do what you’ve outlined. It’s also doomed to fail, as a path to success today, because it’s impossible to figure out what first step to take today.
And so it’s impossible to know when you’ve finished your work for the day. Without a clear definition of what success looks like to you, you’re likely to do nothing, or to keep working until you’re so exhausted you have to stop. Neither of which makes you feel successful, or advance you towards external success.
So you pick up your phone and doomscroll and go to bed promising to do twice as much tomorrow, still without a clear idea of what that looks like.
No More Doomscrolling
If you have done the work to figure out what ‘success’ looks like for you—for now—your internal motivational conversation goes more like one of this:
“I know I want to finish this novel, because I want to prove to myself that I can write something I’m proud of. I need to finish the scene where the protagonist confronts the bad guy, but I’m having trouble doing it. Maybe I need to back up and do some character exercises (from that course/book I bought and never finished) to figure out the characters’ real motivations. OK, that won’t add to the manuscript’s word count today, but I’ll learn more about the characters, which might free me up to write the actual scene tomorrow. So today’s task is: find that character exercise I remember liking in that course I took, and go through it slowly. When I’ve done that I’ll summarise my thoughts, for next time, then my reward will be to take a walk outside.”
Imagine yourself at the end of a day when you’ve ground through 2,000 words or four scenes, because “that’s what successful writers do”, and then collapsed on the couch with a whisky, ‘to recover’.
No imagine yourself at the end of a day when you took a small concrete step that aligns with your goals and your current energy, and that you can put a checkmark next to as ‘accomplished today’. You bound out of your chair with energy left over to hang with the kids or the spouse, knowing that you’ll be back in a day or two to tackle the next task.
Doesn’t that feel like a successful writing life, regardless of external rewards or judgment?
So should you bother writing, in an age of AI, even if the external rewards you once hoped for aren’t guaranteed?
