Day 1: Announcing the 30 Day Essay
I have always enjoyed writing. As a teenager who was confused about his life path after high school, I wrote journal entries. As a young man who appreciated life and love, I wrote lyrics and poems. On a trip to Hawaii in 2007, I wrote a travel blog. And for the past four years I’ve dreamt of writing more and publishing my work. But something has been standing in the way, and I don’t know what it is. I haven’t found the right topic to write about, and it never seems like the right time.
Yesterday something clicked. I recalled a competition that occurred last year to write a story in a short amount of time. I didn’t compete, but that led me to consider starting my own personal competition this year: I would force myself to write something public every day for the month of November - exactly thirty days. Within a matter of seconds of that idea I had the name: the 30 Day Essay. By the end of the day I registered the domain name, started a free tumblr account and hooked up Google Analytics to measure site performance.
This thirty day experiment will test my ability to write in various formats about various topics. Do I want to write stories? Do I want to do more travel writing? Do I want to write my ideas on philosophy and life? How about product reviews or recipes? I teach Web Design and Copywriting at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design; do I want to write a trade book, tutorials or a blog about that? More importantly, can I?
My goal is to understand what I enjoy and am able to write about, but I want to take it a step further. I want your feedback. Let me know if something speaks to you or not, or if it needs a little more. Just promise me one thing: be cool and keep it constructive.
I’ll measure the success of this experiment by combining three metrics: topic frequency, article performance and your feedback. Each post has tags that I will aggregate at the end of the thirty days to see what I write about most. I’ll measure that against individual article performance and your feedback to see if I can find an answer to my question: Should I write more often, and if so, what should I write about?
As I’m about to publish this post, it’s starting to hit me. I’m really putting myself out there with this experiment. This is crazy. And this is what life should be about.
See you tomorrow.
