Hundred

Writing · 100 days · Hundred

  1. What the hundred days look like
  2. A question before you start
  3. Join the next hundred days

Mood-driven · long gaps between sessions

Waiting for the mood has a price you can count

When it arrives you write three thousand words in an afternoon and remember why you do this. Then five weeks pass. Averaged over a year, the good days are rare enough that the book moves at the speed of your moods, which is barely.

No motivation content. A list in the morning, a report at night.

Join the next hundred days

The daily version of this already has takers

where this comes from

Tim Clare's free 100-day writing challenge has run as a podcast since January 2020 on ten minutes of writing a day, timed inside the episode.

source

Writers' HQ sells membership around daily check-ins, weekly write-alongs and monthly goal setting rather than around inspiration.

source

Quoted from the pages linked, not estimated. No number appears here without a source.

Inspiration is real and it is not a schedule

the cost of waiting

It turns up when it wants toThe pages it produces are good. It cannot be relied on for anything that takes months, and a novel takes months.
Long gaps charge you twiceAfter five weeks away, the first session goes on remembering the plot rather than writing it. The gap costs the time and then costs the re-entry.
Writing only when it is enjoyable trains you to stop when it is notWhich is precisely what every long project turns into somewhere around the middle.

What a hundred days tends to look like

Strange at first: writing to a list on days you would previously have skipped without a thought.

Three tasks in the morning, one report at night

how it runs

01 Decide in the morning, not in the mood Three tasks written before the day starts arguing with you about whether today is a writing day.
02 Report at night either way On a flat day the report says so. What gets counted is days reported, not days that felt good.
03 Among people writing flat too Their logs make it obvious how ordinary a mediocre writing day is, and how many of them a finished draft is made of.

the shape of it

What a hundred days tends to look like

entry 1

Strange at first: writing to a list on days you would previously have skipped without a thought.

Day 1–14

Strange at first: writing to a list on days you would previously have skipped without a thought.

Day 50

The average day stops feeling like a failed version of a good day and starts being the actual job.

Day 100

Inspiration still turns up when it likes. It now lands on a manuscript that moved while you were waiting.

Three tasks each morning. One report each night. A hundred days of writing.

gallery

The desk, the page, the hour

before you sign up

Reasonable questions

What if I genuinely have nothing to say that day?

Write that in the report. Three small tasks and an honest nothing still make a reported day.

Do you send motivational messages?

No. There is no pep talk anywhere in this.

Can the tasks be outlining or reading rather than drafting?

Yes, if they move the work. You define them and nobody audits the definition.

Is there a minimum word count?

None at all.

How do groups start?

On one date, with everybody counting the same hundred days.

A hundred days that do not wait for the mood

Leave an email and we tell you when the next group opens. Nothing is charged on this page.

One email when the next group opens.

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