Reflection On My Blog (Why I Recommend A 30 Day Writing Challenge)

I started this blog in the fall of 2017, mostly inspired by my initial rejection from Praxis. I had heard of many participants who had done a 30 day blog challenge (30 days straight of blogging). So I wrote a post called When You Don’t Know What To Write For Your Very First Post On Your Very First Blog.

It was pretty fun, so I wrote some more, and eventually wrote for 50 days straight (after joining Praxis). After that, I wrote once a week, then dropped down to once a month after my career and other life circumstances took precedence.

I’ve written on this blog pretty consistently for about 3 and a half years now, and I would personally recommend starting one yourself for many reasons.

First, it forces you to be okay with shipping imperfect work. In school, submitting imperfect work resulted in failure. In real life, things are incredibly different. You have to be okay with publishing work that may not be as perfect as you like it (due to deadlines).

Another thing they don’t teach you in school:

Do-overs are allowed.

If you try your hardest and it doesn’t work out, you can revise and reship. I sorely wish school had taught me that…it would have saved me a lot of frustration for the first few months of my first job.

Second, it helps to prove to yourself that you can follow through on something you’ve set out to do. You have to be diligent to write and publish something on a regular basis, which has greatly increased my ability to “ship” things in all areas of my life – especially in my career.

There were a few different times during my 50 day blogging challenge for Praxis where it got to be about 11pm at night and I hadn’t written a blog post yet. This resulted in a lot of really random posts written and completed at midnight.

Even this post, to be quite honest, is merely being written to appease my once a month quota I’ve imposed upon myself.

However, some of the posts I’m most proud of were written during that challenge, when I had to force out a blog post late at night, or when I thought I had run out of ideas 🙂

I chose writing because I greatly enjoyed writing as a child and wanted to start experimenting writing on my own outside of a traditional school setting. I discovered that writing was a lot more fun when I could write about whatever I wanted without having someone tell me how long it needed to be, what topics I could write about, or how I needed to edit it.

(That’s not to say I don’t edit my posts – just an FYI) 😛

The point is – even if you don’t feel like it, I challenge you to take a 30 day writing challenge. I have a blog series on how to start a blog on WordPress for free as well, so no excuses there 😉

If you don’t know what to write about, the internet is full of ideas on what to write about. Feel free to read my first blog post above…it’s most definitely not structured or organized at all. But that’s okay! The goal is to just start. Go for it, and see what you’ll learn. I honestly think I’m a better writer now due to all the writing I have done over the years. It’s kind of fun to go back and re-read my old posts to see how far I’ve come and remember how different seasons of my life taught my new things.

Whether you’ve been reading my blog from the beginning, or you just started reading now – Welcome, and consider yourself invited to start writing!

I look forward to your first blog post. I promise you won’t regret, if you stick with it 🙂

Until next time,

Hope Frances