#TeachWritetober19 Day 1: My Goals

The idea for #TeachWritetober came to me last year. A group of friends and I were all participating in November's NaNoWriMo. We were chugging along, writing every day -- until NCTE hit in the middle of the month, only to be quickly followed by Thanksgiving and thinking about the upcoming holidays.

Needless to say, I didn't write a word after the 14th of November.

November is a really hard month to commit to writing a great number of words. (NaNoWriMo has a 50,000-word goal.) There are so many days I'm away from home that I was doomed to fail before I even began.

Hence, the idea to move a daily writing challenge to the month of October.

October is a good month -- no holidays, no conference travel, still not burned out from a crazy school year.

And judging by the response, it looks like a lot of educators agreed with me.

#TeachWritetober -- 

Your choice to write whatever you want, for however long you want, every day of the month.

#TeachWritetober is for you, teacher-writer, to nurture your writing habit by doing something related to writing every day.

You choose the writing outcome.
You choose the amount of time.
You choose -- just write.



This morning I read a post by Benjamin Woodcock where he shared his plans for #TeachWritetober19. He made his goals public and plans a weekly accountability post to share his progress. I thought that was brilliant so I'm going to do the same.

Here are my plans for #TeachWritetober:

• Send at least 3 emails each week to the participants to cheer them on, offer inspiration and ideas, and to check-in. (Accountability and support are HUGE when it comes to challenges.)

• Write daily in my journal. This could be either Morning (Anytime) Pages or a recap of the day. I'm going to be flexible here because the writing is more important than what I'm writing about.

• Write a weekly recap post where I publicly share how it's going -- the good, the bad, the celebrations, and the struggles. All of it.

Any kind of writing that I do above and beyond these goals is icing on the cake. I want to set myself up for success by making this challenge manageable, yet habit-forming. 

I want to set you up for success too!

What are your goals for #TeachWritetober? 

Leave a comment and share or even better -- write a blog post about it and either share the link in the comments or share it on social media and include #TeachWritetober in your post.

Write away, friends!