30 Day Short Story Challenge Complete List

I just finished a 30 day short story challenge. I figured it’d be nice to make a post reflecting on it.

Overall, this was a fun challenge. I finished it in 55 days, which is pretty decent, a little more than 1 every other day. Originally, I thought I’d do 1 short a day, but pretty quickly I learned that I didn’t have the experience to keep my stories short or concise enough to finish in a day. My third story took two days of almost 4 hours each to finish. I’ve also never pushed myself to write like this and that pressure is something that took a little while to get used to.

For the first few stories, I constantly went back, reread, and edited them. That’s fine most of the time, but when you’re trying to just put ideas out and work on your ability to put them out there quickly, then you gotta learn to be okay with just letting things be how they are sometimes.

One of the big things I learned to do was just allow myself to write my thoughts out, without spending a lot of time analyzing them. I’m an engineer professionally, and that is something I do a lot. Everything needs to be reevaluated and double checked by your peers before you finalize it. So, anything I came up with was constantly questioned by my ‘inner self’. Is this what the character would do? Did you want to write this kind of story? Were you trying to go for a moral here? That last one is something I really needed to get rid of. Lots of stories don’t have intentional morals. Your readers will take from the story what they do and many times it’s not what you may have intended. Once I allowed myself to just write what I was thinking, I wrote faster. Stories lengths that took 4 hours before, came out in half the time. Is that a good thing? It depends. For me, yes. I’m trying to speed up my ability to write, but for others, they may enjoy the process of evaluating what a character is doing and whether or not what was written works with their personality. Again, for me this was a positive thing and I’m simply sharing my process.

Another big thing I learned about myself is that I like really bare bones outlines, if I make one at all. Around the 10th story, I started writing the prompt in a notebook and writing what I wanted to happen. For some of the stories I wrote a lot of detail, but for a lot of them I wrote very broad ideas. Maybe I’d say what a character’s drive was or what the problem they were going to face was, but a lot of the time I didn’t write much. That’s the kind of writer I am, I guess, lay out the basics and let the rest come out in the story.

Overall, I’m happy with this experience. Not only have I helped discipline myself to write consistently, but I’ve given myself 30 new storylines that I can expand upon.

My next goal is to work on a novel. This is a longer goal and I’m not going to be posting every day anymore, but I’ll post updates and I’ve got some projects I’ve done in the past I’d like to go over.

In the meantime, below is the full list of the 30 short stories I’ve written. Each one is a link to the story. So you should be able to click on them and it’ll bring you to that page.

Enjoy.

Story 1: An impulse buy leading to intergalactic warfare.

Story 2: “Smoke hung so thick in the library’s rafters that she could read words in it.”

Story 3: The language of flowers, pajamas, a secret passageway.

Story 4: “His wife was having tea with the King and he didn’t even know about it.”

Story 5: The story of how your parents met, transposed to the Victorian era.

Story 6: A balloon, a ball, balustrades.

Story 7: A language class for aliens.

Story 8: “She liked to fit people into the world like puzzle pieces.”

Story 9: Someone goes to extreme lengths to return something they borrowed.

Story 10: An explorer with multiple personality disorder, a widow, a house in the woods.

Story 11: “Winter was the only season we could be together.”