I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was participating in Inktober. The idea behind Inktober is to do a drawing every day of October, following a one-word prompt provided at Inktober.com. I also wrote stories to the prompts, mostly personal anecdotes.
I completed Inktober yesterday. I found it to be an excellent exercise, requiring discipline that I don’t always exhibit. It helped me settle on a voice for a larger project that I am launching on. And, perhaps most importantly, it reminded me of a truth that is easy to forget: ideas beget more ideas. When you develop an idea, you don’t have one fewer idea to develop. You almost always have more. At the beginning of October, I couldn’t have listed thirty personal anecdotes that I wanted to write about. But as I wrote them, new anecdotes came to me.
There are any number of month-long daily challenges bouncing around the Internet, from NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which starts today and is quite a bit more intense than I have ever wanted to tackle, to various poem-a-day challenges. For that matter, you can use the Inktober prompts any month you like. Anyway, I commend the daily discipline to you. It has done me good.
All of my Inktober drawings and stories, from this year and last, are collected at TheHabit.co/Inktober.
