10X Your Best Work With a New Writing Challenge
If you've done the 100 Story Challenge then this is the next step.
Hey Storytellers,
I hope you’re all well and forging ahead with you WIPs.
Let me know in the comments what you’ve got going on I’d love to know.
I’ve learnt from my own that my next skill to improve is self-editing longer works. Every time I work on The Voice in the Darkness, I’m surprised by how far behind it feels. Every time I think “Oh I thought I was further along…“
As I lie here in bed with food poisoning, it reminds of just how important it is to build up a writing buffer. To be ahead of your own production schedule so that when “life happens” at one in the morning, the next couple of days things still go as planned.
I reached out on Twitter to writers in general and got some great topics on ebook formatting, book covers and writer confidence. So those have been added to the schedule.
My metrics has always been public weekly and help one writer, and taking requests that (surprisingly or unsurprisingly) matched up with my own needs dovetails with those metrics.
Today we’re talking about my next grand challenge, and how I’m going to use that to advance my career, while writing in public with an amazing community.
For those that have been following along, you might nod your head as this has been foreshadowed a fair bit previously (Test and Invest).
Let’s get to it!
What’s the 10❌10 Challenge?
It’s the big brother of the 💯 Story Challenge. It’s a little scary.
Warning: This is not for the faint of heart. You will be challenged.I know, I know, I just published another challenge a couple weeks back, but that was a quickie and I wanted to give people time to prepare for Nanowrimo in November.
I’m always looking for word mountains to climb, even if I’m only plodding along.
But as my 500th story came up surprisingly I’m standing on that milestone thinking about what I can do next.
What bigger steps can I take? But not a little bit bigger. An order of magnitude bigger. We often think too small, we make somewhat timid creative bets and because of it stay stuck in a certain familiar creative rut.
At least that’s true for me and I’d wager it’s a little true for a lot of writers.
So here’s the next challenge that could reshape our careers.
I’ve heard from many writers now that the 100 💯 Story Challenge was transformative. Which is so amazing to hear, it helped writers experiment, explore and explode their writing. Publishing more stories, more consistently than ever before.
Learning new habits, new skills, and making new friends.
So what could we do next? I’ve hinted before so I think you won’t be too surprised.
The 10❌10 Challenge
It starts with the 💯 Story Challenge. But once you’ve done that, or if you already have a body of work on Medium, you’re good to go with this one.
Because it’s really simple but I believe (fair warning) it’s going to be quite damn hard.
Rules or suggestions
Take your ten most successful, highly commented stories.
The ones you’re most excited about, you loved writing and felt a desire to keep going.
And your readers loved and demanded more in the comments
Take those and make them 10x bigger.
Simply put
10x your 10 best drabbles or flash fiction pieces from the previous challenge. So if you wrote a drabble make it a long flash or a ten piece Choose Your Own Adventure.
If you wrote a long flash fiction piece make it a long short story (10K) and so on.
You get the idea, right?
That’s the simple bit: make your best ideas richer, deeper and more involved.
Develop your worlds and your characters. Take that gem of an idea, the one your readers validated and invest more of your particular genius.
Allow your fans to luxuriate in the stories they’ve enjoyed the most and asked for more of. Your readers want more. Don’t disappoint them.
Now the hard part
Strive to publish elsewhere.
We can get comfortable, especially once we get consistent.
We like our normal running routes, we enjoy the familiar because we feel safe.
We know the editors who publish our work. And we’ve collected a few slam dunk, fire and forget places that will accept us.
Let’s shake that up a little
Easy route: Find new Medium publications you’ve never signed up to and share your stories there. Push yourself.
Hard route: Publish your stories outside Medium, diversify your audience and try to expand your reach across the internet. Places like Royal Road, Wattpad, Patreon or try actual paying markets.
If those are easy for you or you’ve done them before. Tell us how. Write up your past successes and use the challenge tag (10x10 Challenge) so those in this community can follow your trails up the mountain.
We grow together.
An Example of What I’m Doing?
I’ve got a Fan Favourites list and I use this method to alert me and make sure I don’t miss any stories worth building on.
I’m going to focus on one genre and write to one or two ideal readers.
I wrote Metaversal Kraken of the Heart as a Mashup reply
This particular comment by FJCMontenegro (who may just be my ideal reader) made me realise I’d written something special.
I plan to expand it as an Escape Town ten part serial.
A story that shows consequences of the main character’s actions in another story
Focusing on cyberpunk themes of power imbalance, inequality, and dealing with trauma through VR assisted therapy.
I’ll collaborate with my wife (Dr. and therapist) for ideas on how to make it deeper and more true to life.
Then I’ll schedule that serial on Medium and Royal Road with a “Get Early Access” call to action directing readers to my lower Patreon tiers.
Time limit?
This is a hard challenge so adding a time component might be insane.
But I know personally how motivating time pressure can be.
I could say do this in 10 weeks, particularly if you’re following the easy route. 10x’ing your drabbles into long flashes or shorts is doable at one a week. But prep your publications in advance so that doesn’t trip you up.
But the hard route, the career building ladder, that I plan to take? Seeing as I took nearly 10 months to do the 100 story challenge. Maybe I’ll set that at 10 months.
It’s really up to you
Write up your plan, tag your accountability partners (me included) and get started. Use things like Nanowrimo to add rocket fuel to the start and build momentum.
Lean on friends, family and fellow writers for inspiration and experience.
I’ll be doing just that by interviewing JF Danskin about his Amazon and Royal Road adventures so I can avoid any newbie mistakes.
My plan is essentially:
Write serial fiction based on popular stories
Post in multiple places for free
Funnel towards a Patreon for Early Access
That’s it.
If you’re in, may the road rise up to meet you. And may we all stand on the summit having transformed our lives and writing careers forever.
This is going to be fun! 🚀
*Yes, it’s a silly maths pun because obviously 10 x 10 = 💯
Update on going paid
I’ve been chatting to a few writers and researching the kind of benefits that are interesting to them and have been successful for other writers.
I’ll give a more detailed update next week.
Until then, happy writing!
Zane