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I Wrote a Short Story Every Week in 2022
And I learned a lot
At the beginning of the year I challenged myself to write a short story every week. I created prompts to give myself a starting point for the stories, and I decided not to hit a minimum word count for each one. The mere act of writing the stories was important, not the number of words written.
Was I successful? Why yes, yes I was. I wrote 52 short stories.
Are they all good? Oh heavens no. But they’re written, which means they can be edited and polished.
This challenge taught me a few things, like:
It’s exhausting writing so many stories
There was a point when I wanted to stop and just forget about the whole thing. Some weeks the ideas didn’t flow easily, some weeks I participated in NYC Midnight challenges, some weeks I was in London, and some weeks I was just tired. I suspected I might feel this way so before I started I’d asked if anyone else wanted to join me. I ended up with an email list of people who wanted to receive the prompts as well. This helped with accountability and it helped keep me writing.
Story structure became second nature
Before the challenge I could write a story but it might not have conflict, or it might…