18 Lessons I Learned from Failing to Write Every Day

Notes from the October Daily Writing Challenge

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

October was a pretty big month for me.

I made a commitment to myself to publish on Medium every single day. In my head, I was gearing up for writing an entire novel in November for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) — so much so that I’ve even booked myself a week in Copenhagen to see out the month and to finish it up.

I was feeling fancy.

27,706 words & 18 Published Blog Posts Later

Well, I kind of failed in my target. I also have 13 unpublished posts sitting across my Medium drafts and my Macbook. That’s 4,615 words in draft.

That means that in October, I wrote 32, 321 words.

That’s a great deal more than I’ve written the entire rest of the year combined. In fact, up until October, I’d just about managed to publish 16 posts, which come in at 20,898 words.

So it does seem I’ve upped my writing game — and I guess that was the point.

And, yes, I failed my daily writing challenge. But here’s what I learned in the process.

1. The world didn’t end just because I didn’t make my goal.