A to Z Challenge 2023 – Reflection

A to Z Challenge 2023 – Reflection

This is my 8th year doing the A to Z Challenge. Each year I try to do something different. For the first four years, I picked a theme and wrote individual stand-alone pieces connected to the theme. Three years ago, I added one piece to the challenge that took place over several letters.  

In 2020, I did a story entitled “A Birthday Present,” which took place over the letters (F, H, K, M, Q, R, and S). Here’s the link to that story if anyone is interested: http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=2021

In 2021, I wrote the story “What’s in the Bag?” which took place over the letters (B, D, G, J, and M). Here’s that story if anyone is interested: https://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=2518

2022’s theme for the month was epistolary entries (all my entries were in the form of letters from someone to someone else). The story I created was “Tale of Two Kingdoms,” which took place over the letters (K, Q, S, U, and X). Here’s the link to that story: https://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=3103

In January of this year, in one of my writing groups, I was given 20 minutes to write a story using the words: door, eye, mystic, and realms. Following the sharing of that piece of writing, a number of the participants in that group suggested that that piece sounded like an introduction to a series of stories. I liked that idea. Following my A to Z interest in writing a continuous story over a period of days and my interest as a storyteller in my writing, I chose my theme for the 2023 A to Z Challenge. I would take that initial piece I wrote for that group and make it the introduction to a 26-part adventure. The only change I made from that original writing was to replace the word “realms” with “kingdoms” since I felt it worked better. 

In the past, preparing for the A to Z Challenge meant that I had to start writing before April 1st. As I finished a piece, I would schedule it to be posted on the appropriate day. Usually, towards the end of April, I was only a few days ahead of actually writing the pieces I was posting. Knowing that I was writing a complete story this year, I wanted to make sure that the whole thing was written before April 1st. I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of April, not knowing how this story would end. In that respect, I was very successful. I finished writing the story on March 26th. 

The story, called “Save Me a Story,” involves my foretold quest to find stories (including folktales, fairy tales, and fictional tales) that had been stolen and characters from those tales that had been kidnapped to the world of Selat, where they belonged. I would run into characters from all those stories along the way to help me. My friend Ronald, who has appeared in other blog entries, was part of it too. I decided not to make my story linear from A-Z and followed five interspersed strands until the end. The strands were Harvey (that’s me and the characters that worked with me), Ronald (and the characters that didn’t exactly work with him, but more or less associated with him, Necroma (who was the sorceress, with the evil plan to get rid of all the stories), Information (which included information on certain settings within the story and specific questions and riddles that were posed by/to multiple characters), and Team Story (which involved the final team that I gathered/inherited and led to the conclusion of it all)

In the past, I had used friends, relatives, and elementary students I worked with to help brainstorm ideas. This year, I did most of the brainstorming myself. As I was writing, I enlisted the aid of ChatGPT to help come up with ideas and suggestions. For example, I asked it questions like Give me a list of folk characters that are good at solving riddles; Make a list of folktale antagonists that start with a particular letter (like H or O); Describe Cinderella’s stepmother in one sentence. I never took the entire answer it gave me in any of my writing but used its suggestions to pick out words that worked with what I was writing or did research on some of the characters it named that I wasn’t as familiar with, so I could use them in my story.

I wondered how writing one story would affect my viewership this year. I wasn’t sure how many people would want to read an entire story over 26 days instead of jumping in periodically just to read one or two individual pieces, which happened in previous years. I also stopped using Twitter a while ago, so one venue for advertising my posts was no longer available. I replaced it by sharing the links to my posts with my writing and storytelling groups. I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome. I think I got more readers.

Having finished and scheduled all the writing before April 1st gave me more opportunities to read other participants’ blogs during the month of April, which was also enjoyable.

For those interested in reading this year’s story, here is a chart listing all the threads. I suggest you read the Save Me a Story intro and follow the links to the next part at the end of each piece. I tried to summarize the plot and what was going on at the beginning of each piece of writing, so if you are inclined to read my story by threads, you can do that too. For that, you need to follow the links on this plot graph. 

Save Me a Story – Plot Graph

This was a fun experience this year. It was harder than any other year though it was a lot more satisfying. Whether I do another like this in future A to Z Challenges is still to be determined. I guess you will have to wait until next year to find out. You’re always welcome to continue following my blog throughout the year. I usually post at least once a week. Trust me; you’ll never know what you are going to get.