Writing in the Dark’s First 30-Day Creativity Challenge

Join us in April for 30 days of super potent prompts to sharpen awareness, engage the senses, heighten curiosity & transform your writing (while generating the foundation for lots of new material)

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” ~Mary Oliver

If you are here, you surely do feel the call to live creatively in some way shape or form. And whether or not you identify as a “writer,” you surely do use words, as all humans do, to organize your thoughts and unearth meaning from these endless numbered days. That’s why I’m inviting you to join me, this April, for Writing in the Dark’s First 30-Day Creativity Challenge.

Here's the premise: Every day in April, I’ll share a new post inviting you to complete one easy, clear, and accessible creativity prompt. Note that I am specifically saying “creativity” instead of “writing,” because although you’ll always be invited to record your results, these activities won’t look or sound like the detailed weekly writing prompts paid subscribers already receive. Instead, I might ask you to grab a notebook or your phone, put on your shoes (and jacket if you live where I do) and go outside on a 10-minute walk, jotting down every single concrete observation you can in that time. This exact exercise has yielded amazing results for me in the past—in fact, it was during an exercise like this that I first noted tiny green hairs of baby grass poking up from the spring mud, which spurred a memory of the grass my parents once planted in our dirt yard in Wyoming, and how it didn’t grow, which prompted a memory of the tumbleweeds that overran our yard when that house was first built, which prompted a memory of having to pull those tumbleweeds out of the earth with my bare hands, which prompted me, eventually, to write the story Tumbleweeds.

But the point of the original exercise wasn’t to write Tumbleweeds. It was to get me all the way into my body, into the world, into the sensory-rich environment all around me. Because that kind of full presence automatically boosts creativity and hones my ability to see more clearly—and by see, I mean see not only what is in front of me and around me, but also what is within me and, more deeply, within the world around me.

This 30-day challenge will use a variety of activities and simple materials (nothing you’ll need to buy, I promise) to get you out of your head and into the deeper waters of intuiting and weaving from the creative strands of your own imagination. If your intent is to take that energy to the page in order to unleash your essays and stories, brava! If your intent is simply to feel more alive, more curious, more attuned, more attendant to the meaning and the metaphor all around us, every day, that can both guide and enrich our lives if we let it, brava! You’ll find that aplenty in this 30-Day Creativity Challenge.

That’s because at the heart of every one of the 30 challenges will be the foundation of curiosity, which changes everything, including us. When we’re more curious, we feel more alive and engaged. We become more capable of recognizing and leaning into opportunities. We also find it easier to make connections and identify meaning. Ultimately, we prime ourselves for a richer, realer, and more satisfying way of life because we gradually start to see ourselves and the world around us differently. We see beyond what we expect to see, and beyond what we already know.  We see things how they actually are, as well as how they might have been or could someday be.  We see possibility.

Let’s see some of that possibility together.

And remember, paid subscribers need not sign up—you will automatically receive the 30 daily creativity prompts via email. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you’ll need to upgrade to receive the prompts, and you can do that here for only $6/month or $60/year.

If you’re super busy, and worried you won’t be able to keep up with a daily prompt, just know that the prompts are deliberately very short but highly potent. You’ll never need to spend more than 10 minutes to complete the prompt—but you may choose to spend more time if you wish and are able. The idea is to show up every day in a new way and experience the cumulative benefits of that repetition.

Of course, you can skip a day or two or three if you need to, and just do the prompts later, when you have more time. You can also join the challenge late if you need to, and work at your own pace through the archives. And you can participate in the challenge chats even if you’re behind on the prompts. This place is built for you.

I can’t wait to see what we build, and I look forward to hearing about it in the Shimmers & Shards chat as we adventure through the next 30 days together!