Year Retrospective

2023 ended up being my toughest year of writing thus far. 

My initial focus for the year remained on the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game [Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden] I had been Game Mastering (GMing) since November 2020. We’d just started the final arc of the adventure when 2023 began, and I dedicated most of my time to making sure we closed out the adventure strong. I am thrilled to say that my three players all enjoyed the final arc, which included a big set-piece combat encounter to defeat the Big Bad, and everyone was satisfied with the adventure’s conclusion. It was a long, and at times, treacherous, road, but my players and I got through it. I grew a great deal as a GM and storyteller with this adventure. I know I will be looking back on those two years of adventuring with fondness. With the game brought to a close, and after three years of GMing, I stepped down as the GM of our gaming group. I was burned out and needed a long rest. I also wanted more time to dedicate to my prose, especially to my other primary focus of the year: the Ray Bradbury 52-Week Challenge.

Ray Bradbury, a prolific and successful writer of short fiction—among other forms—believed the best way for a new writer to learn the craft was to write “a helluvalot of short stories.” During his keynote address, “Telling the Truth,” given at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in 2001, Mr. Bradbury challenged new writers, and even intermediate ones, to write—I opted to interpret this as draft—a new short story every week for fifty-two weeks straight (i.e. one year). The purpose of this challenge is not to draft good stories, or original stories, or publishable stories, or whatever else other types of quality stories. No, the purpose is to simply draft stories. A lot of them. Period. Quality doesn’t matter. The purpose is to learn the craft; to develop a writing habit; to practice storytelling “hygiene” as Bradbury put it. Through sheer quantity, you will achieve quality, hopefully, eventually. Mr. Bradbury, when issuing this challenge to the audience, felt it was neigh impossible to not draft at least a few gems within those fifty-two stories, but you needed to dig through that mountain of other stories to find the gems.

I technically began this challenge in November 2022. I’d racked up around twenty rejections that year, which I know is not a lot, but it was a record number for me in the four years I had been writing. When November rolled around, I was feeling lousy about my writing and my inability to publish. The idea of drafting new stories for an entire year without regard to their quality or publishability sounded nice. Very nice, actually. I warmed to the idea quickly, and I also realized I could use it as an opportunity to focus on writing more science fiction—I’d mostly been writing fantasy until then. So, I decided to take Mr. Bradbury up on his challenge.

As 2023 dawned, I was cranking away at the challenge and enjoying it immensely. My focus was solely on drafting new prose, on writing new stories where publishability didn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to write for anyone but myself. It was marvelous, freeing, and sorely needed. I even managed to write multiple stories in a single week on a handful of occasions. Sadly, this euphoric feeling would not last (dun-dun-duuun, foreshadowing!).

2022 was a prolific year for me. Of the dozen stories I drafted that year, I’d revised five of them to final draft. Starting around March 2023, I began submitting those stories for publication. And it did not go well. At all. Like the vast majority of short story submissions, they ended in rejection. I was used to a slow trickle of rejections, usually one per month (until now, I’d only ever have one or two stories in submission at any given time). But with over five stories in submission at once, the trickle swelled into a waterfall of rejections. Every few days, I would get a new rejection and have to submit the story elsewhere. I weathered the rejections well the first few months, being able to focus on the 52-week writing challenge to distract myself. But as the year progressed into May, the seventh month of the challenge, burnout crashed into me, hard.

By May’s end, I was not enjoying the writing challenge as much. I no longer sat down with excitement to write a new story. Writing a story each week became more like an obligation, a chore, a homework assignment. The stories I wrote in the summer tended to be shorter (less than 2,000 words) than the stories I wrote earlier in the challenge (often greater than 3,000 words). As the summer progressed, I struggled to envision and brainstorm original pieces of fiction. I had a lot of difficulty taking an idea for an original piece and expanding it into a full story that I thought would be fun or interesting to write. Many of those ideas never transformed into a story, never had a single word written in a first draft. If it wasn’t for fan fiction, I would have failed the challenge in June. 

Media properties have been a constant source of story ideas for me, going back to when I was a kid acting out made-up scenes from whatever video game or animated show I was bonkers for at the time. Fast forward to my mid-thirties, and things haven’t changed much, other than I now occasionally take the time to write down some of those stories. Dungeons and Dragons, Cyperpunk 2077, Diablo, Starcraft, Star Trek, Star Wars (I think we need to stop using “star” in our titles…) were all sources of inspiration for me in 2023. These were some of the media properties I consumed that year, and whereas my brain was failing me when it came to creating original stories, it was having no problem envisioning stories in someone else’s setting. Star Trek in particular was a lifesaver for me. I wrote eight pieces of Star Trek fan fiction for the challenge, including a comic script.

While fan fiction was saving my goal of completing the Ray Bradbury 52-Week Challenge, it wasn’t preventing the shifts in my emotional state and my attitude toward my ability as a writer.

The constant grind of drafting new prose each week, the lack of time for revision to change the pace of things, my shrinking ability to expand ideas into original stories worth writing, and the cascade of submission rejections brought me to one of my lowest points in the five years I’ve been writing. I sat down for each writing session already wishing it were over. The best part of my week was not writing a new story, but was when I was finished writing it. The writing and submission processes became arduous and unfulfilling. I became depressed about my writing and my ability to improve. Walking around my apartment alone, I often spiraled into a pit of despair, getting closer and closer to convincing myself that writing fiction was not something I was ever going to be good at. In August, I stopped submitting stories; I stopped reading; I stopped actively learning about the writing craft; I no longer critiqued other stories on Critique Circle; I still drafted a new story every week. Not because I enjoyed doing it, but because I was obligated to do it. I didn’t want to abandon a challenge I was nine of twelve months into.

I rallied in September and October, a little, pushing out multiple short stories beyond 3,000 words, a handful of them being original pieces. Being so close to the finish line, I think, gave me a boost. I still wasn’t enjoying the writing process, but I was enjoying playing in the Star Trek and Cyberpunk 2077 sandboxes. I finished the challenge early in mid-October by using a few flash fiction pieces I’d written earlier on in the challenge where I’d draft multiple stories in a single week.

And that was that. The challenge was over. Fifty-two stories drafted within fifty-two weeks. I succeeded. And it was thoroughly underwhelming. I didn’t throw myself a celebration. I didn’t take time to go do something fun as a reward. I simply stopped writing. Or, more accurately, I had to stop writing. I tried going straight into revising some of the earlier stories from the challenge, but it quickly became apparent my heart wasn’t in it. I was sick of writing. I no longer had the patience or the passion for it. So, I stopped. For two months, I didn’t work on any prose.

But by early December, I’d begun feeling antsy. I had this bloated bottle of creative energy that I had grown used to emptying via writing fiction. But I wasn’t writing, and I didn’t know if I could restart. I didn’t even know if I wanted to. In the first weeks of the month, I prepared and ran a D&D one-shot for some family members, and I did genuinely enjoy that. It wasn’t prose, but it was still storytelling, and I hadn’t GMed since earlier in the year, so it felt refreshing to step back into that role for a few weeks. I also, on a whim, began resubmitting stories. By mid-December, I felt like I was in a better headspace, so I took the plunge back into writing prose, starting with a daily line-editing exercise. That kind of worked. It was still a struggle to enjoy, especially with original works. I still cared too much about whether the stories were good enough, were publish-worthy, or were original enough. 

As I write this retrospective, I am actively revising multiple fan fiction pieces. They’ve been more fun to work on than of my original fiction. Fan fiction, by its very nature, is a form that cannot be published, and therefore has to be written for reasons beyond publishability. I’m not trying to catch the eyes of a slush reader, or convince an editor of the story’s merit, or meet the expectations of a critique partner, or prove to anyone the story has value. I’m writing the fan fiction because I want the story to exist, and I wish to see the story in its final form. I’m writing the story for myself. Pure and simple. I want this to be the way I write my original fiction, but I’m struggling to do that. So, as I transition into 2024, I’m going to be focusing solely on revising my fan fiction pieces in the hope that this will help train me to approach my original fiction in the same way: write stories I wish existed; write stories for me; don’t make publishability a factor.

Thanks to the Ray Bradbury 52-Week Challenge, I became a better writer in 2023. But because of the challenge, combined with a lake full of rejections, I also almost stopped being a writer in 2023. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll still be writing when 2024 concludes. Perhaps five years was all I had in me? 

Persistence is key when pursuing art. But so is hope. So, so much hope—for the artwork, and for yourself. I hope by 2024’s end I am still writing, and even more so, I hope I am enjoying it.