Why I Love Vocal's Challenges

Vocal challenges have been a major boon to my writing. I haven’t won a single one I’ve entered. I can’t even say that I’ve produced my best writing for them. Honestly, most, if not all, of my entries have been mediocre - and that’s okay. No, I’m thankful to Vocal’s Challenges for four reasons that have nothing to do with winning them.

1. Attracting me to vocal in the first place

2. Deadlines

3. Fiction

4. Quantity over Quality

I found Vocal after seeing that one of my distant friends on Facebook had liked a post describing their Little Black Book challenge. It offered a $20,000 grand prize. Now, I had been talking about writing for a while. It was a childhood dream that I wanted to finally pursue. The tiny chance to win $20,000 was enough for me to check it out. After checking out the platform, I realized that it offered an opportunity—an opportunity to write and put things into the public eye vs. my mental image of slowly poking away at a novel manuscript until I finally gained the bravery to send it to an agent. I didn’t win a dime from the Little Black Book challenge, but it brought me to Vocal and provided the nudge to write something on a timeline. The first step is the hardest.

The timeline piece is important to me. I’m no longer in school, and I work a job that has nothing to do with writing. No one is going to force me to write anything which means I have to discipline myself to do it. Just to be real for a moment, that is hard when there is no carrot or stick. But the deadlines that challenges impose upon me are the proverbial stick. Also, it allows me to plan backwards. The Summer Fiction Series challenges had to be uploaded before midnight every Tuesday night for eight weeks. I not only scheduled out my writing time, but I was also more resistant to letting distractions impede my writing.

Another advantage of challenges is how they encourage me to write fiction. Writing fiction successfully is my long-term goal, but I never considered writing short stories. The challenges forced me out of my comfort zone while also making me write fiction. I love politics, so I can always sit down and write about the state of the world, but that does nothing for my long-term novel writing goals. Writing fiction for challenges also helped me identify areas where I struggle.

Finally, the most useful part of the challenges is that they have gotten me writing instead of just thinking about writing. Roughly half the stories I have written on Vocal were for challenges. 7 months after I published my first story, I have written 20+ stories on vocal. Once upon a time, I would’ve been soooo disappointed that they weren’t all masterpieces of literature and breathtaking prose. But my mindset changed after I encountered an article that talks about the 70-20-10 rule.

“As extremely prolific songwriter Jonathan Reed has explained on Medium, the truth is whatever you're trying to produce, 70 percent of your attempts will be mediocre, 20 percent will suck, and 10 percent will be amazing.”

That excerpt is from a Inc. article (here) that explains how, by trying to produce higher quantity, artists also produce higher quality because they learn to improve through the process of doing. Practice does make perfect after all.

Learning this changed my writing. Now, I write both to express something and to improve my craft. Better to put something mediocre out there in the process of learning to produce excellence, than to dream of excellence and never achieve it.

Kudos to Vocal for hosting challenges and thank you for providing a space for all of us to write.

Writing tip:

Write in comic sans. For me, it takes the pressure of perfectionism away and enables me to write first drafts faster. I think I originally got this tip from Tumblr, but here is a lifehacker article about it. Link.

While I’ve been writing a lot about politics (Afghanistan broke me), I intend to write a few stories about how I’m learning to improve my writing. If that interests you please subscribe!