Self Help

New Challenges Improve Your Skills

This goes for any activity you want to excel at and become proficient

How often do you challenge yourself?

Really put your mind to a project and work on it until you finish it. Daily, weekly, monthly, once in a blue moon? If you answered daily, you win the prize for standing the best chance of improving your skills!

Where do you write from?

My 2020 produced 202 stories. The good ones from study and learning. The best ones, raw and from the heart.

“Every artist was first an amateur.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

How prolific a writer are you?

In 2021, so far I’ve written 65 posts on Medium. Repurposed 40 Medium stories and written 45 researched posts for News Break. On Vocal, seven original published articles, four of which were competition entries.

I got all the rants, all the political injustices and most other negativity out of my system in the first year. This year is all about helping people who sit in front of a blank page or screen and think, eek! What/when/how/where am I going to write?

I find Medium, Vocal, and News Break welcome challenges. They each demand something different for me to try out for size.

Being chosen

With this breakdown of 2020, I’d like to highlight my trials and small successes. Your time to curation might go swimmingly. It might not. As far as I know, nobody has figured out 100% of how Alan* works.

It took three months to get the first curation, but it wasn’t on ILLUMINATION. In response to a writing prompt on Middle-Pause, I penned A Love Letter to Myself.

The magic moment happened again with Middle-Pause in June with Being Present in Your Life.

Recognizing When We Are in the Throes of Hedonic Adaptation achieved curation a month and a half later. My first for ILLUMINATION.

The next notable story broke a three-month drought and once again found success in Middle Pause. Comfortable, Uplifting, and Pretty.

My first story posted in Technology Hits impressed Alan the curator AI. I Want Me But Absent of Sentience.

Other platforms

Vocal likes fiction, so I focus on that genre and their competitions are a pleasure to write for. Here’s my latest entry. The Devil Drinks Merlot

News Break forced me out of my comfort zone. To earn the top dollars, I had to turn my hand to journalism. Writing about topics I know nothing about involves hours of reading and research. This means the more I do it, the better I get. Makes sense, right?

Five curated stories out of two hundred and two.

Those stats sound terrible. I know people who have never received the coveted recognition. I stopped caring. But I didn’t stop writing. In fact, I doubled my efforts!

Some people join the platform as professional writers (lucky them), many of us spent most of our lives in careers where the closest we got to writing anything was an email or a report! In the passive voice. Try replacing twenty years of the passive voice with strong verbs and nouns! It takes years.

“I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.” ― George Carlin

What do you want to achieve in 2021?

So dear reader, what would you like to get out of writing consistently (I give myself a day or two off every week) for two full months?

Choose any timeframe that suits you. The 100 Articles in 100 Days challenge by Neera Mahajan might work for those of you with more time.

You don’t need to write 1000 words a day. Start with an idea and see where you end up. The story will dictate the length.

If you falter, put the kettle on for a cup of tea. Go for a walk. Return to the story and have another stab at it. Still nothing? Try another idea.

At any point in time, I can have up to four drafts on the go simultaneously! If all else fails, edit or read.

Your efforts will bear fruit

Since the start of February 2021, *Alan the Algorithm chooses almost everything I write for further distribution. The exceptions are pieces that included affiliate links. And some others that Alan clearly doesn’t like for reasons only known to himself.

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time” attributed to the poet John Lydgate and later adapted by President Lincoln

Challenge yourself to write whatever you like, but you have to do it every day. If you have to miss a day for whatever reason, give yourself a break and start afresh the next.

If my brain let me, I would write all day and half the night. Most days, I force myself to get up from my desk and go for a walk in the sunshine. Please, please, please look after your mental and physical well-being.

Stuck on an idea for your next story? Read some of the top stories. ILLUMINATION-Curated makes it easy for you to find stand out articles by top writers.

If you missed the first and second Self Help tips here they are.

And the second is here.

See you soon. Now get writing!