reflections on inktober
31 days and 12,673 words later
During my first semester of college, I wrote a 10,000-word paper for a writing class. I crammed the whole thing in a month, drowsy on bronchitis medication in the manic throws of long nights in the musty dorm basement. This 20-page monsterpiece was once the bane of my existence.
Fast forward to today, and I’m writing more than 10,000 words in a month for fun?
why why why
My friend Zoe is a digital artist (@zoeartdaily) and participates in #inktober every year. It’s an art challenge where participants draw something every day in October based on the word of the day. It’s very popular in the online art community for developing habits and skills.
In late September, Zoe encouraged me to use Inktober as a writing challenge. I had been working to make writing a larger part of my life, and so I was super excited to challenge myself to write daily alongside her art journey!
However, looking at the list of words for this year’s Inktober prompt, I was not immediately inspired. I thought it might be a chore to upkeep, impossible to write about some of these words, or even that it might stunt my limited creative energy.
Despite my low expectations for the potential fruits of my labor, I was curious to try it out anyway, mostly because I wanted to learn how to do hard things! I set out two goals I was hoping to accomplish with this challenge: fall into a writing habit and exercise my creative muscles.
learnings from inktober
Inktober flew by and I was pleasantly surprised by how fun it was. Throughout the challenge, I felt my concerns being quelled by the joy of the writing process.
I’ll leave a summary of everything I wrote for each day below1.
The final word was “landmark”, and it felt very fitting to mark the end of this challenge. I wrote the original bare-bones version of this very post to close out the month. It was satisfying to write and to look back on the significance of the mental limitations that this challenge has helped me to overcome.
Here is what I learned!
letting my synapses fire freely
A few months ago one of my friends told me that he was in between jobs and that with his time off, he wanted to write something. He asked me for a writing prompt and so I thought long and hard about how to craft the perfect prompt for him. I wanted to come up with a question for him that was inspiring and conducive to his brain. I ended up sending him a quote and a paragraph that was curated to what I perceived he might be thinking about at that time.
In hindsight, I should not have thought so hard! Inktober taught me that human imagination is a wonderful thing, and our brains can generate such interesting and beautifully unsuspecting things if we let it.
My biggest concern in starting Inktober was that I would not have anything to write about for most of the words in the list.
But in contrast, I found the random, wacky adventure-themed prompts to be really inspiring! They became the catalysts for some of the most interesting things I’ve ever written because I was forced to get creative whenever I didn’t want to write about a literal rhino or pair of binoculars.
To dig deeper and get creative in working around the prompt word, I ended up experimenting a lot more than I normally would. I tried a lot of new things, not only with the topics I wrote about but also with the style and types of writing.
Some things I’ve written this month that were very outside of my wheelhouse:
Several fiction stories from perspectives very different than my own:
A midwestern country breakup from a man’s perspective
A horror piece where you, the reader, are observing nature and having a peaceful ol’ time in a strawberry field until you realize suddenly that you’re an inanimate but conscious scarecrow
A love letter I’d write my future husband for our 50th anniversary when we’re 80 (I’m delusional, sue me)
A rap… audio included
A co-written relationship advice column with my ex
Poetry galore!
I wrote a lot of weird stuff. And it was so fun.
After a few weeks of reading my Inktober entries, Zoe texted me: “your synapses fire in such a fun way”. Ever since that exchange, I’ve been noticing the makeshift ways I’ve been able to exercise my creativity because of this challenge.
I want to give myself that creative freedom to allow the unexpected synapse firing to happen! And if anyone ever asks me for a writing prompt again, I will make it give space for strangeness.
quality comes out of quantity
I prioritize my mental health and life balance beyond all else these days, so I didn’t try to uphold any quality standard for my Inktober writing besides trying to write at least one paragraph each day. As a result, I had a lingering worry that the quality of my writing would be so poor that there would have been no point in letting those sentences ever see the light of day. I started a private substack called “ash’s shit blog” to dump the unpolished work. But actually, I’ve been surprised at how not-shit some of the pieces are!
Having this safe space for continuous thought dumping has helped me a lot to overcome my mental quality barriers. As a result, this challenge became a beautiful daily exercise for hitting new ideas and generating different, weird, unique content. I never would’ve written down a lot of the things I wrote had I not done this challenge. I might not have even actualized the thoughts.
Two references that inspired the concept of my shit blog:
As people, we’re probably bad at knowing what we are capable of and what is out there before we find it. We need to explore! And discover! Maybe they were onto something when they told us to fuck around and find out.
Throughout the first few days of Inktober, it became clear to me that some of the pieces I was writing were not thought out nor pieces I would stand behind with my full chest. Yet, within the unpolished writing often hid golden nuggets of potential, full-essay ideas I might want to explore further one day. Instead of stifling my creative energy, these nuggets made me want to write more.
There are so many ideas floating around abstractly in my brain at all times, patiently waiting for their turn to be picked up and investigated by my conscious mind. Some of these wander around for years, while others are luckier to be at the right place at the right time. Still, many of these ideas have high barriers to entry. That is, maybe they’re wrapped in a lot of blurry bullshit. To get to the crux of the idea, I’ll have to work to chip away at its protective barrier. For me, this means talking or thinking or writing around the point for a while—saying lots of things that are almost what I mean but not quite exactly—before I can figure out what I actually want to say.
During Inktober, I finally put in the time to write around those ideas so consistently that I ended up uncovering some of them. This made me want to write more and helped me to build a backlog of ideas to continue exploring.
I’ve also found that churning out ideas for Inktober has improved my life beyond my writing hobby. The nature of my writing can get introspective and often includes conclusions I’m making from my own life. Hence, exploring my thought patterns through writing has inspired me not just in my writing journey, but in several other aspects of my life!
accountability partners are the best
I have been working on making creative friends over the last few months and to be honest, they have been completely game-changing for how I view my relationship with writing and how I can talk to them about certain things.
It’s been super epic to do Inktober alongside Zoe and see how she interprets each word through her art. Writing and drawing are super different mediums, so I’m usually amazed at how differently she can portray the same word as me. The funky shapes of the feelings we conceptualize are so very interesting! Sometimes though, I can find the intersections in how we interpret the words and that also feels nice. It’s been a fun ride to have her as an accountability partner in this on top of our 9-to-5s (we work together too).
In general, I’ve been blessed with so many people who inspire me every day. It is so AWESOME. Inktober has been a beautiful and timely reminder of how having an accountability partner in someone you respect a lot is super useful for the days when you don’t respect yourself enough. Seeing her post her drawing every day, and getting her feedback on each piece I wrote made this commitment so much easier.
It was also exciting to wake up on Halloween, day 31, and the last day of Inktober to Zoe’s text message of her interpretation of landmark. She interpreted it in a similar way as I did, drawing us finishing Inktober, alongside two of her other friends who did their own versions of it too.
I am leaving this year’s Inktober journey with a poppin’ new private substack where I will continue to dump my unpolished writing and a new outlook on breaking through creative mental limitations!
Very satisfying :)
short description of what i wrote each day of inktober
backpack - what can a backpack tell you about someone?
discover - discovering things right in front of me
boots - fictional midwestern breakup from the man’s perspective
exotic - an acrostic poem about blueberries
binoculars - comedic social commentary about how a bird must feel so violated that there are people who are proud to be birdwatchers
trek - haiku about dating
passport - every memory of taking passport photos and what we are forced to record versus what we choose to record in life
hike - a laundry list of impractical things to bring on a hike
sun - how the sun is an artist that follows us everywhere in all aspects of our lives
nomadic - a rap about my roommate, audio included.
snacks - what snack time means to us in different stages of life (it’s the same, full-grown adults revert to childhood mannerisms around free snacks)
remote - the internet communities i’ve been a part of and the people i’ve met via substack
horizon - responding to the letter to my future (now current) self that i wrote to myself two years ago (how i couldn’t see past the horizon back then)
roam - i like to roam around in the city as a pastime
guidebook - co-written advice column with my ex on relationship communication tactics we learned
grungy - my enthusiastic love of yoga
journal - what i write about in my journal and how i realize the same things over and over and over but i think they’re novel realizations …
drive - a silly little poem about midsommar, the scary movie
ridge - the lore behind the rocks i’ve gathered on my windowsill from the mountains of california
uncharted - my love for my friend michelle and my admiration of her resilience
rhinoceros - going extinct
camp - a tragic love story between two kids who met at camp
rust - confessions of a not-so-material-girl
expedition - scary unhinged rant about not having purpose, conspiring for more
scarecrow - a horror piece where you, the reader, are observing nature and having a peaceful ol’ time in a strawberry field until you realize suddenly that you’re an inanimate but conscious scarecrow
camera - a thesis on how social media pulling us away from ourselves
road - spinoff on the road not taken about how i listen to my gut
jumbo - what is the legacy we leave behind
navigator - how im trying to navigate what i want to do in my career
violin - a love letter I’d write my future husband for our 50th anniversary when we’re 80
landmark - the beginning frameworks of this post!
James Clear references a photography class experiment in his case against perfectionism. One group was told to take as many photos as they wanted and then to submit the best. The other group was only allowed to take the number of photos that were to be submitted for grading. The group that could take as many as they wanted scored higher grades in the class.
I'm curious about the love advice column with your ex LOL