It’s 2:24am and I just e-mailed in my 24 hour short story contest entry to Writer’s Weekly. One thing I learned is that it took me a lot longer to produce my story than I thought it would. I began around 1pm and have been working for the past 13 hours with only very brief breaks to eat, shower, and talk with my husband. It took several hours to write the first draft, which was about 3.5x longer than the maximum word count. It took another several hours editing, whittling, and polishing. It was both relieving and surprising to me that most of the plot could be maintained in 1/3 of the original words. This was a very enlightening and fun experience and I’m really glad to have had this opportunity. I highly recommend trying it if you are able to and it is up your alley. Writer’s Weekly has their contest quarterly, I believe. Good luck to any others of you who participated today! Hope you had a great experience as well!
Jackie LearnsToWrite 
August 6, 2016 at 12:08 am
Love this idea! What did you learn about yourself during the journey?
LikeLiked by 1 person
August 6, 2016 at 12:51 am
I don’t know that I learned anything too deep about myself other than I actually can sit down and write a whole story from start to finish if I put my mind to it (apparently a little pressure doesn’t hurt sometimes!) and that this takes me longer than I thought- coming up with the idea, the plot, the ending, and then editing. On the NaNoWriMo webpage they talk about “Planners” vs. “Pantsers” (people who think and plan their story before writing, vs. those that just sit down and write) and in this case I was a “pantser” though I think I could be both… I’ll have to try more of the planner method. 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
August 15, 2016 at 10:18 pm
Oh interesting..maybe I too am a “panster” but I’ll admit I can never finish a story from start to end I wander too much! I’ve actually wondered if there is a job for people who write story prompts and story starts because I would be good at that!
LikeLike