The second month of my daily writing challenge was undoubtedly more difficult than the first. With renewed vigor and interest in writing, I started out the month strongly. I focused solely on improving my craft as a writer, and I was happy with the progress I was making.
But then, that all changed about midway through the month. I started to struggle, mainly because I had elevated my standards, and therefore I needed to keep up with those standards. All of a sudden, nothing felt worthy of writing about and all of the “progress” that I experienced quickly vanished.
The past two weeks of writing have been tough. I don’t think I’ve written anything particularly outstanding, and the amount of people reading what I write has decreased. In the first sixth weeks of the year, I was averaging about 35 people per week visiting my site. In the past two weeks, that number has dropped 74% to about 9 people per week.
So to summarize: I’m struggling to write every day, the amount of people reading what I write has decreased, and I feel as if I’m making little progress.
So why continue? If I don’t feel like things are moving in the right direction, what’s the point of maintaining a daily writing challenge?
The simple answer is that I want to finish what I started. My initial goal was to write every day for 6 months, so that is what I’m going to do (barring any crazy changes in my life).
At the end of January, I wrote a similar recap outlining everything I had learned after one month of writing. In particular, I highlighted that I’d like to find ways to grow the number of people reading what I write, which I eventually learned was not a fruitful aim, and instead decided to focus on improving my craft as a writer.
I hope that in my third month of writing, I can strike a balance that achieves both. I’d like to start using various subreddits like r/WritingPrompts, r/poetry, etc. to start getting feedback in real time about my writing, and in turn, this will help me a) improve my writing, and b) get some new eyeballs on my writing.
This will inevitably mean that I will need to incorporate more creative writing into my daily writing routine, which will require more effort but will hopefully be more rewarding and fun.
At the end of two months, I feel as if I’m enduring the first significant hurdle of this daily writing challenge, and it’s up to me to persevere and keep going. It’s easy to stick with something when things are moving in the right direction, but it’s much more meaningful when you can stick with something when the going gets tough.
And in reality, things are never really as bad as they seem. I live to write another day.
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The second month of my daily writing challenge was undoubtedly more difficult than the first. With renewed vigor and interest in writing, I started out the month strongly. I focused solely on improving my craft as a writer, and I was happy with the progress I was making.
But then, that all changed about midway through the month. I started to struggle, mainly because I had elevated my standards, and therefore I needed to keep up with those standards. All of a sudden, nothing felt worthy of writing about and all of the “progress” that I experienced quickly vanished.
The past two weeks of writing have been tough. I don’t think I’ve written anything particularly outstanding, and the amount of people reading what I write has decreased. In the first sixth weeks of the year, I was averaging about 35 people per week visiting my site. In the past two weeks, that number has dropped 74% to about 9 people per week.
So to summarize: I’m struggling to write every day, the amount of people reading what I write has decreased, and I feel as if I’m making little progress.
So why continue? If I don’t feel like things are moving in the right direction, what’s the point of maintaining a daily writing challenge?
The simple answer is that I want to finish what I started. My initial goal was to write every day for 6 months, so that is what I’m going to do (barring any crazy changes in my life).
At the end of January, I wrote a similar recap outlining everything I had learned after one month of writing. In particular, I highlighted that I’d like to find ways to grow the number of people reading what I write, which I eventually learned was not a fruitful aim, and instead decided to focus on improving my craft as a writer.
I hope that in my third month of writing, I can strike a balance that achieves both. I’d like to start using various subreddits like r/WritingPrompts, r/poetry, etc. to start getting feedback in real time about my writing, and in turn, this will help me a) improve my writing, and b) get some new eyeballs on my writing.
This will inevitably mean that I will need to incorporate more creative writing into my daily writing routine, which will require more effort but will hopefully be more rewarding and fun.
At the end of two months, I feel as if I’m enduring the first significant hurdle of this daily writing challenge, and it’s up to me to persevere and keep going. It’s easy to stick with something when things are moving in the right direction, but it’s much more meaningful when you can stick with something when the going gets tough.
And in reality, things are never really as bad as they seem. I live to write another day.
