What’s up with blogging challenges?

Loren asked a good question in their blog: are blogging challenges worth it?

I prefer reading spontaneous posts that are authentic, not those written solely to meet a daily challenge goal. As a reader, I can easily tell the difference.

There are many different blogging challenges and festivals that exist to encourage people to blog and participate in the community activities around blogging. Robert has collected many of them to his blog inspiration page.

My first touch with writing challenges with National Novel Writing Month - or NaNoWriMo amongst friends - back in high school days and participated a couple of times. It was a lot of fun, especially as it wasn’t just about writing but also about challenging myself and finding others who were in the same boat.

As a blogger these days, I’ve been participating in two:

1. IndieWeb Carnival is a monthly festival where a different person from the community picks a topic, introduces it and gives everyone a month to write about it. At the end of the month, they round up the participating posts so everyone can read what each other wrote. I’ve been participating since January and I find our small but active community very lovely.
2. Blaugust is an annual, month-long festival where the goal is to write daily (or set your own goals) and everyone picks their own topic(s) what they want to write about. We have a vibrant Discord server where we talk about blogging but also life and games and pets and all things life. This year was my second year participating and both times I’ve reached the goal of 31/31 posts.

I do still occasionally ask myself the same question Loren ponders: is a blog post written for the sake of meeting an arbitrary goal better than not writing it at all. For my own posts, I aim to keep a certain level of meaningful stuff – whatever that means – and try to avoid posting just for the sake of posting.

But the fact is that for example, last month when I wrote about Python’s standard library, the individual posts were lighter and shorter because there were so many of them to write. But another reality is that I might not have written them at all if I didn’t decide to do it as part of Blaugust. And I learned a lot, I ended up having great discussions with fellow Python developers, people learned new things from my posts and I think it was definitely a net positive over all.

Jedda shared her thoughts on Loren’s blog post in Are blogging challenges worth it? and these quotes really resonated with me:

Joining the challenge pushed, challenged, and inspired me to start writing. Things were hard in the beginning; words were awkward. I didn’t know how to convey my thoughts out loud, or on screen. My posts may not have been the best, possibly questionable now, but at least I think I’ve got some of my groove back since then.

and

Are these blogging challenges worth it?

For me, it is. The community it brings is something that I’ve come to appreciate. I’ve met a lot of very inspiring people through these challenges. I keep telling myself that I write for myself, but sometimes it is still a nice feeling knowing that at least one person is reading what I put out into the world. I’ve also have been enjoying reading other peoples' posts that I may not have otherwise discovered without these challenges.

Of the people I interact with in the web who participate in these challenges, it’s been very rare to run into someone who participates with meaningless or near empty posts just to meet an arbitrary goal or meet some requirements. Pretty much everyone participates because sometimes we just need that external push and positive community pressure and social accountability to silence the procrastination monkey inside us.

I would have given up this year if it wasn’t for my stubbornness to not want to quit. And my blog is 20+ Python standard library posts richer thanks to it. Daily challenge also forced me to limit the scope and actually finish posts. Python’s standard library is so vast and deep that if I have unlimited time to write about it, no post would ever finish.