2025, In So Many Words

About a year ago, I posted my first piece here on Vocal in years. In Making it Hard to Fail, I talked about my goals for the new year in response to a challenge prompt. My goal was simple: to write for 15 minutes a day. No more was required, though as I suspected (and found in executing this plan) more did often follow.

This was a unique goal for me because it was so much less than I'd asked of myself in the past. When I thought of what 15 minutes of writing a day would add up to, even over 365 of them, it didn't seem like enough to achieve my larger goals. But it was something, and I was coming off of a couple years of accomplishing nothing in the field of writing. And that was enough to make me desperate; it was enough to set my sights lower than I'd been willing to ever before in my 36 years.

And I'm so glad I did, because not only did I stick to this goal of 15 minutes a day from January 9 onward, but I went on to be more productive altogether in the year of 2025 than I was in all of the years before when it came to my personal writing projects. Most of the stuff I publish on here is challenge-related, but I wanted to post this little extra here to really illuminate my progress, if only for myself, and to remind anyone who needs reminding what taking things just one small inch daily can accomplish. So without further ado, here are the stats from my year of writing in 2025:

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* TOTAL WORDS DRAFTED: 183,000

I used my Freewrite (which I talk more about in the original linked article) to great success. I'm kind of a slower drafter and was surprised to be able to get 500 or so words in 15 minutes on my best days! This would've been impossible before, just using my laptop. I won't go further into talking about the Freewrite, but suffice to say I am a full convert now. I also took the statistics of how much I actually drafted this year from my Freewrite profile, which keeps track for me.

In previous years, the most writing I did was trying to press out 50k in a month during NaNoWriMo- which not only burnt me out in a month's time but made it unlikely I'd write even half that much in the rest of the year combined (btw: RIP NaNo, great for community but tbh not missing it as much as I thought I would otherwise.)

So. 183k is almost certainly my personal best in terms of rough material in a year- and I have my own low expectations to thank for it. Rock on!

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* DRAFTS IN SCRIVENER: 80.

I usually use Scrivener as my sandbox to work on things I pull off the Freewrite. 80 drafts essentially means 80 things I got into a shape I liked well enough to leave be or even submit somewhere else. Most are very short pieces, 500 words being the average, but again it's so much fun to look back on the sheer number of them.

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* CONTESTS ENTERED: 13

(note: this does not include Vocal challenges, which I am counting separate).

In my original article, I outlined a few places I intended to participate in paid contests to hone my craft- Writing Battle and NYC Midnight, mainly.

I entered 7 contests by NYC Midnight: in 3 of these I made it to the second round. In 1, I came very close (first runner-up) to making to to round 2. 2 are still tbd. In such an intense competition, I consider round 2 a great accomplishment, and should I enter this coming year I hope to get as far as round 3 in at least one!

I entered 6 contests by Writing Battle, which is probably my favorite new discovery of the year. They're still innovating and coming out with some really cool new stuff to improve their competitions, and I've had so much fun with the peer-judged contests especially. Of the six contests (all single-round unlike NYC), I placed top 32 once and in the top 4 (!) once.

Additional submissions: In my original post, I talked about the London Writer's Salon, a group I swear by for writing companionship and inspiration (highly recommend checking them out- to my knowledge, their daily writing sessions are completely free to join!). They're always adding new stuff over there to the community's repertoire, and one of these things was a new online magazine that comes up with a prompt each week. You have to write a piece no longer than 500 words for your entry, and 3 winners are published in the magazine, with the top couple winning some extra prizes. I found this to be such a useful exercise in coming out with something on a quick turnaround, and in total I submitted 27 weeks out of the year. I never won, but the amount of new material it helped me bring to life was invaluable.

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* HERE ON VOCAL:

This is the part that probably fills me with the most joy. I feel like in the past year I have really bloomed on Vocal. I have managed to submit for every challenge posted in 2025, even the ones I initially did not want to do or wasn't inspired by. I gave myself the challenge of finding a way to make each prompt into my own, and in so doing, I wrote a total of 54 new pieces on this site! That's a little bit over one a week- and it more than doubled the amount of work I'd done here in the past years. Out of these 54:

-4 were top stories

-9 received honorable mentions

-12 were runners-up

and 5 were contest winners!

I'm beyond thrilled with these stats and it's been so much fun to be a part of the community here. There's really no place quite like it on the internet for writers, and I hope to be just as present and engaged (& hopefully even more so, as a reader- more about that later) in the coming year!

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* WORK CATEGORY BREAKDOWN:

Of all the things I worked on this year, I thought it would be interesting to separate into different categories and see how many new pieces I wrote in each. So, just for shits and giggles:

- Creative nonfiction/personal essays: 16

- Fiction/ shorts/ micros: 38

- Poems: 24

As you can see, fiction won out this year. Specifically, short fiction, as many of the pieces I wrote were 1,000 words or less, as per the stipulations of various challenges. Short stories (and particularly SHORT short stories) aren't something I had a ton of experience writing before the last few years, and none as much as this year. I learned a lot by having to fit a viable story in sometimes as little as 100 (!) words. In the past, I was someone who mostly focused on novels, but this has been the year of the short story and to some extent, the poem as well, and it's been a well-deserved shift in attention.

These are just the pieces that made it off my Freewrite and onto another draft. I have a few scattered rough poems in the archives I haven't yet put through editing on Scrivener, and the bulk of a novel I've been working on for years, and which I finally finished a draft of this past year. These are counted towards the word count, but don't count as finished pieces for the sake of this article.

So that's that on my writing stats this year. If you've made it this far without becoming totally bored, then like me, I'm guessing you love to read about the minutiae of others' writing lives. I've really enjoyed breaking it down like this and I think in future I'll try and keep this roundup going.

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* WRITING RESOLUTIONS FOR 2026:

1. Keep doing what I'm doing. 15 minutes and all that. If it's not broke, don't fix it.

2. Start submitting to publications. This year I concentrated so much on contests to motivate my juices to flow. The great thing about a lot of these contests is unless I won grand prize, my piece was never published. So I've left the year with some strong portfolio items to submit elsewhere, and I intend to try my luck with that. What is there to lose?

3. Read more. This year my reading fell off a little. I read 62 books total, most of which were poetry and short story collections. This year I want to aim for 100 again like I've done in years before, and incorporate more novels back into my diet as well as a little nonfiction to round things out.

This reading more also extends to Vocal- I don't set aside enough time to read the awesome stuff other people are publishing here and I want to fix that and to be more active commenting too. I know as a writer myself how meaningful it is to get feedback!

4. Get more organized. My system of tracking submissions, storing work, and the regularity of my editing schedule in general could use some work and streamlining. This year I aim to better streamline it so that I'm not scrambling for materials or constantly double-checking deadlines.

5. Try morning pages. This one I debated on adding or not. I've debated it for many years. I've tried in the past, but every time, I gave it up in pretty short order. I don't want the time spent on morning pages to overburden my 15 minutes of drafting time- I don't want to feel like it's adding too much to the daily load. But again and again I run into artists who swear by it. It's hard to dismiss something that seems to have staying power like that. If you do morning pages yourself and have any tips for how to make them work best without overthinking it, let me know!

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Okay, I think that's about it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk and all that. 2025 in a lot of ways was a hard year for me, and this writing stuff is far and away my biggest personal win. Here's hoping for a creatively challenging and prosperous 2026 for us all!