July Challenge: Put Your Thinking Caps On! | #amwriting #challenge

Hi! Long time, no see!

In going through and updating all of the goals, milestones, and Master Plans I set for myself at the beginning of the year, I remembered that one of the major pieces I’ve let fall to the wayside is this blog. Well, consider it revived!

And I’m tying it into another Master Plan for the year, which is to start writing again. With that in mind, I came up with a challenge for myself—and I hope you’ll play along, too!

July Challenge

I’ve already set up a three-ring binder with some notebook paper and a couple of sections. One is for another writing project, which I posted about on Instagram (and I’ll explain more about that here later). But as I was staring at the blank first section of the binder, I suddenly had an idea—not just to get myself thinking creatively again (priming the pump for writing) but also to have something to blog about this month:

An Idea per Day!

As you might be able to see in the Post-it Note in the photo, my idea for getting back into both blogging and writing is to challenge myself to come up with one new fiction-related idea each day. Ideas can range from full-on story ideas to:

• Characters
• Scenes
• Settings
• Conflicts
• Dialogue exchanges
• Relationships

And so on.

I’m doing this handwritten in a binder on notebook paper because that’s how I got started writing. And, as Julia Cameron puts it:

When we write by hand, we connect to ourselves. We may get speed and distance when we type, but we get a truer connection–to ourselves and our deepest thoughts– when we actually put pen to page (para. 3).

I’m also going to do it at night during the time I’ve set aside to “wind down for the night”—a time to relax and clear my mind before I actually go to bed. For many, many years, the hours between “activity” and “sleep” were my most prolific creatively. It’s the time of day when my internal editor/left-brain critic is tired and ready to go to sleep after working all day but my creative right-brain is ready to get out and play. Of course, that’s if the idea doesn’t come to me randomly some time throughout the day. If it does, I’ll jot down a note to myself wherever I am (a Post-it, on my phone) and then rewrite it into the notebook before bed.

And I’ll be sharing some of them here, too! So . . .

Who’s Ready for a Challenge?
_______
Works Cited: