February Freewriting Challenge

Mid-January, I posed a question to my fellow Inkettes: would you want to do a freewriting challenge with me?

Why did I ask?

To be honest, I have been feeling stuck lately. I want to write–a lot. I want to write a whole bunch this year and move forward with publishing plans and queries and just get myself out there. I’ve sat on my ideas and doubted my skills long enough.

I have issues writing in my current notebook. I tried to blame everything else–I didn’t like the paper, my pens were being finnicky, it was never around when I needed it…

But the reality was, I didn’t want to ink anything I wasn’t certain of, that I wasn’t proud of, that I didn’t want to be cemented in the journal like a vault of my embarrassing past.

One of the tactics for writing faster, writing with less judgement, is writing sprints. I’ve seen it in 5000 Words per Hour by Chris Fox (affiliate link), and 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron (affiliate link). I’ve seen it in productivity articles. I’ve seen it just about everywhere (because I’m a productivity article and information junkie. Sigh.)

[image error][image error]And I used to do it all the time. I would have word wars with friends, in-person and online, holding each other accountable at the end for how much we had gotten done.

I wanted to get back to that level of focus, pushing forward with words and focusing on them. But I didn’t want to wait for when other people were around or online. I don’t have that much luxury in my time anymore.

Elisa and Melissa asked me for more details about what a freewriting challenge was…and I promptly replied that I had no idea. After a little back and forth, here is what I propose.

What is Freewriting

Freewriting is a creativity exercise where you start writing and don’t look back. You keep your pen flowing and don’t stop for a set interval of time. It doesn’t have to be pertaining to any specific project. You are start with a prompt or an image or a song. If you get stuck, return to the prompt and keep going, even if it is disjointed.

Uhh, I don’t want to show people what I write during these…

Don’t want to share? Totally fine. Neither do I, really. Last time I did freewriting I did some weird hand-bell magic scene and I relied heavily on my preferred filler words.

The idea is that you let the words get ahead of your censoring brain. You might write your way out of a corner in your current creative work. Or spark an idea for another book–after all, Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in April.

You might write stuff that you want to simply burn once you realize what you scribbled down.

What you will need for this challenge:

Something to write with. This can be pen and paper (yeah, pen, so you can’t go back and be tempted to erase it :P). Or, this can fingers to the keyboard if sitting in front of the computer is where you feel stuck.
A timer. Something reliable. If you have issues where you keep looking up to watch it tick down, turn it away from you so you can’t see the countdown and just write.

That’s it. Two things.

The Freewriting Challenge

For the month of February, I challenge you to do a certain number of 10-minute freewriting sprints per week.

For example, I want to do a minimum of 7 per week. I might have to do two on one day if things get hectic, but the week offers me that flexibility. Especially since I know I have one 15 hour work day and two 10 hour workdays in the month of February.

If you’re tighter on time, you can try Melissa’s goal of 2 sprints per week. We just want to try it and are hoping you will give it a try too!

Joining in?

Let me know below if you want to join in on our challenge. Tell us how many sessions you want to aim for in a week and link to your blog if you are going to keep track there.

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