StoryADay…November?

If your year started in a blaze of good intentions, and you find yourself here, facing the last quarter, thinking, oh no, I haven’t written nearly as much as I meant to…fear not.

This year, I’m re-running the StoryADay challenge during November.

And you’re invited.

Remember, you make your own rules!

Don’t want to write and finish a story every day? Fine!

You decide what ‘story’ means to you, and your own definition of ‘a day’.

The point is to write more than you would otherwise, and to use the energy of the challenge—and the community—to help you do that.

How it works:

Commit
Decide on your rules
Use the daily writing prompts (or don’t) to help you write more than you would otherwise.
Stop by the blog to leave a comment and let us know how’re getting on each day. #OldSchool

This year’s prompts included a peek inside these authors’ heads (and more)

headshots of the authors providing guest prompts for this year's challenge and the words: with writing prompts from P. Djèlí Clark, Mary Robinette Kowal, John Wiswell, Lori Ostlund, Kim Coleman Foote, Sasha Brown, R. S. A Garcia, Jennifer Hudak, Tim Waggoner, Rachel Bolton, Julia Elliot, Kai Lovelace, Anglea Sylvaine, Rich Larson, F. E. Choe,Emma Burnett , Patricia A. Jackson, Allegra Hyde,

P. Djèlí Clark, Mary Robinette Kowal, John Wiswell, Lori Ostlund, Kim Coleman Foote, Sasha Brown, R. S. A Garcia, Jennifer Hudak, Tim Waggoner, Rachel Bolton, Julia Elliot, Kai Lovelace, Anglea Sylvaine, Rich Larson, F. E. Choe, Emma Burnett , Patricia A. Jackson, Allegra Hyde, and more

Throughout this month I’ll be bringing you warm-up tasks—tiny tasks—that will help you prepare for a successful challenge. Sign up and I’ll even send them to your inbox every week.

Here’s the first week’s worth of warm-up tasks.

Go at your own pace, but do go!

Tiny Tasks

DISCUSSION

Find any of them particularly helpful? Done something like this in the past? Share your tips with the community, below!

Keep writing,

Julie

Write A Warm Up Story

Today’s a great day to write a warm-up story before StoryADay

Not on the list? Join for free here

Today’s prompt

Write a story inspired by this image

Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning, 1950, oil on canvas, 34 1/8 x 40 1/4 in. (86.7 x 102.3 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.92

Remember: If you’re planning to write a LOT of stories this month, they’re going to be short, often Flash Fiction (fewer than 1000 words). That means your story’s scope has to be narrow but deep.

You can’t tell the story of this person’s life, just the story of this moment. Everything else, you can hint at.

Warm Up – 5 minutes

Look around around your space and picking out details. Think about things you can see, touch, hear, smell, and yes, even taste.

Spend five minutes writing descriptions of several of those things. Try to find new ways to describe elements that have clichés attached to them: for example, don’t say “the computer fan purred like a kitten”, instead say something like “the white noise from my computer’s fan utterly failed to mask the sounds of my mother crashing around in the kitchen below.” (Or something better that comes from your unique brain and experiences).

Invite the reader into the sensation with your words.

Brainstorm – 5 minutes

This picture depicts a moment in this person’s life.

What are they looking for (what do they desire)?
What are they anticipating is about to happen and why?
What will change for them if they gets what they want?
How many thoughts will run through their mind as they looks out of this window?
What actions do they take to distract themselves from whatever it is they’re anticipating?
What has already happened, before they lean forward to look out of the window?
What point of view and style of story will you choose to help readers inhabit this moment? A first-person stream of consciousness monologue? A slow, lyrical depiction of the moment? A more action driven scene that shows us all the things the main character does before, during and after this moment? A second-person reflection on what it is to wait or anticipate (“you stand at the window, bent at the waist, unaware of the dawn chorus in the long grass outside. All you can think about is…)

You can’t write about all of these things, but you can choose one, two or three and have them add up to a story (think of it like a puzzle for the reader to solve).

Discussion: How did you get on with your short story? How are you feeling now that the challenge is right around the corner?

🌟 Superstars Edge: You will hit bumps during the challenge. The difference is, the StoryADay Superstars writers have a place to land — to recover, to reset, to keep going. That’s why they finish. That’s why they grow. Join us!

Choose Your Challenge Vibe

Earlier this month I asked you to think about what kind of mood you like in stories

Today I’m asking you to consider the mood, or ‘vibe’, you want to create during the challenge.

Are you aiming for:

Experimental?
Ambitious?
Playful?
Energized?
Confident?
Focused?
‘Determinedly outrunning your perfectionism and getting something written’?

What do you want to feel on the 1st when you look back at your month?

Journal about it, and then post your target ‘vibe’ below in the comments. Let it set the tone every time you start a writing session).

Superstars Invitation: Want to guarantee you’ll finish the challenge with that feeling? StoryADay Superstars provides the scaffolding you need to keep your vibe high — and your stories flowing — long after the initial excitement fades. Then, we’ll spend the next five months building on that success to create a writing habit that fits your life today, not ‘some day’.

Decide How To Track Your Progress

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.

Want to write today?

Try the Draft in a Day Workshop
available at a 50% discount until Nov 7, 2025

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!

The Superstars Advantage
When you’re part of a supportive community, you write more — and better. Superstars isn’t just a course. It’s a transformation engine.
Join us and stop wondering if you’re doing it right.
Start knowing you are.
Find out more

Challenge Warm-Up Tasks

In case you’ve missed any, here are all the Warm-Up Tiny Tasks for 2025, to help you get ready for the StoryADay challenge.

None of these is essential, but take a look through the list and click on one or two that seem like they might be helpful to you, wherever you are in your writing journey right now.