In September, I set out to participate in the Story-a-Day challenge. If you haven’t heard of it, Julie Duffy runs a challenge called Story-a-Day in May and September. As the title implies, she emails you a different prompt each day from which you are challenged to complete an entire story, beginning to end, in one day. These stories can be as short as you want; the only goal is to finish them. Ideally, by the end of the month, you’ll have 30 completed story drafts.
If you’re familiar with human nature, you won’t be surprised to hear that I did not end the month with 30 finished stories. I wrote 12 stories, 4 of which were complete drafts and the rest of which were outlines or ideas or the first third of a story before I ran out of time or lost the will to finish.
So do I consider my Story-a-Day experience a failure?
This is where I want to pivot to a lesson I learned from running half-marathons. The original article that gave me this idea has disappeared into the depths of Google, but it was an interview with a competitive runner. She said that her coach had her set three goals for every race. First was the A goal, the shoot-for-the-moon result: hitting a PR (personal record) or winning your age category, for example.
Next, step back and set a B goal. This goal is much more realistic, something boring but achievable with hard work, say a 1% improvement over your most recent race time.
Finally, and I think most importantly, set a C goal, the goal that you will still be able to achieve even if you wake up with a cold the morning of the race, having not slept the night before. It could be as simple as just finishing the race with a smile on your face.
Setting these three goals helps you mentally consider all the outcomes, at least some of which you have no control over. It helps you set realistic expectations, so that your soul isn’t crushed when you find that A goal was unrealistic and won’t be happening.
I chose to look at my Story-A-Day experience through this lens. Though I didn’t formally set goals for Story-A-Day, here’s what they might have looked like:
A: Write 30 amazing stories and begin submitting them immediately to wild success.
B: Write 4 days a week and come up with decent stories I can work with in the future.
C: Practice being consistent in showing up for my writing and learning to generate ideas. Get at least one good idea out of it.
My Story-A-Day ended up being somewhere between B & C. I found that the best part of Story-A-Day was the challenge to come up with a completely new story every day. Coming up with a full beginning-to-end story is one of the things I struggle with most in fiction writing, and so this experience really stretched me in a lot of positive ways:
- I learned that my writing comes easiest when I start thinking about what I want to write in the morning, deliberately, so that once my Kindergartener is off in the afternoon, I can head straight to the keyboard without fear.
- I wrote two pieces of flash fiction that I think are almost ready to put on the submission treadmill.
- I came up with three ideas I want to develop into full-fledged stories in the future, which will keep me busy for a few months.
- Another idea was too big for a short story and might end up being my NaNoWriMo novel this year.
And now I have a better idea of what to expect, I will definitely be doing Story-A-Day again in May. I’m looking at it as an opportunity to generate new stories that could sustain my creative practice for the next year.
