On Writing Challenges

This is one of those topics I think about periodically but I haven’t really written anything down about it. I think.

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There are pros and cons to these “challenge month” things that keep popping up all over the place. (It seems like there’s a new one every month now.) The main ones I’m familiar with are writing challenges.

I think it all depends on where you are in your writing journey. The bottom line is that, as with most things in life, it’s not the same for everyone.

I first encountered this phenomenon in NaNoWriMo. The first few years it was great. Then I started to notice I felt worse and worse if I wasn’t keeping up with everyone else.

There are people who relish overachieving when challenged. I’m prone to that myself, which is one reason I like video games. I always loved taking tests in school, for example. I love doing things well, and I hate doing things badly.

But writing isn’t like solving a math problem. For me, at least.

I’ve found that if you’re not feeling confident in your skills as a writer, it’s really annoying to hear from overachievers writing 10,000 words a day while you’re over here struggling to find some way to write two coherent sentences. So I stopped reporting when I was doing well in NaNoWriMo, and usually only reported when I was falling behind, because that’s the more normal, relatable thing.

It wasn’t long before I stopped engaging with the NaNoWriMo community entirely and just kept my NaNoWriMos to myself.

As for quality of writing during challenges, I’ve certainly noticed with my own NaNoWriMos that there are days when I’m just writing meaningless gibberish to fill the word count, like I was doing an English paper that I hoped the teacher wasn’t going to read very closely. (In high school, I once made up an entire English paper out of thin air that had nothing to do with the assignment and the teacher was nice enough to give me a D for creativity. Still one of my proudest moments in life.)

So in that sense, I can understand the argument that challenges can result in lower quality work. Pressure to produce quantity almost inevitably reduces quality, in just about everything.

But I think there is some value in that as a writer, in a roundabout way. I usually take the position that it’s beneficial to write every day, no matter how good or bad it is, but it’s not always beneficial to publish every day, unless it’s a job.

With Blaugust I usually combat these “is this worth posting?” feelings by doing my own thing. I often question whether I should even sign up, when I’m going to ignore the rules completely. I wouldn’t ever be particularly surprised or upset if Belghast decided in any given year, “Okay that’s nowhere near what you’re supposed to be doing. No points for you!”

I typically try to think up something I’ve never done before, something that sounds interesting to me, and experiment for a month. Maybe something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Something that I know I’ll be able to look back on 5 years later and find it amusing. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. This year I wouldn’t exactly call it a home run, since I’m finding out my old drafts are actually rather bad, but I’ve always liked the “nothing ventured, nothing gained” proverb.

Anyway I think the best way I’ve found to get the most out of these kinds of challenges, and mitigate any feelings of disappointment, is to approach them with a fairly clear goal of what you want to get out of it. For me it’s usually something that’s an alternative to a numerical measurement.

I’m a lot more likely to become frustrated with challenges if it’s entirely metric-based. I don’t particularly like publishing noise on the Internet to fulfill an obligation either, so I try to make plans to avoid having to do that, and if all else fails, I just won’t post, and I’m okay with that too. Blaugust is about as lenient as you’re ever going to find in a writing challenge.

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