Writing is a solitary act with no boss (not really…), no standup, and no one to tell you “good job, 500 words today.” You sit at the page, you fight your own head, and the only person who knows whether you turned up is you. Which is precisely why most of us don’t, most days.
So when Robbie Westacott ran a 30-day writing challenge as part to The Writer’s Journey community he runs, the proposition was simple: set yourself a daily goal, log it on a shared spreadsheet, and do it every day for a month, while everyone else does the same. No prizes. No leaderboard (not really…). Just a column with your name on it and the quiet knowledge that other people could see whether the cell was filled. It worked and there are some learnings. We had a debrief of how the challenge worked for participants and here are some thoughts from that session.
The engine has two cylinders
Robbie put his finger on the mechanism early: there are really two things going on here, and they fire together. One is the private contract — I will write for an hour, or I will hit 500 words. The other is the collective: everyone pushing the same boulder up the same hill on the same days. Either alone is fine. Together they produce something neither manages on its own, a push past what you’d ever do solo.
The numbers don’t lie about that. Emily hit 500-plus words on 26 of 28 days, occasionally closing on 700, and watched a single section of her project clear 17,000 words; output she’s blunt about never reaching otherwise. Rodney finally bulldozed through the chapters of his novel he’d been politely avoiding for months, the difficult bits, the ones that don’t get written until something forces the issue. For my part, the hour-a-day frame gave me cover to do the unglamorous work — proofreading and revisions — and actually finish it, on time, which is not a sentence I get to write often.
It felt competitive. It wasn’t. It was a pacer.
We kept reaching for the word “competitive” and then immediately apologising for it, because it didn’t fit. Bekah supplied the correction, and it’s the best thing said all session: it’s not a race against the others, it’s a pacer. The runner at the eleven-minute mile isn’t trying to beat you. They don’t wish you ill. They just hold a steady rhythm you can lock onto when your own falters.
That’s the whole physics of it. I framed the same thing from the inside: it stopped being isolation and became “reams of paper with somebody else.” Seeing someone else miss a day and still log something didn’t sting; it gave permission. Robbie’s weekly emails highlighting people’s progress turned out to be quietly load-bearing, and he’d been nervous they’d read as a scoreboard. They didn’t. A pacer is not a rival. It’s a borrowed engine.
The unassuming hero in all this is the spreadsheet. Not the goal, the record of the goal. Alexis and Rodney both clocked the difference between a calendar of intentions (write this scene) and a log of what actually happened. The first is a to-do list that mostly accuses you. The second is evidence. You scroll back and see a wall of completed days and think, “oh! I did that“. Both of them are still using it after the challenge ended. So am I. When a measurement instrument outlives the experiment, you’ve built the right instrument.
Thirty consecutive days is a long stretch of a finite resource, and creative energy is more finite than any of us budgeted for. Alexis went in assuming 500 words a day for a month would be “nothing” and came out genuinely burnt out, surprised by how much was being spent each morning. Several of us hit a wall around the halfway mark and needed to stop. The collective insight there is almost more useful than the productivity one: rest is part of the work, not a betrayal of it.
The breakthrough wasn’t that people took breaks. It’s that we mostly didn’t punish ourselves for it and that’s directly downstream of the group. Robbie expected to give himself a hard time over a broken streak and didn’t. When the others saw the organiser himself logging a rest day, the guilt drained out of the room. Brigette put the frame on it: you can’t control that change comes, only the environment in which it happens. The spreadsheet, the pacers, the permission: that’s the environment.
A few of us also learned, the hard way, that scattered effort wastes the month. Alexis kept eyeing the novelists and wishing she’d set one defined target instead of a loose hour. I’d vaguely committed to “edit as many short stories as possible,” which is not a goal so much as an open-ended sentence, and it dissolved into mess by week two. That’s when I pivoted to my proofreading. One clear project with a finish line. That’s the lesson.
What we’d change, and what we’re keeping
Near-total consensus on the shape: shorter, sharper bursts. Two weeks on, a week off, two weeks on. Smaller defaults. A midpoint check-in, a session like this one but at day fifteen, so the thing has a heartbeat rather than a long silence broken only by emails. And the spreadsheet stays, untethered from the pressure, an ongoing, low-stakes nudge rather than a 30-day sprint.
The lurch from vague idea to the page, the fight-or-flight of the blank document: it’s mechanical, it’s universal, and the cure is unromantic. You sit down. You do it. And then, almost always, it’s fun, which is the only durable reason any of us are here. We are not, with one or two hopeful exceptions, Stephen King (as someone put it) We write because it’s how we metabolise the world.
The challenge gamified that beautifully. The trick now is to keep the pacers and lose the burnout; to remember, as Alexis put it, that some days one poem is enough.
See you at the next start line. We just need to work out who’s pacing.