The Creativity Project: Doing Challenges
Bumping up my output by having accountability and challenging myself.
One of the things I did last year was challenge myself to write like a famous author. To try on Neil Gaiman’s writing routine for a few days to see what works and what doesn’t for me. It was a great experience in turning off distractions.
And then I went right back to my old ways.
The lesson didn’t stick as well as it should. I recently did another writer challenge of writing like Kylie Scott. Her style couldn’t be more different than Neil’s. Like me, she’s super distractible, but doesn’t try to completely minimize it. She allows herself to be distracted by emails and social media until it is time to focus.
And her muse doesn’t work for less than two cups of coffee.
Most of the challenge I tried for was to implement a stop time every day and to get all of my non-writing chores out of the way before I started writing. And it worked really well. While I would go back to my desk after dinner, I was getting ahead of my writing quota instead of it taking all day to finish.
I even used her idea iteration for the fourth book in my series. And I think I’m going to use it for every book going forward because I feel like it will make drafting go so much faster in the future. I’m already bursting with ideas for the story.
It was great until the challenge was over. And I went back to my old ways.
Sensing a pattern?
The challenges are great while I’m doing them, but building them into a habit is so much harder. And it is the habits that I’m building that are pushing me forward.
As tempting as it is to just jump from one challenge to the next, I know that isn’t the way forward. They work in the short term, but I need to adjust my day to day habits to make sure that my goals are being met. Which means that I need to find a way to be accountable to myself to get them to stick.
And that in and of itself, is a challenge and is my goal for the next month: getting through my chores first in the day so that I can get my writing done by 5 PM. If I go back to my desk afterwards, that’s fine, but I need to have my quota done before dinner. It may mean taking my writing away from my computer so I don’t have the distraction of the internet, but I plan on doing whatever it takes to achieve my goals this year.
What challenges have you been trying to meet your goals? Let me know!
