Today’s challenge:
Decide how you will track your progress during the challenge, in a no-judgment way
Remember when you were young and your parents/teachers said to you: “we just want you to do your best”?
If you were anything like me, that phrase filled you with foreboding because you knew, deep down, that you couldn’t be ‘your best’ every day.
Sometimes you performed spectacularly. If you were expected to live up to that every day, life would be a nightmare.
And, if you were anything like me, it made you try a little less hard, so people didn’t expect too much from you.
Breaking News: “Your Best” Is A Moving Target
We are human. We get tired. We grieve. We have fun. We have hormones, and hunger, and stress, and inspiration, and dry spells.
We are not machines.
One day you can write 2,000 words of flowing prose. The next day, dragging 350 words out of your brain feels like torture.
The goal must be to keep showing up and doing Today’s Best.
Today’s Best won’t look like Yesterday’s Best. It might be 40% or 140% of what Yesterday’s Best looked like. And that’s ok. Because you’re doing Today’s Best.
The trick is to decide to:
- Show up for your writing, in some kind of routine way.
- Be in the moment with your writing for as many moments as you can mange today.
- Be grateful for whatever Today’s Best looks like (writing it down helps with this)
- Be a goldfish: When you have written what you can today, let it go, move on, and keep showing up on the next days.
Your Rules, Your Log
You make your own rules for StoryADay.
You will ‘fail’ in some way, on many days of a challenge like this.
But that doesn’t mean the venture is a failure. Or that you are.
Today, think about ways that you might log your progress over a month of writing, so you can apply the lessons learned to all the future months of writing you hope to live through.
Some things you might track (I’ll be back tomorrow to help you plan HOW you will log. Today we’re just deciding).
- How many stories you write, overall
- How many stories you write compared with how many you planned to write
- How many words you write each day
- How many writing sessions you do during the month (and when they occur: mornings? afternoons? evenings? And which felt easiest?)
- How much energy it takes to write on each day
- How your energy ebbs and flows between days
- Your feelings towards your stories, characters, and/or writing practice
- Your reaction to everyday ‘failures’ (these might be disappointments about quality, quantity, intensity or emotion, around the challenge and your expectations).
- How many new ideas do you generate during the month, while also using up ideas?
- How many times you attend a writing sprint or check in with a writing buddy
- How in control of your routine you feel, on any given day
- Something else….
IMPORTANT: do not try to track all these things. Pick 1-2 metrics and decide to keep track of them during the challenge.
Practice
StoryADay is about practicing your craft. Practice, without assessment, is play, and play is fine. (You’re welcome to simply play, during StoryADay)
But if you want feel the progress you’re making, deliberate assessment helps.
In my experience, logging what I write and how I feel about it, helps me to notice that I’m doing MORE than my ‘generalized feelings about my writing’ would allow.
You might find the same.
Tomorrow I’ll be back to help you set up your log.
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Discussion:
What will you log, to help you stay present and do Today’s Best, during the challenge, and moving forward in your writing practice? Leave a comment!
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