Last November I participated in NaNoWriMo, an online community challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. It was my second NaNoWriMo and I really enjoyed it.
But when I got to December, I yearned for another writing challenge to take advantage of all the momentum from November, so I made one up: Poem-a-Day. Yes, I wrote a poem a day during December.
Often I would sit down in the morning with absolutely no idea of what to write. So I just started writing whatever popped into my head. One poem was about cleaning out my office. Another was about my poor sense of direction. Another was entitled “Twinkies.”
It took me about 30 minutes a day to create a rough draft of a poem. Sometimes I spent more time, sometimes less, and sometimes I would come back to the poem in the evening and work on it some more.
I expected that I might end the month with one or two poems I liked. However, I was very surprised to end the month with eleven poem drafts that I labeled “keepers” and worthy of revision. That gave my writing inventory a nice bump.
Susan Fuchtman 