cElissaField What we love about writing: constantly changing corner office view.
Do you use word counts, hourly goals or other motivators to reach your writing goals? April is a great month for joining in any of a variety of writing challenges. Wordsmith Studio brings them all together with weekly writing sprints, every Friday in April.
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Join Hourly Writing Sprints Every Friday in April
You may know I am a founding member of Wordsmith Studio, an awesome group of writers and artists who share craft resources and support each other throughout the year. We celebrate each other’s writing, keep each other going, and laugh a lot. This month, we are celebrating our 4th anniversary.
My part of our month-long celebration has been planning and serving as a moderator for all day writing sprints, live on Twitter every Friday in April. Look for camaraderie, motivation and some seriously smoking keyboards with hourly writing sprints, each Friday from 11am-11pm EST.
How #wssprint Works
The live sprints take place on Twitter. Follow #wssprint , or find via @WordsmithStudio or @elissafield. (If you’re a Wordsmith member, we repeat some tweets in Facebook, as well.)
Beginning at 11 am EST, sprints start with a kick-off tweet on the hour. Write or edit for 45 minutes, then share your success — word count, page count, plotting solution, a favorite line, whatever — using #wssprint at :45. We take a break for 15 minutes (time to chat, share, ask questions, invite a friend, cheer each other on), then start again at :00, up until 11 pm EST.
Optional Prompts
Every hour, there is an optional writing prompt.
The prompts are great — more than 13 a day. I am a huge fan of novel prompts shared by Donald Maass in 21st Century Fiction (highly recommended for building depth, power and tension, when building or revising a novel), so we share some from him. Here is a favorite – you can see why I think he’s awesome.
9. “What’s a moment when everything could change? Pause. Explore. What does it feel like to be weightless?” Don Maass #wssprint
— Wordsmith Studio (@WordsmithStudio) April 8, 2016
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Our #prompt this hr is a fav shared by Don Maass, based on his 21st C Fiction. More https://t.co/EXHJfMKGI0#wssprint #writetip #novel #NaNo
— Wordsmith Studio (@WordsmithStudio) April 8, 2016
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Sarah Turnbull (@thesaturnbull) and I wrote the prompts that aren’t credited to Maass, based on writing advice that has impacted our work. There are also photo prompts and ones coordinated with challenges our members are working on (see below).
But there are no rules. No prompts required. Lots of our writers are editing, rather than writing. Use the time however gets you going. Most say it’s just nice to feel like someone else is writing or editing with you.
Do take time to say hello, while you’re there.
What Goals Are Writers Working On?
Some of our participants are using the sprints for organized writing challenges, such as Camp NaNoWriMo, Poem a Day Challenge, A to Z Blog Challenge, or the monthly 500-word-a-day challenge (#AprWritingChallenge this month).
But most — including our Wordsmith Studio Goals Group or visitors from Writer Unboxed and Binder subgroups — are using sprints to keep going with existing goals.
I am using sprints to keep moving from draft 9 to draft 10 of my novel, Never Said. The first week, I finished transcribing handwritten scenes, incorporating new work and changes into the draft. Some writing sprints are chance to anchor scenes with more developed setting, now that I’ve fully developed character and plot. Sometimes I’m working on nonfiction, writing for education or editing for clients.
We’re all jumping in to inspire each other.
Oh, No. I Missed It!
Not all of our participants write along with us “live” — jump in to use the sprints whenever it works for you. You can scan #wssprint to find the prompts and share your success any time. Or, visit previous #wssprint days via Storify. And, considering the success this month and when we ran Fridays Are for (Spooky) Writing last October, be sure to follow @WordsmithStudio for sprints we run in the future.
Did u miss @WordsmithStudio #amwriting sprints last Fri? Join this coming Fri, or find last wk here: https://t.co/NeSG3tuvNj #wssprint
— Elissa Field (@elissafield) April 14, 2016
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How About You?
What challenges are you working on in your writing this week, or what strategies help you reach your goals? We’d love to hear from you — share your thoughts or links in the comments.
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If you like this blog, be sure to click the WordPress +follow button, or follow via email or Bloglovin options in the sidebar. You can find me on Twitter @elissafield or on Facebook.
More on this site:
- Friday Links for Writers: 07.03.15
- Finishing the Novel: Daily Task of Getting it Done
- Writing in Process: Using Alternative Voice to Understand Conflict
elissa lauren field 
I’m currently in the throes of another revision and want to finish in a week as I have a lot agent who requested a full. Hopefully I’ll get to the ms tomorrow late afternoon & join you on Twitter.
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Sounds great. Good to see you here, and hope to see you on Twitter during the sprints. I’ll be there most of the day. Congrats and good luck on having interest from an agent.
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I am writing a historical novel which traces my first French family in the 1600s who came to New France, now known as Quebec Canada (my Mother and I are from there). The ancestors are from my Mother’s paternal side of the family. During my writing and as I outlined, I connected with my ancestor’s wife, Marguerite. There were several reasons why some members of the family came to New France and others did not. Of course, I am using creative license as this is fiction, but I am staying as true to larger events as much as possible.
I am in Camp NaNoWriMo this month so I am trying to write as many chapters for the first 1/3 of the book. I am a bit behind but the sprints help me catch up. What I enjoy most about the sprints is writing with others and tweeting with others during the break. I often suggest we do more sprints during other months.
Thanks for the great post, Elissa!
Signing off –
Monique 😊
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Monique, it was nice to hear the novel project that your sprints have been working toward. You’ve shared some interesting insights between sprints, like how switching from computer to notebook helped you keep going when you got bogged down, or whether you use an outline as a guide. And you’ve been great at cheering others on, as well.
I’ve loved joining in sprints when others ran them (there used to be a group, Friday Night Writes that ran a #writeclub sprint every Friday, which was part of the inspiration when I ran sprints last Oct. – write club had just stopped running regular sprint-days). It’s nice to know there is someone cheering you on, right? I’m glad to hear #wssprint is helping you work toward your writing goal.
We’ll have to keep talking in Wordsmith Studio about how often to run these sprint events. So far, it was for a month, twice a year. There are reasons that timing works well (balancing the work it takes to run them with how well they reach an audience), but it might be worth talking about doing them once a month, or maybe shorter sprinting days, but more often.
Thanks for sharing — it was good to see you here. And keep going with that novel!! :)
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