My last whiny blog was about how the mean ol’ universe was oppressing me like that peasant in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Something about how depressed I was and it was all someone else’s fault because they wouldn’t publish my novel. Wah.
As if to bring me up short, the Universe sent me an answer last week. While reading Writer’s Digest, I came across an article about Ray Bradbury’s Challenge to writers.
The Patron Saint of Writers, as I like to call him, suggested to those of us whining about not being able to write, to take what he called the 3/1/52 challenge.
Every day read one short story. Then read one short poem (NOT the Odyssey as tjat will take a few days; nonetheless, the link will take you to full text if you wish). After that, you read one essay. That’s every day.
You write one short story per week. It doesn’t have to be a good one, just a story. Try to keep it under 3000 words.
You keep at this for a year. After 52 weeks, you should have 52 short stories. At least one of them will likely be good enough to get published. Your job is to determine which one.
But at the very least, St. Ray says, you’re so-called Writer’s Block should vanish.
So I tried it. I read one short story, one poem, one essay. (Which reminds me of the old John Lee Hooker Blues song, One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer. Which I was about to try instead but I read the WD article before I soused myself.)
I expected I would wait a day or two to write my first short story. Then one came to me and I sat at the kitchen table and hand-wrote something. Then I kept going. I finished the story in one sitting.
The following week, I started writing one on the computer. Voila! as the French, say, another story came to me, though this one took three days to write.
Two weeks, two stories.
There might be something to this challenge after all.
Mark Bruce, Writer 