No fooling – I’ve ended the 50k-word challenge for the month of March dismally below the targeted goal at: 19,551 words. The intention I suppose of the challenge was to get you to write swiftly and consistently, and overall, that’s what I did. But like a long-distance run (which I’ve never been good at), I started off strong, my pen swift and dizzy and my fingers flying on the keyboard, only to decline, let me see (as I scan my calendar), right around the middle of the month – March 16th. The number of words after that for each day rose and fell, but I never quite reached the peak of 1,646 words on Thursday, March 3rd. There were exactly 8 days I didn’t write any words (though believe me, I thought of them), which made it nearly impossible to ever catch up.
And so, what do I have to say about taking up this challenge and failing? I won’t be cheesy and say that at least the experiment got me writing more (which it did) or that it’s the effort that counts (because it isn’t). You either meet the goal or you don’t. That being said, I may have written even more in a month’s time when I worked on my graduate thesis (and will plenty more if I get in to a Ph.D. program in creative writing). I won’t even argue that old cliche: it’s the quality rather than the quantity (gag), because honestly, after a while, what you write ends up being mostly bull-crap. So what am I personally reminded of from attempting to write what would equal the length of at least a novella? What I already knew – that writing is a fixed part of my life, whether I write every day, every other day, or only on the weekends. So farewell March 50-k Madness. I hope to never see you again.
The Hungry Artist 