The 30-Day Writing Challenge

Piece 1. The first five minutes of this morning~800 chars

Use no adjectives and no adverbs. Nouns and verbs only.

Concreteness comes from precise nouns and verbs, not from modifiers. Block the modifiers and you are forced to find them.

Piece 2. A place you go often~1,000 chars

No sight. Build the space out of sound, smell, touch, and taste only.

Description defaults to the eyes. The other senses are dull from disuse, not absent.

Piece 3. An object you have held on to~1,000 chars

Write only about the object. No words for attachment or nostalgia. The owner should be visible by the end.

Letting an object speak for a person is a basic move in fiction. Naming the feeling lets you skip the move.

Piece 4. Three minutes out the window~800 chars

Present tense, like a camera. Zero sentences of interpretation or judgment.

This separates what you saw from what you thought. Mixed together, the reader gets a conclusion instead of a scene.

Piece 5. Something you ate yesterday~800 chars

No evaluative words (delicious, good, disappointing). At least three figures of speech.

Evaluation summarizes sensation away. Block the summary and you have to reach for comparison, which is how sensation becomes language.

Piece 6. A stranger (in a cafe, on a train)~1,000 chars

Three sentences of factual appearance, then invent the rest of their day.

Feel the seam where fact turns into fiction. You cannot blend the two until you know where the seam is.

Piece 7. Pull one sentence from each of pieces 1-6 and join them into one~1,000 chars

When it is done, cut 30% of the total length.

The exercise is the cutting, not the joining. Knowing what can go is half of writing well.

Piece 8. Your oldest memory~1,000 chars

Only what you actually remember. Where you do not know, write that you do not know.

An essay earns trust through honesty, not accuracy. The gap left open is often the strongest sentence.

Piece 9. A moment you were ashamed~1,000 chars

No explaining, no justifying. Show it as a scene.

Shame comes with reflexive justification attached. Strip that and what remains is the scene, which is what the reader actually reads.

Piece 10. One sentence that changed you (from a book, or someone's mouth)~1,000 chars

One scene of who you were before it, one scene of after.

Show change as the gap between two scenes instead of explaining it. This is how fiction handles a character turning.

Piece 11. Something you lost~1,000 chars

Convey the loss without the words sadness, regret, or longing.

Name an emotion and the reader receives the name, not the emotion. Block the name and you have to build the situation.

Piece 12. To yourself at eighteen~1,000 chars

Letter form. No comfort, no encouragement. Only the facts you now know, stated plainly.

Remove the comfort and what you actually have to say shows up. What survives the sentiment is the core.

Piece 13. An image that keeps returning (a recurring dream counts)~800 chars

Do not explain why. List the images only.

Explanation kills the image. Today you check for yourself that the scene you cannot account for is the one that stays.

Piece 14. Pick one of pieces 8-13 and double its length~2,000 chars

Grow it only by adding one scene and one piece of dialogue. Growing it with explanation is a failure.

There are two ways to make a piece longer and one of them ruins it. Today is about knowing which is which by feel.

Piece 15. Invent someone who is your opposite~400 chars

Write it as a character card: name, occupation, one small daily habit, one lie they tell people.

The lie is what makes the character stand up. What someone hides is what they want.

Piece 16. An ordinary morning for that character~1,000 chars

First person. Their vocabulary, not yours.

Point of view is vocabulary, not camera position. If your own voice leaks in, it is your essay wearing a mask.

Piece 17. Two people talk. They want different things~1,000 chars

90% dialogue, minimal stage direction. No emotional labels like "angrily" or "hesitating".

Dialogue is colliding wants, not exchanged information. Attach the feeling in the narration and the dialogue stops having to work.

Piece 18. The scene where your character lies for the first time~1,000 chars

Only the reader may know it is a lie.

The reader knowing more than a character is where most tension comes from. This trains you to decide who gets which information.

Piece 19. One event from two characters' points of view (400 characters each)~800 chars

Same event. What each one notices and misses must differ.

Switching point of view means switching what is visible, not switching prose style. If nothing different is missed, it is the same view.

Piece 20. Your character's room~1,000 chars

The character never appears. Describe only the room and let it describe them.

Same muscle as piece 3, now aimed at a person. If you can draw someone in their absence, you need far fewer words when they are present.

Piece 21. A short story with this character~2,000 chars

Opening, event, change. The character must be at least slightly different at the end.

The last six pieces were materials. What turns materials into a story is the change, not the event.

Piece 22. Decide the last sentence first, then write toward it~1,000 chars

Write the closing line before anything else and walk to it.

See how sentences change when you know the destination. You need not always write this way, but knowing the option is not the same as not knowing it.

Piece 23. One room, real time, two people~1,000 chars

No change of location, no jump in time.

When tension is missing we cover it by cutting elsewhere. Remove the exit and you have to build tension out of speech and action.

Piece 24. A scene where something breaks~1,000 chars

What breaks is an object. What the reader reads is a relationship.

This layers event and meaning. Without the layering, the event stays an event and the meaning has to be bolted on as explanation.

Piece 25. Open with one line from a news article~1,000 chars

Continue as the story of someone the article never mentions.

Start from fact and cross into fiction, an extension of piece 6. The story lives on the side the article does not cover.

Piece 26. A scene whose point is the silence~800 chars

Three lines of dialogue at most.

Piece 17 pushed everything through speech; here you take speech away. Find the place where what is unsaid is louder.

Piece 27. Write a funny scene, then rewrite the same scene as a sad one~1,600 chars

The events stay identical. Only the sentences and the gaze change.

Once you feel tone move independently of event, you do not forget it. Making a different feeling from the same material is what style is.

Piece 28. Reorder one scene in reverse chronology~1,000 chars

Keep the sentences as they are; invert only the order.

Where you release information changes the story. Watch the same sentences become a different one.

Piece 29. "I keep writing about ___"~1,000 chars

Skim the previous 28 pieces, find one recurring subject, feeling, or sentence habit, and write about it.

This is usually where the real yield of the course shows up. You cannot know what pulls at you before you write, and after 28 pieces it is visible.

Piece 30. Rewrite your favourite piece without looking at it~1,000 chars

Do not open the original. Only what you remember.

What stays is what stayed with you. What remains is the spine; what vanished was padding.