I Challenged Myself to Write an Article for Medium Every Day, for 30 Days

Not gonna lie, I was completely shocked by the results.

Anna Burgess Yang
5 min readDec 1, 2023
Image created via Midjourney

For years, I’ve wanted to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The challenge is to write an entire novel (50,000 words) throughout the month of November. There are entire planning guides and YouTube videos dedicated to NaNoWriMo prep: it’s a serious commitment for 30 days.

I’ve tried to do NaNoWriMo, many times, and failed miserably. Usually after a few days I’ll find myself so drastically behind on my word count that it feels impossible to catch up. My intentions are good. Last year, I did a lot of planning.

But life happens, I have kids, we have the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. Plus I’m a freelance writer, so I’m churning out thousands of words per week for clients, let alone adding NaNoWriMo to the mix.

This year, I decided to try something different. I wanted to write one article for Medium per day. At ~1,200 words per article, this felt much more manageable. Plus, writing more consistently on Medium has been my goal for a long time. I knew I wouldn’t publish every day, but a side benefit would be creating a backlog of articles to publish in the future.

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Anna Burgess Yang

Freelance Writer. Practical Tips for Solopreneurs. Career pivots are fun. 🎉 https://start.annabyang.com/