Set Yourself a Writing Challenge!

I find the best way to motivate myself when I'm stuck with writing a post, continuing a story or even writing essays for English, is to complete a Drabble or Short Story Challenge.

A Drabble or Short Story Challenge follows some basic guidelines. The most common Challenges I've participated in/heard of are the N Song, the N Word or the N Character Challenges, where N is any number you wish. The number dictates how many drabbles (a piece of writing less than or equal to 100 words, although this is debatable) or short stories (a piece of writing where there is a small amount of characters, one pivotal setting or scene and is usually between 800 and 3000 words long) that have to be written about a coupled song, word or character.

These Challenges can be time controlled (for example, fifty drabbles in fifty days) or they can be a long term project for you to do whenever you have the time or need to write. Personally, I prefer to set myself a long term challenge and complete it when I'm bored, can't get on to RPG or when I'm in hospital.

Of course, you're not just limited to song, word or character challenges. You could simply set yourself a number of drabbles/short stories to write within the next year, or perhaps you could partner up with someone and decide on a way for you each to prompt the other weekly/monthly/etcetera for your writing pieces. One example of this that I have seen would be when each partner gives a line to be used in the drabble. Sometimes these lines can be outrageous and funny, but they are really good ways of making you think as to how your chosen character(s) would react to that being done/said.

Anyway! The point of this topic is that I would really like to see the members of RPG taking up a writing challenge. If you're at all interested (especially if you would like to do a partner Challenge, as you could find a partner here) then do reply to this post. It would be really interesting to see how your writing develops through these Challenges, and I honestly think that these can be great ways of removing writers' block or fixing boredom when you've just nothing else to do!

I think that the Writing Forum would be a great place to post our Challenges, as we can title the topic with the title of the Challenge and make consecutive posts.

As for me, I'm taking up the 50 Songs Challenge - as said above, this is just when I (or another party) selects fifty songs and then writes something to match an interpretation of the song, with lyrics of that song incorporated into the story, or with the title of the song as the title to the story - to alleviate boredom that I may experience in the future during my time in hospital.

So, leave a post with ideas, Challenges you may be taking up and anything else you'd like to add!


Lain (Cloasse)