The 30-Day Writing Challenge

15 Articles, 30 Days, and a whole lot of learning

Hello,

I started a 30-Day Writing Challenge along with 20 others on 15th February. This challenge was led by Vijay Kumar, who is a Writer and Marketer with 20 years of experience.

The challenge was to write 15 articles, each 750–1000 words long, in 30 days.

That is 1 post every 2 days.

I have not written any articles before.

In fact, I am quite new to this. I started writing copy in my last job 1 year ago.

So I wouldn’t call myself a writer.

So this was a really daunting challenge for me.

But since I was between jobs, it seemed like the perfect time to hone my writing skills.

Vijay Sir kickstarted the challenge with an online call on how to write an article in 1 Hour.

Not the final polished version, just the 1st Draft.

That’s all I had to do, write the 1st draft, and publish it on some platform every other day.

The article need not be my best piece of writing, it just needed to have a start, a middle, an end, and a title.

And it needed to be published somewhere to be counted.

Vijay sir’s bonus call did help in narrowing down my niche, finalizing the topics, and learning how to define the introduction, the body, and the conclusion of an article.

I decided to go with the niche — Instagram Marketing for Small Business Owners — as it was the simplest for me to write 1000-word articles about.

The aim was just to write consistently — not well, not to sell.

And I wrote 10 articles in 30 days, which is 5 less than the number of articles we had to write, but 10 more than I would have written otherwise.

Then I got an extension to write the remaining 5 articles.

And here I am writing the 15th article, completing my 40-Day Writing Challenge.

Here is my reflection on these last 40 days of writing:

1. Sticking through this challenge till the end feels extremely fulfilling, and gives me the motivation to take on more challenges, and execute the ideas I have been sitting on for too long.
2. Writing a 1000-word article sounded intimidating. But when I chose a niche, put down the topics, and gave a structure to my articles before starting to write, it became easy. The lesson is to SIMPLIFY bigger tasks by breaking them down into steps. The bells and whistles can be added later.
3. The main challenge was just to WRITE CONSISTENTLY. Not effectively, not flawlessly, just to write. Putting half-baked articles out on Medium pushed me majorly out of my comfort zone, and helped me overcome my urge to prepare and read and learn everything, and never really implement.
4. Community matters. The 20 people on the challenge’s Whatsapp group provided the greatest motivation and inspiration during these 40 days. Learning with them and from them made the challenge easier.
5. After writing 15 drafts of articles, I understand the craft better and how I can improve it. I can start working on that now.
6. There is more structure in my thinking now. Ideas flow smoothly, and they are less random and chaotic.
7. There is no shortcut to learning a craft. You first have to get into the habit of doing the craft. Unless you do, you can’t improve.
8. A mentor like Vijay Sir, generously willing to share his time and years of expertise for free is invaluable.

That’s a lot of learning in 40 odd days. :)

I know that the niche I chose is super crowded, and I don’t really have any new insights to share, that haven’t been shared before.

But I have 15 complete articles, that have taught me more than a book on writing could have taught me.

And so I consider this challenge a huge success.

Here’s to taking on more challenges and making more art. This is just the start.

Thank you for reading,

Nikita 🌼