For the month of November, I decided to do a 30-day writing challenge. Every so often, I like to challenge myself to do a freewrite every day for 30 days straight. It may not seem like much of a challenge, but there are times where I struggle to fulfill the requirements. Writing consistently was the most important thing for me with this challenge. It helps me to get unstuck. By having a concrete goal that I can track, I can hold myself accountable and focus on doing my best each day.

For each day, I chose a prompt to focus on for the freewrite. Sometimes I chose the prompt before I began writing, but at other times I jumped straight into writing and the prompt sort of found its way to me while I was writing.

30 Prompts

1. Pumpkins
2. Forty
3. Birthday
4. Strangers
5. Jet Black Hair
6. Tutor
7. “Take Bigger Bites” (“Chomps” commercial)
8. Sweet and Spicy
9. Beans
10. The lyric: “I’ll never go back to Georgia, at least not ‘till I have to.” From the song: “Jaime All Over” by Mayday Parade
11. The song: “Ghost” by Demi Lovato
12. The song: “Ruin the Friendship” by Taylor Swift
13. Circus
14. Senses
15. The song: “My Wish Was You” by Eli Lev
16. Body/Body Language
17. Bouquet
18. Skeleton
19. Corner
20. The Wheel of Fortune
21. The Matchmaker
22. Thanksgiving
23. Hurry Up
24. Slick/Wet
25. Poison
26. Style
27. Tablecloth
28.  Dictionary
29.  Hot Chocolate
30. “I can’t believe I almost forgot.”

Comments by Date

11/1

• Clearly, I was still in the Halloween spirit. Not only did I write about pumpkins, but they were sort of like “killer” pumpkins.

11/6-11/8

• I skipped these days. I don’t know why I completely blanked on these days. I wasn’t all that busy and I had no reason to skip out on writing. I just forgot and somehow remembered on the 9th.

11/11

• This day’s freewrite has a lot of potential. It felt like a turning point during the challenge. I started to feel more inspired overall and I became more connected to the world around me.

11/11-11/13

• These are full on first drafts, not just scraps. This was the sweet spot. These poems sparked my passion for writing and I’m looking forward to the final drafts and the direction each of these poems will take.

11/16

• I skipped this day for some reason.

11/20

• I skipped this day, but I wrote down two things that made me feel inspired. I must have forgotten to do an actual freewrite or simply ran out of time to do it.

11/21

• I used the inspiration from the previous day to write the skipped day’s poem. The poems I wrote on this day were more first drafts than scraps.

11/25

• I wrote down several pieces of inspiration throughout the day, but no freewrite for some reason.

11/26

• I used the inspiration from the previous day to write the skipped day’s poem.

11/27-11/28

• I skipped these days because I was busy and too tired to create.

11/29-11/30

• I can tell I rushed through these freewrites just to get to the end of the challenge. I was tired and wasn’t feeling it, especially with the holiday season.

Experimental Freewrites

The following freewrites were experimental and a bit different from what I usually write. Some are more experimental than others.

• 11/4 prompt #4 (I wrote in Spanish.)
• 11/9 prompt #8 (This one was a bit risqué.)
• 11/12 prompt #12 (This one was from the perspective of a character from a song.)
• 11/17 prompt #16 (This one was a bit risqué and embarrassing, if I’m being honest.)
• 11/18 prompt #18 (I acknowledged one of my insecurities.)
• 11/21 prompt #21 (When I started writing this, it just decided it wanted to sound like a fairy tale.)
• 11/24 prompt #24 (This one was the most risqué thing I’ve ever written. Apparently November was the time to practice writing risqué poems.)

Final Thoughts

I liked a total of 5 poems out of 30. There were 2 short periods of 2-3 poems each that I felt good about. I wrote them from 11/11-11/13 and on 11/21. They were spread out over the month. There was a week and a half before the first batch I liked and about a week until the second batch. I don’t know if it’s a consistent pattern, but it’s interesting that about every 7-10 days there was some kind of breakthrough.

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Also, if you’re interested in checking out my debut poetry collection Juniper, you can find it here.