My Story

The short story:

I am taking part in the My 500 Words challenge, which can be found on this website: http://goinswriter.com/my500words/



The long, slightly rambling, story:
Written more for my own benefit than anyone else's - like everything in this challenge!

As a child, I was so sure of myself. When people asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?", I would reply, "I'm going to be an author." Not, "I'd like to be an author.", "I'm going to be".

As time went on I stopped writing for fun. I stopped reading for fun, too. I like to blame my education for this, forcing me to read books I hated and then write long essays analysing them in excruciating detail, until neither reading nor writing was enjoyable anymore. In reality though, it's my own fault. When I realised that the chances of making enough money to live off my writing were extremely slim, I started focussing on other things that would earn me a living.

After I left university, I started reading again. Studying German and Italian had built my love of language into a real passion, and reading for enjoyment felt like coming home after a long and exhausting journey. For my birthday last year a friend bought me a leather-bound journal (Tom Riddle's diary, as a matter of fact) and a nice fountain pen to go with it. Being left-handed, I've never been able to write with a fountain pen, but this one was designed with us lefties in mind, so I was excited to try it out. I began writing again. I remembered how much I had always enjoyed it.

I happened upon the "My 500 Words" challenge by chance. #500words was trending on Twitter to advertise a children's writing competition hosted by the BBC, and when I clicked to read more I found lots of old tweets all linking back to this one blog post on goinswriter.com. The idea of setting myself a challenge for my writing was much more appealing than just sitting down every day and hoping inspiration would hit. This way, I could get a significant amount of writing done every day, and use writing prompts whenever I needed. My problem with getting back into writing had been that I was having ideas but then writing a few sentences and giving up on them again. I was putting too much pressure on myself. By focussing on quantity rather than quality, I'm getting myself back into the habit of writing, and enjoying it. Gradually, I will work on improving the quality of my 500 words, much like a runner who runs 5km a day and then gradually works on increasing the speed.

The rules from the original blog post are below, feel free to join in on the challenge!

• Write 500 words per day, every day for 31 days.
• You can write more if you want, but 500 words is the minimum.
• Don’t edit. Just write.
• If you miss a day, pick up where you left off. Don’t make up for lost days.
• Encourage, don’t criticize (unless explicitly invited to do so).