It All Adds Up

Lesson 10 of 10 from the 200 Words-a-Day Challenge

In July 2023, I reluctantly accepted a challenge issued by

☕ KimBoo York

to write—and share—at least 200 words a day. Word count wasn’t the point; attempting to break through my resistance to sharing my writing was.

This small daily task taught me a lot about myself, my creativity, and my writing practice. So I decided to also share my top ten lessons learned from the challenge in the hopes they’ll support you and your practice as well.

Following the pattern and the practice of the month-long challenge, I’m delivering these 10 lessons learned as micro-essays of at least 200 words.

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It All Adds Up

The minimum daily word count I committed to for the July challenge was 200 words. Exactly 200 a day for 31 days is 6,200 words, not an insignificant number. So when the challenge ended, I asked myself: What would happen if I continued to write at least 200 words a day for a full year?

Following through on the math, 200 words times 365 days equals 73K words. That’s a short novel or a long novella, or untold articles and blog posts.

I often went over the daily goal during the challenge, so I wanted to know how much I actually wrote. Getting mathy again, I counted titles, the micro-essays, and the prompts, but left out intro text, hashtags, and miscellaneous instructions and background about the challenge. For the challenge alone, I wrote 10,941 new words in the month of July.

Projecting that out by multiplying by 12 months, but giving myself grace for non-writing days, and 80K to 120K words in a year feels attainable—a novel draft in one year (novels today average 70K to 100K words).  Using this same approach and practice, I can complete my current WIP, Dancing at The Orange Peel. This also gives me some peace and hope about future projects.

Just 200 words (also see Lesson #9) on the regular. I can do this.

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Lesson #10 of 10

We try to make it harder than it really is; consistency wins the game.

NOTE: This is not new knowledge for me. But heretofore, acknowledging the truth of this lesson has been little more than an intellectual exercise. This time, I felt it. This time was visceral.

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That’s it. Those are my top ten takeaways from the July challenge. I’ll be taking a break for the Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. and a visit from a friend, but I’ll be back soon to share a lessons roundup. I hope you’ll stick around to also find out what’s next for Gina’s Quill.