One Hundred 'K'

In June I signed up for a writing challenge known as ‘100k Words in 100 Days’. It began on 1st July and the challenge is (guess what?) to write 100,000 words in 100 days. Seems easy, on the face of it – just 1,000 words a day. What could be simpler?

The rules are few, and nobody doing the challenge even has to provide any evidence that they are actually writing, but there doesn’t seem much point in cheating or lying about it because, as the adage so often repeated to us in our school days says: “If you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself.” The main rule is that the words that count towards the total have to be new words, which I suppose is obvious. However, they can be anything one likes (within reason). Blogs count towards the total – so perhaps I should try to make this blog as long as possible (but I won’t, for fear of sending you to sleep, dear reader), as does fiction, poetry, non-fiction writing, articles and reports etc. Tweets and Facebook postings definitely do not count, nor do letters or emails.


I am working on a novel that I started ten years ago and then abandoned after about 18,000 words. I had enough of the novel at the time – and since – to use it for submissions to agents. There was certainly enough for the obligatory first three chapters and synopsis and as such, I sent it off to various parties, usually re-hashed and re-edited every time, depending on my mood. It was rejected every time, over and over again. A good friend of mine, and a successful novelist herself, suggested that I perhaps wasn’t fully ‘in love’ with the novel and that therefore it wasn’t a work that I cared enough about to finish. She suggested that I had lost interest in it and that it wasn’t really what I wanted to write and that I needed to find an alternative ‘voice’ with a totally different piece of work. She was probably correct, but because I needed to write something – anything – for this challenge, I decided to pick that novel up again. If nothing else, just the discipline of getting the words down is a great motivation and if the novel turns out to be no good (which might still be the case, I regret to say) then at least I’ll have been writing for one hundred days, which is something I haven’t done for years. And the surprise for me has been to discover that I do care for the novel after all. I am quite excited about the way it has developed - I have experienced that delicious moment that all writers encounter when we suddenly realise that our characters are writing their own story. I think this novel might work after all.

Sadly, I have already fallen behind on the target. Today is Day 50, so half way through, but by the end of today I expect my total to be only about 43,000. So I have some catching up to do. The shortfall arose when I went on holiday at the end of July. I foolishly thought that I’d carry on while I was away - after all, it seemed perfectly reasonable that I could bash out 1,000 per day whilst lounging on the beach. Not so. I hardly opened my laptop at all while I was away – the beach was too relaxing, the sightseeing too urgent, and the ‘fruits de mer’ too tempting. But hey, I can catch up can’t I? If I exceed the 1,000 word target by just 35% for the next twenty days, I will do it. Then it’s a simple coast for the remaining thirty days and hey presto, I will have done it.

Procrastination is the enemy! No distractions will be tolerated. Except that I’ve just realised that it’s absolutely imperative that I immediately need to make a sherry trifle. Oh, and doesn’t that meat in the fridge need a marinade? And that pile of ironing, doesn’t that require some attention? This feels a bit like Sisyphus's challenge. As soon as I start getting ahead, I fall behind again. Oh dear.