Make Your Rules

Now that you’ve spent some time thinking about Story Sparks, characters, settings, and the mood of the stories you might want to write, as well as your Writer Identity, Tiny Win Celebrations and Bounce Back Plan, it’s time to get serious about making your rules for StoryADay

My Own Rules?

Yes.

StoryADay May’s original challenge was to write a story a day in May. It’s a huge challenge and thrills a certain type of writer with the massive commitment, the opportunity to outrun the demons of perfectionism, and the opportunity to tell the people who love you “sorry, not this month, I’m focused on my writing.”

But.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Your Tiny Task for today is to

Set Your Rules For StoryADay May

You get to set your own rules. Rules that will:

  • Push you to write more than you usually would
  • Help you out run pefectionism
  • Force you to keep writing when inspiration has dried up—which usually results in you reaching for the weird ideas that, in turn, re-spark your inspriation. odd, but true.

they might look like this:

  • I will write a story a day, even if that story is a single sentence that I’m being extremely creative in describing as a story. The point is to think about narrative and try to craft something complete, every day.
  • I will write a story three days a week, starting and finishing a story in a single 24 hour period
  • I will write every day except these days…(good if you have long-standing commitments in May)
  • I will write a 100 word story every day. No more, no less.

You can even decide to do something completely different, as long as you stick to it. In the past people have used the challenge to

  • Write a new idea for a picture book every day of the month
  • Write backstories for my novel world and its characters
  • Write connected stories set in a single apartment building
  • Revise a scene from a work in progress every week day.

TIP: Keep the rules simple and few.

Flexibility, Without Fracture

The best type of tree to stand under when it’s windy is a healthy one, and one with plenty of flex. Too rigid, and the limbs will snap off. We don’t want that in a tree or in your StoryADay Challenge!

If you’re nervous that your rules might be too rigid and threaten to break you, make your plan today and commit to sticking to it for one week.
If you are really hating it at the end of that week, tweak the plan for Week 2, then stick to the new plan for a week.
Discover something about your writing practice that makes your Week 2 plan make no sense? Change it for Week 3 and stick to that for at least a week. and so on.

StoryADay May is about finding out how to be a writer, for you, in this moment, not ‘some day’. It’s your challenge. Make commitments, stick to them for long enough to figure out if they’re working, then tweak.

For The Best Experience, Consider Superstars

Want Support During StoryADay May — and Beyond?

StoryADay May is an incredible way to spark your creativity — but it can be intense, and it’s easy to lose momentum without the right support system.

That’s why I created Superstars: a six-month guided experience that gives you community, structure, and resources to support your writing journey through May and beyond.

Find out more and join us, here

When you join Superstars, you’ll get:

  • Daily writing sprints and accountability during May (and all year round!)
  • A private, off-social-media community of committed writers who “get it”
  • Access to a library of workshops on craft, mindset, and productivity
  • Monthly themes to help you stay focused and growing
  • Critique opportunities to help you revise and share your stories
  • Encouragement to help you write more, finish more, and feel like a writer

Superstars is about more than just writing more. It’s about writing better, finishing what you start, and moving toward your writing goals in a structured, supported, and sustainable way.

Here’s what your next six months could look like:

  • May: Show up daily, write more than you thought possible, and lean into the challenge with support all around you.
  • June: Refine – Choose a story from May and revise it with intention. Participate in Critique Week to get thoughtful, constructive feedback.
  • July: Improve – Strengthen your craft with focused workshops on scene-building, character, pacing, and dialogue.
  • August: Triumph – Polish a piece and get it ready to share. Learn what success looks like for you, and celebrate your growth.
  • September: Engage – Make your writing more engaging, and reconnect with readers, fellow writers, and your creative purpose.
  • October: Imagine – Reconnect with your vision and voice. Participate in a second Critique Week to prepare for what comes next.

Find out more and join us, here

Don’t Go it Alone

I created Superstars after seeing what worked during the StoryADay Challenge:

  • Writers who engaged and showed up daily? They finished strong.
  • Writers who kept writing after May? They polished and published.
  • Writers who tried to go it alone? Too often, they floundered.

Superstars has been helping writers stay focused, finish their work, and live more confidently as writers since 2018.

If you’re ready to turn your May breakthrough into a writing life you love — I’d love to welcome you into Superstars.

You don’t have to do this alone. Let’s keep writing — together.

Find out more and join us, here

Help! I Missed A Day. What Do I Do?

OK, so this is Day 5 of the challenge and if you haven’t missed a day yet, the chances are strong that you will. Soon.

So here’s my advice, based on five years of May challenges, a couple of StoryADay September challenges and the writing courses I run.

Let It Go
[1. Cue the sound of my two elementary school aged boys screaming “No! Enough with the Frozen!”]

Let the unwritten stories go and write again tomorrow.

Seriously. This is not so much about turning out 31 complete stories as leaning to turn up every day, even when you feel like a failure. I encourage people never to try to catch up with days they’ve missed. That creates far too much baggage. (You can always keep writing into June if you want your 31 stories!)

Watch And Learn

The other point of a challenge like this is to try to do more than you think you can do, and to watch where it is hardest and where/when it was most fluid. Then, when you go back to your normal writing schedule you will have all these experiences in your tool kit. You’ll know that Saturday is maybe not a day to expect to get much writing done. And you’ll know that 11-midnight is prime time. Or you’ll know that it’s easier to write when you have a plan (or not).

Don’t worry too much. Just keep turning up, keep breathing and keep watching all the ways your inner demon tries to sabotage your writing life. Say ‘Huh, that’s interesting, demon. Nice try, but I’m still turning up again tomorrow”.

If we are going to write for the rest of our lives (and lets face it, we are), all we can do is keep learning!

Adjust Your Rules

Back in 2012 (my third year) I decided I was no longer going to commit to writing on Sundays. I COULD, I just didn’t HAVE to.
Between running the site and having two small children and a husband that I quite like to spend time with, something had to give. Sundays were it, for me.

This is fine. If you decide not to write EVERY day in May that’s cool.

BUT do try to assess your progress on a week to week basis rather than waking up each day and thinking “I wonder if I should write today”. (You should).

Stop now and see how your first five days (which include a weekend) have gone. Decide what you’ll commit to for the next seven days.

Of course, I thoroughly encourage you to write an actual StoryADay unless the thought of it is making you truly miserable. If you’re miserable, change the rules. But keep writing.

So, how’s it going? What are you learning? What tips do you have?

How To Set Your Writing Rules

The point of doing this challenge is to push yourself to do more than you thought you possibly could.

The point is to unleash the flood of creativity that comes when you have to write every day.

The point is not to give you yet another way to fail at a creative endeavor.

So yes, you should set yourself a goal that seems momentous, preposterous, monstrous even. And maybe for you that will be: writing 30 stories in 30 days. But maybe it will mean writing a story on five out of seven days.

The StoryADay Rules say there is one rule, “Write and finish a story every day. That’s it.”

They then promptly go on to talk about all the ways you can add to — or subtract from — that absolute.

I know it’s a bit confusing. It’s my fault. I appreciate rules, but I’m just not very good at being told what to do and I fail to see why I should expect other writers to be any better. Hence…

So, here follows my attempt to make sense of the part where the site says “set your own rules.”

What Do You Mean “Set Your Own Rules”?

The point of doing this challenge is to push yourself to do more than you thought you possibly could.

The point is to unleash the flood of creativity that comes when you have to write every day.

The point is not to give you yet another way to fail at a creative endeavor.

So yes, you should set yourself a goal that seems momentous, preposterous, monstrous even. And maybe for you that will be: writing 30 stories in 30 days. But maybe it will mean writing a story on five out of seven days. Or limiting yourself to 100 word stories. Or taking Thursday’s off.

If you know that your Saturdays are packed with people and obligations, sun-up to sun-down; or if you have tried the challenge before and noticed that you always failed to finish a story after five days of successes; or if you are a member of a religious group that takes the holy day extremely seriously, don’t torture yourself. Write it into your rules that you get to take certain days off.

How Do I Know What A Good Set Of Rules Is, For Me?

And if you haven’t done the challenge before (or if you haven’t written anything for a while) I strongly encourage you to stick to the basic rule: write and finish one story every single day for a month.

I know that sounds ridiculous in itself: surely if you haven’t been writing you should warm up a bit, ease yourself in? No. Sorry. This is not like running a marathon. You’re not going to pull a muscle or ruin your knees.

If you haven’t pushed your short-story writing before, you have no way of knowing what your boundaries are. Only by trying to write a complete story every day for 30 days can you know whether or not you can do it. Or how close you can come. And the effort is its own reward.

If, however, you took part in May, you’ll have a good sense of how much time you could make for writing, and what your goals need to be.

Just be honest with yourself. If you wrote 12 stories in May you might be secretly disappointed in yourself — or you might be thrilled. It all depends on you, and your circumstances. Just set yourself a goal that’s a little more ambitious than whatever you accomplished before and promise yourself you will push and push to get to it.

The Second Rule

The second absolute rule you should set yourself is to treat every day as a new day until the end of the month.

No going back to finish yesterday’s story – until next month
No berating yourself for yesterday’s shortcomings
No looking ahead and saying “I’ll never make it!”
Try your utmost to stick to your writing rules today. Forgive the past, and forget the future. Just write today.

What If I Fail?

Well, first of all, I have a problem with that word: “fail”.

Did you try? Then you didn’t fail. Did you complete a story every day for a month? No? Hmm, well, did you learn something about your style or your voice or your writing method? Did you write more than you wrote the month before (or in any month before. Ever.)?

There may well be days when you fail to finish a story. Forget it. Forgive yourself and move on. You are in pursuit of a great challenge here. Keep after it.

It’s entirely likely that some of your stories are great steaming heaps of passive voiced, prepositionally phrased, tedious prose peopled by heroes who wouldn’t know a plot point if it pointed right at them. Don’t give up on them. Keep writing until you get to the end. Even if you have to kill someone (in fact, that can be kind of fun). Pushing through to the end of a story teaches you so much more than giving up and starting afresh. Finish.

And if it gets to midnight (or whenever you go to bed) and you simply cannot finish today’s story: get some rest. Let it go and vow to start afresh tomorrow.

When the month is over, you can revise what’s worth saving, and learn from what’s not. While the challenge is still running, just keep writing. Strike the word ‘fail’ from your vocabulary. So long as you are writing, you cannot fail. Pat yourself on the back. You wrote. You got complete stories out of your brain — where you didn’t even know they were lurking — and on the page. You are courageous and to be congratulated.

Can I Adjust My Rules?

Yes. Absolutely. This is your challenge. I’d rather you adjusted your rules than gave up. Just don’t be too easy on yourself. This is meant to be a, er, challenge!

In Conclusion

Set ambitious goals
Try to meet them. At the very least, put some kind of ending on each story.
Be hard on yourself every morning and kind to yourself at the end of every day.
Treat every day as a new challenge (don’t look back!)