In late December 2012, I was thinking about the upcoming new year and wanted to give myself a writing challenge. At the time I was writing for Tony Pitch Comics and had finished consulting with TinyCo for some of their games. I had also spent the last several years writing screenplays for a variety of companies and was looking for something new. Or in this case, something old -- prose fiction. I realized it had been far too long since I had worked on my prose, and so that became the medium of choice.
The primary goal was to write something every day. Rain or shine, busy or tired, I wanted to challenge myself and have the pressure of a deadline. I also wanted to keep myself honest with this endeavor, so I decided blogging it would be the best way to go. Every day, anyone in the world could actually check in and see the results and find out if I missed a day or not. That was a lot of pressure, but it also helped me keep going. Once you've made the effort to finish 100 stories, you certainly don't want to stop and fail.
I had a few simple goals -- I wanted to work on new, previously undeveloped ideas, explore as many styles and genres as possible, and do all of it in my spare time. I tried to think about various ideas for about an hour and then I had to pick one and start writing. Writing sessions lasted for about an hour and the stories were to end up over 500 words in length. And then once the hour was up, it got published. And that was it. There was no time to go back to revise or rewrite, I always had a new deadline and a new story to come up with. It meant I didn't stop myself and trip up my own efforts pursuing perfection. It meant I had to let things go. It meant that I had to be as creative as possible as quickly as possible. It taught me a lot about brainstorming and being okay with moving on.
365 stories in 365 days. Thankfully it wasn't a leap year.
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