Reay Jespersen

Tracy, an aspiring writer friend of mine, has recently challenged me to take on the exercise put forth by one of the writing groups she belongs to: write a minimum of 100 words per day for 100 days. You can’t write 200 words one day and then take the next day off; what you do on any day only counts toward that day’s total. And if you ever miss a day, the 100 days starts over again.

I thought it was an interesting challenge, and as some may know, I’ve enjoyed numerous writing challenges (typically self-imposed) over the years, so I was quite happy to accept hers. Thus far, now I guess heading into my third week (give or take - I’ve got it written down somewhere specifically so I don’t have to keep the specifics in mind all the time), I’ve kept it up. And not only am I getting more writing done than I normally would, given my tendency is to wait to be struck by both inspiration and the time to write - which can probably be chalked up to most writers’ penchants for procrastination - but I’m finding that the process of writing is in itself giving me more ideas.

I’m normally hit with ideas pretty routinely. I’ve got an ever-growing collection of small notebooks to jot down ideas when they occur to me, to the point where if I had every day to myself to write, I still couldn’t hope to use all of them. But this regular process of writing every day - which is of course supposed to get you into the very habit of writing every day - helps to lubricate my imagination even more. So I’m not only enjoying meeting Tracy’s challenge head-on, but also the work it’s accomplishing, as well as the more cohesive ideas I’m getting from the process. My wife had articulated it best a few days ago, saying it was nice to see that the ideas I’m getting now are more complete and usable, rather than the notions for lone characters or scenes or coo character names or other tidbits I’m typically struck with. It would seem that creativity begets creativity.

Awesome.