Writing Camp Day 1
Let’s get writing!
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be! And welcome to Day 1 of Writing Camp!
First of all, congratulations! You made it! You’re here! Which means you’ve already done the most important part of your writing practice: showing up. It’s easy to let writing take a backseat to, well, everything else you’ve got going on. But today you’ve chosen to show up and face down that blank page. You’ve got this!
What Day 1 is all about
On this first day of Writing Camp, we’re going to focus on getting started. This will mean different things to different people. In some cases, it’ll mean starting a piece of writing from scratch. In other cases, it’ll mean starting a writing ‘sprint’. But whatever your starting point happens to be and whatever your chosen writing project is, we’re going to get it off the ground and build up some momentum!
Setting goals
We’re at the start of a new calendar year, which is a nice, neat time to set some big writing goals. So the first thing I want you to do is to create two columns (either typing them out or writing them by hand—whatever works best for you): label the left-hand column ‘WRITING GOALS FOR THE YEAR’, and label the right-hand column ‘GOALS FOR WRITING CAMP’.
Now, take 3 minutes and note down what kind of writing goals you want to set for the next twelve months. These writing goals can be ANYTHING. Maybe you have some major deadlines looming. Or you want to submit a certain number of pieces to different publications over the next year. Maybe there’s one Big Project you want to get done. Whatever it is, or whatever they are, write it all down.
3 minutes later….
Ok! So you’ve got some long-term goals set out in writing or typed up. This is what you’ll want to keep half an eye on during Writing Camp and throughout the rest of the year. But instead of thinking of it as a ‘must-do’ list, think of it as a compass: it’s there to keep you pointed towards where you want to go, not to make you feel guilty or anxious. And just as you’d check a compass from time to time while making your way from Point A to Point B, you’ll want to revisit your list of long-term goals every now and then to remind yourself of where you’re going, and/or to reassess where it is you really want to go. This is normal—there’s a lot of course-correction that goes on in the long-haul writing journey!
Now, take 3 minutes and reflect on how the 5 days of Writing Camp might help you establish the writing practice you’ll need to reach these goals. Do you want to practice meeting a fixed word count each day, or maybe writing for a fixed amount of time each day? Do you want to reach a specific word count by the end of the writing week? Do you want to try using this week to come up with a basic structure for one piece of writing?
Once you’ve figured out what you want Writing Camp to help you do, write/type down that goal in the right-hand column. Write it in colourful ink. Type it in bold. Print it out and draw brightly coloured lightning shapes around it. Make it as eye-catching as possible and keep it in a place where you can see it all week long!
Day 1 Writing Prompts
Each day of Writing Camp, I’ll give you three different writing prompts to choose from. Pick whichever one feels right for you and your project.
Option 1: Freewritten description of your piece
One of the things that most often gets in the way of a good, steady writing practice is fear of imperfection (this is why one year ago I made a resolution to master ‘messy writing’). It’s hard to start writing when you know that what you’ll write at first probably won’t look like at all what you want to end up with!
To get around this, you sometimes have to trick your brain into relaxing a bit. My favourite trick: instead of immediately trying to write the thing I want to write, I use [brackets] or marginal comments or simply a separate paragraph to describe the thing I want to write.
When I’m at the very beginning of a writing project, it might look something like this:
[This first paragraph should sort of set the scene for the reader re the Peasants’ Revolt. Describe Richard’s arrival at Mile End, maybe imagine what the journey from the Tower would have felt like to a young king on his way to confront armed rebels. Hunt down chronicle accounts etc. of what it was like and what happened afterwards. I’ll use this to quickly give readers a sense of how extreme the social/political upheaval was at this point in time.]
I also use this trick when I get stuck in the middle of drafting a piece. To keep myself moving, I use [brackets and bold type] in the middle of a paragraph to describe what needs to be added later:
John Lydgate, also known as the ‘Monk of Bury’, produced an incredibly varied body of work over the course of his career. [1-2 sentences: mention mummings/disguisings (difference?), ‘soteltes’, pedigree…others] But he is perhaps best known today for his admiration and adulation of medieval England’s greatest poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.
When I write these little ‘notes to self’, I usually find that the words flow much more easily. After all, they’re not for my readers, are they? They’re for my eyes only, and they’re just there to remind me of what it is I’m trying to write, or what I’ll need to add in to complete the draft later. And sometimes, I end up using pieces of my descriptions in the final product. That’s because slapping down a scrappy description essentially gives your brain permission to relax and do its thing.
If this sounds like it might be helpful to you on Day 1 of Writing Camp, then give it a shot: give yourself 5 minutes to freewrite a description of all or part of your piece of writing. During those 5 minutes, do not look back. Do not stop to correct anything you’ve written. Don’t stop at all. Just keep moving forward, even if what you’re writing occasionally includes stuff like ‘I really don’t know exactly what I want this piece to look like’ or ‘I really don’t want this piece to look like X’.
Once you’re done with your freewriting, look it over, but don’t correct or erase anything. Instead, if there’s anything in there that seems useful, circle/highlight it, and maybe see if you can come up with any further notes on those specific useful bits. If you’re not yet sure whether there’s anything useful in there, don’t worry! You can either set it aside until Day 2 (the brain doesn’t stop writing just because you’re not typing or holding a pen!) or try out one of the other options below.
Option 2: Directed prompt
If you need a little more direction, take 10 minutes to write a response to one of the following questions:
What first got you interested in this topic or story?
What makes you MAD about this topic/story?
What does everyone get totally WRONG about this topic/story?
What do you find RIDICULOUS about this topic/story?
What do you think is BIZARRE about this topic/story?
If you had a secret conspiracy theory about this topic/story, what would it be?
These questions are designed to help you find the beating heart of your piece of writing, the thing that grabs you about it. If it grabs you, it’s probably what’ll grab your reader, too.
Option 3: You do you
If you’re at Writing Camp for the camaraderie and accountability rather than the prompts, that’s great! Do your own thing, and let us know about it in the chat!
Ok, folks: time to write!
I’ll see you tomorrow for Day 2 of Writing Camp!
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VB,
M
The "freewritten description" prompt just helped me get a good hour of writing done on a project I was having a really hard time with! Thanks so much for this, and looking forward to tomorrow!
I had already previously written some goals for the year but then yesterday was listening to a podcast about writing quarterly goals and was like, I should do those too. I may have a goal-writing addiction!