52 Week Challenge – Debrief

I’ve put off writing this for a very long time, four years actually. For me, this is kind of like admitting defeat. I never completed the Ray Bradbury 52 Week Challenge. The Challenge was the whole reason I started this website in the first place. Well, mostly. I started this website because I wanted my own sandbox to play in and build castles and race Tonka trucks and create my own worlds. The 52 Week Challenge just gave me the last little nudge I needed to buy the real estate and construct my playground. If you’re interested in reading my initial thoughts about the Challenge and see where my head was at the time, you can catch all that action here.

Things started out strong, as they always tend to do. I was pumped, excited, stoked, ready to meet the challenge. I had initial fears and reservations and concerns, but I was mostly just excited to get going. In the end, everything I feared ended up happening. But I stood up to those fears, looked them in the face, spit in their eyes, planted my flag in their borders because that’s what you have to do if you want to get anything done, especially the stuff that’s important, the stuff that matters most to you.

And even though the hordes of fear overwhelmed me in the end, I got in some good sucker punches and karate kicks to the crotch. I put up a good fight. I didn’t just lay down and die. And even though I’ve been down in the dust the last few years, I’ve been plotting my eventual rise and retribution. Someday I’ll conquer that 52 Week Challenge. Someday I’ll be victorious. I don’t yet know when that day might come, but I feel like I’m plotting and working towards it a little more every day.

So what happened anyway? Why didn’t the 52 Week Challenge work out so well for me? And what lessons did I learn in the process? Allow me to explicate. Educate. Expectorate? Let me ‘esplain it to you.

EATING THAT ELEPHANT

I don’t want to say I bit off more than I could chew, but let’s just say I could definitely hear my mom’s voice warning me that, if I don’t take smaller bites, I’m gonna choke. And choke I did. For anyone not familiar with the Ray Bradbury Challenge, it’s basically this: “Write a short story every week; it’s not possible to write fifty-two bad stories in a row.” In other words, quantity will, at some point, help you produce quality. You’re writing a lot, and with all those words, you’re practicing and getting better. Many authors have said more or less the same thing, that inside every writer is an awful lot of really awful words that you just have to expunge from your system. Purge the poison. Push out the pus. Whatever metaphor you want to use. By writing a new story every single week, you’re getting out all that bad juju and freeing up valuable real estate for the good neighbors to move in. Or something. It’s possible I’m mixing some metaphors up around here, but I’m allowed to do that because I’m a writer and this is my sandbox.

TIME

A brand-new story every week turned out to be quite a lot for me. I can already hear people out there starting in with that old chestnut, “Well, if it’s important and a priority, you’ll find a way to get it done.” And while, yes, in theory that’s almost always true, that advice also almost always comes from people who don’t have jobs and spouses and children to take care of and their own houses that require building by themselves. Yes, I realize everyone has competing priorities, and something always has to give. I think we’ve all also heard the stories about authors who turned to drugs or alcohol, or who never married, or are working on their fourth marriage, or who neglect their children, or who can’t hold a steady job, or whose physical or mental health has gone to crap. The truth is I could have completed the 52 Week Challenge. But there would have been consequences in the form of people and things in my life that would have suffered greatly. I’d have broken down from sleep deprivation, or I would have lost my job, or my wife and kids would’ve hated me because I neglected them all the time. I like to think I have my priorities straight. The writing is important, yes, but it’s not the most important. I know that for me, personally, I’d feel pretty awful if I completed all those stories – maybe even sold a few – and my family fell apart, or the house we’re building never got done, or I lost my job, or I missed birthdays or anniversaries because, you know, deadlines. Do I wish I had more time for writing? Yes. Absolutely. Always. And often while I’m wrapped up doing other things, I regret that I don’t have more time for writing. It sucks. But at the same time, I have to content myself with knowing I’m focusing on the highest priorities at the moment, and I have to be happy with the limited time I get every day to write. Besides, once my time machine works reliably and my multiplicity duplicator cranks out a few more copies of me, I’ll be unstoppable. Just. You. Wait.

SELF-FLAGELLATION

Maybe the biggest reason I didn’t finish the Challenge is because it stopped being fun and started feeling like torture. Every week was a race against the clock to finish a story on time and get started on the next one. Think up a new story idea, flesh it out in my mind or on paper, draft the original concept, and polish it up as best as I could, all in seven days. I just can’t work that quickly. Day five and six would roll around, and that voice would start yelling at me in the back of my head, “You better wrap this up, soldier! Move it, move it, MOVE IT!” The first few stories I wrote were pretty incredible experiences for me. My eyes would pop open in the middle of the night as my brain would form a story idea from somewhere deep inside the never-sleeping recesses of my subconscious. It’d be a mad rush at three or four AM to grab my notebook just so I could get it all down. But as the weeks went on and the backlog of stories grew, it was a scramble to get one story done before I had to start the next one. I never felt like I was doing the current story justice before I had to stop and start the next one. And I don’t exactly write short. I’m not so great at flash or micro fiction. My brain thinks long, more in the short story and novelette range of five to seven thousand words. Certainly more than I can comfortably finish in seven days, especially when the best I can manage is 500 – 1,000 words per day most days of the week. After those first initial bursts of energy, I started to fall behind and never felt like I could catch back up again. It was a constant tug of war between finishing one story and starting another. It got hard to breathe.

LESSONS LEARNED

But it wasn’t all for naught. I did learn some valuable lessons along the way. I have no regrets about doing it, other than, you know, not finishing. Sheesh…I didn’t even make it halfway…fifteen percent was all I managed! Eight out of fifty-two stories, or nine, or something like that. I learned some stuff about myself though and my process for generating stories. I learned about my own habits and my own dedication and my own pace.

I’m dedicated, yo. Once I start a story, I finish it, no matter what, no matter how bad the thing seems to be spiraling out of control. I can honestly say I’ve never abandoned a story. I have a theory: if a story sucks, it’s because I made it suck. And if I made it suck, I can make it un-suck (aka “awesome”). Great stories have been created from the most mundane ideas. It’s all about the presentation and the words and the images. Any bit of straw can be spun into gold; it just takes a bit of magic sometimes and a little bit of extra time. I’m willing to spend that extra time.

Writing matters. It matters to me. I mentioned earlier that other things are a high priority in my life, and many of those come ahead of writing. But don’t get me wrong; writing is an important part of my life. Most days of the week, I write for an hour on my lunch break at work. That’s what I get. That’s my time for me and my writing. That time is my own personal Area 51 and I guard it fiercely. I lie about it to people. I make excuses. I disappear into it like planes passing over the Bermuda Triangle. “Where’d Morgan go?” my coworkers ask at the office. “I don’t know. He was here just a second ago.” Ninja vanish. Smoke and mirrors. UFO’s? There aren’t any UFO’s around here, just a bunch of weather balloons. Look right here at my flashy thing for a quick second. I started writing seriously about twelve years ago and I’m still at it. The desire never faded. It’s part of my life. I imagine it always will be, so I carve out time for it in my day. Every day that I can. Most days of the week for sure.

My process. I learned that I have a process for story. It’s much like an artist’s process for drawing. There’s an initial idea. There’s a loose quick sketch. There’s some refinement. There’s line work. There’s shading and highlighting and detailing and erasing and redrawing. There’s final rendering. I go through all the steps. Some stories have arrived gift-wrapped and whole, sitting on my doorstep like an abandoned baby. But that’s rare, thankfully, because abandoned babies are hard to take care of, and even harder to dump off on your neighbor. Most of the stories I’ve written come a little at a time: a little dialogue here, some images there, a fleeting glimpse of the Milky Way caught through dark forest treetops, a little here, a little there, until it all finally comes together. I can’t force it. When I try, it feels, well, forced. I’m also neither a pantser nor a plotter. I’m more of a hybrid, some kind of weird half-breed creature called a Plantser. Plotser? I dunno. Something like that. I like to sketch out the overall plot and nail down all the major points to the story, kind of like a storyboard artist laying out the entire film in small thumbnail sketches. But I leave all the details inside those scenes wide open and loose, to be filled in later during the actual writing.

If you found this website because of the Ray Bradbury 52 Week Challenge or came here hoping to see what that was all about, I hope you weren’t too disappointed. It started out well. I’m really happy with the handful of stories I completed. (You can read them by following the 52 Week Challenge Link up above.) I hope you find some joy in them. Some day I may get back to the challenge and finish it. Not sure if it will happen inside a single year though. One of those stories – Bordertown – actually led to my first Semi-Finalist story in the quarterly L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. So the process wasn’t entirely a lost cause. And even though I didn’t complete the Challenge, I did learn a tremendous amount about myself and what is important in my life, and it helped me better understand my own writing process and needs when it comes to writing and storytelling.