A to Z Challenge 2020 – Reflection

A to Z Challenge 2020 – Reflection

    So ends another A to Z Challenge year. This has been my 5th one.    

    Finding themes has always been an interesting task. Each year, I brainstorm with friends, family, and students that I work with. Generally, I get my theme idea early in the year and then use the ideas that I get from everyone to formulate what kind of writing I will do. 

    It has varied from personal essays to opinionated dialogue to random scatterings of thoughts. As I have progressed through the years I have experimented with different forms of writing, dabbling with some individual fiction pieces, to poetry, to memoirs, to editorials. The more open-ended I have become the more I’ve been willing to experiment. 

    I admire the bloggers that can write a 26-part story, poetry for every entry, well researched factual pieces, and personal narratives. 

    This year’s theme left all that I did open-ended. I chose to use Google Images to write something similar to an alphabet book. Using suggestions from students for nouns and adjectives, and Google Images using the phrase, “A is for”, “B is for”… “Z is for” I came up with the ideas for each piece. And I tried everything.

    In the past, I have started my actual pieces some time in March and for the most part, was able to keep 2 or 3 days ahead of the actual posting date. This year I started much earlier. I actually started writing, A is for Awesome in November of 2019. I didn’t finish it until March. 

    In the past, I wrote my pieces sequentially. So after writing “A” I would write “B”, etc. This year I jumped all over the place. After writing ‘A is for Awesome” and explaining to my students how I developed some of my characters from real people, a student came up to me and asked me to write about him. So my second piece was “C is for Courageous.”

    Every one of my previous year’s pieces stood on their own. However, after writing my third piece, “Be is for Bold” (which later was renamed “B is for Birthday”) I realized that what I had written had the potential for being a multi-letter story. I didn’t want to do it sequentially, so I worked out which letters would continue the story (F, H, K, M, Q, R, and S) and then wrote the rest of the story before jumping back to where I left off in the regular alphabet. For those of you that want to read the whole story, “A Birthday Present”,  I also posted it all in one place as one piece, after the final part, “S is for Surprise” was posted on April 22. Here’s the link: http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=2021. That piece was my favorite one to write. It was fun to see it evolve as I was writing it. In fact, the ending only came to me the day before I wrote: “R is for Rescue”.

    Somewhere after completing “K is for King” which was part of the “A Birthday Present” story, I was inspired to write a poem about my teaching days and thoughts about the present state of education, so I jumped to writing “T is for Teaching” before returning to the Birthday saga. 

    Everything else I wrote in order, alphabetically. Having pre-written 11 pieces by mid-March, I had some leeway in getting the other pieces done on time. Even so, I still managed to be only a few days ahead of myself when the final due dates arrived. 

    I really enjoyed this year and as usual, am stumped as to what theme I should pick for next year. I definitely would like to do this again, despite the fact that it is very time-intensive and can be draining. The COVID-19 quarantine did give me more time; not wishing that that scenario should ever occur again. But I have learned over the years that the more I write ahead of time, the less stressful it is. I do wish I would have more readers and comments, but then I don’t tend to read other people’s blogs as much as I should and comment on them. I do read more after the A to Z is over. So I understand. 

For those that are interested here is the full listing of all this year’s entries with links to their posts:

A is for Awesome, B is for Birthday, C is for Courageous, D is for Definitely Daffy, E is for Email, F is for Follow, G is for Guitar, H is for Hunted, I is for Ignorant, J is for Jam, K is for King, L is for Love, M is for Mistake, N is for NO!, O is for Obsessive, P is for Prepare, Q is for Queen, R is for Rescue, S is for Surprise, T is for Teaching, U is for Untold Stories, V is for Virtual Reality, W is for Weather, X is for Unknown, Y is for Year, and Z is for Zero.

Be well. Stay safe. And keep on writing and sharing. 

Harvey Heilbrun