My local writer’s group is doing what we call a 50-50 challenge. In this challenge, you write a minimum of fifty words a day for fifty days. In any one week, you are allowed to have two days of no writing, but must make up those words on another day, but if you go three days without writing, you are out of the challenge.

Fifty words a day doesn’t sound like much, does it? Especially with this being NaNoWriMo where everyone is trying to do over a thousand words a day. Even that little paragraph above has over fifty words. And yet, there are days when getting down even fifty words is a struggle. Days when you get home from work and your brain is fried and the kids are clamoring for dinner and, oh yeah, you have to make those three dozen cupcakes for school for tomorrow and… you get the idea. But still, fifty words… you can do that, right?

The idea is not to make writing one more thing to add to an already overloaded to-do list, but to make writing something you think about – and/or do – every day, even if it’s only one small paragraph. And you’d be surprised how many words you actually do get out when you sit down to write.

You may start out with the idea of only writing fifty words. One small paragraph. But those fifty often lead to fifty more. And soon you have a couple of pages. And it doesn’t matter if you write on the computer, or bathroom toilet paper – all that matters is that you get your fifty words down.

So…have you written your fifty yet today?