The Breakdown: Guided Writing Challenge

Because it's always personal

Hey, Runners!

We are on the last part of our rotWIPs description breakdown: the guided writing challenge.

This is the seemingly simplest part of this whole thing, but it’s really not, because rotWIPs is a sort of hybrid writing workshop/creative challenge/personal growth experience.

In a challenge, a goal is set and people try to hit it. The level of instruction and guidance provided varies widely.

In a workshop, it’s all about what you’re going to learn. It’s highly structured and dedicated to specific learning objectives.

In a personal growth experience, you learn more about yourself as a person, and hopefully learn to give yourself a little grace and stop holding yourself to impossible standards.

This experience is all of these things.

Why?

It’s not professional; it’s personal.

The guidance I’m going to provide in this challenge is going to be less instruction-focused (although there will be instruction, especially when we get to our crafting section) and more a step-by-step walkthrough of the personal experience of writing a long-form piece of fiction.

I will be walking you through not just the craft of writing, but the emotional pitfalls that come from writing.

And a warning: It’s gonna get personal.

Question: What is your biggest fear about potentially participating in this challenge?

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I don’t believe in professionalism. I think that everything is personal, because we are all people. There is no compartmentalization here. We are all full-ass human beings having a human experience and one of the most human things we can do is create.

That means there are going to be feelings and trying to cut them out and keep your creation space professional… well, in my experience, it doesn’t work. Hell, it doesn’t work in an office¹, why would it work in a creative process?

So this is gonna get personal. You’re gonna have to unpack some of your baggage. It’s going to be hard in ways we usually try to compartmentalize out of our creative process.

But honey…. it is going to be so worth it.

Pinky swear.

1. Yeah, you wanna know why Mary in accounting is always so passive-aggressive in her emails? PERSONAL. SHIT.