Welcome to the Easiest-AND-Hardest Writing Challenge of 2024!

Let's write for ourselves and nobody else! Terrifying!

Hello and welcome to 2024. If your 2023 was difficult, I hope this year will be a salve and a comfort; if your 2023 was incredible, I hope this year tops it; if 2023 was a mixed bag of challenges and joys, I hope 2024 has only manageable challenges and enduring joys.

If you’re subscribing to this or even just reading it, then I’m grateful to you for joining me in doing something that scares me during 2024. Doing things that scare you is supposed to be good for you, but it’s also something I avoid at all costs.

One nice thing that happened to me during 2023 was publishing my third novel, THE WONDER STATE, and going on a small book tour through my home state of Arkansas. I wanted to visit Pearl’s Books in the Ozarks, which meant renting a car to drive four hours from Little Rock (where I was born) to Fayetteville (which I visited a lot as a teenager). I was incredibly anxious about driving an unfamiliar car all alone through a much-changed landscape. I worried about this part of the trip for months beforehand, even sometimes longing for an act of fate beyond my control to make it impossible (so that I could dodge responsibilities without anybody being mad at me, naturally). In the end, it was … fine. One midsized sedan is pretty similar to the next, and the roads through Arkansas felt nicely familiar. I listened to a podcast by myself and enjoyed the overcast July day. In the end, I texted a friend that sometimes it felt better to be in the thick of things that (minorly) scare me than to be abstractly obsessively worried about them from afar.

(Pictured: me after driving by myself for four hours.)

So here is something that scares me (in a low-stakes way). Not this substack, which is putting my words out into the world, something I’ve become more accustomed to since I sold my first novel 8-9 years ago. No, what worries me is the opposite: writing words without an audience in mind. Which brings me to:

THE 2024 WRITE FOR YOURSELF CHALLENGE

What I’m proposing is that we (me, whoever is interested, maybe you?) set aside time for ourselves to write something that we have absolutely no plan or expectation of ever being seen by other eyes. We write something purely and totally for ourselves. This is an important challenge for me because I’ve become incredibly bad at this. It’s not as if everything I write HAS an audience, of course, but everything I write has an EXPECTATION of an audience.

It seems to be a common story for wildly successful authors to find their breakout hit by writing something entirely for themselves: a book that was only meant to be a fun side project, a distraction, a comfort. I love this, because it shows that a writer being authentic and giddy and free is what readers want, but it also means that when I sit down to write for myself, I’m already imagining myself telling Terry Gross how surprised I am that this private project has found an audience, and just like that, the project is no longer private, it’s being written for the readers who are delighted to find that this book wasn’t written for them at all.

It’s an embarrassment and a frustration for me. I’m not a public person, usually. I’m a wallflower, the quietest person at the party, the quietest person not at the party, keeping my private life sheltered close. But somewhere along the way, I turned my creative writing into a way of sharing myself, and though I’m infinitely grateful to get to share my words at all, I also worry that I’ve lost the part of myself that would write no matter what: that would write even if I were the last person alive. So I’m trying to turn 2024 into the year where I reconnect with that side of my creative life.

So why should you join this challenge? It’s a tough sell. We all have jobs, lives, families, obligations, things that must be tended to: giving over precious writing time to a project that won’t be seen by other people feels indulgent, precious. Writing is also one of those careers that’s often earmarked as a hobby, and creatives are expected to give up our work for free or for exposure, so maybe a challenge that plays so heavily into this stereotype will rub some people the wrong way, which I get.

But here is what I can offer: my hope is that writing something purely, entirely, only for yourself will reconnect you with something essential and playful that will, in turn, nurture the writing you do share with the world. I hope that we can acknowledge that creators deserve to be compensated for their work, but also that there’s a necessary part of our creativity that lives beyond the reaches of capitalism, and if you’re able to sometimes engage with that side of yourself, it will enrich your understanding of yourself and your experiences on this planet. And it’s fun! That’s what I want, mostly: to find the fun in writing again, the way I felt when I was a homeschooled feral child crouched in front of a rickety word processor, pounding out blatant plagiarisms of Diana Wynne Jones and having the absolute best time of my little life. Is it even possible to feel that way as an adult with a career? I don’t know! Not full-time, I’m sure! But for a few minutes each day? An hour or two a week? Yes! I think so!

Anyway, the best part of this challenge is that you can do as much or as little as you like and I’ll never know. It’s all up to you. I’m going to send twice-monthly updates and reminders and reflections on how it’s going for me, and I’d like to create a space where we can chat about it with each other, too. (This will all be totally free, as well.)

So join me! Maybe! Join me and never tell me about it. Maybe you’re a writer who already does this, in which case I envy you and would love to know more. Maybe you’ll only write for yourself for a few minutes each week, or you’ll write a whole novel one month of 2024 and then shelve it forever with a clean conscience. It’s all up to you. But if you’d like my support and encouragement, I’m right here.