It’s day four of my challenge and so far I have managed to deliver a daily dose of a thousand words. No guarantees about the quality of the words though, the thousand word challenge is all about the numbers, for me anyway. However, I have chosen to use my words in a blog and that makes the quality an important question. Talking about the quality, last night before going to bed (I did sleep, at least a couple of hours) I realized I have forgotten the “feel free” speech so here we go. I’ll post it in the beginning so anybody dropping in can see it without having to scroll too far.
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When I first read about the challenge in a blog the title of the post was something like: “Take the thousand words a day challenge and see how it changes your life.” I found that intriguing and had to try. Things did change but maybe not how I thought it would. Later I will tell you about an unexpected change that came from my first try. This time I can see clear changes happening too, changes that are a little bit more logical considering it’s a writing challenge.
I have mentioned in previous posts that I have always been writing and started with doodling thoughts before I knew how to write properly. Writing is important and it’s not what I write it’s the writing itself. No matter where it leads me. Using the challenge to explore my inner most thoughts, trying to figure out what I want to do with it, IF I want to do anything with it at all. Not that I would mind writing a top selling novel, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. And that’s okay. When I write, even when it’s stories I tend to write it as thoughts of the main character. A little bit like when I’m writing this blog. I have been blogging before, tried different ways of blogging, different styles. The first blog I created was the one I worked on most, but for some reason I stopped.
The first change I have made when doing the challenge this time is taking it from the privacy of Google doc’s and placing it in a blog. I realized that I missed blogging and wanted to give it another try. While I was writing Google docs and only sharing the content with my boyfriend I would still write pretty much in the same style as I do now, whatever was on my mind would end up in writing. Moving to a blog has made me think a lot more about my writing, what and how I write about it. I have started to plan my writing. An obvious necessity when you’re blogging, but something I had to work hard on when I was blogging earlier. Now I can find myself thinking about my writing, formulating text in my mind while I do other things.
When mentioning thinking and planning above I had to pause and just look at the words. Thinking and planning is not exactly what I do when I write. I don’t plan my story before I start, I just go and see where it takes me. I was reading some “How to write” books a while back and they all agree that it’s important to think and plan ahead. I have always been relying more on inspiration than anything else. I don’t have the patience to plan ahead, I want to go when I want to go. Even if I haven’t thought about it before the thousand word challenge is the opposite. It’s about getting the habit of writing every day even if you don’t have any inspiration you have to write. It’s a writing exercise to help you get past that feeling when you’re staring at that white page and all the words seem to have deserted you. They haven’t.
Some slightly more unexpected things that happened the first time I was doing the thousand words challenge had nothing to do with writing at all, but everything to do with why I am here right now. It’s almost a year since I left the solitude of singleplayer Minecraft and visited my first servers. Still alone because my real life friends don’t play Minecraft. I visited the Playmindcrack server and all the old map going to all the buildings I had watched being built in videos. It was really fun just walking around in a world filled with builds that I hadn’t made myself. There was another server I was really curious about though, the Lords of Minecraft. I have recorded my first visit, how I was trying to be as invisible as possible avoiding people, just walking around looking at everything. And I knew I had to stay.
At this time I was also really working on my blog and I began the thousand words challenge. Using it a little bit the same way I have done this time, to solve problems. One night i had just began my writing there was a tweet about an event on the Lords of Minecraft server and it looked like so much fun, I really wanted to go. But being scared of other people and going to events doesn't really work and I needed to write. Putting it all into words as I wrote about it made me challenge my fear. I went to the event and I have never regretted that decision. It put an end to my writing challenge, but it resulted in me growing as a person. I created a new Minecraft character called her IshiEmi, set her up with the full set of Internet necessities, moved in on the Lords of Minecraft server found so many wonderful new friends, met a guy on Twitter who has become the most important person in my life. All happened because I decided to challenge myself. I could write a lot more about this, but...
I have reached and passed the goal of one thousand. So I will end this post here and continue tomorrow.
If you made it this far….
Many thanks and I wish you a wonderful day!!!
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