Writing Challenge
How To Build A Backlog Of Articles When You’ve Never Done It Before
The key is focused abstinence from the Internet
After awkwardly eking out over 50 articles in three months, I wanted to find a way to make writing easier on myself. I wanted to produce more content at a faster rate. The answer that I found was the Cold Turkey Writer. This godsend restricts your access to the Internet so that you can have thoughts again.
I know, it really is beautiful.
This tool helped me create a backlog of over 30 articles in February.
The fact that I stumbled upon David Majister’s post right after building a backlog seemed like fate, so I decided to join him in his journey to submit 30 articles to 30 publications in 30 days.
Here’s why I’m doing it and how you can too.
I’ve run out of ideas
Continually creating something from scratch has its limits.
— Tim Denning
Trying to enter into a state of deep composition is hard. Writers have to battle confusions, anxieties, and insecurities. To write is to undergo an emotional process where we learn to care for ourselves and cultivate our ideas with patience.
The muse does not show up every day, but our doubts do.
Feedback is how you disrupt that doubt. Seeing reads, claps, and highlights proves that your work has value. Sometimes we all need that boost to keep going, and feedback is an easy hack to getting it. By publishing some of the contents of my backlog, I’m allowing myself to interact with more readers.
This effect is doubled because David’s challenge requires you to send your work to 30 different publications. As I’m not yet published in 30 publications, this will require me to seek new ones. Reading and writing for new publications expands what you read, who you know, and what you write.
It widens your world so that you can do and be better.
Publishing is the key to the door of more ideas. It might sound counterintuitive, but by depleting the backlog, I’m helping it grow larger.
This is because change creates progress. You can’t advance as a writer without publishing your work and getting feedback in the form of reads, claps, or comments.
It’s time to let go
Sitting on your material for too long can make you overly analytical. You can block yourself from submitting it. That’s how you get burnt out and give up.
Publishing your work is how you reach someone. It’s how you create a community around yourself and stick to your goals.
By releasing my work, I’m giving up perfection and taking what is available. I’m putting myself out there and seeing what happens. It’s enlivening because after having written 30+ articles, I was feeling burnt out.
My writing started to feel like an obsessional engine that was sputtering due to a lack of inputs. I wasn’t watching television or exercising because I was so focused on my writing. Even reading took a hit which meant that it was getting harder and harder to generate ideas.
But I wasn’t ready to stop writing and start publishing because I was afraid of being rejected.
I was starting to get comfortable with writing, but comfort is the death of progress. You can always push yourself farther by changing up your routine.
Submitting at such an aggressive rate means opening up to more rejection. It means accepting the potential of going unread. It means more critiques which can be painful to integrate.
It’s easy to get stuck in questions. What experiences can I discuss without catching flak? What if a potential employer sees my writing and decides not to hire me? How do I write to serve the reader?
But answers only arrive on the other side of an attempt. Our fear is often upheld by ignorance. Taking the plunge is how you find the gold in life.
Our lives are ours. They have to be lived authentically if we are to enjoy them.
Feedback creates momentum
A submission is guaranteed feedback. Your work will either be published or not-published. It can be praised, critiqued, or both. If it is ever released, people will either read it or they won’t. Every piece of feedback that you receive presents the potential for you to improve.
Claps, comments, and highlights can boost your confidence and give your writing some added direction. But rejections and silence can educate you. These are the means by which you can elevate your approach. Failures push you to do better.
Submitting your work is a way forward. It’s a seed that you can plant to turn your life into a forest of publications. Those can be the means by which you connect with more readers and learn new things.
I’ve been blacklisting myself
I have read countless articles from publications like The Writing Cooperative, Publishous, Better Marketing, Curious, and The Ascent. I understand their styles and have even written articles that I believe would be good fits for them.
Yet I haven’t even filled out the forms to join their teams. “No” isn’t something anyone likes to hear. But the road to success is paved with disappointments.
The only way to get better at writing is to embrace rejection with a smile. Rejections build grit. It builds new understandings. It moves you forward.
I’m hoping to attain as many rejections as possible this month so that I can get better.
Experience means data and growth
Majister’s method will give me loads of experience in a short amount of time. Sending work to 30 different publishers will widen my network considerably. It will also help me to diversify my topics and style of writing. Diversity always leads to better results.
Stillness is stagnation. I could sit forever or launch my ideas without hesitation and see what happens. The results will include a variety of experiences.
There might be a litany of harsh notes and a host of rejections. But new ideas will form as I acquire new experiences through publishing. What doesn’t work will be a data point I can learn from. What does will fuel me with a greater understanding of what to focus on. There’s no downside to submitting aggressively.
Challenges force you to build new habits in response
Aigner Loren Wilson suggested that I create a huge backlog, but I didn’t listen at first because I wanted to keep publishing every day.
You might be ahead of me already. Obviously, the key to publishing every day is creating a backlog in advance. But stress can kill your brain cells. It’s not always easy to think clearly. I can be super dumb sometimes.
I got lucky, though. Shivendra Misra taught me that I could organize my tasks into doable chunks with the Cold Turkey Writer.
This app gave me the means to stop trying to create within a state of distraction all the time. So I went into hibernation and started crafting the beginnings of a backlog.
Impressive demands require impressive plans
With Shivendra’s advice, Aigner’s now seemed doable.
Creating a large backlog still seemed daunting, but I figured that a daunting word count would get me there faster. I chose to religiously lock myself out of my computer’s WiFi until I had written 4,000 words.
This was difficult. I tried to do this every day which meant that I came up short several times. It was embarrassing going to bed with a locked computer, but by 3 AM, it seemed silly to keep going. My embarrassment was only made worse by the fact that I had to send files to my co-writer for our web series.
My mornings became crammed sprints through coffee. I had to claw my way to the end of 4,000 words so I could meet my other writing obligations. Your success as a writer is strengthened when you can balance multiple projects. But using Cold Turkey Writer made this skill non-negotiable.
It inspired me to document every idea I had, no matter what it was. My sessions became the all-around playground of ideas where everything was documentable and usable. Poems emerged. Jokes came about. Personal stories poured onto the page.
I created legions of content in a short period of time. The trick was simply doing it. Staying off of the Internet for a set time every day allowed me to think and achieve remarkable things that I thought were out of my reach.
Now it’s time to test my output by putting it out there.
My writing and publishing format for this month
I don’t want my backlog to fully dwindle, but I do want to scale back the time I use to write. This is so I can fit in reading and exercising more. I believe these choices will significantly boost my creativity, allowing me to produce even more content.
By writing less and publishing more, I’ll have time to reflect and come upon fresh approaches. The challenge of finding 30 different publications will also help me to mix up what I write about.
As a result, the content I release will be a mix of both new and backlogged content. I intend to frequent the many publications that I started my Medium journey with while also expanding my horizons.
Here are some publications I will be focusing on:
- Synergy by Dr Mehmet Yildiz is home to lots of great content about writing and productivity. My backlog experiment has left me with a host of new insights that I’d like to share with this community.
- Writing For Your Life by Joel Eisenberg. He encouraged me long before I discovered the power of the turkey™. I intend to return with some new work that I’m excited to share.
- Books Are Our Superpower by Anangsha Alammyan is a publication that I’ve never written for before, but I was struck by the work published there by Emily Wilcox. And it seems fitting as I’m currently rereading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami, a book that was assigned to me by my now-deceased professor.
- The Pom by ◦•●Christina M. Ward ●•◦. The turkey™ has revved up my poetry practice.
- The Brain is a Noodle by Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) because of my undying love for short-form and this wild piece here.
- Yard Couch by Isaiah McCall and Cody Collins. My friend and I have been planning some fun parkour pieces.
- MuddyUm by Susan Brearley as I’ve read some of the funniest stories there.
- Mind Cafe by Adrian Drew for all the inspiration I’ve found there.
- And 2 Minute Madness by Toni Koraza since I love their short and innovative format.
My plan is to keep writing multiple times a week while submitting a new piece every day. Like David, I assume that exploding my submissions rate like this will yield amazing benefits. I’m excited to meet new writers and watch fresh ideas take shape by taking on this challenge.
I also intend to detail the steps in my 30-for-30 challenge along the way with the publication Everything Shortform edited by Greg Prince.
When the pieces go live, I’ll be adding them here as a list at the bottom. And after I’ve completed the 30 days, I intend on doing a reflection piece.
Takeaways
The beauty of a challenge is the specificity of vision and the comradery of community.
I know where I want to go and how to do it. Now I just need to start and see what happens.
David’s provided us all the field to practice in public and grow with him. I’m excited to join him, and I hope you do, too.
